Taketomi Ghost Town; Friendly Lion Guardians

I did a quick trip to Taketomi island, which is only a 10 minute ferry ride, but with the december season and typhoon after effects, it was a harrowinig experience. the seas were really rocky (definitely different from the calm seas around phuket, a long tail boat would never make it here) and at one point we hit a wake and I think we were airborne for a second.  now, I`m not sure how much of it was nature and how much of it was man-made. There are only 3 ferry companies (tri-opoly?) and they all leave at the same time almost - so I`ve heard that they sometimes race each other. maybe the other pilot was playing rough
 
Anyways, Taketomi is a barely populated island (300 people) and I saw at most 5 people who weren`t tourists on the island.   The main attraction of Taketomi is that it preserves a lot of the ryukyu architecture. the chinese influence is pronounced with the reddish tiles and atop everyone`s house or lampost, there`s a little lion.  The lion is supposed to be a guardian for the house and stern/ferocious, though I did see one that seemed to like having his picture taken (japanese bunny ears and all).
 
besides being a preservation of traditional architecture, what`s also neat is that here and Iriomote are the only places in the world (according to what I`ve read) where `star sand` can be found. star sand really isn`t sand but are the skeletons of `little sea creature` - you can actually see the spiky arms of the star and from what someone told me, it can be pretty painful to step in.   the goal for　most people is to try to gather your own on the beach, but since the ones on the beach are crashed upon by the waves, the little arms are usually broken off. (I`ve looked). Yet the ones they sell in stores have almost perfectly formed arms - I think there`s some secret harvesting place where the commercial wholesalers go for the good stuff. so to get good star sand, I broke down and bought some
 
now the other interesting thing that happened on taketomi (was only there for about 2 hrs) was that I actually ran into caucasian tourists who spoke english (they were brits)! pretty amazing!  we didn`t talk for long, but they had just gotten into ishi the day before I did and caught more of the bad weather. they seem to be pretty immune though, since they even went snorkeling in this weather!