Japanese island hermit removed

The 82-year old Japanese hermit Nasafumi Nagasaki, living on a deserted island for 29 years, was first noted in this blog in March 2014. News.au.com is the first source with an update.

Nasafumi Nagasaki became famous as the “naked” hermit because the island of Sotobanri is deserted, and the loss of many of his possessions in a typhoon convinced him to go about without clothes. His intended two-year stay became 29 years. He received occasional visitors, chiefly curious Western media, and unknown friends bringing supplies, though he foraged and built his own homestead. In a visit, island-watcher Alvaro Cerezo learned from Nagasaki how passionate the latter was about staying on the island and dying there. Nagasaki told him: “In civilisation people treated me like an idiot and made me feel like one. On this island I don’t feel like that.” … “Here, on the island I don’t do what people tell me to do, I just follow nature’s rules. You can’t dominate nature so you have to obey it completely.”

But suddenly Nagasaki is no longer on his beloved island. He was apparently observed by an island passerby to be weak and sick and he was removed by authorities to the nearest city of Nishigaki, where he now lives in government housing. He was, perhaps, temporarily ill, but then fully recovered, nevertheless authorities will not allow him to return.

Multiple URLs use this original source: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/naked-hermit-who-lived-on-deserted-island-for-thirty-years-captured-brought-back-to-civilisation/news-story/cb26d68f95f682f86e04d339e11e1541

Jeannie, “Lady Hermit of Cornwall”

Not just a local historical piece but of wider interest is the story of the “Lady Hermit of the Cornish cliffs” of England. The article is from the CornwellLve website. Here is opening text:

Its one of the strangest stories to emerge from 20th century Cornwall – the rich, educated, young Russian woman who was known across the county as the “Lady Hermit of the Cornish cliffs”.

So unusual a sight was Jeannie Schmolivitz, who made her home in caves in west Cornwall and lived on blackberries, that she spooked many a local into thinking she was a ghost.

Jeannie became a media star of the day, with national and international newspapers reporting her story, which took in a broken heart, madness, arrests, incarceration, daring escape and a final “rescue” which took her from Cornwall back to Russia.

Jeannie Schmolivtz (her surname could also have been Schmulewitz) became a sensation as the 1900s dawned, though her story is now largely forgotten.

URL: https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/history/strange-tale-mad-russian-hermit-1675063