Koshiki Honey: Sweetness from Southern Japanese Islands

An Island of Ancient Beauty

In the early autumn of 2023, I suddenly found myself with a day free during a business trip to Kagoshima Prefecture. I used the time to travel to Koshiki, a place I had wanted to visit for some time. I only knew about it, though, because of Soshū, a brand of delicious sweet-potato shōchū made there.

Koshiki is actually a close grouping of islands—with the main three, Kamikoshiki, Nakakoshiki, and Shimokoshiki, connected by bridges—in the East China Sea, at their closest point about 20 kilometers west of the Satsuma Peninsula in Kagoshima. All three together have a population of just over 4,000 people, and their primary product is seafood like jackknife shrimp and silver-stripe round herring.

I took the high-speed ferry from Sendai Port Terminal across to Koshiki, a trip of about 50 minutes. As we approached the island, jutting boulders and bare cliff faces, like the bones of the earth laid bare, delighted the eye. Layers of rock formed 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous period folded and jutted above the surface of the sea.

The view from the high-speed ferry connecting the Kyūshū mainland with Koshiki. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Ancient layers of rock expose themselves over the calm sea. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

I disembarked at Kamikoshiki Sato no Kō port, rented a car, and headed off for Shimokoshiki and the Yoshinaga Shuzō distillery, home to Soshū. For more than 40 kilometers, I drove along the seaside and enjoyed the rocky scenery speeding by. On the road, I saw barely any other cars or people.

Sadly, the distillery was closed for the weekend, but I happened to run into the owner’s mother while I was there, and she agreed to show me around. It was lunch time, and when I asked if she could recommend someplace to eat local seafood, she recommended the newly opened café Kaw

The Koshiki Bridge connecting Nakakoshiki and Shimokoshiki is 1,533 meters long. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

One of the boulders along the base of the bridge looks like an old rice steamer, or koshiki, the source of the island group’s name. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Dropping Domestic Honey Production

“Kawangui is a word in the local dialect meaning ‘beside the river,’” explained cafe owner Kobayashi Kei. After perusing the shop’s menu, handwritten each day on a chalkboard, I ordered the lunch of the day. It included sashimi of a skipjack-tuna-like fish called oboso. Other customers included a family of locals, and the youngest was eating watermelon sherbet with relish.

Honey-drizzled watermelon sherbet. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Inside Kawangui. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

“It’s topped with honey we produce ourselves from Japanese honeybees!” said Kobayashi.

That phrase, “honey from Japanese honeybees,” got my attention. This native insect has been largely replaced by Western honeybees. I have heard that now, the only places where you can reliably find honey from these native bees are on outlying islands where Western honeybees have not been introduced.

I have also seen news stories about how domestic honey production in general, including from Western bees, has been falling. There are many reasons: harmful mites, agricultural pesticides, and above all the reduction in the nectar sources: flowers like lotus or clover, and trees like black locust, cherry, bodaiju (Bodhi), orange, and apple.

Other influences are shrinking farmland, shifts toward fruit trees with less nectar and pollen, climate change altering the flowering and growing seasons, and destruction of forest and farmland by weather disasters like typhoons.

Kobayashi Kei, owner of Kawangui. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

“I Want to Repay This Island”

The story of how Kobayashi came to Koshiki and started beekeeping is fascinating enough to fill a biopic.

Kobayashi was born in Saitama Prefecture. After graduating from a Tokyo junior college, she entered Saitama University to study international cooperation. Then, she worked for a trading company in Tokyo for three years until she decided to work in international cooperation as a nurse. She enrolled in Gunma University, and after graduating, took work at a hospital in the city of Hachiōji, Tokyo.

She worked for five years in cardiology, then joined a medical corporation taking Japanese medical care overseas. She was sent to Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh, where she taught local medical staff. She returned to Japan in 2021 and came to Koshiki for a year of special remote-region medical training.

One day, a man came to her clinic for treatment with a lobster fishing tool hooked in his head. His name was Sagara Nobuo.

Sagara was born in Koshiki. He had gone to the prefectural capital of Kagoshima to work in the restaurant business and in a civil engineering company, but returned home and became a fisherman after the death of his brother. He had picked up the beekeeping hobby in his mainland days and brought his Japanese honeybee swarm back to Koshiki with him.

Sagara Nobuo, the “Nobu” of Koshiki Honey Nobu Kōbō. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

According to Sagara, much of Kagoshima’s agriculture is based on large-scale crops like rice, sweet potatoes, and tea, which use pesticides harmful to honeybees. But, luckily for the bees, agriculture as a business has largely fallen by the wayside in Koshiki, and the islands are rich in nectar-providing plants, leading to purer, more natural honey.

Sagara invited Kobayashi to a party and introduced her to his island friends. He began to take her fishing and on other island activities, and soon Kobayashi took an interest in his beekeeping, as well.

“I had initially planned to finish my year of training and leave Koshiki, but then I started thinking that it would be nice to take some time to repay the islands somehow. But due to depopulation, there are few young people, and I just couldn’t think of a way to enliven them,” reflects Kobayashi. Then, suddenly, she thought of turning beekeeping into a business.

Drinking parties became a bridge between local islanders and outsiders. (© Kobayashi Kei)

Kobayashi decided to make use of Nobu. She learned what he knew about beekeeping and opened workshops on making candles out of beeswax from his hives. When her training at the local clinic ended in April 2022, she started preparing to go into business, and in September 2023, they founded Koshiki Honey Nobu Kōbō in an old farmhouse Sagara owned. They now produce and sell wild honey from Japanese honeybees and beeswax products.

They also applied for government subsidies for businesses on outlying islands and used the money to remodel a livestock barn at the farmhouse into Kawangui. Sagara catches and prepares the fish served at the café himself, and they also offer dishes using their honey.

Using Untapped Resources

Koshiki Honey has flavors reminiscent of persimmon or mango, giving it a character that evokes Japan’s southern islands. That might be from bees collecting nectar from the island’s crops of loquats or Japanese plums.

You can only harvest honey from Japanese honeybees once a year. (© Kobayashi Kei)

The real fascination with this story is how it hints at ways to use local resources—people, knowledge, nature, regional character—to revitalize aging and depopulating islands. It is a demonstration in how to cooperate to break through business obstacles—a small crew generating maximum momentum, unearthing hidden talent, integrating production, processing, and sales, and creating a single flow from ingredient procurement to profit.

Hives stand in the hillside forests. (© Kobayashi Kei)

The number of hives has increased from the initial 10 to 26. There are now between 50,000 and 200,000 bees in action, and in the autumn of 2023, they produced a total of about 80 kilograms of honey. Koshiki Honey products are sold at shops including Kuwangui and at the port, as well as online. With honey sales on track, Kobayashi is now thinking of setting up a place where visitors to the island can stay more comfortably as the next stage.

The logo dyed into the shop’s noren curtain incorporates a hexagon hinting at honeycomb, which surrounds a line drawing of the shop’s peaked rooftop and three wavy lines suggesting a river. Those three lines are also meant to represent the island’s people, newcomers like Kobayashi, and tourists. It is an expression of the ideal future Kobayashi wants to build here.

The noren hanging in Kawangui’s entrance. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Japanese honeybees gathering around the entrance to their hive. © Ukita Yasuyuki.)