Photo: 663highland / CC BY 2.5Ishigaki is one of the Yaeyama islands, 400 km from Okinawa's capital and 270 from Taiwan, with their own language, weave and songs. People come for Kabira Bay, a turquoise inlet farmed for black pearls, and for Taketomi, a village of coral-stone walls and red-tiled roofs fifteen minutes offshore. The night sky is among Japan's darkest, and your ship ties up at a bare quay on Painuhama, 10 minutes by car from the island ferries.
Ishigaki is in Okinawa Prefecture and is not Okinawan. The Yaeyama islands are further from Naha than Tokyo is from Osaka, closer to Taipei than to their own prefectural capital, and they have their own languages, weaves, songs and a long memory of being taxed by people who lived somewhere else.
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On the morning of 4 April 1771, an earthquake off the Yaeyamas sent a wave into these islands that killed roughly twelve thousand people — about a third of everyone alive here. Boulders the size of houses are still sitting inland where the water put them.
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A minsah belt carries two blocks of squares — one of five, one of four — repeated down its length. The numbers are a pun in the local language: itsu no yo made mo, "for all time." A woman wove one and gave it to a man, and the belt said what she was not going to say out loud.
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In the 1970s outside developers began buying land on Taketomi. The islanders responded with a written charter: do not sell, do not soil, do not destroy, do not damage, and make use of what is here. Fifty years later the village looks the way it does because of that document.
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From Ishigaki you can see 84 of the 88 recognised constellations — more than anywhere else in Japan. In spring, the Southern Cross clears the horizon here, which it does not do from anywhere on the main islands. In 2018 the surrounding national park became Japan’s first certified Dark Sky Place.
Read the story →Cruise seasons run spring to autumn, but the port changes underneath them.
Around 18–20°C. Japan’s earliest cherry blossom, and the Southern Cross begins to clear the horizon.
Comfortable everywhere. Humpbacks pass these waters into April.
Warm without humidity, the sea already swimmable, and the clearest southern sky of the year.
Yaeyama’s rainy season starts before the mainland’s. Heavy, warm and short each day.
The night-blooming flower starts, and is gone by dawn each morning.
Peak sea season. Kabira and Taketomi are at their most crowded.
Ships do reroute. When it is clear, the water is at its best all year.
The highest risk month for this port. Check rather than assume.
The sea holds its heat and the crowds have gone. An excellent month.
Around 22°C while the rest of Japan closes for winter. The reason this port has a winter season.
