Jon's Journeys: Amami Hillbillies

Materiya Waterfall

Amami Oshima is a pretty good sized island at 715 square km. I've already written about the coastline, which is where almost everyone lives. Sugarcane cultivation is traditionally the main economy, and in stores you can find chunks of brown sugar to buy as souvenirs, original flavor, as they say. They're starting to grow some other things, like mangos and passion fruits, too. They had passion fruit in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago, and I just stood there over the mound of fruit, intoxicated by the smell.

Amami has traditionally been a poor island (like a Japanese Haiti), and it's still poor compared to the rest of Japan. But it's still Japan, so you don't have the crime and other problems that usually go with urban poverty. It also means the island has stayed relatively undeveloped, with 95 percent forest according to one account. A map I have from a vegetation survey shows it as mostly natural forest, whatever that means. Amami was a neglected corner of Japan for many years. Here's an excerpt from an article in Time magazine from Monday, Feb. 24, 1958, a few months before Masami was born: "Life is grim on Amami Oshima, an island in the typhoon-swept East China Sea, 200 miles southwest of Japan. The islanders are beset by leprosy, poverty, poisonous snakes, and fire. Again and again, storm-spread fires have all but wiped out the wooden shanties of Nase, the island's largest town (pop. 43,000)."

That's our town, and I haven't seen too many people walking around with leprosy lately, but the population hasn't changed much. Young people tend to get out of here as soon as they can, leaving the island with an aging population. The infrastructure has developed way out of proportion to the population, as, to make up for years of neglect, federal money pours in here for roads, tunnels, parks, and all that cement that they're trying to cover the island with. There are tunnels 2 km long and more, shortcuts that save the busy commuter nearly 2 minutes off the brutal Naze City rush hour commute. There are paved roads in the middle of the forest, good roads that go nowhere. Some look promising for a while, then just end suddenly.

Another dead end

These roads are not necessarily maintained, and I often find myself on a road overgrown with weeds, barely passable on the motorcycle. I've been exploring a lot of these roads, and going into the mountains with Theo on weekends. Well, I can't really say they are mountains, as there probably aren't many that are over 2,ooo feet. I have a tourist map, which doesn't have all of the roads on it, has roads on it which aren't there (maybe overtaken by the jungle?), and doesn't distinguish between paved roads and jumbles of rock and mud. Add to that landslides, mud, fallen branches, moss growing on unused roads, streams going across the road, and riding off the beaten track on Amami becomes an adventure. I regularly get lost here. I have a good sense of direction usually, but I get turned around on the winding roads here, and in the thick forest, there's no reference point. At least in town I can climb a telephone pole in the maze of streets and orient myself by seeing where the ocean is.

The island is not incredibly big, but there are no roads that are straight for more than two blocks. The maximum speed anywhere on the island, including so called "highways" is 50 kmph, about 31 mph. That is probably too fast for most roads, but that doesn't stop anyone from going 80 or more. Add to that the obstacle course of bicycles, motor scooters, people walking on the road, and cars parked in the road (where else would they park?), and driving becomes a kamikaze commitment.

There are trails in the forest, too, and although some were well built, a machete is usually needed. I usually grab a stick to collect spiders and their webs that take over the trails.

I climbed this tiny hill on the edge of town and had 20 big spiders on my stick by the time I got to the top. By big I mean as big as my face, which is why I carry a stick to clear them out of the way. Even though I know they're not poisonous, it is still creepy to have a giant spider crawling on your face, stuck there by its own web. Today I was trying to catch a lizard like the one from the picture in the last blog. He was on a tree trunk, turned to face me and gave me a flying kick to the face. We dubbed him the ninja lizard.

Theo and I took off one Saturday afternoon, June 28, on our first mountain adventure together. We stopped at a nice nature center, looked at the displays and got some information, some even in English, which is really rare. We were the only ones at the nature center. We got a butterfly chart, which was nice. Although I came equipped with a bird guide to Japan, I haven't used it, as nearly all the birds seem to have left for the summer. Must be too hot for them. But there are butterflies everywhere, dragonflies, and other insects. We headed off to Materiya Falls, which I'm guessing is Amami's biggest waterfall. It's not as huge as the ones on Yakushima, but it's a nice one, and there are good swimming holes in the splash pools. Theo and I went swimming (see picture above). Some Japanese tourists came by and took our pictures. These iridescent blue damselflies were everywhere.

Forest Polis

After the waterfall, we went to a developed forest camping and recreation place called the Forest Polis (Forest Police? Don't ask me). They must have spent a fortune on this place, with campgrounds with tent platforms, cabins, ponds, wooden walkways, observation towers, landscaped grounds, developed trails, but the place was practically abandoned, and some of the wooden decks had caved in. Things fall apart pretty fast here with all the rain and the heat and humidity, so it probably wasn't even 10 years old. I remember going there a few years ago when everything was new. Anyway, we had the place to ourselves. There were lots of dragonflies and butterflies around the ponds. We saw a couple of Amami's most interesting and elusive birds, a Ruddy Kingfisher, an orange bird with a long beak, and the large red and blue Lidth's Jay, along with some flyovers of green pigeons.

The walk around the Forest Polis didn't take long, so we decided to ascend the Mt. Everest of Amami Oshima, Yuwan dake. At a whopping 694.4 meters (2248 feet), it's the tallest mountain on the island. It was shrouded in clouds, so it really did feel like we were in the mountains. Of course, we were the only ones there. We climbed the 639 slippery steps of the wooden walkway to the shrine. The cicadas were deafening. There are a few different kinds, and the call of one species made me think the brakes on the motorcycle were scraping. This made for an eerie hike through the mist to the abandoned shrine, with the cicadas screeching in the dense forest.

The pinnacle of Amami.

I don't know what the cow was doing at the shrine. There was an observation tower where we could look out over the mist. We hiked the rest of the way to the official top, but it was in dense forest, so we couldn't see anything.

A couple of weeks later, on July 12, Theo and I went to the north part of the island to another forest preserve type place with developed trails. It must take a lot of work to maintain the trails here, judging by the state of the mountain roads. So you can't just hike anywhere in the forest. This was another developed place with wooden walkways, ponds, a playground, and three, count 'em, three observation towers. We saw three snakes, some salamanders, and a Lidth's Jay that sat and posed for us.

We were the only ones in the forest, of course, except for this guy in a green jumpsuit like the maintenance people here wear, but he turned out to be a naturalist. He caught up with us at the last observation tower at 5PM to tell us that the forest was closing. He invited us back to an evening firefly program he was doing for 20 preschoolers. I was sure that we wouldn't go for a walk in the forest at night with the threat of the Habu, the nocturnal poisonous snake that's reputedly under every blade of grass here. If you'll remember from a few years back, Masami's mother would yell at me to get inside when I would try to sit in the backyard. But after the slideshow, we actually went for a walk in the forest at night, viewing the fireflies, finding two huge frogs, and enjoying the night view from one of the platforms. Even with 20 noisy preschoolers tagging along, ignoring the naturalist's pleas for quiet, it was a magical experience.