Okinawa and Ryukyu Honey

Naha is closer to Taipei than to Tokyo, and the food remembers it. The menus in the Makishi market district carry the evidence: pork braised for hours in awamori and brown sugar, bitter melon that arrived via Chinese trade routes through the Ryukyu Kingdom’s maritime network, island tofu sold hot and unset from the shop window in a way that has no mainland equivalent. The cooking philosophy is called champuru – a word borrowed from Malay meaning “mix” – and it describes a place as much as a technique.

The Ryukyu Kingdom existed for 450 years as an independent maritime state, its red-lacquered castle looking out over trade routes connecting China, Japan, Korea, and the ports of Southeast Asia. The cuisine that developed here belongs to none of those places entirely and borrows from all of them. Rafutē – pork belly slow-cooked with black sugar, soy sauce, and awamori – traces its ancestry to Chinese dongpo pork. Awamori itself, Okinawa’s native spirit distilled from Thai indica rice using black koji, was in production before Japan ever arrived. The kitchen at Makishi Public Market, operating for more than sixty years in the heart of Naha, stocks tropical reef fish in colors that do not exist in any mainland fish counter, whole pig faces, sea grapes, fresh shekwasha citrus, and the sharp leaf of gettou – shell ginger – used to wrap the steamed mochi sold at shops along the castle road in Shuri.

Shuri Castle, the seat of the kingdom from 1429 to 1879, burned in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. It was rebuilt in 1992. It burned again in October 2019. The reconstruction is currently underway, the main hall scheduled to reopen in 2026, and the work is visible from the outer grounds: scaffolding, craftsmen, timber framing – the palace making itself legible in the process of becoming. The stone-paved road that descends from the castle gate toward the old harbor below, laid in the sixteenth century, is still intact. Along it, among the cafes and sweet shops that have operated in the shadow of the castle for generations, there is honey to find.

The island chain does not end at the main island. Miyako and the Yaeyama islands – Ishigaki, Iriomote, Yonaguni – lie another 300 to 430 kilometers southwest, closer to Taiwan than to Naha. Iriomote is covered 90 percent by old-growth subtropical jungle and is part of the same 2021 UNESCO World Natural Heritage inscription that covers Yambaru. The chain as a whole was isolated from the Asian continent for the better part of a million years, which is why its species lists read differently from everything to the north.

In the main island’s northern third, the terrain shifts from resort infrastructure to forest. Yambaru – 山原, mountain-forest land – covers three villages: Kunigami, Ogimi, and Higashi. The area is less than a tenth of a percent of Japan’s national land area. It contains roughly half of Japan’s endemic bird species and a quarter of its endemic frog species. The density of endemism exists because the northern Okinawan landmass was isolated for so long that its species developed on their own. In 2021 the Yambaru forest was inscribed as a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site, recognized on the same criteria as Galápagos and the Amazon.

The signature resident is the Yambaru kuina, the Okinawan rail, formally identified as a new species in 1981. It cannot fly – its wings are too small – but runs fast through the forest understory on red legs. Road signs through the northern villages feature it; the speed limit drops to 40 kilometers per hour at night. Its population is threatened by mongooses (introduced to Okinawa in 1910 to control habu vipers, an intervention that did not go as intended), by traffic, and by feral cats. Noguchi’s woodpecker is similarly endemic to Yambaru, similarly endangered. The old nest cavities this woodpecker excavates in the forest canopy now attract feral Western honeybees – a small ecological complication the prefecture has had to address formally.

On the east coast of Higashi village, Gesashi Bay holds Japan’s largest mainland mangrove forest, a national natural monument since 1972. Canoe tours work the tidal channels at high water, moving through the root systems of the hiru-gi trees as the tide rises into the interior. At the island’s northern tip, Hedo Cape stands at the confluence of the Pacific and the East China Sea. On a clear day, Yoron Island in Kagoshima Prefecture is visible across the water – the boundary of the old Ryukyu maritime territory.

Ogimi village, on the northwest coast just south of the Yambaru proper, is nationally known for the concentration of long-lived residents in its population and for the shekwasha citrus grown on the hillsides above the coast road. Emi no Mise, a lunch set restaurant run by village grandmothers, has served island vegetable food made from the produce of local gardens since 1990. The menu changes by season; reservations are required. There is a shekwasha soft cream at a roadside shop on the way through.

Getting here: Naha Airport has direct flights from Tokyo (approximately two and a half hours), Osaka, Fukuoka, Seoul, Taipei, and Shanghai. Yambaru is reached by car – exit the expressway at Kyoda IC, then north on the coast road. The drive from Naha takes between 90 minutes and two hours depending on the destination. There is no passenger rail north of the Naha city monorail. The outer islands have their own airports and ferry services.

The year-round subtropical climate means there is no wrong season. Typhoon season runs from July into September. Spring and autumn offer the best conditions for forest wildlife. The kanhizakura – Okinawa’s endemic cherry, a Taiwan species with deeper pink flowers than the mainland’s ornamental varieties – blooms in January and February, two months before the sakura season opens anywhere else in Japan. The bloom begins in the north and moves south, the inverse of the mainland’s 桜前線. By the time it finishes in Nanjyo, the bees have already moved into the citrus groves.