Cape Zanpa

This guide to Cape Zanpa in Okinawa opens on the lighthouse's troubled birth in the early nineteen seventies, when construction crews found the headland still fenced off as a live-fire range used by the American military on former base land. It follows the friction between builders and soldiers, exercises that halted work without warning, and the years of pressure from local fishermen and shipping captains who wanted a beacon on this exposed western coast. Communication between the crews and the soldiers on site broke down again and again before the tower ever rose.