A Western Outpost Shrinks on a Remote Island Now in Japanese Hands
Martin Fackler, NY Times, 6/10/12
CHICHI JIMA, Japan Every morning, as the sun rises over this remote Pacific Island and its tiny port with typically Japanese low-slung concrete buildings, John Washington commits a quiet act of defiance against the famously insular Japan: he hoists an American flag over his inn.
Mr. Washington, 63, whose white skin and blond hair, which is turning white, mark him as something of an outsider, is a great-great-grandson of the islands founding father, an American sailor named Nathaniel Savory who set sail in 1830 with a band of adventurers for this island, which was known as a lawless natural wonder.
These days, Mr. Washingtons attempt to evoke that history seems increasingly like an act of desperation. His community descendants of those settlers is vanishing as young people leave this isolated outpost, a 25-hour ferry ride from Tokyo in a chain once known as the Bonins, or assimilate, dropping the Anglican religion and English language of their forebears.
(...)
Today, the island is a sleepy place. Its rhythms are set by the arrival once every six days of the ferry that makes the 600-mile journey from Tokyo, which has administered Chichi Jima as part of what are now known as the Ogasawara Islands, after the United States returned them to Japan in 1968.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/world/asia/fewer-westerners-remain-on-remote-japanese-island.html?pagewanted=all