The Yoron-To (-jima) Island is situated at the southernmost end of Kagoshima. It is comprised of coral reefs that have surfaced in the Amami Islands having a circumference of 24 kilometers. It is part of the Amami Islands Quasi-National Park. It is famous for the beautiful ocean with barrier reef and fringing reef that developed around the island and the semitropical climate where the average temperature is over 20 degrees centigrade. Many divers visit this island to enjoy marine sports all the year around.
Eight hundred miles south of Kyoto is the southernmost point in Kagoshima Prefecture, the Island of Yoron. Yoron is a very small island, just eight square miles in area, it has one tiny village, and fewer than a thousand residents. This tiny island is a Japanese Tourist Mecca, hosting thousands of Japanese visitors every summer. Visit Yoron because of the humpbacked whales who breed in the waters surrounding the island. The island is also home to pristine untouched coral reefs, and the sunken remains of dozens of ships and hundreds of airplanes from the largest land/sea/air battle ever fought, the Battle of Okinawa. Divers come for the reefs, photographers come for the whales, and Japanese mourners come to pay tribute to loved ones and relatives who died in the battle.
The entire island can be seen on foot, but renting a bicycle is the better method of seeing everything that Yoron has to offer. The people of Yoron are very friendly and open, and since the island is so small, everyone knows everyone else. There are a couple of small "resort" style hotels on the island, and a couple of bars, a botanical garden (which is really more like a tropical version of a formal Japanese garden), a lighthouse, a "cave shrine", and a reconstructed "folk" village. Shopping opportunities are pretty limited, with one fantastic exception.
Yoron Pottery (which is famous throughout Japan) is run by Kiyomi Kaneko, who is not only a famous potter, but one of Japan's most famous nature photographers (he won the prestigious "Japanese Magazine Photographer of the Year award in 1987) It was Kaneko-San who first photographed Yoron's Humpbacked whales and coral reefs in the late fifties and early sixties. Kaneko was an engineering student when he was drafted into the Japanese army in late 1944. He was sent for training as a Kamikaze pilot. Two thousand Kamikaze pilots from his flight academy died in the Battle of Okinawa. The war ended before Kaneko-San was assigned a plane. After the war he became a photographer and then a diver, and in the late fifties moved to Yoron, to be near the spirits of the many friends who had died in these waters.
The largest O-kaneku Beach has a 2-kilometer long white sand beach with shallow water, an ideal and popular sea-bathing spot. The Yuri-ga-hama Beach situated 1.5 kilometers offshore of the O-kaneku Beach is noted as the stardust beach because the deposits of dead plankton on the beach look like star-shaped sand grains. A glass-bottomed boat service can take you to this mysterious beach that only appears at ebb tide. The Yun'nu-Rakuen Garden is a botanical garden in a tropical atmosphere with 40 kinds of hibiscuses and 150 other kinds of semitropical plants. Flowers bloom all the year round. It is a popular spot for strolling.
You can learn the history and culture of the Yoron-To Island at the Southern Cross Center. This center displays a wide range of exhibits, from the stoneware of 3,000 years ago to the development of the present Yoron-To Island. The top floor has the highest observation deck in the Island. You can see Okinawa Island and Okino-erabu-jima Island on good clear days.
The people of Yoron and Okinawa do not have a long history of being Japanese. Prior to 1609, the islands were semi-autonomous and paid tribute to China. After this time, they fell into Japanese control, and only at the start of the 20th century they were forced to learn and speak Japanese. In the second world war, the islands were the main battleground with the Americans
Most of Yoron is covered by sugar cane fields and small farms populated by goats and chickens. It seems that this is a place that time has forgotten. In the fields, old men and women looking well up into their eighties toiled away. Indeed, the people of the southern islands of Japan have an average lifespan longer than any other people in the world.
