Secrets & Mysteries - Revealing the ancient world of the Ryukyu Archipelago
The wind has died, but the East China Sea is still moody and fitful. It's an overcast day in October, and a half-dozen Japanese divers and I are sitting in a circle on the floor of the Shota II, a 50-foot dive boat bucking in the swell. Off the port side slips a wall of black cliffs softened by the occasional bay: the southern coast of Yonaguni-jima, a Japanese island about 70 miles east of Taiwan.
Rui Kuriki, a 34-year-old divemaster, sits on his knees in the middle. As he briefs us on the adventure ahead, his voice is high-pitched and nasal, and it carries well over the din of the boat's twin engines. I squeeze into a rented wetsuit, which fits poorly and is boring compared with the hot pink, black and white suit of a lady next to me, who sits in silence.
"When we get underwater, we'll be on the southwest corner of the ruins," Rui says, running a finger across a map showing submerged staircases, water channels and teetering monoliths.
A Japanese university professor believes these are the remains of an ancient civilization.
The popular theory goes like this: Thousands of years before the pyramids, but after we figured out the wheel, there was this antediluvian society whose future was fraught with terrible doom. Who knows what life was like back then as much as 10,000 years ago but warriors and clergymen probably stood on stone terraces perched over the sea and gazed south across the waves. With crude tools, they coaxed monuments to sea turtles and temples to gods from the salt-slathered rock. To protect themselves from evil, they made charms of slate etched with strange symbols.
But something terrible happened anyway. Maybe it was an earthquake or a tsunami, or maybe the sea level rose, but the ground under their feet sank into 100 feet of water so clear you could mistake it for air. And there it sat for thousands of years, forgotten. Then one day, long after Jesus, the Mongol Empire and the Renaissance, we learned how to breathe underwater, and a diver happened upon the site anew. What he saw gave him goose bumps.
At least that's the idea.
"Think it's true, Rui?" I ask.
"I think maybe," he says, somewhat uncomfortably.
Yonaguni is just one of about 160 islands and islets in Japan's Ryukyu archipelago, a 700-mile-long string of limestone crags and gentle coves that divides the East China and Philippine seas. They sit like a keel in one of the planet's swiftest currents, the Kuroshio Current or Black Stream, which burbles northward with equatorial water and the zesty upwellings favored by hungry whales, mantas and everything else. Some of Japan's most-vibrant reefs blue coral, sea fans and tables thrive at sites where visibility can top 100 feet.
Chances are you've never heard of any of these islands but one, Okinawa, which sits in the middle of the chain about 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo. It's the biggest slender but 70 miles long with an expressway blazing past sugar-cane fields and steep hills. During World War II, months of brutal fighting took place over this island, and today about 50,000 American troops and their families are still based here. Okinawa can seem remote, but it's a hub and jumping-off point for going even deeper.
For two weeks we plan to hit the more-intriguing and charming islands, like Yonaguni, Ishigaki and Zamami, places frequented by humpbacks and hammerheads. We'll wander some of the country's least-known beaches, sample rowdy markets with displays of sake-pickled rattlesnakes and hopefully catch a giant tug-of-war festival. Of course, we'll dive in 80-plus-degree water while being mindful of Japanese customs, too. All of it seems so new, and I won't see another American traveler the entire time I'm here.
The boat comes to a halt near Arakawabana point on Yonaguni's southeast shore. We're only a couple hundred feet from a cliff band, and waves trip into a frothy mess on rocks about 10 feet below the surface.
"That's the top of the site," Rui says. "Stick close and I'll show you the gate into the city."
I roll backward into the ocean. When the bubbles clear and I can see, I have no idea what to believe.
Solving the Mystery A few days ago I'd been wondering whether I'd ever see anything at all underwater.
Typhoon Krosa formed the day I arrived, and rain soon lashed the windows of the hotel so fiercely I dreamt it was gravel. The 75 mph winds heaved pandanus trees into tangled piles and disemboweled a fishing boat that oozed green nets through a gash of mangled wood. Ferries were pinned helplessly in the harbor, and I sometimes wandered the glistening streets of Naha, Okinawa's largest city, wondering why I'd come during the height of storm season.
But the weather is a boon for topside exploring, and on day five the wind finally dies.
"Good news," says Lisa Slater, the owner of Open Coast Travel, a Los Angeles-based travel company that specializes in the Ryukyus. "Boats are running."
In moments we're on one bound for the Kerama Islands, 20 miles west.
The sea is nauseatingly rough, but after an hour on a high-speed ferry, we land on Zamami, an island about three miles across and whittled by cerulean bays. It's one of the few places in the Keramas with people, about 1,000 of them, and bikes far outnumber cars. Downtown is an alley six paces wide with one ridiculous stoplight that's always green.
"We used to have a lot more people here," says Hideyasu Mirahira, who grew up on the island and started Zamami's first dive shop, the Patio House, in 1971. "Now it's mostly tourists," about 60,000 of them a year, "who come for beaches and diving."
Though admirably spry, Hideyasu hasn't dived in years and now helps run a small hotel, also called the Patio House, with about 12 rooms ringing a garden of azalea hybrids. His wife, Emiko, feeds us a breakfast of steamed fish-paste cakes, miso and toast with sesame-seed cream, while their son, Kazuaki, a strapping 26-year-old with an orange wetsuit, prepares to take us diving.
We pile into a 32-foot wasen, a boat with a round, open bow, and sit on the floor. As we motor 15 minutes to our first site, we pass a small flotilla of yellow kayaks aiming for a spit off Agenashiku, one of dozens of uninhabited islands in the Keramas. Dive boats flying green flags zip between other islands so tightly clustered you could backstroke between them.
"Slow time," says Chihiro Kondo, an artist from Tokyo who's here for a few days of shallow reef diving. "Back home, busy, busy."
For 56 minutes, I follow sea snakes and trumpetfish around fan corals at a site called Butsu Butsu Sango, and I spend nearly an hour at Nishibama with rusty-purple groupers. We poke around a shallow bank at a place called Adanshita that's filled with the remnants of an old seaweed farm, a more-peaceful relic of the area's tumultuous past.
Hideyasu was 4 years old on March 26, 1945, when the Allies launched an invasion of the Ryukyus. Operation Iceberg, as the onslaught was dubbed, was a critical step toward the Japanese mainland and hopefully the end of World War II. The first bombs fell on the Keramas, and Hideyasu remembers running into the mountains as Zamami's buildings burst into rubble.
"Okinawans had long been resigned to the severe typhoons that swept their land," a U.S. Army historian later wrote, "but nothing in their experience prepared them for the tetsu no bow, 'the storm of steel.'"
Though the horror has long since passed, divers can still see remnants of the fighting. The next day we join Momo Mikawa, a diver who hated the ocean until she put on a mask.
"The underwater world shocked me,""she says. "I'd only seen sea cucumbers in sushi restaurants."
She signals for us to submerge, and we drop to about 50 feet at a site off Aka, a teardrop-shaped island a couple miles south of Zamami. The current is strong, and we briskly move along walls of limestone fractured into magnificent slots. Butterflyfish and moorish idols stick close to the rock. We fin around a corner and see a cannon barrel aiming drearily toward the sky. The whole thing is encrusted in coral, including nearby artillery shells. One of them is ripped open, perhaps from an explosion.
It's my first experience, literally, diving into history and I profusely thank Momo when we return to the boat. She hands us warm cups of barley tea, apparently the drink of choice, and dips her head into a deep bow. When we leave the next day to go back to Okinawa, Momo meets us at the dock and hands out little thank-you notes.
"It was great to dive with you," she writes. "I'm so happy that you enjoyed."
Shaping Opinions We have some time in Naha again, and one day we drive out to meet Masaaki Kimura, a geologist at the University of the Ryukyus who's studying the ruins off Yonaguni, our next stop. I remove my shoes at the door of his cluttered office and jam my feet into white slippers, which are often kept for guests, all of whom must have size 6 feet.
"So you are going to Yonaguni?" asks the professor, offering us cold cans of green tea. "I can tell you what I know."
Masaaki first saw the ruins during a dive in 1992, a few years after a Yonaguni fixture named Kihachiro Aratake happened upon the area while looking for new dive sites. At first Masaaki believed the submerged terraces and neatly carved stone steps, which cover roughly 484,000 square feet, were the product of erosion and geological forces.
But on subsequent dives he found what he believes to be crude tools, like an ax embellished with bizarre engravings and a stalactite that he says proves the area was above the sea 10,000 years ago. He noticed what looked like the remnants of a road, stadium and temples. After years of study, he concluded the site is unquestionably man-made and that something happened to submerge it.
"Some of the features can be explained by nature," he says. "Many of them can't."
Of course, other scientists readily dismiss the idea of a Japanese Atlantis as fantasy and say tiny marine critters can leave strange marks in stone. Tectonic shifts in the Pacific Plate below can fracture the rock into angular formations that look like steps.
Either way, it's only about an hour in the air from Naha to reach Yonaguni, Japan's westernmost island, where we plan to see it all for ourselves. We immediately head into Kubura, a town of a few hundred homes with red tin roofs and a bell tower that blasts "Greensleeves" at noon.
As we drive along, it's obvious that Typhoon Krosa was considerably stronger here, leaving a windmill in shreds and the air limp with seawater. Yonaguni is just 20 square miles with few beaches, and rocky shorelines rise into hills and pastures where small, endemic horses roam. Rust sprinkles everything: cars, vending machines, even the doorknobs at a spectacular four-story beach house we rent overlooking a bay.
After a quick lunch of tofu champuru, a Ryukyu stir-fry, we meet up with Rui and the divers at SaWes shop. Soon I'm sitting on the floor of the boat as we grind out to the ruins. Kihachiro himself, the man who discovered the site in 1985 (and who makes a fine living promoting it), steers from the helm.
"Regulators in!" Rui shouts when the boat comes to a stop.
Three Japanese office workers and I bite our mouthpieces in unison.
"One, two, three!" Rui says, and everyone rolls in, except for me. I apparently missed that part of the briefing.
I roll in alone with a big splash and join the others just below the waves.
When the bubbles clear, well, if it's not a ruin I'm looking at, it doesn't take much to imagine one. Though I can't picture the living arrangements, I can immediately see crisp steps running up the side of a giant pyramid with the top lopped off. Two monoliths about 20 feet long and slightly tapered like obelisks teeter over a narrow tunnel. Rui points to a carving in a stone just around the corner that looks something like an arrow pointing at the hole.
"To show way to gate?" he writes on his slate.
The current picks up, and I drift by a wall now hairy with sea whips and latch onto a step to look around. Unicorn fish swim by. About 50 feet above I can see the swirling boils of crashing waves and 50 feet below appears the row of neatly stacked rocks believed to be a road. We float over triangles and circles cut into the surface and ogle angular slabs that look something like a sea turtle with its head and arms outstretched.
"I believe!" says Mitsue Abe, one of the office workers, when we surface and drink barley tea.
I dive four more times on the site, each time growing no more certain of what I'm looking at.
But who cares? Sunken city or not, it's an unusual dive site and certainly thrilling. To celebrate, we head to Snack Mami, a windowless bar run by an older lady with one good eye and wearing enough makeup to make batter. She is so thrilled to see the only Western tourists on the island that she fires up the karaoke machine, squeezes her smoky dress in next to me and belts out a screechy tune that reverberates off the Pepto-pink walls. A fat man whistles, a drunken one claps, and I happily down cold Orion beer from a glass that smells like fish.
Celebrating the Gods At first a lot of things can smell a bit strange in Japan, just like they do anywhere foreign. Trying to sniff some olfactory character out of a place is one of the best parts of traveling, I think. The air on Kaua'i reminds me of passion fruit. In Geneva it's chestnuts. But on Ishigaki, our final island, I'm going with the marshy stink of dried squid chips, because my nose is deep in a bag of them. That's because they're shockingly delicious.
After almost two weeks, foods that my Western-but-adventurous palate first found challenging are now savory addictions. Those steamed fish-paste cakes on Zamami? Must-haves. I stuff myself full of umibudo, a type of Okinawan seaweed that looks like bunches of miniature green grapes. When we board a flight to Ishigaki, an island with about 50,000 people, the divers at SaWes send us off with a gift of fermented beans pressed into tubes.
"Oishii," I say, meaning delicious, and eat them all.
If Zamami was slow time and history, and Yonaguni grit and intrigue, then Ishigaki, the third-largest island in the Ryukyus, falls somewhere in the middle. The south end of the 21-mile-long island is urban, with streets that clog at rush hour around a bustling port some 250 miles south of Okinawa. But 45 minutes up the coast, it's nothing but mangrove swamps, tiny villages and sparkling bays with clam diggers mucking about in capris.
Thanks to the typhoon, I now have only two days here instead of five, which is far too few. More than 65 dive sites pepper the 19 neighboring islands, called the Yaeyama group, while nearby sits Japan's largest reef, a 100-square-mile smorgasbord of blue corals. So many big rays come to a point off Ishigaki's northwest tip in the fall and spring that divers call it the Manta Scramble. The Seamen's Club, a dive shop and hotel in the north, has space on a boat running out to sites today. We grab a bag of squid chips for the ride.
La Mer is by far the most Western-style diving vessel we board in the Ryukyus. Whereas the wasen in Zamami were little more than open bows with cedar decks, La Mer is a 63-foot powerhouse with twin jet-propulsion engines, an onboard compressor and a sheltered deck with space for 40 people. Between dives, the guides serve a buffet lunch of soups with lotus flower roots, champuru and, of course, barley tea.
"The wind is still too strong to go to the mantas," reports Marie Kirikihira, a divemaster from Kyushu with long black hair and a furrowed brow.
She can see I'm disappointed and promises to show us the best sites off the island's protected southern tip.
After a 20-minute ride near Nagura Bay, the captain kills the engines and I see more dive boats tied to moorings than I have on any other island so far. At least eight ships float nearby. We divide into groups, and Lisa and I go with Marie, who takes us on two dips.
We haven't seen many endemic fish or corals, but at Taketomi Minami, a site 45 feet deep, robust schools of glassy sweepers, yellow gobies and blue-green chromis swarm in the 81-degree water. Large heads of bumpy coral that the Japanese call komonshikoro sango sprout from a sandy bottom, where visibility is 65 feet. (It can reach 100 feet.) At Little Sand Paradise, we drop and hover around a solitary rock stuck like an island in a sea of sand, 55 feet down. It's absolutely packed with more sweepers, double-lined fusiliers and a good dozen Japanese divers crammed around a pair of leaf fish.
"Without the wind, normally we could just take a small skiff out from the hotel," Marie says when we get back on board. "It's faster and less crowded that way."
But these are our last dives in Japan.
Shortly before sunset we drive north toward Kabira, a village framed by an indigo bay that twinkles with black- pearl farms and muffin-top crags. I'd hoped to see an annual festival: a giant tug-of-war match in Naha where tens of thousands of people take turns tugging on a 660-foot-long rope that's 4 feet thick and weighs so much a crane has to lift it. We've missed it (thanks Krosa!), but all is not lost.
While we look for a restaurant I hear drums. Louder and louder it grows, until we find a courtyard next to a school packed with kids in headbands holding hoes, spears and scythes. They twirl, kick and beat on small paranku drums while a man with a large mallet rings a gong.
For hours we sit on the ground watching them.
"It's our biggest festival," a lady tells me. "It's a celebration to ask the gods for a good harvest and to bring us health and happiness."
A warm breeze swoops in to ruffle the branches splattered with a languid moon. I have no idea if the gods are listening, but I know exactly what to believe.
Special thanks to Patio House Reef Hotel (opencoastravel.com), The Terrace Hotels Co. Ltd. (terrace.co.jp), SaWes Dive Shop (yonaguni.jp) and Seamen's Club Resort Hotel (seamensclub.co.jp).
Deco Stops Spend an afternoon wandering around the splendid courtyards of the 15th-century Shurijo Castle, the former home of Ryukyu royalty and the scene of some of World War II's most-vicious fighting. To get an idea of ancient Ryukyu life, visit the replicated village of Ryukyu Mura, a sprawling complex of traditional homes, farms and performance grounds where you can watch karate demonstrations and listen to the twang of Okinawan music. Drive north for about an hour to the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, a 2.6 million gallon tank and one of the planet's few places that houses whale sharks. On Yonaguni Island, be sure to stop by an awamori factory, where you can sample the sake-like liquor as it ages in wooden barrels. On Ishigaki Island, head to Kabira Bay on the island's northwest side to wander along a cedar-lined beach with muffin-top crags poking out from a blue-green lagoon. Some of Japan's best black pearls are farmed here.
The Guide to Ryukyu Average water temperature: 84 degrees Fahrenheit (73 degrees Fahrenheit in winter) What to wear: A 3-5 mm fullsuit Average visibility: 100 feet When to go: Spring and fall; typhoon season is July through October
Must Do When you arrive in Naha, head to the International Market on International Street to find colorful T-shirts, dried fish and jugs of sake with pickled rattlesnakes a drink that's supposedly good for your health. (Buy the whole jug for $400.)
Must Dives Manta Scramble (Ishigaki): Every spring and fall, manta rays swarm around clusters of coral heads to feed on blooming plankton just off the west coast of Ishigaki.
Yonaguni Ruins (Yonaguni): These ruins might not be the vestiges of an ancient civilization, but it doesn't take much to imagine a lost city.
Dana Drop (Yonaguni): A wall 180 feet deep drops off Yonaguni's northern side making for a spectacular drift dive when combined with almost infinite visibility. Go in December, January or February to catch schools of hammerheads that surround the island.
Nita Cave (Kerama Islands): Visit this spectacular cavern, in about 45 feet of water, at noon when the sun shines through it, creating a dazzling light show.
Sakubaru (Zamami): This network of coral canyons and walls lousy with angelfish and butterflyfish is also home to destroyed artillery cannons and shells.
Must Have Rooftops, bridges and entryways everywhere you look in the Ryukyus you're bound to see doglike dragons staring back. Called shisa, these traditional Ryukyuan decorations were once believed to ward off spirits. Souvenir shisa can cost from $30 to $250.
Travel Tips Open Coast Travel runs custom trips to the Ryukyus and can arrange flights, guides, rental cars and diving. Seven-night packages with 10 boat dives out of Zamami start at $1,200 and include breakfast, dinner, bilingual dive guides and most ground transfers. For Yonaguni diving trips, packages start at $1,395 for 10 dives, six nights on Yonaguni, one on Okinawa, most meals and round-trip flights from Okinawa to Yonaguni. For more information, visit opencoastravel.com or call 866-628-3425.
Japan Listings All Nippon Airways Co. Ltd fly-ana.com
Japan National Tourist Organization japantravelinfo.com; jnto.go.jp
Japan Transocean Air www.jal.co.jp/jta
Okinawa Convention & Visitors Bureau ocvb.or.jp
Okinawa Prefectural Government pref.okinawa.jp/english/index.html
Open Coast Travel opencoastravel.com
Patio House Reef Hotel opencoastravel.com
The Terrace Hotels Co. Ltd. terrace.co.jp
SaWes Dive Shop yonaguni.jp
