Japan’s beaches are emptying out – and vanishing

TOKYO – A beach fittingly dubbed “Ibaraki’s Gold Coast” for its sweeping, unobstructed views of the Pacific Ocean and pristine sand is now a shadow of its former self.

The Otake Coast Hokota Swimming Beach, a crescent of sand spanning 1km in Ibaraki prefecture, north-east of Tokyo, traditionally drew tens of thousands of swimmers, sunbathers and surfers every summer.

Yet in 2026, for the second time in three years, the Hokota city authorities decided against opening the beloved local landmark for the official beach season, citing “ongoing severe erosion of the sandy beaches and damage to seawall blocks”.

What was once a welcoming broad stretch of glistening sand – where surfers lingered until twilight, beachgoers lazed under parasols and children built sandcastles – has been reduced to a threadbare, modest sliver of sand.

The malaise that is afflicting Otake Beach is seen elsewhere in Japan, an archipelago of over 14,000 islands where the people’s cultural identity has long been closely bound to the ocean.

This relationship is immortalised in Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic ukiyo-e woodblock prints, particularly the Great Wave Off Kanagawa. It is also commemorated during umi-biraki, the modern-day rituals where Shinto priests bless the waves at public beaches to officially launch the swimming season.

Japan even has a national public holiday, Marine Day, celebrated on the third Monday of July, when the people pay homage to the sea’s bounty and take part in the therapeutic ritual of ocean bathing.

Yet the country is now experiencing a bittersweet estrangement from the seas. Otake Beach is merely one casualty in a broader retreat taking place across the country’s shores.

While Japanese beaches are never physically gated off, an “official” opening means the local authorities deploy lifeguards, install safety nets and allow seasonal beach huts that sell shaved ice and rent out towels or umbrellas.

Beaches that are not open do not have active lifeguards or rescue personnel present, and visitors are asked to refrain from entering the sea.

Over in Osaka, Tokimeki Beach remains closed in 2026 after annual visitor counts crashed by two-thirds from 101,000 in 2016 to just 33,000 in 2025.

The haemorrhage extends to Kumanoe Beach, in Miyazaki prefecture’s Nobeoka city, which also chose not to open in 2026 after summer visitors dwindled from 25,000 in 2005 to a mere 1,000 in 2025.

This decline is at once cultural and environmental. Many Japanese are actively shunning the ocean, while the ocean is also swallowing the very beaches that were once popular.

In 1985, an estimated 37.9 million people in Japan visited a beach at least once a year, according to data from the Japan Productivity Center’s Leisure White Paper 2025. By 2024, that number had shrivelled to just 4.4 million, a nearly 90 per cent collapse. 

Anecdotally, the shift, driven by changing lifestyles and shifting beauty standards with fair skin gaining popularity over sun-kissed tans, has accelerated in an era of extreme summer heat, driven by the rise of “cruelly hot” days.

Consequently, the number of approved swimming beaches open during the summer has dropped by roughly 30 per cent nationwide, from 1,379 locations in 1993 to 966 in 2025, according to a tally by the Japan Travel and Tourism Association. 

Yet even if public enthusiasm were to return, the sand itself is slipping away.

The shrinking of Japan’s coastlines began as a slow-motion crisis born of rapid post-war industrialisation, but it is now being dramatically accelerated by climate change.

In its post-war rush to modernise, Japan dammed its rivers, paved its valleys and aggressively mined riverbed sand to feed its hunger for concrete.

Normally, rivers act as natural conveyor belts that carry mountain sediment down to the coast, where wave action spreads it along the shore in a self-replenishing equilibrium. 

But decades of damming and concrete embankment projects have choked off this natural sediment pipeline.

Research by Tohoku University coastal engineering expert Keiko Udo, cited by domestic media, shows that industrialisation had already caused the average width of Japan’s sandy beaches to contract from about 66m in 1950 to 43m by 1990.

Now, climate dynamics are compounding the damage. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, sea levels along the Japanese coastline have risen at an average rate of 3.4mm per year over the last two decades.

Under moderate warming scenarios, Udo estimates that more than 60 per cent of the sandy beaches that existed in 1990 could completely vanish by 2100, even if global warming is successfully capped below 2 deg C.

And that is the baseline. Japan’s Environment Ministry has warned that if sea levels were to rise by one metre by 2100, up to 90.3 per cent of the nation’s sandy shores may be wiped out.

At Otake Beach, city officials have already tried to fight the encroaching tide in 2025, spending 40 million yen (S$319,300) on a “beach nourishment” project that pumped roughly 12,000 cu m of sand onto the denuded shoreline. The intervention allowed the beach to open for the 2025 season, following its closure in 2024. But the imported sand was swept away by the Pacific waves in a matter of months.

Deeming it financially unsustainable to replace the sand annually, the Hokota authorities kept the beach closed in 2026 as they searched for a more permanent engineering solution. “It is deeply regrettable that we must cancel the opening of the beach, but we made this decision with public safety as our top priority,” Hokota Mayor Shigeki Igawa was quoted as saying in the local Ibaraki Shimbun newspaper.

Farther south in Kanagawa prefecture, the shorelines of Kamakura and Chigasaki, near the popular tourist enclave of Enoshima, remain bustling summer hubs. But they, too, are fighting a gruelling rearguard action against the sea.

One 24-year-old acquaintance, an avid surfer who moved to Chigasaki for easy access to the ocean, tells me that catching waves is an irreplaceable daily ritual for him. He says that surfers like himself are acutely aware of the erosion, given that different stretches of the beach are closed at varying times of the year for nourishment works, but are grateful for the municipal intervention as it keeps the surfing community’s lifeblood intact.

Since the 1960s, Chigasaki’s shoreline has retreated by as much as 50m, forcing the authorities to begin continuous beach nourishment in 2006, with more than 800,000 cu m of sand dumped onto the coast to date. Now, city planners no longer treat sand replenishment as a temporary fix, but as a permanent, ongoing maintenance task required just to keep the shoreline where it belongs.

Even as many are shunning the beach as lifestyles evolve amid the oppressive summer heat, the danger for Japan is that it is losing far more than places to swim. It is watching its physical and cultural perimeter steadily dissolve into the ocean.