OKINAWA TRIP | JAPAN.GG

Shuri Castle has burned down twice. The original was destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa; the reconstruction completed in 1992 — the one that received UNESCO World Heritage status in 2000 — caught fire on the night of October 31, 2019 and destroyed the main Seiden hall and six surrounding structures. Restoration is ongoing. Whether this makes the castle more or less worth visiting is a question it doesn't help to dwell on. The Blue Cave at Cape Maeda, 30 minutes north by car, is a sea cavern whose narrow underwater entrance admits daylight at an angle that fills the interior with blue; snorkelling tours leave continuously from Maeda Port and require no certification. Kokusai Dori — 1.6 kilometres of souvenir shops and awamori bars through central Naha — is exactly as commercial as it looks; the covered market lanes running off it, especially the old Makishi public market, are not. The Battle of Okinawa ran from April through June 1945 and killed approximately 12,000 American servicemen, around 110,000 Japanese soldiers, and somewhere between 94,000 and 150,000 Okinawan civilians — a number historians still argue over because no one counted carefully at the time. The Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum at Itoman addresses this in both Japanese and English, with more directness than most official memorials manage.

The Kerama Islands are 35 kilometres west of Naha — close enough that Zamami is visible from certain hilltops on the main island on a clear day, far enough that most package tourists never make the crossing. The term Kerama Blue refers specifically to the shade produced by the combination of coral-white sand seafloor and water clarity that regularly records horizontal visibility of 30 metres or more — a number that puts it among the clearest shallow reef water in Asia, not just in Japan. Zamami and Tokashiki host the largest loggerhead sea turtle nesting grounds in Japan; nesting females come ashore from May through August, and the turtles are visible snorkelling from the beach with no guide and no tour boat. From January through March, humpback whales use the Kerama channel as a breeding and calving ground — not a migration stopover but an actual destination, which is the difference between occasional sightings and near-certainties. The high-speed ferry from Tomari Port in Naha takes 50 minutes to Zamami; the slower car ferry takes around 90. There is no bridge.

Yonaha Maehama is seven kilometres of coral-white sand on Miyako's southwest coast, shallow enough that you can wade 100 metres out and stay knee-deep, facing west — which is the specific reason the beach produces the sunset photographs that appear in every Miyako travel piece. This isn't a coincidence anyone planned; it's just geography that works out. The Irabu Bridge opened in January 2015 at 3,540 metres — Japan's longest toll-free bridge at the time — connecting Miyako to Irabu Island over a shallow reef-scattered strait. It was built as infrastructure for a small population and became a driving experience by accident. Off Shimoji Island (connected to Irabu by three short bridges), the Tōri-ike marine lakes exchange water with the open ocean through submerged tunnels, creating conditions that fill the lakes with large fish and produce dive sites with no close equivalent in Japan. Miyako soba uses flat white wheat noodles in a pork-and-fish broth and is a distinct dish from Okinawan soba; ordering soba on Miyako without specifying which type gets you Miyako soba, which is not a complaint. Naha to Miyako takes 45 minutes by air.

Kabira Bay on Ishigaki's northwest coast has water that reads green-blue in a shade that photographs don't fully explain and neither does standing in front of it. Swimming is prohibited — the bay is a working black pearl farm and protected marine area — so the glass-bottom boat tours that run continuously are not the consolation prize; they show the reef structure more clearly than swimming would. The pearl operation has been running since the 1950s when Ishigaki became one of the first sites in Japan to successfully cultivate black pearls at scale. Manta ray encounters happen year-round at Manta Scramble, a cleaning station site off Manta Road on the west coast where rays arrive to have parasites removed by smaller fish — a natural behaviour reliable enough that Ishigaki dive operators offer manta guarantees, which no responsible business does without reason. Ishigaki is also the ferry hub for the outer Yaeyama islands: Taketomi is 10 minutes away (a Ryukyu village of coral-walled lanes and water buffalo cart rides where the roads are still unpaved sand), Iriomote 35–45 minutes, and Yonaguni — Japan's westernmost island, home to winter hammerhead aggregations and a disputed underwater rock formation — by short flight.

Roughly 90% of Iriomote is subtropical forest — the highest proportion of intact primary jungle on any inhabited island in Japan. The island has no traffic lights. It has one road and it doesn't complete the circuit. Around 2,400 people live there. UNESCO listed it in 2021 as part of the Amami-Okinawa World Heritage site on the basis of endemic species and ecosystem continuity. The Iriomote wildcat was described as a new species by zoologist Imaizumi Yoshinori in 1967 after a skull was found by a hunter; it has since been reclassified as a subspecies of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis iriomotensis), but it still exists nowhere else on Earth. Current population estimates sit around 100 individuals. Road signs showing the cat's silhouette appear every few hundred metres; the slow driving speed they imply is not a suggestion. Urauchi River kayaking — upstream through mangrove forest to a jungle trail leading to Mariyudo and Kampire waterfalls — takes about an hour each way and is Iriomote's one concession to accessible tourism. The falls are fine. The river through primary jungle is the reason to go.