How a Japanese Island Quietly Disappeared

Esanbe Hanakita Kojima, as the island is called, may have been eroded by wind and ice floes



Residents of a village on the main island Hokkaido (pictured) didn't realize one of the small, uninhabited islands, Esanbe Hanakita Kojima, off the coast near them had vanished completely. (Jesper Rautell Balle/Wikimedia)

By Brigit Katz
smithsonian.com
November 2, 2018 12:29PM


‘Tis the season of disappearing islands. Late last month, a remote Hawaiian island, once an important nesting site for green sea turtles, was all but wiped out when Hurricane Walaka tore through the Pacific. Now, as Justin McCurry reports for the Guardian, an uninhabited islet off the northeastern coast of Japan has vanished, its absence for some time unnoticed by residents of a nearby village on the main island of Hokkaido.

Hiroshi Shimizu, an author who has written about Japan’s islands, was first to remark on the disappearance of Esanbe Hanakita Kojima. During a visit to Sarufutsu, a village on the northern tip of Hokkaido, he realized that the island was nowhere to be seen, and reached out to the local fishery cooperative association, according to the Asahi Shimbun. The association consulted its sea chart and confirmed that where Esanbe Hanakita Kojima once stood, there is now only empty sea.

The island was last surveyed in 1987, at which point it protruded less than five feet above the water. The Japan Coast Guard has theorized that the little island was likely eroded by wind and ice floes that form in the Sea of Okhotsk, which lies between Siberia and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

“It is not impossible that tiny islands get weathered by the elements,” an unnamed coastguard official tells the Agence France-Presse.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/japanese-island-quietly-disappeared-180970694/#eo2W71p7hIfwSpmB.99