オーハ島

At low tide, a strip of sand emerges between Ōu Island and the smaller island to its east, and one can cross on foot across a narrow channel. This is Ōha, an island in Kumejima Town where the last resident left some years ago. The fields where sugarcane once grew have gone quiet. Houses stand without occupants. Fresh water no longer rises from the ground here; what arrives comes through a submarine pipe from Ōu.

From Tomari Fishing Port on Kume Island, chartered boats make the crossing. Most who come are bound for Hate-no-Hama, the long sandbar that extends from the island's eastern flank, a thin line of white that seems to dissolve into the shallows. The sandbar draws day visitors who rarely set foot on the inhabited core of Ōha itself, leaving the abandoned settlement to a different kind of silence — one held by walls, doorframes, and the slow weather of the East China Sea.

Beneath the surrounding water lie the remains of a Ryūkyū tribute ship, a submerged record of when these channels carried trade rather than charter boats. The Higashi-Ōu-Oki site, registered as cultural property, anchors the island's memory to something older than its brief modern habitation. Ōha, then, is less a destination than a threshold: a place where a recent village has already become history, while the older history continues, underwater, in its own time.