Ie Island

We took the short ferry from Motobu on a tip from an Okinawan friend who insisted we time our trip for lily season, something neither of us had ever planned a trip around before. Ie Island turned out to be small enough to circle by scooter in an afternoon, its flat, sugarcane-covered profile broken by a single strange limestone peak that locals call Tacchu, visible from the mainland long before the ferry even docks. Lia spent most of the crossing squinting at it, trying to guess its height, before giving up and just admitting she liked not knowing yet.

A Million Lilies

The island hosts Japan’s earliest lily festival, timed to Golden Week, when a large park near the coast fills with what’s said to be close to a million Easter lilies in full bloom, their white heads nodding in the sea breeze against a backdrop of impossibly blue water. We wandered the paths slowly, the smell almost overwhelming in the warmer pockets of the park, stopping so often for photos that a walk that should have taken twenty minutes ate up most of our morning. Lia, who claims not to be a flower person, spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to get one photograph of a single lily with Tacchu framed perfectly behind it.

Climbing Toward Tacchu

Tacchu dominates the island’s otherwise flat skyline, an abrupt limestone peak that looks almost out of place against the surrounding cane fields, and a trail leads up through scrubby brush toward a viewpoint near its base. We didn’t attempt the summit itself, which involves some genuine scrambling, but even the lower trail gave us a view back over the lily fields and the full sweep of the island’s coastline, the ferry we’d arrived on now just a white speck crossing the strait. A local hiker we passed told us Tacchu had been used as a wartime lookout, its height making it valuable for spotting ships long before the island’s beaches became better known for lilies than lookouts.

White Sand and Quiet Beaches

We spent our last hours on the island at a beach on its northern coast, sand pale enough to look almost artificial against water that shifted between turquoise and deep cobalt depending on the clouds passing overhead. It wasn’t crowded, even during festival season, and we had a long stretch of shoreline mostly to ourselves, Lia wading out until the color of the water changed beneath her. Somewhere behind us Tacchu still caught the light, and it struck me that Ie Island manages to hold two completely different kinds of beauty, soft flower fields and a hard stone peak, within a coastline you can cross by scooter in under an hour.

Getting There

Ie Island is reached by ferry from Motobu Port on Okinawa’s main island, a crossing of about thirty minutes that runs multiple times daily. From Naha, it’s roughly a couple of hours by car or bus up to Motobu before the ferry crossing, making Ie an easy addition to a trip that also takes in the Motobu Peninsula. Scooters and bicycles are available for rent near the port and are the easiest way to see the island in a day, though renting a car on the mainland side beforehand gives you more flexibility for the drive up.