The story of Inubosaki Lighthouse begins with disaster. On October 6, 1868, the Tokugawa navy warship Mikaho slammed into the rocks of Cape Inubo during a typhoon, killing 13 crew members. Japan had only recently opened to the West under the provisions of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Amity and Commerce, signed a decade earlier, and foreign vessels were navigating these waters in growing numbers. The rocky headland jutting into the Pacific on the northeastern approach to Tokyo Bay was a known hazard, but the old Tokugawa Shogunate had built no lighthouse here. When the new Meiji government took power, the need was undeniable. Cape Inubo would get its light.

The Meiji government turned to Richard Henry Brunton, a civil engineer born in 1841 in Kincardineshire, Scotland, who had arrived in Japan under contract to modernize the country's coastal navigation. Over his career, Brunton designed and constructed 26 lighthouses stretching from the northern reaches of Hokkaido to southern Kyushu. For Inubosaki, he faced a particular challenge: Japan had no tradition of brick construction. Brunton solved this by supervising the building of a brick factory in Tomioka Village, in what is now part of Narita City. The factory produced 193,000 red bricks for the project. Uncertain of their strength, Brunton specified double-thick walls for the tower, a decision that gave the lighthouse its distinctive solidity. Work began in early 1872, and the light was first lit on November 15, 1874.

What made Inubosaki Lighthouse exceptional was not only its construction but the glass at its summit. The tower was fitted with a first-order Fresnel lens, the largest and most powerful classification of lighthouse optics. A first-order lens stands nearly four meters tall and can cast light visible from over 20 nautical miles at sea. Few lighthouses in the world received such lenses, and Inubosaki was among the select group equipped from the outset. The lens transformed Cape Inubo from a ship-killer into a beacon, its concentrated beam sweeping across the Pacific to warn mariners away from the very rocks that had claimed the Mikaho. Today the lighthouse is recognized as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan and sits within the boundaries of Suigo-Tsukuba Quasi-National Park.

At 31.5 meters, Inubosaki is the second tallest brick lighthouse in Japan, surpassed only by the Shiriyazaki Lighthouse in Aomori Prefecture -- another Brunton creation. The tower's double-walled construction proved prescient in a country where earthquakes are a fact of life. In 1977, the lighthouse underwent repairs focused on historical preservation and seismic reinforcement, ensuring the 19th-century brickwork could withstand the tremors that regularly shake the Kanto region. The cylindrical form remains largely unchanged, its red-brick surface weathered by salt air and Pacific storms into a warm, textured patina that catches the morning light with particular beauty.

Cape Inubo holds a special place in Japanese geography: it is one of the easternmost points of the main island of Honshu, making it one of the first places on the mainland to greet the sunrise. The city of Choshi, which surrounds the cape, is a fishing port where the Tone River meets the Pacific, and the lighthouse has become a symbol of the city itself. Visitors climb the tower for panoramic views of the open ocean, and on clear mornings the horizon seems to stretch forever. Below the lighthouse, the coastline drops away into rocky shelves and tidal pools where the Pacific crashes in constant motion. From the air, the white cap of the lighthouse and its red-brick column are unmistakable against the dark volcanic rock of the cape, a man-made punctuation mark at the very edge of Japan.