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.