About

Thanks for visiting my site. I'm Richard, founder and owner of Ishigaki-Japan.com. Late 2008 I made the decision to quit my job in software in order to make the move from England to Japan with my Japanese wife and we currently reside on the semi-tropical island of Ishigaki.

Within a couple of months I'd grown to love Ishigaki and the laid back lifestyle which it offers, which is pretty much the polar-opposite of life in dreary old Great Britain. However, I also realised that I needed to do something to keep my mind occupied, after all, you can't spend all day every day hanging out at the beach.

It then occurred to me that one thing which was missing was a quality English guide to Ishigaki and its surrounding islands in the Yaeyama archipelago. It was for this reason that I founded Ishigaki-Japan.com in the hope of providing the definitive English guide to Yaeyama for the English speaking world.

Armed with a GT mountain bike a Canon 50D digital SLR and lots of suncream I began the task of documenting everything which I thought would be of interest to those wishing to visit the island. Along the way I've made some great friends and have witnessed some of the most beautiful views to be found in Japan. I've also learned much about the depth of Yaeyama culture.

The size of the site soon grew beyond my initial expections and I learned that Japanese people were also accessing it, primarliy to look at the pictures. I therefore made the decision to provide a Japanese translation of the site which finally launched in early September 2009.

Although the site currently has limited information about other islands in the Yaeyama archipelago my medium-term goal is to provide comprehensive guides to these wonderful destinations, however, my short-term target is to complete my work on Ishigaki. Once this is done I'll be catching more ferries to destinations like Hateruma, Iriomote and Yonaguni, so you might find that guides to these islands arrive one bye one.

Feedback

Is there something you don't like about the site? Have I made a mistake somewhere? Is there a feature which you'd really like to see? No matter what the reason please don't hesitate to contact me with feedback. I'll take all criticism onboard and I'll endeavor to reply to all emails.

How can you help?

If you've found this site to be of use it would be really appreciated if you could link to it from your blog or website. This would really help me out as increasing my search engine ranking is one of the biggest and toughest challenges which I face.

Once again, thanks for visiting my site, and please come back again soon as I'm adding new information all the time.

See you on Ishigaki!

Richard