Okinawa Diving: The Kerama Islands and How to Get There

Where the diving is in Okinawa: the main island and the outer groups

Two places get called "Okinawa diving" and they are not the same. The operators in this list are almost all on Okinawa main island, clustered on the west coast around Onna, Seragaki and Manza. The reef that fills the photographs is the Kerama Islands, roughly 40 km to the west.

The Kerama group is protected as Keramashoto National Park. Japan's national parks portal, run by the Japan National Tourism Organization with contents provided by the Ministry of the Environment, gives the establishment date as 5 March 2014 and the park area as 3,520 ha. Read that number carefully: it is the land area. Figures you will see quoted for the surrounding sea are larger, and none appears on a reachable official page, so none is printed here.

The practical consequence is simple and nobody tells you it up front. If the Kerama reefs are why you are going, you are booking boat days, not shore dives, and the operator you choose has to run them.

Green Fins dive centers in Okinawa

Green Fins is run by the Reef-World Foundation with the UN Environment Programme, and its assessments are made by trained assessors in person rather than by self-declaration. The register, read between 2026-08-14 and 2026-09-21, carried 16 members in Okinawa: 5 Gold, 6 Silver, 3 Bronze, 1 Digital and 1 Restricted.

That is the strongest spread in this directory. Five Gold members in one location is more than anywhere else here, and 15 of the 16 carry an assessment marked in person within the last 12 months. The one exception is a Digital Member, which means the business is registered but nobody has assessed it, and that difference is the whole reason we publish the tier rather than a tick.

Every name, with what each field rests on, is on the Okinawa operator list.

What the operators in Okinawa say about themselves

Separately from the register, each operator's own site carries more: 33 of the 37 responded. Training agencies they name themselves, which is their claim and not a check by anyone: PADI on 12 and SSI on 8. That comes from reading 33 sites, 113 pages in all. One more could not be read. One more has not been opened yet. The operator list for Okinawa gives the page each name was read on.

Not one of the 37 publishes which languages its instructors teach in. That gap is worth more attention here than in most places, because a large share of these sites are written in Japanese and a visitor's first question is whether a dive can be briefed in a language they share with the guide. A site with an English version answers a question about the website, not about the boat. Ask directly.

Island diving ends with a flight, and the number is 18

Okinawa is reached by air and left by air, often on a short hop to Naha and then a longer leg to the mainland or beyond. That makes the surface interval before departure part of the dive plan rather than an afterthought, and the figure most divers remember is the wrong one for a dive trip.

DAN's consensus guidelines set a minimum preflight surface interval of 12 hours after a single no-decompression dive, but 18 hours after multi-day repetitive diving, and “substantially longer than 18 hours” after dives involving compulsory decompression or trimix. Three days of two-tank boat trips is the 18-hour case. The guidelines also note that the trials behind them ran “in a dry hyperbaric chamber with resting volunteers”, so longer may be wise after a week of being immersed and working.

In practice: plan the last dive for the morning of the day before you fly, not the day itself. It costs one night of accommodation and removes the one risk on a dive trip that is entirely within your control.