One day on the shore.
There’s a chain of islands trailing off the southernmost tip of Kyūshū. Seen from a map they remind me of pebbles, dark-green marbles scattered across a wide, featureless expanse of blue.
This is Japan’s tropical south.
Landing here for the first time is a revelation. Just two hours ago and we were still in the land of megacities, volcanoes and fast trains, where there’s already a nip in the air and gingko leaves are starting to turn golden; Miyakojima, instead, feels like another country. Orchids bloom in planters scattered throughout the airport. Tropical fish swim in the aquariums placed above the baggage carousel. Workers sport colourful shirts adorned with printed flowers, a stark contrast from the sombre outfits worn by their colleagues up north.
We hop from island to island: Miyako, Ishigaki, Taketomi, Ikema. We encounter the same efficiency, courtesy and care of the mainland – can an archipelago be called such, by the way? – coupled with the warmth, the sunsets and the humidity that feel like they belonged to another country, another hemisphere altogether.
The Ryukyu islands inhabit some sort of twilight zone where they can belong to Japan while, at the same time, be something else entirely. Recent history tells of a painful past of subjugation and forced assimilation to the nationalistic. War, and their people’s use as cannon fodder, followed in 1945. Taipei is closer than Tokyo and this geographical truth echoes in the spiciness of their ramen and in the geopolitical tensions of these times. Japanese F-15 fighter jets take off from Naha airport and Coast Guard vessels cruise into Ishigaki port. This might be a tropical paradise, but no one told Xi Jinping.
I’ll fess to an embarrassing truth. I’m not one for seaside holidays. I can hide behind a plethora of platitudes – the boredom of sitting on a beach, all-inclusive resorts, even the impossibility of finding a bike suitable for my legs on these islands – but the reality is that, well, I don’t swim. No, rather, I can’t swim.
Owing to a youthful misadventure, undoubtedly conflated to huge levels in my mind, I harbour a strong sense of mistrust towards water. Over the years I managed to bring myself to board a whale-watching boat in Sri Lanka and in Iceland, or a Istanbul vapur; I can even frolic in the shallows of a pool or of a beach, but I’ve so far never been able to escape a deep sense of foreboding at the sight of open ocean.
It’s hard to enjoy a tropical island if its party piece feels, however irrationally, like a threat. The thing is, though, that the only loser of this mental shackle is me. I’ll be the only one not to admire a sunset from these islands; it’ll just be me who will miss out on admiring the calm mornings when the mountains are mirrored in the still waters of the rice paddies, and much more.
There’s a small island at the tip of Miyakojima. A slender bridge jumps above the shallows and so Ikemajima is just a short bus ride away: mellower and, if possible, quainter than its larger neighbour. Sugarcane wallows in the warm breeze. Villages lay asleep in the heat, a postman buzzing on his moped the only sign of activity. One of the firefighters casts a line in the harbour next to his tiny station.
A narrow sandy path leads past the parking lot of a clam farm and to the promised land: a half-moon of crushed coral sand surrounded by tropical vegetation and steep, rocky cliffs. The sea is transparent, clouds hang in the blue sky and we’re all alone, here.
I sit on the beach, venturing occasionally in the shallows to cool off, content of looking the world go by. A cargo ship cruises on the horizon. A plane booms overhead, bound for Tokyo. Hermit crabs amble the foreshore, labouring under the towering shells they call home. Other critters are busy bailing water out of their holes, stopping occasionally to scan me, pincers held up high.
Suddenly, something long, dark and sinuous crosses “our” bay. The kidako moray is as elegant as it is mysterious, and it stays in our field of view for the briefest of moments before returning in that part of the sea where the water is deeper, the blue hue darker and the hic sunt dracones message rings loudest in my mind. But, suddenly, I’m not feeling as scared anymore.
“Come, there’s more here” is the invite. Holding my breath, I follow the invite and dunk my head in the water. Beneath, a multi-coloured world of striped fish opens before my eyes. Dozens of tropical pinnipeds swim around the outstretched arms of corals. Further ahead, as the water grows deeper and colder, there’s more. Normally, that would be enough of a taster for me. Here and no further, mister: that’s a world I don’t belong, an environment not made for beings like me. Normally I’d feel the urge to come back to shore. Not today.
For the first time, the ocean doesn’t feel menacing. I feel on the cusp of a new world ripe with the chance of discovery, pulled in by a sense of wonder and not repulsed by fear. All I have to do is to muster the courage – and the skills – to get there… and one day I will.
