Pirates and Pearls: Adventures in Japan’s Deep South
The helmsman has a scar on his forehead and his “Welcome aboard” is as worn as the seat of his canvas shorts. Business is brisk for this ‘old pirate’, whose glass-bottom boat tour departs hourly from the pearl farming town of Kabira, on Ishigaki island in southern Okinawa.
Any musings I have about how much bullion might be buried in his backyard, or how many sea monsters he may have wrestled, are interrupted by the growl of the boat’s engine. In a few moments our tour is underway.
It’s a supremely local set-up: a ticket shack, a boat, an old salt to pilot it, and a bunch of freshly shampooed, sweating sightseers willing to part with a thousand yen for a thirty-minute tour. It is money well spent as we glide Zeppelin-like over a world filled with light and colour, the helmsman deftly manoeuvring us around enormous heads of coral teeming with tinsel-coloured fish while providing a dialect-rich commentary which, if incomprehensible to non-Japanese speakers, leaves mainlanders slightly bemused.
It is not just the local vernacular which intrigues in the Yaeyama islands. Here at the very bottom of the Ryukyu island chain, which stretches from Kyushu island almost to Taiwan, a peace and charm more in keeping with Micronesia pervades the townships and shores. This is Japan’s ‘deep south’, where a mobile device is a pair of chopsticks, an application is something you fill out for a rental car at the airport counter, and FB stands for ‘face-in-book’, an activity best performed at any one of the sandy beaches on the twelve inhabited islands.
Ishigaki island serves as a hub for all air and sea transport, tourism and commerce. In just under two hours flying time from Osaka (three hours from Tokyo), its undulating sugar cane fields and cattle ranches creep from beneath the clouds, lush and otherworldly. There is not a hilltop temple, giant Buddha, nor geisha quarter in sight.
My airport rental car is a bug-green Nissan Note, and I feel the urge to whistle one as I depart Ishigaki airport and follow the winding coastal road towards Kabira, a sleepy township where I’ve heard a burnt-out city dweller can rejuvenate. My phone battery is flat, so I take mental snapshots: a roadside sugarcane juice stand, a flattened poisonous habu snake, a blue kingfisher smashing a crab against a fence post, a billowing thunderhead against a lapis blue sky.
Typhoons pass through Okinawa from June to November, and this explains the ugly, bunker-like architecture which lines the main street of Kabira township. However, a stroll deeper into its narrow hillside streets reveals the quaint tile-roofed and wooden stilted homes built in the Yaeyama tradition. Protected by coral rock walls (Ishigaki means ‘stone wall’) and a rooftop shiisa, or ‘lion-dog’ figurine to ward off evil spirits, a growing number have been given a new lease of life as cafes and izakaya pub-restaurants.
Maetakaya guesthouse is an eclectic mix of both past and present; the three-storied guesthouse stands metres from the high tide mark of Kabira Bay, affording views of the black pearl farms and a sandy inlet where the glass bottom boats come and go. Next to the guesthouse the owner’s parents’ one-hundred-year home still stands, barely visible behind riotous bougainvillaea and hibiscus trees.
My hosts are a quietly-spoken couple who rise early. The husband greets me before dawn with a shy smile and bucket full of clams he has gathered in the estuary. The bivalves arrive in a bowl of red miso soup soon after, and together with rice, grilled reef fish, and a sliced baby pineapple from the local corner store, my breakfast tray is replete.
For three nights, I am the sole guest at Maetakaya — alone, but not lonely — with my dried squid snacks and bottle of Omoto awamori, a liquor distilled locally from Thai rice and best taken with ice and water.
Close to the Tropic of Cancer and two thousand kilometres from the hustle of Honshu, the night sky is filled with everything you can’t see in a city bathed in neon light. The atmospheric stability and ‘dark sky’ effect over the Yaeyamas mean you can view eighty-four of the known eighty-eight constellations, including Orion — after which Okinawa’s popular beer is named — not to mention satellites and shooting stars which constantly sweep the celestial stream.
The next day, I am back on the deck to witness a dawn horizon lit like a fire. The husband’s shyness gives way to profundity when he asks me, ‘How many sunrises will you see in a lifetime? How many will be as beautiful as this?’ It’s not so much a question as a reason to rise early; within hours the heat becomes too oppressive to do anything but swim.
Unfortunately, the idyllic inlet and surrounding beach are off-limits to swimmers due to boat traffic, jellyfish, and strong currents, though one suspects the ban may have more to do with the sensitivity of local pearl farmers, whose hand-cultured black-lip pearl oysters produce the rare and highly coveted Ryukyu black pearl in the middle of the bay.
The best place to take a dip lies a short drive from Kabira, at the small township of Yonehara. Here, a roadside bakery-cafe, and an atelier producing colourful hand-painted shiisa, give tourists pause to stop, refresh themselves, and shop for souvenirs. Travelers seeking solitude stay longer; a camping ground set among the casuarina and laurel trees on the shorefront costs only a few hundred yen, and though its facilities are basic, it is about as close to living the castaway dream as a city slicker can get. Yonehara Beach is where the daytrippers meet the drop-outters to enjoy the lagoon and snorkel its teeming reef at low tide.
To view bigger creatures, it’s back to Kabira — and the old pirate’s boat tour — that one must go. A scrum forms around the glass floor of the boat as the masked sightseers ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at a world they have only ever seen in a big city aquarium. A fat, banded sea snake sidles by, a sea turtle dives for cover, giant clams quiver at the touch of passing parrot fish.
Could it be this same parrot fish, called irabucha, which arrives at my table later that evening? Inside Jinbei, an izakaya lying a short walk from Maetakaya and the ticket shack, it is a credible notion. I search the wooden tables for the old pirate, but my senses are arrested by a succulent platter of reef fish sashimi and garnished with sea grapes, which arrives at my table. Goya chanpurū is the signature dish of the Yaeyama islands, a stir-fried mix of sliced bitter melon, a knobbly cucumber-like vegetable, tofu, and smoky-flavoured bonito flakes.
The awamori flows easily at Jinbei, and soon, what began as five tables of strangers becomes a single room of new friends; a sanshin three-stringed banjo is produced and one of the regular customers proceeds to strum out old favourites to a clapping, whooping audience.
On my second visit to Jinbe, I appreciate even more the grotto-like appearance of the place: a dried habu hanging coiled and talisman-like over the door, the faded snapshots of the chef landing a swordfish, hand-blown glass fishing buoys and other curios from the deep sea.
I glance beyond the service counter and into the kitchen, where a man who looks mysteriously like the old helmsman makes short work of a reef fish with his filleting knife. Catching my gaze, he winks an eye and says, ‘Welcome aboard!’
