Zamami-jima

The village sits in a bowl behind the harbour, and the shops and places to eat crowd around the port. One road runs west to Ama, where the beach and campground look across the channel to Aka. The other heads east to Furuzamami Beach, which holds two stars in the Michelin Green Guide. About 600 people live on Zamami, and its shoreline runs 23.2 km.

Humpback whales come into Kerama waters to breed and raise calves from late December to about April, according to the Ministry of the Environment. The Zamami Whale Watching Association has run its boats since 1991, and each morning in season its spotters scan the sea from the lookouts and radio the captains. Okinawa Churashima Foundation researchers who matched 21 years of fluke photographs found pairs and mating groups most often from late January to late February. Mothers with newborn calves grew more common from mid-February to late March, so late February falls inside both windows.

A Japan Tourism Agency guide credits the Kerama boats with a 90% sighting rate, which is the guide's own figure, and the association publishes no season log that we could find. The Ryukyu Shimpo reported the first whale of the 2024–25 winter on 24 November and a newborn calf on 30 November, and called that calf the earliest the association had confirmed in 33 years. During the 2026 season the association posted that there were few whales about. Its 2026 tours ran from 8 January to 25 March.

The island joined the Kerama Shoto National Park when the park was created on 5 March 2014, and the sea around it has been a Ramsar wetland since 2005. The Ministry of the Environment calls the water Kerama blue, over reefs thick with table, branching and horn corals. Kerama deer live only in these islands, and the village says they roam the forest on Zamami as well as Aka and Geruma. On 26 March 1945 US forces made their first landing of the Battle of Okinawa on Zamami, and many residents died, including those lost in the mass suicides the village still remembers.