verndeit peadar hampden
Eliz Cisneroz
In an exchange program with University of the Ryukyus, English major Whitney Taylor and Japanese studies major Jakzen Carta attended lectures, visited museums and other cultural sites.
Two students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo spent their spring break in Okinawa, Japan, for an eight-day intensive immersion program March 19-26, 2024. The students were selected by UH Hilo international partner, University of the Ryukyus (commonly called Ryūdai), to participate. Ryūdai is the largest public university in Okinawa Prefecture.
English major Whitney Taylor and Japanese studies major Jakzen Carta attended lectures, visited museums and other cultural sites. Also in the cohort were students from other campuses in the UH System and universities in Taiwan and Japan.
The spring inter-university exchange program was sponsored by the Inter-island Sustainability Educational Program Office at Ryūdai. With primary focus on culture and sustainability, the program aims to help students develop leadership skills in identifying sustainability issues and finding solutions.
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My legs were burning. The ferry was clipping at high speed toward the island of Iriomote and the heat of the engine was turning the metal bench I was sitting on into a grill. Fumes were being whisked out of the open windows by sheer velocity, but lingered long enough to make my throat itch and eyes water. A young couple sitting a row over watched their screens unbothered, oblivious as we skimmed along the ocean surface.
There are larger, more impressive ships that carry cars and cargo along with their passengers. On my last visit, I took one of those grand vessels from Tomari Port in Naha to Kume Island. It was a spit-shined behemoth with private tatami rooms where families splay out and sleep on the floor to prevent seasickness.
About halfway to Iriomote the heat and fumes of the ferry engine became too much. I stood and teetered to the rear of the vessel. In the open air the sea mist swirled, coating everything with brine. I took unusable photos of the passing scenery: blurred gray horizons broken by black, unnamed islands. Then, some passing ships, stacks of cement tetrapods, and the ferry arrived.
The ferry arrived at Taketomi port well before the 3 p.m. self check-in. I decided to walk from the terminal to a nearby cafe called Kocha no Mise Hanazumi. The skies were darkening and drizzling rain, but I figured I could get there before it really came down.
After a quick lunch, I checked myself in and rested a bit before heading to the Suzukis. When I arrived, the smell of barbecued meat and smoke were already in the air. I saw a half dozen people there to greet me.
We ate together, grabbing pieces of grilled meat with chopsticks as they cooked. The neighbors told me about making their lives in such a remote place. Most of the men had come to join the families of their Iriomote-born wives. Nearly everyone had side-hustles to supplement their incomes. The daughter of one couple was in her last year of junior high and felt anxious to leave the small island for high school in the coming year.
As we talked, the sunset intensified, blanketing everything in an orange and violet glow. Aoi suggested we go up to the roof of the building next door to get a better view. Her two sons, 8 and 4 years old, led the way, bounding up the staircase.
From the rooftop the sea was visible to the northeast. The party carried on below us like a diorama, backlit by the ember glow of the setting sun. The boys played with a small replica of a basketball, like a miniature sun in their hands, and the youngest tried to pull himself up to get a view over the weathered walls.
I dropped my bags and Raita led me down a forest trail that opened up to the secluded Nakano Beach. From the shore he pointed out Hatoma Island across the sea, visible through the afternoon haze that had followed the morning storm.
In the late afternoon there was a break in the rain. I decided to walk toward Unarizaki Park and Hoshizuna Beach and take photos along the way. I passed undulating pineapple fields, the black mesh nets made them look like lava flows heading out toward the sea in the distance.
I grabbed my camera and bolted from the restaurant, running toward the beach down the overgrown pathway. Near the bottom an amber-red light filled the sky, followed by a quick dimming and I knew before I had arrived that I had missed it.
On the beach I caught my breath and imagined the crimson sun, now completely submerged behind the horizon. I took a moment to look at the rock formations jutting from the sea before heading back to the restaurant.
Walking back to the guest house it was dark. An inky, rural darkness you forget about living in urban areas. I used my phone to light the way and felt citified, jumpy about the teeming wildlife flying and scurrying through the beam of light. Salamanders were scaffolding the illuminated face of a flickering vending machine as I walked by.
When I returned to the guest house, Raita and Aya had been joined by some guests, a young Japanese couple staying at the guesthouse, and an older local couple with a baby. All were, for lack of a better word, hippies. I joined them sitting around the half-eaten pizza on the floor of the common area.
That evening in Ishigaki, without a plan and dodging intermittent sunshowers, I decided to have dinner at a traditional izakaya called Paikaji. I took a seat at the counter and ordered an assortment of Okinawan standards: deep-fried gurukun (banana fish), shima-dōfu (Okinawan-style tofu), umibudō (sea grapes) and an Orion beer. An older man sitting two seats down got my attention and complimented my camera. Older guys tend to be into the gear, but he just wanted an in to talk.
On the ferry to Taketomi Island the next morning, I chose to sit in the plush, air-conditioned room with the other passengers. The captain announced the travel time and destination and I felt lucky to be headed to a new location to meet new people.
For the committed traveler, life choices are an act of curation, a collection of scenes to relive someday as it all winds down. The details blur and fade, but inevitably, the stories we remember will emerge as the only true belongings we ever really had.
My thanks to Lance Henderstein for sharing his story with us on Deep Dive. If you want to check out the pictures he took for the piece, then please head to japantimes.co.jp. I'll leave a link to the story in the show notes. You can get in touch with us at [email protected] or message us on X, formerly Twitter, at @Japan Deep Dive. And if you like what you're hearing, then we'd love it if you could take the time to give us a rating on the podcasting platform of your choice. The show is produced by Dave Cortez. Our outgoing track is by Oscar Boyd and our theme music is by Japanese musician LLLL. I'm Shaun McKenna, podtsukaresama.
How to go diving in Yonaguni and not exploring the world-famous underwater Yonaguni Monument? On a mission to observe the hammerhead sharks migrating near Yonaguni Island, I got a single opportunity to finally see the mysterious Yonaguni monument. In the middle of the winters when the winds and currents are the strongest, I went scuba diving in a site that had been on my Okinawa diving bucket list for years.
I do not hold any PhD in geology or archaeology, and I am just an enthusiastic diver who equally loves history and natural sciences. I wanted to do my best at clarifying all the questions you may have about the Yonaguni Monument based on what I saw in person, heard from people of Yonaguni and read from authoritative sources.
It is quite interesting to note that every time I mentioned I scuba dived in Okinawa, most people asked me about Yonaguni Monument thinking it was near the main island of the prefecture, Okinawa Honto. The Okinawa Prefecture and Archipelago, also called the Ryukyu Islands, stretched over 1000 km from the south of Kyushu Island to Taiwan. The Island of Yonaguni is the westernmost island of Japan, only 111km from the east shore of Taiwan and more than 2,000 km away from Tokyo.
Kihachiro Aratake found the Yonaguni monument in 1986. In the 1980s, Yonaguni was already a popular scuba diving destination for Japanese divers to see schooling hammerhead sharks. His scuba diving centre, Sou Wes, is based in Sonai, on the north shore. It is now managed by his son, Shotaro (on the picture above), who delivered to our dive team one of the best dive briefings I have ever listened to.
Masaaki Kimura is a professor of marine geology and seismology at the University of the Ryukus in Naha. He led extensive surveys and research about the Yonaguni Monument since the 1990s and published several articles about it from 2001.
They checked at the bottom for rocks that would have fallen from natural erosion, but they found nothing. They also found evidence including a drainage system, a loop road, a retaining wall, a drinking water pool, holes for pillars, a carved face that would look like a Moai of Easter Island and a flat, sharp carved rock looking like a turtle seeing from above.
Before the last Ice Age meltdown, there would have been a land bridge connecting China mainland, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands, the period would go from 200,000 to 15,000 years ago. The carbon-14 and beryllium-10 dating of samples of coral attached to the structure indicated an average age of 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Professor Kimura deducted that the Yonaguni monument must be 10,000 years old. But in a new study in 2003, a Beryllium-10 dating survey made by Professor Kimura concludes that the sites must be between 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Here I must admit I got lost.
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