Naked hermit removed from island paradise
Japanese police tell ageing recluse that he cannot go back to his solo existence on unpopulated island
‘All that I want I can find here. I don’t need anything else. I’ve already told my family that I will die here’
MASAFUMI NAGASAKI was living in a state of perfect bliss, spending his days wandering naked and alone on a Pacific island, foraging for food and watching turtles hatch on the beach.
That is, until reports of his ill health prompted police to take him away from his Robinson Crusoe-like existence and rejoin mainstream Japanese society.
Mr Nagasaki, 82, lived a simple life on the remote island of Sotobanari, about 120 miles east of Taiwan, for nearly 30 years, having moved there to escape urban life, but he has now been taken away despite insisting he wanted to die there.
The wiry and tanned recluse was picked up on a nearby island in Okinawa Prefecture, south-west of Japan, after police received reports that he appeared to be weak and in ill health. Since then he has been living in a local authority property 45 miles away on Ishigaki island, according to Alvaro Cerezo, a documentary maker who befriended him in 2014. When Mr Nagasaki was found, Mr Cerezo said he “probably only had the flu” but he is not being allowed to return to Sotobanari, an uninhabited island half a mile in diameter and his home since 1989.
The man nicknamed the naked hermit was coy about his background, although he did indicate that he had been married and had two children.
There were suggestions that he had worked as a photographer, in a factory and in Osaka’s seedy nightlife district before turning his back on civilisation.
Initially, Mr Nagasaki intended to stay on the island for a couple of years, but discovered that he enjoyed his newfound lifestyle so much that he decided to live there permanently.
“In civilisation, people treated me like an idiot and made me feel like one,” he told Mr Cerezo. “On this island, I didn’t feel like that”.
He added: “Here, I’m not told what to do. I just follow nature’s rules.”
Mr Nagasaki spent his first few years on Sotobanari wearing the clothes he had brought with him from the mainland, but a typhoon swept away virtually all his possessions, including clothing.
“Walking round naked doesn’t really fit in with normal society, but on the island it feels right; it’s like a uniform,” he said in an interview with Reuters in 2012. “If you put on clothes, you’ll feel completely out of place”.
Mr Nagasaki followed a strict routine, staying in his tent between dusk and dawn to avoid insect bites and doing morning exercises on the beach.
He spent much of his day foraging for vegetarian food – he had given up meat and fish and would not touch turtle eggs after seeing hatchlings scurry out to sea. He used a series of buckets to gather rainwater.
Once a week, he would dress and sail to a neighbouring island where he would buy food and drink with money sent regularly to him by his family.
Before being forced to leave, Mr Nagasaki had told Mr Cerezo that he had wanted to stay indefinitely. “I won’t leave, even if someone tells me there is a better place”, he said.
“All that I want I can find here. I don’t need anything else. I’ve already told my family that I will die here.”