Osaki-Kamijima Island is an area which has developed through building of wooden ships and the activities related to shipbuilding such as marine transportation and training of crewmembers, and also through the agricultural industry such as growing citrus fruit. However, due to the change of industrial structure, population decline has been noticeable, and the Island is now referred as an “Island facing possible extinction”. The authors carried out a research on the changes of the maritime history at the Island which once prospered in shipbuilding, marine transportation and training of crewmembers.

We started with a research of written materials and interviews with local people, and the collected written materials and photos were digitalized into an archive. We focused to a research on the ships built in the Island between 1873 and 1982 and obtained data for 1,622 ships. In this paper, we report the changes which we found regarding shipbuilding from Meiji Period to Showa Period at the Island.

The authors aim at producing an “Educational material to learn local industrial legacies” in the near future for the children growing up in the areas facing the Geiyo-Shoto Islands and the Seto Inland Sea.