Administratively, Tokyo's Ogasawara Subprefecture also includes the settlements on the Volcano Islands and the Self-Defense Force post on Iwo Jima.

Upon their repeated rediscoveries, the islands were largely ignored by the Spanish, Dutch, and isolationist Japanese until finally being claimed by a passing British captain in 1827.

Ethnically, the island is now majority Japanese but remains unusually diverse, which is reflected in the local Creole language known as Bonin English.

Improved transportation has made agriculture more profitable and encouraged tourism, but the development required for an airport remains a contentious local issue.

The name Bonin comes from an 1817 article in the French Journal des Savans by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat in which—among various other misunderstandings of his source material[3]—he misread a description of the islands as uninhabited (無人嶋, "desert island[s]") for their actual name, used the wrong reading of the characters (buninshima for mujintō), and then transcribed the resulting reading incorrectly into French as Bo-nin Sima,[4][5] which eventually lost its original hyphen.

[6] At the end of the 20th century, prehistoric tools and carved stones were discovered on North Iwo Jima and Chichijima, establishing that the islands were previously home to at least some members of an unknown Micronesian people.

[7] The first recorded visit by Europeans to the islands happened on 2 October 1543, when the Spanish explorer Bernardo de la Torre on the San Juan sighted Haha-jima, which he charted as Forfana.

His small library of Japanese books included Sangoku Tsūran Zusetsu (三国通覧図説, An Illustrated Description of Three Countries) by Hayashi Shihei.

After several years of planning and frustrated initial attempts, the expedition finally set sail on 12 July 1587, commanded by Pedro de Unamuno.

[6] Japanese maps at the time seem to have been rather inaccurate, to the point that some contemporaries considered them to have been deliberately misleading[15] to discourage colonization attempts by foreign nations.

Frederick William Beechey used the Spanish name as late as 1831, believing that the Japanese "Boninsima" were entirely different islands.

[17] The first permanent colony was made up of Nathaniel Savory of Bradford, Massachusetts, America, Richard Millichamp of Devon, England; Matteo Mazzaro of Ragusa/Dubrovnik, Austrian Empire (now in Croatia); Alden B. Chapin and Nathaniel Savory of Boston; Carl Johnsen of Copenhagen; as well as seven unnamed men and 13 women from the Kingdom of Hawaii.

[24] Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy visited the islands in 1853 and bought a property at Port Lloyd from Savory for $50.

[2] As fighting crept closer to Japan during the later stage of World War II, most inhabitants were forcibly evacuated to the mainland.

All residents except those descended from the original settlers (the Ōbeikei Islanders) and/or related to them by marriage were expelled,[35] while pre-war inhabitants of White American or European, Micronesian or Polynesian ancestry were allowed to return.

[37] Historically, the Bonin Islands consisted of subsistence farming with some exploitation of timber and grazing land for export to the mainland.

[41] In Japanese, the geographical expression for the full range of the municipality is the "Ogasawara Archipelago" (小笠原諸島, Ogasawara-shotō) which in turn is sometimes calqued back into English as another meaning for "the Bonin Islands".

The Bonins are mostly composed of an andesitic volcanic rock called boninite, rich in magnesium oxide, chromium, and silicon dioxide.

Although the area is currently dormant, most of the islands still have steep shorelines, often with sea cliffs ranging from 50 to 100 meters (160 to 330 ft) high.

It operates the Ogasawara Maru (おがさわら丸), an 11,035-ton 150-meter (490 ft) long vessel with 170 private rooms and a total capacity of 894 passengers.

[56] With a top speed of 24.7 knots (45.7 km/h; 28.4 mph), it makes the trip from Takeshiba Pier in Tokyo in about 24 hours in good weather.

Previously, there had been plans for a 14,500-ton "techno superliner" able to reach a maximum speed of 38 knots (70 km/h; 44 mph) and make the same journey in only 17 hours with a capacity of around 740 passengers.

The ShinMaywa US-1 seaplane from the SDF post at Iwakuni is used during visits by the Tokyo governor and other dignitaries and for any emergency requiring rapid transport back to Honshu.

Travel time to the mainland would be cut to around two hours, improving tourism and providing emergency services,[64] and the national, regional, and local governments have all supported the idea in theory.

[67] On 26 June 2016, the Japanese Minister of Environment Tamayo Marukawa talked about airport construction on the Bonins after the meeting in Tokyo commemorating the fifth anniversary of their registration as World Natural Heritage.

[69] In fiscal 2019, 490 million yen was included in the Japanese budget for a feasibility study and a survey on Chichijima to determine the best location to construct the runway.

This includes a significant proportion of ancestors from the United States, Europe, and other Pacific islands, who can often be distinguished by their physical features, family names spelled out with katakana, and adherence to Christianity.

Bonin by Robert Standish describes itself as 'a novel', but claims 'this book is an accurate history of the Bonin Islands', based mainly on information from Nathaniel Savory's great-granddaughter, and includes descriptions of maltreatment of the Anglo-Polynesian population by the later Japanese settlers and authorities and a detailed map of the Chichijima group (on the back end-paper), including over 50 English place-names.

[76] Chapter XVI of Jack London's autobiographical novel John Barleycorn says, "This isolated group, belonging to Japan, had been selected as the rendezvous of the Canadian and American sealing fleets", and describes the drunken visit of a young sailor and his shipmates to the Bonin Islands.

[citation needed] The 2017 anime film The Irregular at Magic High School: The Movie – The Girl Who Summons the Stars takes place on fictional islands in the Bonins.