Hisaka is a small island just across a narrow strait from Fukue, in the Goto archipelago far out in the East China Sea west of Nagasaki, and it has a quiet, particular history. Christianity arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century, was banned by the shogunate in the early seventeenth, and ruthlessly suppressed. Yet in the countryside around Nagasaki, communities went on practising in secret for more than two hundred years, mixing Catholic prayers with Buddhist and Shinto forms in order to avoid detection. They are known as the Hidden Christians, or Kakure Kirishitan. In the late eighteenth century, the lord of the Goto islands asked for farmers from the mainland to settle his empty land, and many of those who came were secret Christians, glad to move to a remote place where they might be left alone.
The villages they founded on islands like Hisaka were deliberately modest and tucked in hollows by the sea, and UNESCO included the sites in its 2018 listing of the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region. After the ban was lifted in 1873, many of the island Christians built churches, and the Goto islands are now dotted with white chapels with a dramatic sense of simplicity.
Reaching Hisaka takes planning. You ride your bike around Fukue, the main island, which has good roads along a rugged coast, and then make the crossing by boat from a small port. Ferry and boat schedules depend on weather, and the sea in the Goto channel can be rough, so check times locally and be prepared for changes. On Fukue itself, the riding is lovely, with grassy volcanic hills, long beaches and camellia forests, and the traffic is light. Spring brings camellias in bloom, while typhoon season in late summer and autumn can close ferries.
Fuel should be filled at Fukue, where the town of Fukue, with more than twenty-five thousand people, has stations, because smaller islands have little or none. Bring cash, since small places do not always take cards, and expect to find simple food such as fresh fish and noodles made in the island style.
When you stand on the quiet slope above the water, with a small church tucked in the trees, the story feels very close, and it is respectful to keep voices low near places of worship.