Opinion

Glass-Bottomed Boat

By DOUGLAS LUMMIS

Recently I visited a small seaside recreation area south of Naha. This was not one of the gaudy, expensive beach resorts built for what the Okinawans call yamatonchu ― yamato Japanese. Rather it has been there for many years and has been used mainly by local people.

The person I went with, who is an uchinanchu ― a native of Okinawa ― remembered visiting there during her school days and riding in a glass-bottomed boat. Through the glass you could see wide stretches of colorful coral, populated by countless tropical fish.

We noticed that the beach was covered with sand brought in from somewhere else. You could tell by the way it was piled up against the hill on the inland side that it had been dumped by trucks, not brought in by waves. Also you could see a clear line near the water's edge where the local sand ended and the imported sand began. (The imported sand was white and soft; the local sand was dark, rocky and rather hard ― not suitable for sunbathing.) My friend told me that this is done at most resort beaches in Okinawa now. The trouble is that the imported sand is soon carried away by the sea.

We bought tickets and boarded the glass-bottomed boat. Besides us, there were four young yamatonchu women. The driver said, "First I'll take you to where the fish are." We sped to a place somewhat distant from the shore and stopped there. Indeed, through the glass we could see a few tropical fish of exotic shapes and brilliant colors. The four women, in a holiday mood, excitedly asked the driver the names of the various species, and he obligingly told them, even when they asked about the same fish several times.

But something about the fish seemed odd. Fish tend to swim together in orderly schools that form beautiful patterns, but these fish were crowding together in a disorderly mob. Then I discovered the reason: The driver was feeding them fish food through the bottom of the boat. That is why they all came up to the boat when it arrived ― they had been trained to, like carp in a pond.

Then the driver said, "Now I'll take you to where the coral is," and drove the boat to a different place. There we could see some shapes in the water, brown and gray. "Is that coral?" one woman asked. "It's dirty, isn't it," another muttered. Trying to maintain their vacation spirits, they raised their voices: "Oh, coral!" "Look, coral!" Then we returned to the shore.

Later my friend told me that when she took the boat trip as a child, you could see fish and coral as soon as the boat left the dock. Since then something ― pollution? imported sand? the tourist industry in general? ― has come close to destroying their habitat. What we saw through the glass was not a world untouched by overdevelopment, but overdevelopment itself, in all its tragic ugliness.

Shukan ST: Jan. 9, 1998

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