Japan for Divers & Snorkel Travelers

About this book

Japan is two seas at once — a warm current carrying coral gardens up its southern face, a cold current feeding kelp forests in the north — and it dives both of them with a system all its own: the licence card checked at the shop counter, the local guide who leads every journey, the logbook stamped like a village document, and harbours where the dive boats queue behind the fishing fleet.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — History & Setting, The Water & How It Works, People, Practice & Meaning, and Going In: Travel, Booking & Care. The foundations first: the Kuroshio road, the Oyashio gift, the ama grandmothers who were diving centuries before the tank. Then the journeys: the Kerama blue and Okinawa's cave coast, Izu's training bays and current islands, Miyako's limestone arches and Yaeyama's manta-looking grounds, the working west, the drift ice and kelp of the north, a full part of snorkel-only gardens at the surface, and a handbook of licences, operators, seasons and care.

No depth, visibility or sea condition is asserted anywhere in this book — deliberately. Those numbers belong to the day and to the operator's briefing. What every entry does state, in full, is its access rule — where a licence card is required, where a guided tour is required — and where to confirm everything else officially before you travel. This is the complete guide to the system under the surface: how to enter Japan's water as a guest, from the coral south to the frozen north.