Name: The Naked Hermit.

Real Name: Masafumi Nagasaki.

Age: 82.

Appearance: Well, you know … he’s an 82-year-old naked hermit.

I see. Doesn’t he get cold? Not much. Until a few months ago, he lived on Sotobanari, a tropical island on the far southern tip of the Ryukyu Islands below Japan. He had been there since 1989.

Holy moly! Agreed. He was like a real Robinson Crusoe, with a few minor differences.

Such as? Well, he was naked apart from a pair of sandals.

Yes, I got that. And he bought rice cakes from another island once a week, using money from his sister.

The naked hermit, Masafumi Nagasaki, staring at the sea. Photograph: Yuya Shino/Reuters

Hey, that’s cheating! Look, surviving alone on an island is actually quite difficult.

You don’t say. And of course he wasn’t shipwrecked like Crusoe. He chose to be there.

Why? The details of his life before Sotobanari are vague. According to Alvaro Cerezo, an explorer who stayed with him for five days in 2014, Nagasaki used to be married.

And for some reason Mrs Nagasaki didn’t want a naked hermit for a husband? One imagines not. He was a photographer at one point, and may have been working in a factory in Osaka when the hermit plan first came to him.

Osaka? The futuristic metropolis? That’s right. As he told Cerezo, he was a “city man with no outdoor experience” but civilisation didn’t appeal to him. He planned to stay for only two years. And a typhoon stripped away much of the island’s vegetation and many of his possessions.

Like his clothes? Exactly. But then he found his groove, and has since largely given up killing or eating animals, even the deadly pit-vipers that sometimes slither into his tent.

Wow. So he’s, like, a super-hippie? Not quite. He’s super-practical and secular. He spends all day tidying the beach, and keeps to a rigid routine governed by a wristwatch he keeps on a tree branch. Between 6.30pm and 8.30am he stays in his tent to avoid mosquitos. He became furious if Cerezo was even a couple of minutes late.

I guess you pick up a few quirks as a hermit. I guess.

So why did he stop? These details are vague, too. But it seems he was spotted looking weak and taken to the city of Ishigaki to recover. Now he’s not allowed to return. “My wish is to die here without bothering anyone,” he once told Cerezo. “I want to be killed by a typhoon, so nobody can try to save me.”

Poor guy. I know. I’m sure the vipers miss him.

Do say: “I renounce the evils of civilisation!”

Don’t say: “Except sandals, watches, tents, rice cakes, boats and money from my sister.”