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| Iriomote Island |
I teach on an island called Iriomote. It's the largest island in the Yaeyama region of Okinawa and the second largest of all the Ryukyu islands. Iriomote is one of my favorite islands to visit, not so much because of the people I meet there (though some of my favorite schools and students are on this island), but because I feel a sense of calm on this island that I rarely experience anywhere other than here. It's as if Iriomote has very little of the interference that exists elsewhere in the world. By interference, I mean all of the technology that we have come to rely on that inevitably also decreases our ability to connect to the natural world. My ability to slow down and accept things as they are is increased when I have less distractions and less of the buzz of technology all around me.
There are only 2000 inhabitants on this island, most in small towns on the Eastern or Northern part of the island. There is one long coastline that stretches from the southeastern town of Ohara over the northern coast and ends in a very small fishing village called Shirahama. From this point on, you have to take a ferry if you want to reach the remote villages that are on the islands off the southwest. Apart from these villages and towns, there is only wilderness on this island. The entire interior and most of the southern part of the island is dense jungle covering large mountain ranges and valleys. There are beautiful waterfalls and long rivers that run through these little traveled areas. You can hike or kayak to reach the waterfalls, but there are warnings that if you plan to go beyond the second waterfall, you must report this to the Iriomote forest service, detailing where you plan to travel and for how many days as so many people have lost their way and have never been found again.
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| Ida Beach on Funauki (a small island off the coast of Iriomote) |
I have yet to travel beyond the coastline (though I plan to take a kayak trip to visit the waterfalls), but even from my experiences in staying overnight on this island (I teach at two very rural locations that require me to overnight in a village on the island) the remoteness of the island affects me in a way that the other Yaeyama islands do not. I have only felt a similar sense of the extensive power of nature in one other place in my life in a similar way and that was in the Everglades in Florida. In both Iriomote and in the Everglades I am hit with the endlessness of time, the sense of eternity stretching out before me in the mountains that jut up all around the island. Place has the ability to affect our sense of time and space and these two areas make me think of how ancient this world is and how time itself is, in all essence, unmeasurable in the natural world (or at least, the way humans calculate and measure time becomes insignificant). These are areas where the significance of my life is put into perspective. I feel the least lonely here on this island, even though most of my time spent there is by myself. All of the small details, the quotidian, banal struggles and stressful situatons are of little importance in the overall scheme of life on earth. Iriomote exists and its existence reminds me of this. It also reminds me of how far humans have removed themselves from the natural world and how this removal has enabled us to destroy the natural world without feeling any sense of culpability.
