Taketomi Island

The water buffalo sets the pace. On Taketomi, a coral island fifteen minutes by boat from Ishigaki in Japan's Yaeyama archipelago, the tour is a wooden cart pulled at grazing speed through lanes of white sand walled with coral stone and roofed with red tiles. Singing to the sanshin as the cart creaks forward is the drivers' tradition, and the only urgency on the island is the tide.

Taketomi keeps a Ryūkyūan village landscape that its residents have chosen to protect by rule: the coral walls, red-tiled roofs and hibiscus hedges are held under a preservation agreement that keeps modern building out of the village. The red tiles, once forbidden to commoners under the Ryūkyū Kingdom, only arrived in 1905, so the village is both old and younger than it looks. At Kaiji Beach the star sand is made of the skeletons of tiny foraminifera, and visitors sift the grains hunting for whole five-pointed stars. Fewer than 350 islanders live here, and the boat runs often enough for day trips, but staying the night is when the island shows its real character.