East Heiannazaki

Higashi Henna-zaki: A Wind-Shaped Limestone Cape at the Eastern Edge of Miyako Island

The cape juts roughly two kilometres into the sea from the eastern shoulder of Miyako Island, a slender finger of Ryukyu limestone bracketed by cliffs about twenty metres high. On the morning of 6 February 2007, the Agency for Cultural Affairs added it to the national register of Places of Scenic Beauty under criterion eight, which covers dunes, sand spits, beaches and islands. The Japanese name, Higashi Henna-zaki (sometimes pronounced Agari Henna-zaki in the local dialect, since agari means east), gathers up several things at once: a geological accident peculiar to coral seas, a community of plants that grows nowhere else at this scale, and a love story passed down in Miyako folk song.

Visitors usually arrive by rental car. The drive from Miyako Airport takes around thirty to thirty-five minutes along a route that leaves the inland sugarcane fields behind and ends at a generous car park near the base of the headland. From there a paved walkway runs to the lighthouse at the tip. The walk is flat, but the wind is almost always present.

The Shape of the Cape

Henna-zaki is unusual in keeping a steady width along most of its length. Between the base and the middle the cape is about 120 to 180 metres wide; beyond the midpoint it widens to between 200 and 250 metres before tapering at the lighthouse end. The surface sits as a flat tableland roughly twenty metres above the sea, and that tableland tilts subtly seaward, which produces the small basins and hollows you can see along the cliff edge if you look down.

The waters around the cape are coral. A reef about 380 metres wide skirts the north-eastern shore, and a separate elliptical reef (around two kilometres east-to-west and one kilometre north-to-south) lies offshore, separated from the cape by a channel about 120 metres across. Boulders of Ryukyu limestone are scattered across the reef tops, fallen, it seems, from the cliffs above. The largest of these, found near the tip, are called tsunami-ishi, or tsunami stones. They reach six to eight metres in diameter. Local tradition links some of them to the great Meiwa tsunami of 1771, which struck the southern Ryukyu Islands with devastating force, though the official designation simply records that such boulders are present and remarkable. A second cluster of giants on the outer reef goes by the local name panari.

Why the State Chose to Protect It

The case for designation rested on two intertwined points. The first is the cape itself as a karst landform on Ryukyu limestone, with its cliffs, basins, fringing reef, offshore reef and scattered boulders forming a single, legible coastal system. The second is the vegetation. The wind blows hard here all year, and nothing tall survives. What does survive is a community of low woody and herbaceous plants adapted to wind, salt and thin soil—a kind of botanical assembly typical of subtropical coasts but rare in Japan at this scale.

Three species in particular put the cape on the botanical map. Solanum biflorum (Japanese: tenjiku-nasubi), Strobilanthes glandulifera (miyakojima-sō) and Vigna nakashimae (miyakojima-tsurumame) reach their northern limits of natural distribution here, which makes Henna-zaki a useful reference point for plant geographers working on the boundary between the Ryukyus and mainland Japan. A fourth, Osteomeles anthyllidifolia, known locally as ten-no-ume, forms a creeping mat along the upper edges of the north-eastern cliffs that is, according to the designation, of a scale unmatched anywhere else in Japan.

What You Will Actually See

The first impression at the cape is not, strictly speaking, the view. It is the wind. Squat, wind-pruned shrubs hug the ground, and where the path approaches the cliff edge the eye is pulled toward two horizons at once: the East China Sea to the left, the Pacific to the right. Few places in Japan let you see both oceans from the same point on land. The cliffs themselves are sharp-edged limestone, weathered into the small pits and runnels typical of karst exposed to salt spray.

Spring transforms the headland. From around April into early May, Easter lilies (Lilium longiflorum, called teppō-yuri in Japanese) open across the tableland in such numbers that the cape reads as white from a distance. Later in the year, the ground cover settles back to greens and silvery greys, while the wind keeps the air clear enough that the offshore reef shows up as turquoise shoals against deeper indigo.

At the seaward tip stands the Hennazaki Lighthouse, completed on 27 March 1967 and one of only sixteen lighthouses in Japan that the public can climb. The tower is 24.5 metres high, with 97 steps spiralling up the inside. From the gallery the panorama is essentially uninterrupted: ocean to roughly 360 degrees, with the cape itself trailing back westward like a green causeway. A small admission charge applies; hours vary by season, and the lighthouse occasionally closes in poor weather, so checking ahead is sensible.

The Story of Mamuya

The cape is also where the Miyako tradition places one of its best-known legends. A nobleman from Nogusuku, a settlement about six kilometres to the north-west, fell in love with a young weaver named Mamuya, who lived in the village of Pyauna near the cape. He was already married. Knowing the love could lead nowhere, Mamuya hid herself in a small cave in the cliff and kept weaving. When the nobleman came to find her, she eluded him and threw herself from the rocks into the sea below. Folk songs about Mamuya are still sung on Miyako Island, and along the cliffs of the north-eastern shore people will point out a small cave said to be her shelter and a rock-overhang grave said to be hers.

It is the kind of story that gives a place an emotional texture it would not otherwise have. Whether or not it happened, it has been part of how Miyako residents have seen this stretch of coast for generations.

Around the Cape

The eastern side of Miyako Island has a different character from the resort areas around Yonaha Maehama and Sunayama on the west and north. Inland from Henna-zaki are sugarcane fields, low limestone hills and the residential districts of the former Gusukube township. Yoshino Beach, a few minutes by car back toward the centre of the island, is one of the better-known snorkelling spots, often visited for its clear water and resident sea turtles. Hora Fishing Port lies just below the cliffs to the north-west of the cape and offers a sea-level view of the same limestone wall the lighthouse sits on.

Because there is little artificial light on this side of the island, Henna-zaki is also valued for night-sky viewing; the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye on clear nights. The walk from the car park to the lighthouse has no lighting, so a torch is essential after dark.