Coin Locker Babies (19 page)

Mystery of the Caves at Uwane

The island of Garagi, a volcanic mound 4.6 kilometers square and forty kilometers south of Iwo Jima, was officially returned to Japan by the U.S. government only in 1985, seventeen years after the rest of the islands in the Ogasawara archipelago. For reasons never made clear by the U.S. authorities, during the entire period of this extended occupation the island was closed to its former residents, and even requests made by people wanting to visit family graves were routinely turned down. It is known that the U.S. navy maintained a small intelligence and communications outpost on the island, and it was rumored that the base served as a listening post for spy satellites, but according to well-placed sources with the
Self-Defense
Forces on Iwo Jima, the Americans operated nothing more than a radar tracking post, part of the navy’s worldwide network. In any case, all traces of the radar equipment had been removed by the time the island was returned to Japan, and the wooden buildings that had apparently housed the installation are now elementary and junior high schools.

Garagi Island: population 184; principal features, pineapple fields and an office of the National Weather Bureau. The population these days is about evenly divided between the descendants of prewar inhabitants and young urbanites seeking refuge from the city, but dreams of further expansion and a booming tourist industry have been stymied by the lack of transportation—the ferry from the main island of Ogasawara stops only twice a week. Still, Garagi is a tropical paradise; lush green hills sloping
down to clear blue waters which, on the north shore of the island, enclose a spectacular coral reef. With the destruction in recent years of the coral surrounding the other Ogasawara islands by illegal Southeast Asian fishing boats, the reef at Garagi has become the last remaining example of this undersea wonder in Japanese waters.

It was in 1985, just after the island was returned to Japan, that Wataru Aritsuki quit his job in Tokyo and moved to Garagi to open a diving shop. His original capital consisted of nothing more than a diving instructor’s license and a small savings account, but before long the island’s reputation began attracting enthusiasts from as far away as Australia and Germany, and by the time our story begins, more than a thousand divers had made the roundabout journey to Garagi. At one point, a famous underwater photographer was calling Garagi’s reef the most beautiful in the world. But a darker side to the beauties of these waters has been revealed by Aritsuki himself, who even now, when the entire diving area has been closed off and swimming strictly prohibited, can’t bring himself to leave the island, making a living by working part-time in the pineapple fields. We caught up with him recently for an interview.

“It’s really sad, especially seeing that places like this are so rare nowadays. People don’t have any idea how badly most other coral has been damaged, not only by poachers, but just by having big developments going up on a beach. The old-timers on the island were always complaining about the bad ferry service, but I thought it was great. Put in an airport, throw up hotels, and this place would be Okinawa all over again; but Garagi was a diver’s paradise, a dream of an island. We have table coral out there over eight meters across—nothing like it anywhere else. But now… It’s a shame what’s happened… You want to know about the ‘accidents’? Actually, I’m trying to forget all about it. It was a real shock. I suppose if it had stopped after the first one, you could have called it a fluke, but three times in a row…”

In its heyday, there were thirty-one diving sites on Garagi’s north shore, 
something for every diver from the complete beginner to the professional. Among them, Uwane Cove was known as the most treacherous. First, before you ever put on a tank, there was the problem of getting to the site; it lies at the bottom of a sheer cliff, with only one very steep and narrow path down. The challenge of carrying air tanks the hundred or so meters to the water restricted it to the young, strong, and healthy. A few meters offshore, an almost vertical shelf falls away to a depth of eighteen meters, but the coral here is still sparse, and you have to swim out along a bare, gently sloping bottom to a depth of about eighty meters where, nearly a kilometer and a half from shore, you come to a great outcrop of rock. Around this rock, dubbed Little Uwane, which actually protrudes above the surface in one spot, flow powerful and unpredictable tidal currents and whirlpools that could suck a diver to the bottom and leave him there forever. But it is also around this rock that the intrepid diver finds—or used to find—some of the world’s most spectacular coral and a rainbow display of tropical fish, all guarded by friendly dolphins.

Uwane quickly became known as the most beautiful and thrilling diving site in Garagi, if not the world, and it was in order to make this spectacular dive a bit safer that Aritsuki and some friends set about charting the currents. Still, only the most experienced were allowed the privilege of diving at Uwane—“experience” meaning, in this case, not only a mastery of diving equipment and techniques but an unquestioning willingness to follow the guide’s instructions.

In September of 1986, the well-known French underwater photographer, J. E. Claudel, spent three months on Garagi and had this to say about Uwane Cove:

“The water is ten times clearer than in the Maldives, the fish a hundred times more numerous than in Tahiti or Rangiroa, and the coral… is breathtaking! I must say, I seriously doubt that even Jacques Cousteau himself, when first beginning to explore the unknown ocean floor shortly after the invention of the aqualung, could have been more thrilled or more
satisfied than I was at Uwane.” The photographs Claudel took of this reef more than do justice to his enthusiasm and, sadly enough, have become almost the only record we have at present of this extraordinary spot.

On November 4, 1987, an undersea volcano two hundred kilometers to the south of Garagi erupted, shaking the island with dozens of minor earthquakes and, naturally enough, altering the pattern of the currents that swirl around Little Uwane. It was in the wake of this eruption, while beginning to rechart the tidal patterns, that Aritsuki first discovered a large underwater cave. The entrance, which he speculates may have been opened by the earthquakes, was in the form of a long split in the rock just wide enough for a person to slip through, but, once inside, the passage widened gradually and began to twist about at fantastic angles until you came eventually to a large rock ledge. The ledge, apparently, was a nesting place for shrimp. Aritsuki and his companions ended their initial exploration at this ledge, noting that from that point on the passage split into three separate branches, each of which they considered fairly dangerous to follow. The depth gauges at the ledge read twenty-nine meters, sufficient to require considerable decompression time, and factoring this in with the eight minutes it took to reach the ledge from the surface, with no time for sightseeing, Aritsuki calculated that they had come to the limits of their twelve-liter double tanks. If they were to explore further and perhaps find another exit, they would need better equipment and more help.

It was a few months later, on January 19, 1988, that the first “accident” occurred. It happened during a routine tour of the cave that Aritsuki was conducting for two German women, a Mrs. Franz Mayer and her companion. Leaving a rope trailing behind them to mark the route, they passed through the entrance into the passage lit only by their flashlights. It was somewhere in the part just before the ledge that Aritsuki heard a clinking sound which he immediately recognized as a dolphin. What was odd, however, was that the thing was coming their way at a terrific rate. He knew, of course, that dolphins almost never attack people, and even
in the rare case where a pregnant female turns on swimmers, it is more to frighten them than to do any real harm. Thinking that the animal had perhaps been startled by the light, Aritsuki signaled the two women to lie flat on the floor of the passage and then, switching off his flashlight, sank down himself to wait for the dolphin to pass overhead. Soon, he could sense a single animal approaching, then racing by, but almost instantly it must have turned and begun butting Mrs. Mayer, who was nearest at hand, with its snout. Hearing her scream, Aritsuki turned on his flashlight to find the dolphin savagely attacking both Mrs. Mayer and her friend. The shock of the attack had made Mrs. Mayer lose her regulator.

“I’d never seen a dolphin do anything brutal like that before. I suppose it must have wandered off from its herd and gone a little crazy, but by the time I saw it, it was all covered with cuts and just out of its mind—no other way to describe it. I could see that Mrs. Mayer was going to drown without her regulator so I tried to use myself as a decoy to draw off the dolphin, but by this time things were so stirred up inside the tunnel that you couldn’t see anything. It didn’t look like the dolphin was going to break off the attack, so I did what I could to get the ladies outside, but they’d stopped moving, and in the end it was everything I could do just to get myself out. We were pretty deep, and I knew I would have to decompress, but before I’d even grabbed onto the anchor chain to wait, the dolphin came charging out of that hole after me. I thought I was a goner, but it didn’t turn out like that; just as it spotted me and started to charge, it spit out a cloud of blood, went belly up, and floated to the surface, stone-dead.

“I have a feeling the police and the German insurance company were a bit suspicious of me for a while. They couldn’t believe that a dolphin would attack like that, and I can’t say as I blame them; if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it myself. Yep, that was the first ‘accident.’”

The second occurred on February 2 of the same year, this time without Aritsuki there to witness it. A local fisherman, Tetsuji Owa, and his two
sons went shrimping in the cave and all three perished. His wife, Katsue, concerned when they failed to come home, had contacted the fishing co-op, and Aritsuki had been dispatched to find them. This he did: all three bodies were floating on the ceiling above the rock ledge. The autopsies reported the cause of death as acute coronary failure, but all three had been in perfect health prior to the accident and there was no history of heart disease in the Owa family. The ledge where they were found was a space about as wide and high as the average living room, and it was thought that a sudden, violent upcurrent might have thrown them against the ceiling, damaging their tanks. But all this seemed unimportant beside the oddest aspect of the case: one of the sons was found with a hand spear buried in his thigh, and the other had a gaping cut in his shoulder made by a diving knife. The spear, as far as they could tell, belonged to the father, while the knife belonged to the boy who had been speared. Nearly as odd, perhaps, was the fact that all three still had their regulators held firmly in their mouths, sealed there by rigor mortis. So in the end, despite what the autopsies said, it was widely assumed that the three men had died in some sort of violent family feud.

Two months later, in March of 1988, an underwater photographer working for a Tokyo documentary film company came to the island with four assistants to make a movie about this strange incident. Naturally, they got in touch with Aritsuki. It was then that the third “accident” occurred.

“I told them they should forget about it. The Diving Center in Tokyo had sent a directive banning diving in the cave, and you can see why I wasn’t crazy about the idea of going back there, but this photographer—Ozaki was his name—said it didn’t matter whether I went with them or not, they were still going to the cave. I figured I didn’t have a choice, and at least if I went along I could see to it that nothing happened, or if anything did happen, make sure we’d have a way of keeping in touch. I had them rig everybody up with waterproof transceivers, and I tied ten reserve air tanks to the anchor chain to go down with us. 1 also made Ozaki leave
one of the assistants at the mouth of the cave holding the end of a rope that was tied around the rest of us; he had instructions to pull us out if anything went wrong.

“The camera lights for the filming were much brighter than anything I’d ever had with me, so I got a good view of the inside of the cave for the first time. We even discovered the young of a really rare kind of shrimp and a nest of blind moray eels. We’d made it all the way to the ledge without any trouble and we were poking around at the entrances to the three tunnels when it happened. Ozaki threw his camera down and started thrashing his arms and legs about like he was in terrible pain. After that he clawed at his chest for a few seconds and then stopped moving altogether. When I think back on it, it started just after Ozaki had taken his regulator out of his mouth for a few seconds to focus his camera. Anyway, as soon as I saw him go spinning around, I realized something was wrong and pulled on the rope according to plan. I tried to stop them, but three other guys swam over to Ozaki; they must have thought his hose was broken, because they all tried to give him their regulators, but almost as soon as they had them out of their mouths, things started to go crazy. The guy closest to Ozaki let out a bloodcurdling scream—people think you can’t hear underwater but you can, you know; you may not be able to make out words and stuff, but you can hear, and this was one loud scream… Anyway, he let out this scream and then shot his spear gun into the chest of another guy who was holding the lamp. The light fell out of his hands and went spinning over the edge, down somewhere deep, but for one second I got a glimpse way back in one of those cracks. I suppose my eyes could have been playing tricks on me, but, you know, I swear I saw these weird-looking flat gray things—rocks, maybe, but too regular for any rocks I’ve ever seen—stacked up inside that crack. Looked exactly like concrete, but why would there be concrete down there at the bottom of the ocean?…