Minamitorishima
— the morning the sun reaches Japan first.
Not only on a wall.
“A single triangular coral island, two kilometers on a side, sitting alone in the open Pacific roughly 1,850 kilometers southeast of Tokyo. No civilians live here, only rotating crews from the Japan Meteorological Agency, the Self-Defense Force, and the Coast Guard. The runway takes most of the land. The reef takes the rest. The nearest other piece of Japan is more than a thousand kilometers away, and the dawn line crosses this island before any other Japanese soil. from the studio
Minamitorishima, 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.
Minamitorishima, also called Marcus Island, is a single isolated coral island in the western Pacific Ocean, the easternmost territory of Japan at roughly 24°17' N, 153°59' E. It is triangular, with each side about two kilometers long, and reaches only nine meters above sea level at its highest point. Administratively it belongs to Ogasawara Village, Tokyo Metropolis, though it lies about 1,850 kilometers southeast of central Tokyo and about 1,300 kilometers from the nearest other Japanese island. The island's exclusive economic zone covers around 430,000 square kilometers of open ocean.
There is no civilian population. The only residents are rotating personnel from the Japan Meteorological Agency, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, and the Japan Coast Guard, totaling fewer than 30 people at any time. Access is restricted to government flights into the 1,370-meter runway that occupies most of the island's interior. No tourism, no fishing village, no harbor for civilian vessels. The reef edge falls away to deep ocean within meters of the shore, and the dominant sound is wind across coral rubble and the long Pacific surf.
Because the island sits at about 154° east longitude, the dawn reaches Minamitorishima before any other piece of sovereign Japanese territory, several minutes earlier than the easternmost cape of Hokkaido. The Japan Meteorological Agency station here has logged surface weather data continuously since 1968, and in recent years the surrounding seabed has drawn attention for unusually high concentrations of rare-earth elements in deep-sea mud. The island itself, though, is mostly silence, low scrub, frigatebirds, and a horizon with nothing on it at all.