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Yambaru NP, Okinawa
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At 503 m, Yonaha-dake is Okinawa Island’s highest summit—but not Okinawa Prefecture’s: Ishigaki’s Omoto-dake reaches 526 m. “Island high point” is the key distinction.
A Ryukyuan work song, Kunjun Sabakui, remembers hauling timber from Nagao-yama on Yonaha to build Shuri Castle’s North Hall. Its dance still mimics choosing, loading and dragging the logs.
A Kunigami village survey records a local tradition that future King Shō En (Kanemaru) hid at Intsuki Yatochi at Yonaha’s foot while fleeing toward Shuri, supplied with food by a blacksmith’s family in nearby Okuma.
Mist turns Yonaha’s summit forest into cloud forest, where ferns and orchids perch on wet tree trunks. In adjoining protected forest, Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency counted 378 plant species across 104 families.
The Okinawa woodpecker’s range is considered the smallest of any woodpecker species on Earth; it was described to science from Yambaru in 1887. Yonaha’s protected forest is among its documented habitats.
An Okinawa woodpecker excavates a nest cavity in a large tree almost every year; old holes can later shelter Ryukyu long-furred rats or Ryukyu scops owls. One bird’s abandoned nursery becomes another’s home.
Okinawa woodpeckers divide their foraging by sex: males often hunt prey on the ground, while females mainly feed in trees. No other woodpecker is known to show this pattern.
The ridge around Yonaha is Kunigami’s watershed: Hiji and Yona rivers run west to the East China Sea, while Oku and Anpa drain east to the Pacific. A raindrop’s first slope sets its ocean.
