Asahi Shimbun, May 22, 1997 Pacific isle of dreams Japan's Yonaguni Island near Taiwan shares a common past with its neighbor and is pushing for closer ties. By YOICHI FUNABASHI Shukan Asahi YONAGUNI, Okinawa Prefecture--"On a clear day, you can see Taiwan distinctly, not just the outline of the island but sometimes you can even spot cars shining in the distance," I was told in Naha, Okinawa's capital. Unfortunately, it was cloudy the day I stood at Irizaki, the western tip of Yonaguni Island which is also the westernmost point of Japan. The tiny isle is one of Yaeyama Islands in the East China Sea some 400 kilometers southwest of Okinawa Island, the main island of the Ryukyus chain. Although I couldn't see Taiwan, I did eye a motionless boat in the distance. "It's a patrol boat of the Maritime Safety Agency," explained Sukeharu Yoneshiro, an official from the Yonaguni municipal office who provided me with a tour of the small island. In the spring of 1996, when Taiwan was holding a presidential election, China fired a few missiles into the waters near Taiwan as warning shots. One of them dropped near Yonaguni. Since then, the Japanese patrol boat has been stationed there. All islanders say their island is closer to Taiwan than to Ishigaki, the principal part of the Yaeyama Islands. The television in the lobby of Yonaguni Airport shows Taiwanese programs. Cell phones can also be used there, provided they were made in Taiwan. I visited the Yonaguni Folk Museum, which displays household items and supplies that show how islanders lived before and after World War II. Yonaguni has a history of growing paddy rice that goes back 500 years. When it rained, farmers would lead their cattle into the paddies to have them stamp the soft ground into a bed for rice seedlings. On rainy nights, they stayed up all night planting the seedlings by torchlight. This traditional method of farming continued until the outbreak of the Pacific War. The island has also been producing dried bonito since 1895, and in the early Showa era (1926-1989) it boasted the largest dried bonito processing plant in the Orient. Because the plant's chimney was very tall, it was leveled by U.S. bombers during the war and not a trace of it remains today. Nae Ikema, who runs the museum, was born and raised on Yonaguni. Next year, she plans to publish a dictionary of words and terms peculiar to Yonaguni that she spent many years collecting. "It's the least I can do to repay the island," Ikema said. The museum's exhibits artifacts linking the island with Taiwan. For example, Taiwanese money was used in Yonaguni before the war and the exchange rate between it and the yen was one to one, Ikema explained. "Elementary school students usually went to Taiwan on an excursion like I did in 1930," she said. In those days, Taiwan was a rich country with a high standard of living. "We stayed at an inn with electric lights, telephone, electric fans and flush toilets, which were all new to us," she said. "When people here got seriously ill, they were taken to a medical school in Taiwan," Ikema said. "Today, they're taken to Ishigaki by helicopter. "All large pieces of tableware came from Taiwan. I think, even today, most families use Taiwan-made tableware," she said. "We do at our house," Yoneshiro said. "Black pigs raised here were an important export item to Taiwan," Ikema said. "People used to share the boat ride to Taiwan with the pigs. It took 14 hours to travel from here to Keelung. We left at night and arrived there in the morning." Another item Yonaguni exported to Taiwan was black sugar. Although the island is still dotted with sugarcane fields, the future of sugar production seems dim. Yonaguni Mayor Seizo Irinaka took me to a beer garden that night with Yoneshiro and Chokichi Arasaki, another Yonaguni official. Delicious raw marlin was served by the garden's owner, Toshio Azuma. The 1990 film "Rojin to Umi" (The Old Man and the Sea) is a documentary about Shigeru Itokazu, a marlin fisherman. He uses a harpoon to catch marlin from a boat. The fish weighs more than 100 kilograms and can swim at speeds exceeding 100 kilometers an hour. The chase is virtually a fight to the death between man and fish. Immediately after completing the film, Itokazu's body was found at sea with a string eating into the thumb of his left hand. The 81-year-old fisherman was pulled to his watery death by a giant marlin. The small island is home to some 1,800 people. It has no doctors. Ikema's late husband Ace, who wrote a book on the history of Yonaguni, was the last doctor on the island. The remote island has no bookstores, either. "But we are a border town," stressed Irinaka, the mayor. Indeed, the island is a frontier separating Japan from Taiwan. Fifteen years ago, Yonaguni became sister cities with Taiwan's Hualien. "We became the first Japanese local government to form sister city ties with a Taiwan city," Irinaka said. The island is organizing a number of programs to promote cultural exchanges with Taiwan. For example, it offers Chinese language lessons for adults and children. It plans to start a home-stay program between Taiwan and attract anglers from Taiwan, where fishing is a popular sport. However, despite the short distance between the sister cities (135 kilometers), people have to fly 1,000 kilometers to travel between them. "It should actually take only four or five hours but because we have to change planes at Ishigaki, Naha and Taipei in order to reach Hualien, it requires up two days of traveling," said Arasaki. It is the islander's dream to operate a direct flight to the Taiwanese city.