Chichijima
— — an island the ferry takes a full day to find.
Not only on a wall.
“The main island of the Ogasawara group, also called the Bonin Islands, roughly a thousand kilometres south of Tokyo and reached only by a twenty-four-hour ferry from Takeshiba pier. There is no airport. About two thousand people live here, mostly around Futami port, on a subtropical island of headland forests, white-sand coves, and water clear enough to see the bottom thirty metres down. UNESCO inscribed the Ogasawara Islands as a Natural World Heritage Site in 2011 for their endemic plants and snails. from the studio
Chichijima, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chichijima, meaning Father Island, is the largest and most populated island in the Ogasawara archipelago, an isolated chain in the Philippine Sea about one thousand kilometres south of central Tokyo. Administratively it is part of Ogasawara Village in Tokyo Metropolis. The island covers roughly 24 square kilometres and has a resident population of around two thousand, concentrated around the main harbour of Futami on its west coast. The Ogasawara group is volcanic and oceanic — it has never been connected to a continent — which is the reason for the unusual rate of endemic species in its plants, land snails, and forest birds.
The waters around Chichijima are warm and exceptionally clear, with summer visibility often above thirty metres. Humpback whales calve in the channel between Chichijima and Hahajima from roughly February through April, and bottlenose and spinner dolphins are resident year-round. The coast is a sequence of small white-sand coves cut into low cliffs of weathered andesite, with a few longer beaches — Kominato, Kopepe, Miyanohama — used for swimming and snorkelling. The reef system is dominated by hard corals at the northern edge of their Pacific range, sheltered enough that small boats can run out from Futami on most days outside typhoon season.
Chichijima is reached only by the Ogasawara Maru ferry from Takeshiba pier in central Tokyo, a sailing of about twenty-four hours. There is no airport on the island, and no plans to build one — the absence of one is part of how the endemic ecosystem has been preserved. The ferry runs roughly once a week, which sets the rhythm of any visit at a minimum of three nights. Most of the island's land area is inside Ogasawara National Park, and access to the protected forests requires a registered local guide under rules introduced after the 2011 UNESCO inscription.