Ogijima is a small island of 1.34 km² set in the Seto Inland Sea like a confetti, about forty minutes by ferry from Takamatsu, after a stop at Megijima, the island of Momotaro’s oni. Attached to Kagawa Prefecture, it hangs its village on the south-west slope, in a pile-up of houses, stairways and steep lanes that look as though they were built with very little room and a great deal of stubbornness. Home today to around 150–180 people, Ogijima keeps the traces of a singular history: cows once rented out in exchange for rice, an 1895 granite lighthouse, a shrine tied to prayers for childbirth, and since 2010 the Setouchi Triennale, which has helped bring a little life back to the island.
Welcome to the Village That Climbs
Ogijima isn’t an island you visit on the flat: it climbs! It refuses the lazy tourism of the nice horizontal path with soft-serve ice cream and polite explanatory signs. Here, the village starts at the port and immediately begins to scale the slope, as if each house had wanted to see the sea before its neighbour. The lanes are narrow, twisted, often too tight to walk two abreast without a bit of jostling. You pass pots, nets, buckets, pipes, half-open doors, bicycles that look as though they gave up ten years ago but maybe still serve every morning.
The Cats Have Seized Power, but with Elegance
People sometimes come to Ogijima for the cats, and it would be wrong to pretend that isn’t an argument. They’re there, everywhere without being exactly everywhere. On a low wall, under a car, near a rope, in the middle of a staircase, in that very Japanese pose of the cat who seems to have been assigned to watch over an entire neighbourhood. But what’s beautiful isn’t only that there are cats. It’s the way they belong to the island’s rhythm. They live alongside the inhabitants, the visitors, the artworks, the damaged houses, the baskets, the harbours, the shadows. They add a layer of silent presence to a place already very inhabited by detail.
Contemporary Art Has Stepped into Daily Life
The Setouchi Triennale changed Ogijima without turning it into an over-clean arty set. Here, contemporary art doesn’t keep its distance from the village: it settles into daily life. You meet it at the port, on the façades, in the lanes, on the residents’ carts, sometimes even on a sea wall, with legs. Literally. It mixes with the tired houses, the electric wires, the cats, the basins, the crumbling walls. And that’s exactly why it works.
Right on arrival, Jaume Plensa’s Ogijima’s Soul sets the tone. This large white structure covered in letters serves both as an artwork and as a welcome building. You step off the ferry, pick up a map, then look up at this roof made of intertwined alphabets, casting its shadows on the ground. On paper, it might seem a little showy. On site, with the sea in front, the boats in the harbour and the village climbing behind, the whole thing becomes much simpler: a white UFO, elegant and slightly strange, that acts as if it had always been there. A little further on, on the sea wall, Keisuke Yamaguchi’s Walking Ark pushes the strangeness even further. The work looks like a white-and-blue ark, inspired by Noah’s Ark, set on long legs. It looks as though it could stand up and leave the island at low tide. Anywhere else, it might be too weird. On Ogijima, it goes down very well: the houses already cling to the slope, the cats occupy the stairs, the ferries glide in the distance, and this legged ark almost looks like one more resident.
Higher up in the village, the works become more discreet. Some slip onto the façades, others seem almost absorbed by the lanes. They don’t always seek to dominate the landscape. They agree to share the frame with a basin, a cat, an antenna, a damaged wall or a sliver of sea. That’s perhaps where Ogijima becomes truly interesting: when you can no longer quite tell what belongs to art, to DIY, to chance or to daily life.
Ogijima Doesn’t Do Pretty
It would be a shame to sell Ogijima as a simply charming island. It is, of course, but the word is too tidy. Ogijima has cracks, empty houses, corners where you feel life has receded. And that’s exactly what makes it stronger than a postcard.
Alongside that, life returns in touches: a café, a library, a few activities, families settled since the Triennale, a school reopened after several years closed. Not a great rural miracle in brochure form, more a fragile, uneven recovery, sometimes very beautiful, between abandonment and the wish to stay. Even the painted walls don’t try to look like “painted walls”. With Ogijima Wallalley, Rikuji Makabe set onto the façades pieces of wood salvaged from the island, sometimes from boat materials, covered in colourful silhouettes. As if someone had repaired the village with memories of sea, wood and paint. Sometimes you can no longer quite tell whether you’re looking at an artwork or local DIY that became too beautiful by accident.
It’s this tension that makes Ogijima so strong: a cat in front of a tired house, an artwork at the end of a lane, a plant growing anywhere, the sea behind three pipes and a plastic crate. The island doesn’t erase daily life to make itself desirable; it leaves it in the foreground.
The slope as a tourist filter
Ogijima sorts people a little by the calves. You have to climb, come back down, get lost, return, accept that Google Maps isn’t always the main character of the story. The island isn’t big, but it has this way of folding in on itself that gives the impression there’s always one more lane, one more corner, one more terrace, one more passage you haven’t seen.
This slope also explains the existence of the onba, those little hand-pushed carts the residents use to carry shopping, belongings, harvests, sometimes simply to help themselves walk. The Onba Factory turned them into a useful artwork, creating personalised carts for the inhabitants. A rather perfect idea for Ogijima: contemporary art, yes, but with wheels, handles, and a real reason to exist.
And then there are the scenes that need no explanatory panel. A woman hanging out or bringing in her laundry in the sun, pink pegs, towels, a folded blanket on the ground, a tired wall behind. On another island, you might have framed the sea. On Ogijima, this kind of image says almost more than the landscape: the island isn’t only visited, it’s washed, carried, tidied, repaired, started over every day by those who still live there.
Climbing toward the Toyotama-hime shrine, the slope changes register. These are no longer just stairs to tire out visitors, but a real ascent toward a place where people came to pray for childbirth. Women from other islands once travelled here to ask for a safe delivery, and the women of Ogijima also gathered here in the evening, with their own chairs, to chat. The image is magnificent: at the top of this too-steep village, a shrine tied to birth, and local women who turn the sacred into a neighbourhood lounge.
It’s an island of micro-events. A curtain that moves. A rusted mailbox. A cat vanishing up a staircase. A smell of sea and laundry. An old house you can’t read: abandoned, lived-in, kept, forgotten? You move through a kind of investigation with no crime, just clues of life. And then suddenly, the sea appears. Not as a grand tourist revelation, more like a breath between two walls. Ogijima is very good at that: it shuts you inside its lanes, then hands you back the horizon all at once.
The lighthouse, or the art of ending at the edge of the world
At the north of the island, the Ogijima lighthouse waits at the end of the path, white, spare, almost too crisp against the sea. Built in 1895, it gives the walk a real direction: you leave the village, the cats, the works, the tightly packed houses, and head toward another Ogijima, more open, more mineral, more silent. This granite lighthouse is nothing like a romantic backdrop. It has, rather, the stubborn elegance of useful constructions that ended up becoming beautiful. It reminds you that before being an island of contemporary art and photogenic cats, Ogijima was above all a point on the sea, a place from which boats had to be guided.
In February, the road to the lighthouse fills with Japanese narcissus. Nearly ten million flowers, they say, as if the tiny island had decided to make up for its size with a completely outsized bloom. On Ogijima, even the flowers know how to take up space.
An island for those who love wonky things
Ogijima isn’t the most famous, not the most spectacular, not the most neatly museumified of the Setouchi islands. And that’s precisely why it stays at the top of mind. It has that rare mix of local life, contemporary art, sovereign cats, tired houses, newcomers, small rebirths and domestic ghosts.
You can come for the Triennale, for the cats, for the photos, for the sea, to tick off one more island in the Seto Inland Sea. But if you leave genuinely moved, it’s often for something else: because Ogijima never gives the impression of having tidied everything away before your arrival. It keeps its electric wires, its too-steep stairs, its damaged corners, its traces of life, its sometimes incongruous artworks, its far-too-confident cats. It doesn’t try to be perfect. It prefers to be lived in. And honestly, it’s much better that way.
