Left behind,
alone on the island.

In 1177, near the end of the Heian period, a plot to overthrow the Taira clan led by Taira no Kiyomori was uncovered at a villa in Shishigatani, Kyoto (the Shishigatani Conspiracy). Three men involved in the plan — the monk Shunkan, Fujiwara no Naritsune, and Taira no Yasuyori — were captured and exiled to Kikaigashima, a remote island far south of the capital. Despite having once held the high rank of sozu (a senior Buddhist cleric), Shunkan was forced to endure a punishing life as an exile on a desolate island wreathed in volcanic smoke.

The following year, 1178, a general amnesty granted to mark the safe delivery of the empress's child brought pardons for Naritsune and Yasuyori, and a ship arrived at Kikaigashima to bring them home. But Shunkan's name alone was missing from the pardon document. Clinging to the boat on the shore, Shunkan begged not to be left behind, but the ship departed regardless, leaving him alone on the island. This scene — "Shunkan, left alone on the island" — is one of the most celebrated passages in the Tale of the Heike, later staged repeatedly as the Noh and Kabuki play "Shunkan," and it has moved audiences to tears ever since.

There are actually several theories about which present-day island corresponds to the "Kikaigashima" described in the Tale of the Heike. The most widely favored candidate is Iwo-jima — part of the outer rim of the Kikai Caldera, now Iwo-jima, Mishima Village, Kagoshima District — where a "Monument to Shunkan" and "Shunkan-do," a hall said to enshrine him, still stand today. But a long-standing rival theory points instead to Kikai Island, further south (now Kikai Town, Oshima District), rather than Satsuma Iwo-jima — a claim bolstered by the similarity between the names "Kikaigashima" (鬼界ヶ島) and "Kikai Island" (喜界島) — and the two islands still, in a sense, compete for the "real" title today.

Iwo-jima is also one of the islands with its own legends of Taira clan survivors (ochudo). Tradition holds that remnants of the defeated Taira clan, after their loss at the Battle of Dan-no-ura, fled all the way to this remote volcanic island and settled there — layering the memory of the Taira clan's glory and downfall, alongside Shunkan's tragedy, onto this small island many times over.

Kagoshima is home not only to tragedies like Shunkan's, but also to a place that claims to be the birthplace of a beloved fairy tale about longing for the Dragon Palace. We introduce the legend of Urashima Taro, associated with Nagasakibana, the cape at the southern tip of the Satsuma Peninsula.