Yanbaru National Park

This guide to Yanbaru National Park on Okinawa opens on a Thursday morning in August 2016, when a police officer tried to stop a motorcycle on Route 70 near Takae village and the rider refused to halt. It traces the sit-ins that followed, the plan to cut six helipads into these hills for US Marine Corps helicopters, and the hundreds of riot police sent north to break a blockade held by a hamlet of barely a hundred and sixty people. This forest also shelters a flightless rail and a woodpecker found nowhere else on earth, species conservationists petitioned by the thousand to protect that same summer.