24 July, 2006

Rain Again... and the Rain and the...

When is the rainy season going to go away!?
Well it’s just drizzles and not stormy rain like other parts of Japan, but I think I had more than enough already. It seems like the same front is giving severe damage in southern Japan. On the news it looked like water flooded everywhere above floor level at the best, and in worse cases streets turned into rivers as deep as an adult’s chest level. Some parts suffer from consecutive flash floods and mudslides over and over. And of course, a lot of the farm goods and crops are no good. Nearly the entire country has turned into a flood archipelago.

I’ll have to say that I’m lucky to be in Tokyo. Tokyo has pretty much always been calm in terms of water disasters. In fact, there was a fireworks display close to my house last night (well, not that close but anyways), and although we had a tiny bit of rain I could still enjoy the coming of summer with my eyes and ears.

Going back to rain...
My stories on coral actually have a bit to do with rain. From here beyond are stories I heard from divers plus some research I did on my own.

Say, it rained on Main Island Okinawa for quite a long time, for days. Where does that water go? The sea of course. When the rainwater flows into the sea, it drags a lot of mud and sand. What it does is that 1) the blending of fresh water and sea water changes the water quality, 2) the sand (especially reddish soil) coming from industrial and agricultural districts and also from the American Base mess the water around the coral blocking the healthy growth of zooxanthella, coral’s buddy. The soil of Okinawa is extremely poor in humus layer (black) which functions as the adhesive between layers of soil so the earth is brittle to begin with naturally, and on top of that there are human factors such as ripping off green for industrial use of land.

That’s not all. The heavy rainfall spreads the ocean all kinds of chemical pollution from air and earth. Coral surrounding the islands like the brim of a hat are kept alive by the land. So the efforts to protect only the coral or only the sea most times end up in vain. Additionally, the overuse (over-appreciation, should I say?) of the divers and tourists is another coral-killer factor. When I dived, there was a jerk sitting on top of a table coral thinking it’s rock or something. Ignorance... but not knowing is never a reason good enough to forgive. It’s really sad that not many people acknowledge coral as living beings but stones and rocks.

The “healing” boom in Japan knows nowhere to stop, and from that exaggerated image of resort = healing the number of “immigrants” to Okinawa is increasing one way. To the land of people who respect and appreciate the blessings from the ocean moves in immature people who only take the value as beauty.

All right, the coral reef is worth protecting because it’s pretty. But beauty is only one of the many values of coral.

There are more than one hundred countries in the world that has coral reef, and the coral reef protects the lands of those countries from salt-water invasion. Imagine how much benefits the reefs have brought us in the past thousands of years.

Also, healthy coral reefs are located in the places with highest marine production places in the world – or it may be the other way around – and the amount of marine products mainly fish produced in these regions are estimated to be as much as one tenth of the total marine products all the human beings in the world eat.

Furthermore, coral reefs are the oldest biogeocenos on earth with a history of 500 million years, and are places where sophisticated and fragile organisms concentrate. It is expected that hundreds of unique and special medications can emerge from such reefs.
But natural coral can be broken very easily, and not to forget that a lot of the destruction is due to some kind of human influence.

Currently, efforts are being made in Main Island Okinawa to bring natural coral back to its shores by whelm a special kind of ceramic blocks to the bottom of the ocean so that coral eggs can adhere to them and will eventually grow into great reefs. The eggs flow all the way from the islands I have been talking about for the past few weeks, the Kerama... which means, that if the coral in Kerama dies, there will be no eggs to flow to the main island.

Perhaps the best thing us humans can do is to leave them alone.

If any of you became interested in visiting the Kerama reading this blog, please leave the corals as they are. Or actually, leave everything in the silent nature as they are, not only the coral.

I believe that by doing so (by not doing anything) the nature will heal you. Because you acknowledge it as the most important thing, it will give you something that is truly important.

Umm, sorry, I didn’t meant to make this sound so riddly in the end (sounds like it’s going nowhere)...

I’m planning to go to Kerama again in September, so I’ll try to give you a report. I’ll stop here with the difficult stuff.
I can’t wait to go there again... oooh the beautiful sunrise and seeing deers... I guess I’m gonna have to write them out here!

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