In Japan, more than one hundred islands have been connected to the mainland by bridges since the period of high economic growth beginning in the late 1950s. This has been aimed at bringing the economic levels of the islands up to that of the mainland. But, although reliable transportation routes to the mainland have been secured, a diversified life space has yet to come into existence on the islands. Indeed, the functioning of the communities on the islands has weakened.
The objective of this paper is to understand the present status of the social and functional decline on these bridged islands. Here our example is Kouri-jima in Okinawa, where a fixed link to the mainland was completed in 2005. We consider the influences of the sea bridge from the perspective of the social experiences of the inhabitants.
Analysis reveals that the fixed link has certainly brought some merits to the island, in terms of saving time, labor, and transportation costs, as well as the reliability of the route. In fact, the new route has brought convenience and flexibility to some of the island’s inhabitants. On the whole, however, these effects have been restricted to a narrow range of the island’s livelihood. In addition, the effects of the fixed link on transportation have brought disadvantages to many aspects of everyday life, causing the inhabitants mental, physical, and economic burdens at the levels of the individual, the family, and the community. As a result, close social connections between the inhabitants, on which the traditional community was based, have weakened considerably, bringing changes to the “island lifestyle” that depended on the sea that surrounded it.
The influences of the fixed link have resulted from essential differences between land transportation and marine transportation. Three factors have compounded the negative influence of the fixed link: first, the loss of the functions of marine transportation, which had complemented and maintained the restrictive and cooperative characteristics of the community; second, the independence and reliability of land transportation; and third, the increase in strong influences from the mainland. The results of this study suggest that characteristics of a “non-island community” have emerged here, with the new land transportation route and its emphasis on convenience causing an imbalance in the transportation system and a disruption of the cooperative and symbiotic nature of the community.
