Naoshima

Naoshima has been inhabited for many centuries, and its name is traditionally explained by a legend about an exiled emperor who praised the islanders' honesty. Before the modern era its people lived from fishing, salt-making and the coastal trade that moved along the Inland Sea, as on most of the islands around it.

The modern island was made by industry. In 1917 Mitsubishi built a copper refinery on the northern shore, and the smelter's tall chimney, company housing and imported workforce turned a farming and fishing community into a works town. The plant gave Naoshima steady employment and tax income for decades, but the smoke damaged vegetation on the northern hills, and the contrast between the industrial north and the empty south shaped what came next. On neighbouring Teshima, the illegal dumping of industrial waste from the 1970s became one of Japan's longest environmental disputes, settled after a twenty-five-year legal battle; the waste was then shipped to Naoshima for processing.

In the late 1980s the mayor of Naoshima and Soichiro Fukutake, head of the Okayama publishing and education company Benesse, agreed to develop the southern end of the island for art and education. A campsite came first, then Benesse House in 1992, the Art House Project in Honmura from 1998, the Chichu Art Museum in 2004 and the Lee Ufan Museum in 2010, all designed with Tadao Ando. Visitor numbers rose into the hundreds of thousands a year, and the Setouchi Triennale, first held in 2010, spread the model to other islands.

Naoshima's identity now rests on a single idea: that contemporary art belongs in an ordinary place rather than in a capital city. The buildings are sunk into hillsides or hidden behind village facades, so the island reveals its works slowly and on foot. Visitors move between them in near silence, and photography is barred inside most of them, which gives the island a quieter, more deliberate feel than the numbers would suggest.

Beneath that lies a working island community of a few thousand people, with shrines, a fishing harbour and the routines of a small Japanese town. The puppet theatre known as Naoshima Onnabunraku, performed only by women, is the island's own older art form. Houses in Honmura are clad in boards blackened by fire to preserve them, yakisugi, a western Japanese building tradition that the art project chose to keep rather than replace.

Relations between residents and the art site have generally been co-operative: local people opened houses to the project, work the museums and cafés, and run guesthouses, while some object to crowds, traffic on narrow lanes and the cost of housing. The etiquette asked of visitors is simple and often posted — quiet in the lanes, no photographs of houses and gardens, no shortcuts through private land — and reflects the fact that Honmura's art route runs through people's front doorsteps.

About 3,000 people live on Naoshima, most of them in Miyanoura, Honmura and the smaller settlement of Tsumuura, and the population has been falling steadily since 1970. It is an old island: a large share of residents are over sixty-five, the school is small, and many younger people work on the mainland or have left for Okayama and Takamatsu.

Two economies run side by side. The Mitsubishi Materials works on the northern shore still employs islanders and now recovers metals from industrial waste, including the waste brought over from Teshima, as well as smelting ore, and it remains the largest single employer and taxpayer. Tourism provides the rest: museum and hotel jobs, cafés, guesthouses, bicycle hire and the boats. The two rarely meet, since the industrial north is closed to visitors and the art sites lie to the south.

The day follows the ferries. Morning boats bring visitors from Uno and Takamatsu, buses fill, the villages are busy from mid-morning to late afternoon, and the island empties again with the last crossings, after which the few open restaurants serve mostly overnight guests. Housing for seasonal staff, an ageing population, the cost of running services for a small community, and how many visitors the island can absorb in a Triennale year are the recurring local questions.

Naoshima eats from the Inland Sea. Sea bream is the prized local fish, caught in the tidal narrows and served raw, grilled with salt or cooked with rice as taimeshi; hamachi yellowtail is farmed in the waters of Kagawa; and octopus, conger eel, sawara mackerel and small shrimp turn up in set meals, rice bowls and tempura. Nori seaweed and salt production have long histories on these islands.

Being part of Kagawa, the island also eats Sanuki udon — thick, firm wheat noodles in a light dashi of iriko, the local dried sardines, or cold with a dipping sauce — though there are far fewer noodle counters here than in Takamatsu. Olive oil and olive products from nearby Shodoshima, soy sauce brewed in the Inland Sea towns, and wasanbon, the fine pale sugar of eastern Shikoku, appear in shops and on menus.

The visitor economy has added its own layer: cafés in converted village houses serving coffee, curry rice and cakes, a handful of restaurants using local fish and vegetables, and island-themed sweets and salt sold as souvenirs. Choice is limited and many places keep short hours or close on the days the museums do, so buying food at the port or bringing it from the mainland is common practice among people staying overnight.