A “naked hermit” who spent 29 years alone on the island says goodbye for good

An 87-year-old Japanese man who spent nearly 30 years on a remote island got his wish to see his old hometown last.

Before the boredom of civilization in the 1950s, Masafumi Nagasaki worked as a photographer.

Abandoned by his wife and two children in 1989, he is rumored to have moved to Sotobanari, a 1 km wide, dense, uninhabited island free of fresh water, hundreds of kilometers south of mainland Japan.

After 29 years of quarantine, it was discovered in 2018 by a local fisherman lying almost unknowingly on the beach.

The doctor acknowledged his health concerns and decided that he needed hospital treatment.

On his first visit from an outsider in 2012, he said he lived entirely on the island, except for weekly donations of water and rice balls returned to him by his family.

He told reporters at the time: “I don’t do what society tells me, but I obey the rules of nature. I can’t beat nature, so I have to obey her.”

His health forced him to return to mainland urban life. There, the government provided a small amount of money to cover his housing and basic needs.

However, a Spanish study discovered Masahum a few years ago but decided to keep his life a secret, saying that he had a hard time making friends and that his neighbors treated him with “disgust and a little fear,” Álvaro Selezo said.

Retirees accustomed to living in completely bare sandals managed to store their clothes in public.

However, he was very frustrated with the pollution caused by being in the city, walking restlessly and picking up trash wherever he went.

“In a society like Japan, few people understood his eccentric lifestyle and his extreme desire to live naked on a desert island,” he said.

The difficulty of his adaptation was compounded by the pandemic, which has forced him to spend most of the last four years in isolation.

The terrible irony of fate was that the virus was forced to spend most of its days on a small island in a much smaller room where it was in no danger of being trapped.

“His little room was like a desert island where he could be isolated, since it was the only place to dress and live freely, as he has been doing for the last 29 years,” Selezo added.

The 87-year-old woman returned to Sotonab earlier this month with the help of Mr. Selezo’s company, Docastaway. Docastaway offers tourists a “relaxing” experience of spending two to five weeks alone on an uninhabited island.

The footage shows Masahum throwing his hand up in the air and laughing happily after reaching the shore.

Now he’s back on the mainland, but “luckily he wasn’t sad to leave,” Selezo told the New York Post.

He added: “He seems happy to have the opportunity to say goodbye to his island.

“Maybe a few years later, if you still want to spend your last days on Sotobaran Island and you feel like the time has come and you’re ready to leave this world, we definitely want to help you. You’ll be there.”

Massafum is considered the longest running voluntary landfill in history.

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