Okinawa, the Other Japan

Okinawa sits closer to Taipei than to Tokyo, and it feels it. For four and a half centuries these islands were the Ryukyu Kingdom, a maritime state that traded with China, Korea and Southeast Asia and absorbed something from each. You hear it in the three-stringed sanshin and the pentatonic songs, taste it in a cuisine of pork belly, bitter melon and long-simmered broths, and see it in Shuri Castle above Naha, whose vermilion Chinese-influenced halls burned in 2019; the restoration of the main hall is due to be completed in 2026, so check what is open before you go.

The water is the other argument. Off Motobu, the Churaumi Aquarium keeps whale sharks and manta rays in its vast Kuroshio Sea tank, but the real thing is a boat ride away: the Kerama Islands, a national park of coral shelves so clear that the shade of blue has its own name. Divers drop into the Blue Cave at Cape Maeda; sea turtles graze off Zamami; further south, Miyako's Yonaha Maehama runs seven kilometres of white sand, Taketomi keeps its coral-walled lanes and water-buffalo carts, and Iriomote is nine-tenths jungle, mangrove river and Yaeyama palm.

Okinawa also carries its history plainly. The Peace Memorial Park at Mabuni names every person who died in the 1945 battle, on all sides, on stone walls facing the sea, and the quiet there is part of any honest visit. Balance it with an evening in Naha: Kokusai-dori's noise, a bowl of Okinawa soba with a slab of stewed rafute, pottery from the Tsuboya kilns, umibudo sea grapes popping like caviar, and awamori poured over ice while somebody starts an eisa drum. Nothing on the mainland prepares you for it, which is exactly the point of adding it to a wider trip through Japan.