Volcano Islands uninhabited. The first recorded sighting by Europeans was in October 1543 by Spanish navigator Bernardo de la Torre on board of carrack "San Juan de Letrán" when trying to return from Sarangani to New Spain. Iwo Jima was charted as Sufre, the old Spanish term for sulphur. The islands were uninhabited until 1889, when the two northern islands were settled by Japanese settlers from the Izu Islands. They were annexed by Japan in 1891. The population was about 1,100 in 1939, distributed among five settlements: Higashi, Minami, Nishi, Kita and Motoyama (meaning "East", "South", "West", "North" and "Mountain of Origin",
Japanese settlement in the Marshall Islands closer cultural and economic ties with Japan. Japanese firms that were based on the Marshall Islands since the 1960s actively sought joint ventures with local companies from the 1980s onwards, mainly in the fishery sector. Expatriates usually consisted of Okinawan fishermen based at Majuro, where Japanese companies have built smoking and canning facilities to facilitate the processing of tuna catches. The Marshall Islands remained sparsely populated by Japanese settlers, relative to the other mandated Micronesian islands. The first pre-war census of the Marshall Islands counted 490 Japanese among 10,000 Marshallese, and the number of Japanese settlers increased to 680 scattered