In an age of global tourism, gender-equality laws and Instagram-driven travel, Okinoshima, the Japanese ‘Island of Goddesses’, remains one of the world’s most inaccessible places—an island so sacred that not only tourists but women as a category are forbidden from setting foot on it. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, Okinoshima sits quietly in the Genkai Sea off northern Kyushu, wrapped in layers of ritual, taboo and controversy. Its forests are untouched, its soil packed with ancient offerings, and its rules—especially the ban on women—raise uncomfortable questions about how “heritage,” religion and gender coexist in the 21st century.
Okinoshima has been revered since at least the fourth century as a sacred site of maritime worship. Ancient Japanese sailors performed rituals there to pray for safe voyages, leaving behind mirrors, rings, weapons and ceremonial objects from across East Asia. The island is associated with the Munakata goddesses—three female deities believed to protect sea routes—worshipped through the Munakata Taisha shrine complex on the mainland. In Shinto terms, Okinoshima is not merely a holy place; it is itself a kami, a divine presence. That status explains the island’s extreme restrictions: nothing may be removed, nothing altered, and access has always been tightly controlled.
Central to these restrictions is the concept of kegare (穢れ, ritual impurity), a foundational idea in Shintoism. Unlike sin in Abrahamic religions, kegare is not moral failure but a state of pollution caused by death, blood or disruption of natural harmony. Menstruation and childbirth—because of their association with blood—were historically classified as sources of kegare. Over centuries, this belief crystallised into spatial boundaries known as nyonin kekkai (女人結界, women’s exclusion zones), barring women from certain shrines, mountains and islands. Okinoshima represents the most uncompromising expression of this logic.
Yet historians note that the ban was not always absolute. Early ritual use of Okinoshima likely involved elite male envoys, but the idea that women were inherently unfit for sacred proximity hardened over time, particularly after Buddhism arrived in Japan in the sixth century. Buddhist doctrines emphasizing female spiritual inferiority merged with Shinto purity rules, reinforcing exclusion. By the medieval period, nyonin kinsei (女人禁制, prohibition of women) was firmly embedded, not only as religious custom but as social order. What began as ritual caution evolved into permanent gendered exclusion.
Japan officially abolished most women bans during the Meiji era, when the state sought to modernize and present itself as a “civilized” nation. In 1872, women were formally allowed to climb sacred mountains previously closed to them. Many sites complied. Okinoshima did not. Its priests and guardians argued that the island’s sanctity depended precisely on its unbroken taboos. When UNESCO granted World Heritage status, it praised the continuity of ritual practice and the island’s pristine condition—but critics argue that this recognition also froze a discriminatory tradition in time.
Feminist scholars and activists have been particularly vocal. Historian Yuki Miyamoto and others have pointed out the irony of an island dedicated to female deities being closed to living women. Japanese women’s rights advocates argue that framing exclusion as “culture” masks structural sexism and turns inequality into something untouchable. International observers have raised similar concerns, questioning whether global institutions should celebrate heritage that rests on gender discrimination, even indirectly.
Defenders counter that Okinoshima is not a public space but a ritual archive, and that almost no one—men included—can enter today. Since 2017, even the limited annual male visit has been halted, leaving only Shinto priests rotating on the island. Yet critics respond that symbolic exclusions matter, especially when they align so neatly with historical patterns of controlling women’s bodies and spiritual authority.
Okinoshima forces a reckoning with an uneasy truth: traditions do not survive unchanged because they are timeless, but because they are protected by power, reverence and silence. As debates around gender, religion and heritage intensify worldwide, this small, forested island stands as a stark reminder that “purity,” once enshrined, can exclude as much as it preserves—and that sacredness itself is never free from politics.
Let me get this straight, darlings. There is an island in Japan dedicated to female deities, guarded, revered, worshipped for more than a thousand years as the spiritual home of goddesses who protect sailors and hold the balance of the sea—and living, breathing women are told to stay the hell away. If irony were incense, Okinoshima would be choking on it.
I have nothing against sacred places. I respect faith, ritual, silence, moss-covered stones, and old men chanting to the wind. What I do struggle with is this persistent idea that women are spiritually powerful enough to be worshipped as goddesses, but apparently too messy, too leaky, too inconvenient to be trusted as humans. Dead women: divine. Mythical women: pure. Actual women with bodies, blood, hormones, opinions? Oh no, darling. Dangerous. Polluting. Please remain offshore.
The explanation, as always, comes wrapped in the soft language of tradition. “Purity,” they say. Kegare. Blood. Balance. Respect for the kami. Funny how purity rules almost always ensuring that men remain at the center of ritual authority while women are asked to embody silence, absence, restraint. Funny too how these rules survive modernization, constitutions, gender-equality laws—because when discrimination puts on ceremonial robes, it suddenly becomes untouchable.
What really fascinates me is how carefully this exclusion is framed as neutral. “Almost no one is allowed anyway,” defenders say. True. But symbols matter. A ban that explicitly names women sends a message that echoes far beyond that island: that female bodies are still a problem to be managed, that reverence does not equal access, that worship does not translate into agency.
It’s particularly rich when you remember that the goddesses of Okinoshima were believed to protect men at sea—men who faced danger, risk, death. Women, meanwhile, were cast as the danger. The sea could be trusted. The storms could be appeased. But women? Too unpredictable. Too cyclical. Too real.
I don’t need Okinoshima to open its gates. I don’t need a ferry ticket or a ritual bath in cold water to prove a point. What I want is honesty. Call this what it is: a tradition built on ancient gender fear, preserved by modern prestige, and politely wrapped in UNESCO language. Sacred, yes. Untouched, yes. Above criticism? Absolutely not.
If goddesses are strong enough to guard an island, I suspect they’re strong enough to handle women setting foot on it. And if they aren’t—well, perhaps it’s time we stop confusing reverence with exclusion, and holiness with control.
Spicy Auntie bows to the sea. But she keeps her eyes wide open.