Just twenty minutes by ferry from Takamatsu, Megijima first feels like an island right next door, almost an extension of the city. From its fields, its lanes or its shoreline, you often glimpse the buildings, the port cranes and the mountains in the background. But the crossing is enough to shift everything. The sea imposes a break, the ferry sets the tempo, and the island suddenly seems to live at a slowness all its own. Also known as Onigashima, the island of the oni tied to the Momotaro legend, Megijima mixes a quiet beach, an ageing village, stone walls, tired houses, contemporary artworks and artistic oddities. Less cute than Ogijima, less obvious too, it has something stranger about it: a slightly crooked island where the demons seem to have retired.
Ogijima’s weird little sister
Megijima could be the little sister of Ogijima. Or its slightly less presentable big sister, depending on the mood. The two islands answer each other across the sea, but they don’t catch you the same way at all. Ogijima climbs, meows, presses its houses against the slope and eventually sends you up to its white lighthouse. Megijima spreads out more, with its oni, its improbable Moai, its harbour sculptures, its beach, its fields and that sense of a slightly ageing island that isn’t especially trying to charm you.
That’s exactly what makes it interesting. Megijima doesn’t go for grand effects. It moves through details: an old red mailbox, a rusted sign, a black wooden wall, a cat at the roadside, a basketball hoop planted near the sand, a house turned into an art installation. Nothing seems perfectly aligned. And that’s just fine.
An island of the old, but with tenderness
Megijima has that very particular atmosphere of islands where the young seem to have taken the ferry the other way. Here, everything appears to belong to an everyday Japan, a little slow, a little worn, not really in a hurry to modernise. The fields are still there, wedged between the houses, the vegetable patches spill over behind the low walls, tools sit by the façades, and the streets sometimes feel held together by a few retirees, two cats and a lot of silence. It isn’t sad for all that. More a sense of general retirement, of simple gestures still going on: growing, repairing, watering, waiting for the boat.
The demons are less scary than the empty houses
With its nickname of Onigashima, Megijima obviously plays the demon card. You come across oni statues, grumpy faces, squat silhouettes, a whole little folklore tied to Momotaro. But on the spot, the demons mostly look like annoyed mascots. They’re there, they pose, they do their job at the mythological tourist office.
The strangest part is elsewhere. In the quiet lanes. In the grey façades. In the opaque windows. In the grasses reclaiming the edges of the houses. In those details that make it feel as though the island keeps more memories than inhabitants. Megijima isn’t really frightening. It has, rather, a very gentle way of letting absences linger.
The retro cinema that swallows everything
The big moment of Megijima is Island Theatre Megi. And there, the island abruptly changes time zone. You leave the fields, the stone walls and the low houses to step into an old dream of American cinema, as if a piece of New York had washed up on a too-quiet Japanese island.
The work is by Yoichiro Yoda, an artist born in Kagawa but raised in New York, who had long dreamed of recreating the atmosphere of the old 42nd Street cinemas that disappeared in the 1990s. For the Setouchi Triennale, he turned a former Megijima warehouse into a ghost theatre, with a retro façade, ticket booth, red curtains, turquoise walls, portraits of actors, nods to Chaplin, Broadway, Yoda and the old temples of popular cinema. It’s not just pretty or nostalgic: it’s a complete mental set, a cinema that screens not only films but an entire vanished world. And the contrast is delicious. Outside, an ageing island, vegetable patches, cats, the ferry to Takamatsu. Inside, New York, red velvet, the stars, the neon and that absurd sense of having found an American neighbourhood theatre in the middle of the Inland Sea.
MECON, or contemporary art that grows crooked
Megijima also has a few surprising installations, and MECON is one of them. Set in the island’s former primary school, the work by Shinro Ohtake mixes salvaged objects, vegetation, vivid colours, mosaics, pipes, boat parts and a faintly radioactive greenhouse vibe.
It’s precisely that contrast that works. The art doesn’t smooth the island over. It throws it off. The blazing reds, the green passages, the thick plants and the cobbled-together materials rub against the ageing of the place. Nothing is too clean, too white, too museum-like. You’re in something living, dense, almost invasive. On Megijima, contemporary art doesn’t make the island more modern, it makes it weirder. And that’s much better.
Black wood, orange rust and walls that hold firm
A large part of Megijima’s charm lies in its materials. The dark wood, the grey façades, the vertical planks, the rusted sheet metal, the openwork breeze blocks, the old stone walls. You could almost tour the island just by looking at the surfaces.
The stone walls, called o-te, are part of Megijima’s landscape. They protect the houses from wind and sea spray, and give the village its slightly fortified look, with its narrow lanes and sheltered passages. Nothing looks designed to be pretty, but everything ends up being so: an orange lamp on rust, a worn door, a blackened façade, a line of stones. Megijima is a tactile island; it’s best seen up close.
The moss insists, the cats supervise
In the middle of all this, the mosses, bonsai and little gardens bring another energy. A very green moss spills out of an old washbasin, a flowering bonsai concentrates all of spring in a single bowl, branches cross through interiors as if nature were gently taking the place back. That’s perhaps what keeps Megijima from becoming merely melancholy. The island is ageing, yes. But something is still growing. The moss insists. The plants return. The little trees stand up to time.
And then there are the cats. Fewer, less sovereign than on Ogijima, but perfectly in their place. A cat sitting at the roadside is enough to put the island back to its scale: a wall, a low light, a silence, an animal watching you as if you were the intruder.
Megijima, the island that rewards a second look
Deep down, Megijima is perhaps the island of small dislocations. You come for the oni, the beach or the Setouchi Triennale works, and you leave with something else: an old American cinema lost in a Japanese village, stone walls facing Takamatsu, quiet vegetable patches, over-green mosses, discreet cats and that rare sense of having visited an island that doesn’t quite resemble what it promised.
Less obvious than Ogijima, but full of surprises, Megijima richly deserves a few hours, especially if you like slightly crooked places, suspended moods and islands that keep a share of strangeness under the sun.
