TOKYO/WARSAW — A men-only island in Japan where women are banned and male visitors must bathe naked in the sea before visiting its shrine, has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The tiny landmass of Okinoshima is permanently manned by a Shinto priest who prays to the island’s goddess, in a tradition that has been kept up for centuries.

Limited numbers are permitted to land on the island in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) — this year it was 200 — for a yearly festival that lasts just two hours, but they must adhere to strict rules.

Most importantly, they must be men, but they must also strip off and take a purifying dip in the ocean before they are allowed to set foot on the sacred ground of the shrine.

Despite its inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage list — often the prelude to a leap in tourist numbers — shrine officials say they are now considering banning future travel for anyone apart from priests, partly out of fears the island could be “destroyed” by too many visitors.

“The island has sometimes been said to ban women, but in principle anyone but the priests who pray there for 365 days a year is barred from entering,” said a spokesman.

The ban on female visitors specifically “has nothing to do with discrimination against women,” the official told AFP by phone.

It is considered dangerous for women to travel by sea to get to the island and the shrine will not change the centuries-old rule, he said.

“It is meant to protect women, the birth-giving gender,” he added.

The island, which sits off the northwest coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, was an important window for foreign trade in Japan since ancient times, forming part of a trade route that linked the archipelago to the Korean peninsula and China.

Thousands of gold rings and other valuable items have been found there.

“These treasures are believed to have been offered to the gods in order to pray for national prosperity and the safety of marine traffic,” says the Web site of Munakata Taisha, the shrine which owns Okinoshima.

UNESCO’s heritage committee considered 33 sites for the prestigious status at its annual gathering in Poland.

On Sunday it also accepted Taputapuatea, a portion of the “Polynesian Triangle” in the South Pacific thought to be the last part of the globe settled by humans, to the list.

It also added Britain’s Lake District — muse for artists from William Wordsworth to Beatrix Potter — and the Valongo wharf in Rio de Janeiro where slaves from Africa first arrived in Brazil.

UNESCO’s World Heritage list includes over 1,000 sites, monuments and natural phenomena that are of “outstanding universal value” to humankind.

It includes treasures such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Taj Mahal in India, and the rock-carved city of Petra in modern-day Jordan.

WILD BEAUTY
Britain’s Lake District, an area of wild beauty that beguiled poets and artists from William Wordsworth to Beatrix Potter, was praised by the UN’s cultural body for its “picturesque aesthetic” as well as its links with Romantic art and literature.

“The special significance of the Lake District lies in the interaction between social, economic, cultural and environmental influences,” it said in a statement.

Considered the cradle of the British Romanticism movement pioneered by Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, the region becomes Britain’s 31st World Heritage site.

John Glen, minister for arts, heritage and tourism, said the new status would boost the Lake District’s international reputation and benefit locals.

“It is a unique part of the world that combines a vibrant farming community with thousands of archaeological sites and structures that give us an amazing glimpse into our past,” he said in a statement.

SLAVE PORT
The committee of the UN cultural body said the Valongo wharf in Rio de Janeiro was a reminder of the estimated 900,000 Africans who were brought there by slave traders starting in 1811.

The old stone wharf “is the most important physical trace of the arrival of African slaves on the American continent,” UNESCO said on its Web site.

For Valongo, the world heritage honor makes it a twin with Ile de Goree, a small island near Dakar harbor that was chosen in 1978 as the emblem of the departure points for slaves from west Africa on their way to the Americas.

Valongo deserved the recognition like Auschwitz and Hiroshima “to make us remember those parts of the history of humanity that must not be forgotten,” historian Katia Bogea, head of Brazil’s national heritage institute (IPHAN) told the UNESCO committee.

Today the Valongo site is not on the water, but well inland, following expansion of the original city. The remains were only discovered by accident in 2011 during massive works to refurbish the port area for the 2016 Olympics.

Historians had known that this was the area where the biggest slave trade in the Americas was centered, but few Brazilians were aware. Nearby, a couple discovered by chance that their house was sitting on a mass grave of what could be tens of thousands of slaves.

Valongo is where the slaves, often emaciated and sick after the voyage, were taken to be quarantined, sorted and sold.

“It’s a unique memorial, containing the last remaining vestiges of the slaves’ arrival,” anthropologist Milton Guran recently told AFP.

Guran also pointed to a far reaching consequence to UNESCO status: “It will oblige Brazil to recognize its African roots” and will also encourage educational tourism. — AFP

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