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Iriomote Ishigaki NP, Okinawa
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Taketomi’s biggest festival still prays for crops although farming has ended on the island. Tanadui lasts 9 days, with about 50 dances and comic plays, plus a night-long yūkui procession that visits homes.
Local legend puts a woman at the heart of a famous song: Kuyama (1722–1799) is said to have refused a Ryukyuan official’s advances. Her story lives on in Asadoya Yunta, now sung around the world.
Taketomi’s minsa belts hide a love message in their weave: the signature 5-and-4 kasuri pattern sounds out “itsu no yo made”—“forever”—and was traditionally given by young island women to their beloveds.
This quiet village once governed the Yaeyama chain: it was the region’s political center from 1524 to 1543, then later served as the seat of Taketomi Village government from 1914 to 1938.
Taketomi’s rooftop shisa can be wonderfully individual. The island’s transport guides say roof builders traditionally shaped them by hand from leftover plaster used to secure the red tiles.
Red roofs are a later layer of the “old” village: Taketomi’s houses were once thatched, and conversion to Okinawa’s distinctive red tiles spread from the Meiji era onward.
Residents sweep the white-sand lanes by hand each morning. One island resident recalls children choosing patterns—zigzags or waves—as they brushed the sand, turning everyday tidying into a small creative ritual.
The white lanes depend on a rare local accommodation: although collecting beach sand is generally prohibited, Taketomi residents appealed to authorities and had spreading sand on village roads recognized as a local custom.
Islanders adopted their own preservation charter in 1986, a year before national designation. Its drafting drew on the spirit of an earlier residents’ charter for Tsumago-juku, a historic post town in Nagano.
The protected district is a 38.3-hectare landscape, not just a row of photogenic roofs. Selected in 1987, it includes 3 settlements and their white-sand lanes, coral-stone walls and surrounding environment.
Taketomi’s 3 central settlements are surrounded outward by trees, farmland, protective forest, beaches and coral reef. The red-roof village is the island’s human center within a much larger natural landscape.
As daily life changed rapidly in the 1950s, a local temple priest began saving ordinary island tools. His collection now holds 842 items—from farming implements to ritual objects—and is nationally registered.
Shared wells were essential to village life until 1976, when drinking water began arriving from Ishigaki through a pipeline under the sea. Many old wells are still respected rather than simply erased.
One village well has an unexpected commemorative purpose: Kinin Well was dug to celebrate victory in the Russo-Japanese War and was completed on January 18, 1906.
A traditional compound often had separate buildings for living and cooking: the fūya was the main house, while the tōra was the kitchen. The two roofs belonged to one household, enclosed by coral-stone walls.
