Depleting reefs may profoundly reshape Ishigaki Island’s tourism industry.<\/b>
\nViewed from a satellite, Japan\u2019s southern Yaeyama archipelago is a splatter of green blobs ringed in turquoise. Closer to Earth, those encircling lagoons take on more complex shades of blue, often streaked with white lines made by dive boats, cruise ships, rusting inter-island ferries and, more recently, the armed vessels of Japan\u2019s Maritime Self-Defense Force.
Beneath liquid trails of tourism, transportation and regional tension are the kaleidoscopic colors of Japan\u2019s largest and richest coral reefs. Down here, changes mirror the turbulence on the surface, as reefs grow and shrink, and aquatic species migrate in and out each season. These enduring oscillations are expected, but a newer change is pressing itself, sharply, into the lives of those connected to these islands: The colors are leaving. And \u201cleaving\u201d is the right word: Staring through the tempered glass of a scuba mask, what we see when we look at the color of coral is living tissue, the soft biomatter of a plant-animal slowly building a calcium carbonate skeleton. As sea-surface temperatures rise well beyond the average (and for longer periods) in summer, the plant half of the relationship \u2014 single-celled algae called zooxanthellae \u2014 leaves and, without a source of energy, the coral animal turns bone white. If the algae don\u2019t return when waters cool, coral eventually dies, its skeleton decays and an entire reef can collapse.
In 1998, Ishigaki and other islands in the Yaeyama archipelago were hit by the first global coral bleaching event. Some parts of the reefs collapsed as a result. Bleaching events have returned in parts of the globe every three to five years since then, but in 2016 and 2017, particularly high sea-surface temperatures appeared back-to-back for the first time: Roughly 90 percent of Yaeyama\u2019s coral was bleached in 2016 and, according to the Environment Ministry, more than 70 percent of the largest reef, the Sekisei Lagoon, died. In January, the ministry reported that roughly 49 percent of the remaining coral was bleached in 2017; we still don\u2019t have accurate figures on how much has died. None of this is normal.
Here are the stories of people in the Yaeyama archipelago, particularly those on the main island of Ishigaki, whose lives are affected by single-celled zooxanthellae and climate change \u2014 two interrelated factors, microscopic and planet-sized, that determine the color of coral. The quantitative story of reef decay has been well told, even on these remote islands, but there are few stories that explore how changes to the Yaeyama reefs are affecting people, including reef scientists, hotel directors, guesthouse owners, government employees, tour guides and divers such as Harvey Tiew Lee Leong and his pregnant wife, Mikiko Ando Tiew.
Yonehara Reef lies in a coral-rich transparent lagoon on Ishigaki Island.| COURTESY OF DIVING SCHOOL UMICOZA
Leong and Tiew run Diving School Umicoza in a patch of jungle in northern Ishigaki, between a shrimp farm and cow paddocks, and looking out to an azure lagoon. Umicoza is one of roughly 200 dive schools\/shops on Ishigaki, and specializes in excursions to the island\u2019s northern reefs. During summer months, instructors will spend hours each day swimming over coral, alongside tropical fish, sea snakes and manta rays.
\u201cWhen I first came here\u2026 lots of coral,\u201d Leong says. He slides open the door to the garden at the center of school, leading the way to a view of the lagoon below, his tanned and tattooed arms barely showing beneath the black sleeves of a hooded sweatshirt. The coral now? \u201cDead,\u201d he says. We both know the answer is an exaggeration, but not by much \u2014 over the past 20 years, significant amounts of the reef (some reports suggest more than half) have collapsed.
The waves break hard against the reef edge below, and clouds hang heavy, spitting into a cool northerly wind. The air smells like wet foliage. Droplets run down umbrella-sized taro leaves into soggy earth. Cane and cattle stretch around the headland to the south, leading to farmland where the SDF is building missile batteries to defend the island from invasion. Also worrying to locals is the invasion of tourists, whose numbers increase each year \u2014 in 2017,1.3 million domestic and foreign visitors came to this island of almost 50,000 people and, since Ishigaki was named the world\u2019s No. 1 trending travel destination by TripAdvisor in January, more are expected.
Geopolitical tensions and out-of-control tourism worry Leong and Tiew, but there are more immediate concerns troubling them today.
\u201cWe just hope the typhoons come (this year),\u201d Leong says. \u201cEach time the typhoon comes then the ocean temperature will go down a bit.\u201d
Certain dive locations have been completely changed over the past two years due to mass-bleaching events. Anything that brings down the water temperature \u2014 even destructive typhoons \u2014 is desirable.
\u201cMaybe in another 30 to 50 years we still can see something,\u201d Leong says, thinking about how the reef might look to his children when they are older. \u201cI hope coral is growing, I hope the next generation will also see them.\u201d
Tiew will give birth to their second child later this year.
Umicoza does what it can to mitigate stress on the coral by limiting the number of dives it takes each day, and ensuring minimal damage occurs when they drop anchor. Tiew says that some unregistered dive shops, particularly those that have flourished as tourism booms, are not so careful. Umicoza also takes customers to see the changes to the reef: One photo from a group dive in 2017 shows a single blue branching coral amid the brown rubble of a collapsed reef. But there is only so much that can be done.
\u201cThe water temperature we cannot control, nor the typhoons,\u201d Tiew says.
The scale of the problem exceeds them, their school, their island, the archipelago and nation. \u201cIt is a global thing,\u201d Leong says. \u201cIf I\u2019m just alone, I can\u2019t do anything.\u201d
Fish swim around healthy coral off the coast of Okinawa\u2019s Ishigaki Island.| CAMERON ALLAN MCKEAN
In his sixth-floor Tokyo office, professor Hajime Kayanne rummages through papers. He answers many questions this way, by scouring the office for graphs, photographs, diagrams. The walls of his room in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of Tokyo are stacked with books on coral, and his view of the city outside is gradually being eaten away by the publications that no longer fit on the shelves.
Kayanne has been studying changes to reefs since around the 1990s. He is not equivocal about the causes of the changes. Here is the opening line to a research article published in January that is co-authored by Kayanne and 30 other scientists who work at 24 different institutions around the world: \u201cThe health of coral reefs is declining globally due to human-induced environmental changes.\u201d The full implications of that simple sentence are hard to process.
\u201cThe rate of recovery cannot catch up with repeated bleaching \u2014 it\u2019s not possible,\u201d Kayanne says.
Before the first bleaching event in 1998, Kayanne says that Shiraho Reef \u2014 the specific location on the southeastern coast of Ishigaki that he has devoted himself to studying \u2014 \u201ccontained a high diversity of coral.\u201d
\u201cAfter the bleaching,\u201d he says, \u201cthat diversity was lost.\u201d
Witnessing the sudden deterioration of a rich coral garden is visually shocking, and has been used effectively by filmmakers and photographers in documentaries such as Netflix\u2019s \u201cChasing Coral\u201d or the BBC\u2019s \u201cPlanet Earth II\u201d series. In this footage, the complex reef cities of the northern Great Barrier Reef crumble to ruins following the widely publicized mass-bleaching event in the summer of 2016.
However, scientists such as Kayanne often attempt to take a less human view, by considering coral changes in the context of longer time scales. Although these considerations are rendered through the dry, emotionless language of science, they can be deeply disturbing, with \u201closs\u201d occurring at hard-to-fathom scales.
\u201cCoral reefs,\u201d writes Charles Birkeland in his 1997 book \u201cLife and Death of Coral Reefs,\u201d \u201care especially sensitive and vanish about a million years before other groups of organisms each time there is a global mass extinction.\u201d The full implications of that sentence are also hard to process.
Fish swim around healthy coral off the coast of Okinawa\u2019s Ishigaki Island.| CAMERON ALLAN MCKEAN
Associate professor James Davis Reimer, a Canadian marine biologist who runs a laboratory at the University of the Ryukyus on Okinawa\u2019s main island, has spent his academic career wrestling with the microscopic and planetary at play in changing coral reefs.
Hours before flying back to his lab and family in Okinawa, Reimer agrees to meet in a crowded Tokyo restaurant to explain his experiences with the declining reefs of southern Japan.
He talks fast and passionately, his voice submerged under the clatter of cups, shuffling feet and morning conversations. Perhaps because he lives and works in Okinawa \u2014 and sometimes even takes his daughters to visit locations he is studying \u2014 the changes are felt more powerfully. His home is changing, and he sympathizes with those who live around Ishigaki. He says he doesn\u2019t \u201cusually cry,\u201d but visiting sites where coral gardens have turned to \u201crubble\u201d has affected him deeply.
\u201cTo go there and see it,\u201d Reimer says, \u201cit just hits you.\u201d
Biodiversity and \u201cecological imbalance\u201d are central concerns of Reimer\u2019s.
\u201cBiomass might not be down, but the number (of species) is,\u201d he says in response to questions about the efficacy of cultivating heat-resistant corals. Cultivated coral may ensure that the size of reefs doesn\u2019t change, but the biodiversity will drop significantly \u2014 only a handful of heat-resistant species have been cultivated so far in Japan. This is an important point: The future is less colorful than the present.
It\u2019s not just about coral, but these bleached species are acting as early warning systems.
\u201cIn the next few hundred years,\u201d says Reimer, \u201cthe number of animals is not going to decrease, the number of rare animals will decrease.\u201d
He is quick to point out that this is not something that is going to happen, it\u2019s a process that is already taking place. That said, \u201cprocess\u201d is arguably too benign for what Reimer is talking about: at best, a profound lack of biodiversity; at worst, widespread extinction.
\u201cIf it is already gone, it\u2019s gone,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not coming back.\u201d
It may be obvious that reef bleaching would directly affect those studying or working closely with coral, but the Yaeyama archipelago\u2019s changing reefs are beginning to leave the water and enter boardrooms, the lobbies of luxury resorts hotels, tourist information counters and guesthouses. If the concerns of Kayanne and Reimer are correct, the changing reef will profoundly reshape what tourism looks like on Ishigaki.
Dai Takakura, acting director of the Ishigaki City Tourism Exchange Association, sits on a low sofa at the back of his office. The window outside looks out to other government buildings and the port, with the islands of the archipelago further south. He is aware of what is happening to the surrounding reefs, but also aware of the complexity of the situation: How does one change the temperature of the ocean?
If the reef really does collapse in certain areas, will that be a problem for the tourism department? \u201cProblem,\u201d he replies. One word is enough, but he goes on to explain that full magnitude of that problem has not manifested yet for the local industry.
He explains that existing environmental concerns \u2014 believed to be more local than global by many who work in tourism on the island \u2014 have led to meetings being held four times each year, which are attended by those whose livelihoods are connected to the island\u2019s ecological wellbeing: Ishigaki City\u2019s environmental office, tourism departments, fishermen, divers and volunteers. The main outcome of these meetings is knowledge-sharing. Attendees explain how they have mitigated environmental damage, from picking up garbage on beaches to cultivating corals.
Takakura acknowledges that the group talks about bleached coral, \u201cbut not about global warming,\u201d he says.
Sharing knowledge is also a priority of Hoshinoya Taketomi Island, a luxury resort on a coral atoll 10 minutes by ferry from downtown Ishigaki.
Naoki Tagawa, director of Hoshinoya, says the resort is focused on protecting the cultural assets of the island and working closely with locals, but admits that the changing reef has affected his work.
He says the resort now holds lessons with \u201cteachers on Ishigaki Island who know about the coral reef.\u201d The teachers explain to staff \u201cwhy corals are getting whiter.\u201d
Alongside knowledge, the owners of Le Lotus Bleu, ry\u014dkan-style accommodation in Ishigaki\u2019s Shiraho Village, share experiences with guests. The married owners, Patrick Verniolle and Maiko Okutani, initially wanted to buy a house on the main island of Okinawa, but that changed once the airplane they were traveling to Ishigaki on broke through the clouds and they saw those green blobs ringed in turquoise.
\u201cWe are snorkeling in summer at least once a week,\u201d Verniolle says. \u201cSometimes I take guests to the beach and we go swimming together.\u201d
Sitting in his living room, with winter wind and rain teasing wooden door frames, he reflects on these excursions that have taken place during the past six years. The changes to the coral, he says, are \u201cvery visible \u2014 you can really see the degradation.\u201d
One of the main reefs he visits with guests is Yonehara, a picturesque sliver of white sand leading into a coral-rich transparent lagoon. It\u2019s enshrined in postcards and promotional brochures distributed to tourists at the airport, but more unstable than those images suggest.
\u201cIt is not as beautiful as before,\u201d Verniolle says. \u201cThat is what all the people on the island are saying: It was much more beautiful, there were more colors.\u201d
To see Yonehara for yourself, you will need to take the route from the city of Ishigaki that cuts directly across the island \u2014 past the construction sites of new hotels and resorts. Fleshy taro leaves spill onto the road, beside stalls selling fruit from local farms: papaya, mango, guava, dragonfruit. However, on winter days like today, these stalls are empty. In summer, the water at Yonehara will be thick with tourists snorkeling above the reef, but it is empty, too, except for a family of beach-combing Taiwanese tourists, and a lone snorkeler.
The water is crystal clear and warm. Even in winter, the surface temperature of the sea rarely drops below 23 degrees Celsius; in summer months over the past two years it has regularly risen above 30 degrees.
The current, pulling toward underwater passageways where the lagoon merges with the ocean, threatens to suck everything into waves breaking against the reef\u2019s edge. Each collision sends spray into the air, hanging like the haze of a forest fire.
In the shallows, Porites corals (in the shape of small sunken moons) are dead, now coated in algae and seaweed. Patches of reef in the lagoon remain empty, and once-living fragments of coral line the sandy bottom. Further out, sea life is more lively and coral more resilient, but algae-ridden skeletons emerge here and there.
The reef is \u201cless\u201d than it was 50 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago, even one year ago \u2014 less rich, less rare, less colorful. This sense of loss over the Yaeyama islands\u2019 ever-diminishing present reappeared in every interview for this article, as each person repeated the same phrase almost word for word: \u201cIt used to be more beautiful.\u201d
The downward spiral of thoughts is stopped by the sudden appearance of a poisonous (and shy) banded sea snake that emerges from a table coral. It twists around a school of fish on its way to take a breath at the surface.
For a brief moment, the sea snake turns to look at the human in the water, and both stare at one another, uncertain exactly of how to move forward, floating above a changing reef at the end of Japan and resisting the pull toward a less-colorful future.<\/p>\n