Okinawa has an unusual advantage for a trip with small children: the water is warm, the reef turns long stretches of coast into shallow pools, and the bathing season lasts seven months a year. It has an equally clear drawback: the prefecture is 160 islands spread over a thousand kilometres, and no road links them.
01 Why one island and not the archipelago
The main island covers 1,207 square kilometres, about 106 from north to south, and holds around nine in ten of the prefecture's inhabitants. It is by far the part of the archipelago with the most infrastructure: supermarkets open late, hospitals, car rental at the airport and apartments with kitchens.
The temptation is to add Ishigaki or Miyako. With small children it is almost always a miscalculation: Naha and Ishigaki are 411 kilometres and one flight apart, with all the check-in, waiting and rigid timing that entails. Two islands in a week means two places to stay, two rental cars and two of your seven days spent in transit.
02 The car is not a convenience, it is the condition
It is worth saying plainly: outside the Naha area, Okinawa has no train. The island's only railway is the Yui Rail monorail, with 19 stations and 17 kilometres of track in total; end to end costs 370 yen and takes 37 minutes. It serves the airport and the city, and that is where it ends.
Driving here is easy in the essentials and demanding in the detail. You drive on the left, the speed limits are low and the main signage is also in Latin script. What is worth sorting out before leaving home is the licence: Japan accepts the international driving permit issued under the 1949 Geneva Convention, but some countries do not issue it and their drivers need an official Japanese translation of their licence instead. Check according to where yours was issued.
03 The one long day that is worth it
If you make only one big drive all week, make it the run north. From Naha airport to Churaumi Aquarium is about 90 kilometres and close to two hours on the Okinawa Expressway, exiting at Kyoda, with a toll of around a thousand yen. Parking at the aquarium is free.
Admission is 2,180 yen for adults, 1,440 for high-school students, 710 for primary and junior-high, and free for children under six. The aquarium sits inside Ocean Expo Park, which has its own beach, shaded areas and room to run: that is what turns the day into more than two hours of tank.
And since you are up there, the finish is half an hour further east: the Kouri Bridge, some two kilometres of roadway over turquoise water to a small flat island. It is a short drive that children tend to enjoy more than many sights, precisely because nobody has to get out of the car.
04 Where to put your base
The island is long and narrow — in many stretches barely eleven kilometres wide — so the choice of base decides the whole trip. The central west coast, around Onna, puts the sea within minutes of almost any accommodation and sits halfway between the airport and the north. It is the option that cuts the most daily driving.
Naha makes the opposite case: it is the only part of the island where you can live without a car, with the monorail, restaurants on foot and pharmacies at any hour. But it has no usable beach, and from there every swim becomes an hour's outing. It only works as a base if you have decided not to drive — and then it will be a different trip.
With young children, the best accommodation is not the prettiest. It is the one ten minutes from the water.
05 You do not entirely choose the dates
The bathing season runs from late March to 31 October, but two stretches inside it are bad. From 10 May to 21 June on average comes the tsuyu: six weeks of closed sky and up to 284 millimetres of rain in June. And August and September bring the typhoon peak, with 2.2 and 1.9 approaches on average respectively.
For a family with no school constraints, April and October are the best dates of the year: beaches open, prices contained, few people. If you depend on the school calendar and can only travel in summer, the first half of July is markedly better than August, and it is worth leaving a day of slack before the flight home.
06 When not to bring the family here
There are three situations in which Okinawa does not pay off. The first is not wanting to drive: without a car the trip shrinks to Naha and organised excursions, and with small children that is a worse plan than any European coast three hours from home.
The second is coming in search of Japan in the conventional sense. There are no Kyoto temples and no bullet train here; there is reef, canteen food and a culture of its own that reads better looking at the East China Sea than at Tokyo. If the family trip has to be the trip to Japan, this destination will leave you feeling you went somewhere else.
And the third is the flight. There is no direct connection from Europe: two planes and, layover included, well past fifteen hours door to door. With children under three, that journey outweighs everything good that follows. From four or five upwards the balance tips the other way, and the memory of that aquarium tank lasts for years.
Royonx Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur for the traveller who wants the interior without renting a car.
Dsdugan California, for the traveller who swaps the coast road for the dry side of the range.
LordDimwit