Masafumi Nagasaki was living in a state of perfect bliss, spending his days wondering naked and alone on a Pacific island, watching baby turtles hatch from eggs and foraging for food.

That is, until reports of his ill health prompted police to take him away from his Robinson Crusoe-like existence and forced him to rejoin mainstream Japanese society.

Mr Nagasaki, 82, had lived a simple life on the remote island of Sotobanari for nearly 30 years, after moving there to escape the hamster wheel of urban life, but has now been forced to leave despite insisting he wanted to die there.

The elderly recluse - now wiry and deeply tanned - was picked up by police from a nearby island in Okinawa Prefecture, in the far south-west of Japan, after they received reports from a group of people that he appeared to be weak and in ill health.

After being plucked from obscurity, Mr Nagasaki has since been living in a local authority property 45 miles away on Ishigaki island according to Alvaro Cerezo, a documentary maker who first befriended Mr Nagasaki in 2014.

When Mr Nagasaki was found, Mr Cerezo said he "probably only had the flu" and that he now isn't allowed to go back to Sotobanari, which is uninhabited and measures just half a mile across.