A photograph of Japan’s Yonaguni Island taken by a man surnamed Lee (李) from Taiwan’s east coast has been making the rounds on social media, as capturing such a shot requires rare conditions.
Lee on Saturday said he took the photo with his camera’s telephoto lens from the Wuyan Cape (烏岩角) in Yilan County’s Suao Township (蘇澳) during a trip on Aug. 6.
A military buff, Lee said he had wanted to photograph warships at Suao Port (蘇澳港).
Photo courtesy of Lee
When he stopped at the Wuyan Cape at about 2pm, he noticed a black spot far in the distance in the Pacific Ocean, he said.
“I was curious and focused on it with the telephoto lens of my camera, and was surprised to see the island’s outline in the ocean. It looked like a warship sailing on the water,” Lee said.
He checked his compass and was certain that it was Yonaguni Island, the westernmost island in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, he said.
“It was my first time seeing Yonaguni Island with my naked eyes. I had heard that some people had seen it, but only on very rare occasions,” Lee said.
Many people on the Internet commented on the rare sighting, saying Yonaguni looked close to Taiwan, even though it is 108km away. Some said they did not know Taiwan was so close to the Japanese island and that it could be seen with the naked eye.
Geography expert and teacher Yang Chih-hsiang (楊智翔) assessed the photo and verified Lee’s sighting.
The sighting “needs quite unique conditions, such as weather, sunlight, top visibility and other special qualities. From what we know, Yonaguni Island can be seen from the coast of Yilan County for only a few days a year,” Yang said.
Japanese anthropologist Yousuke Kaifu made a similar sighting in 2019, albeit from a higher vantage point. He hiked up to a more than 1,000m high mountain in Taroko National Park along the coast of Hualien County to take a picture of Yonaguni.
“Yonaguni residents have said they can see Taiwan proper for only about 10 days a year from the shoreline,” he said.
Kaifu, a professor at Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, is a proponent of the theory that people migrated to Japan from Taiwan via the Kuroshio Current.
On July 7, 2019, a crew of five comprised of four Japanese and an Amis from Hualien made a successful crossing in a wooden canoe, departing from Taitung County’s Wushipi Harbor (烏石鼻港) and arriving in Yonaguni 46 hours later.
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