Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  On the map, Sado is separated from the mainland by an unbroken stretch of clear blue sea, but in fact its two mountainous halves are peaks that belong to a long underwater range called the Sado Ridge. The island was formed by massive upheavals along this ridge that raised huge irregular blocks, marked on both sides by deep faults and tilted toward the west. Such upheavals, triggered by accumulations of pressure between tectonic plates in the earth's crust, exemplify Japan's general geological instability, its recurring pattern of violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

  Over the centuries these forces shaped Sado's topography, creating a jumbled landform of steep hills and mountains cut by shallow, swift-flowing streams opening into narrow valleys that broaden briefly where they meet the sea. Except for their grassy summits, the hills are clothed in thick scrub, bamboo, and deciduous trees like beech, oak, chestnut, maple, and cherry. Here and there can also be found irregular stands of conifers like red and black pine and sugi, or Japanese cedar. Once there were dense forests of hardwoods as well, but these were intensively logged for home- and ship-building, and for firewood, which used to be one of Sado's principal exports. A complex network of trails and footpaths, few of which appear on even the most detailed maps, still run like the threads of a web throughout the island; they mark the passage of woodcutters, charcoal burners, plant gatherers, hunters, traders, priests, and pilgrims.

  For although Sado has always been poor and isolated, humans have lived there since earliest times. The sea yielded salt, fish, seaweeds, and crustaceans. The mountains provided edible plants, tubers, nuts, seeds, and wild fruits. Hunting was probably never more than marginal: Sado is too small and too distant from the mainland to have sustained much of an animal population, although there are badgers, rabbits, and other small mammals, plus a few pheasant and pigeons. In hard times, as elsewhere, the islanders would have had to fall back on snakes, snails, and lizards. But even before rice cultivation was introduced, a subsistence diet was there for the taking.

  This is confirmed by prehistoric remains — tools, ax heads, ornaments, shards of pottery, grinding stones, beads, coins. Nearly all the finds have been made on the southern half of the island. Communities emerged later along the rugged northern shores. The secrets of the fertile central plain, obviously the most congenial area for settlement, are effectively beyond recovery. Flat as a carpet and already at sea level, the plain has subsided again and again over the centuries, gaining layer after layer of new topsoil washed down from the sides of the mountains.

  The northern half of the island has always been the loneliest and least developed part. The shoreline from Ryotsu to the northern tip is called Uchikaifu, the "Inside Coast," because it faces toward the mainland. The other side, facing the Japan Sea, is Sotokaifu, the "Outside Coast." Between them is a twenty-mile-long ridge of mountains so steep and rugged and tangled that only a couple of roads cross it even today. Uchikaifu's only settlements are in places where rivers or streams have cut a way down to the sea, creating narrow valley mouths where natural terraces could be enlarged, levelled, and irrigated for growing rice and vegetables. Elsewhere, the mountainsides rise like fortress walls from narrow strips of beach, and the road winds obediently along at their feet, hardly deviating at all from the line of the shore.

  That an adequate, well-paved road exists at all is due entirely to contemporary skills in engineering: twenty years ago much of it was a stony, unmade track with crazy, dangerous edges teetering above the sea, and twenty years before that there were sections where it didn't exist at all. Certain spots could only be passed at low tide, and even then only by scrambling over the wet rocks or running along the sand at the base of a cliff on the receding wave. Such problems discouraged travel among a population already little inclined to it, so that the far north was rarely visited. Poverty, a monotonous diet, and unsanitary living conditions were the norm. Every village, every family knew inbreeding and what came with it — poor eyesight, bad teeth, weak bones, stunted growth, and, often enough, stunted minds as well.

  As in other remote parts of Japan, Sado's natural increase in population was offset by emigration. Many who heard tell of conditions elsewhere left to seek better lives on the mainland. But demographic records show that only a tiny proportion of the emigrants came from the most isolated parts of Sado. Between 1900 and 1950, as many as 40 percent of those who lived on the central plain packed up and took the boat, while in the far north, where people had far more reason to want to leave, nineteen villagers out of twenty stayed where they were.

  ***

  As I walked along, banging out a regular rhythm on the ground with the bamboo stick, I heard a car approaching from behind and moved into the verge to let it pass. Instead, it pulled up beside me, and the driver wound down the window. "Good morning!" he cried cheerily, in English. "I am Togashi, the Super Powerful Laughing Mushroom Farmer!"

  I gaped at him for a moment in surprise. Mr. Togashi was a youngish man, perhaps in his early thirties. He had long, straggly black hair tucked up under a white knitted cap that made him look like a pixie. One of his front teeth was missing, and another was encased in gold. He beamed at me, as if meeting up with a long-lost friend.

  "This my work house, look, here!" he went on, gesturing at a tumble-down shack beside the road in the shadow of a huge old cedar. "Please come in, we drink tea!"

  He pulled off the road, jumped out of the truck, and gestured to me to follow him into the hut. At one end was a tiny room containing a table cluttered with magazines, bills, and papers, two broken chairs, a stool, and a gas ring connected by a red plastic tube to a cylinder of propane. He filled a battered aluminum saucepan with water from a tap above a small sink, placed it on the gas ring, and struck a match with a flourish.

  I wanted to get this right. "You're a mushroom farmer?" I asked. "You grow laughing mushrooms?"

  "Yes, yes, super powerful laughing mushroom," he replied with a broad smile. "Look, look here."

  He rummaged through the papers on the table and handed me a paper sticker with his name, address, and telephone number on it. It was an advertisement for his business. The illustration was a drawing of the cap of a mushroom with female features crudely added — full red lips, pink blobs on the cheeks, and wide, round eyes with absurdly long eyelashes.

  "You eat my mushrooms, you dream, yes, make every girl pretty like this one!" he laughed.

  I felt like I was dreaming already. Mushrooms, hallucinogenic or otherwise, thrive in Japan's damp climate, and there is indeed a species called warai-dake, or "laughing mushroom." But their consumption is illegal and certainly not suitable for commercial advertising. Sado is off the beaten track, but not that far off.

  "Look, this my customer," continued Mr. Togashi, picking a slightly crumpled photograph out of the papers on the table. "This my customer in Tokyo."

  The photo showed a woman in a sheer evening dress that clung to her curvaceous body and shimmered like the scales of a snake. She was standing in a dimly lit nightspot of some kind. Behind her, a few customers were sitting at a wooden bar, hunched over their whisky glasses. The woman had one hand resting casually on her hip. A lazy smile played around her mouth. She was every inch the girl who doesn't get taken home to meet mother.

  Mr. Togashi handed me a cup of tea with an expression of amusement on his face. "It's good?" he asked. "You like my business? You want to work with me?"

  "Well, it looks like a good business," I told him. "Where do you get the mushrooms from?"

  "I grow," he answered, "grow mushrooms here. Come, I show you."

  We put down our tea and I followed him out of the room and along a passage to a low door. Fixed to the wall was a panel with various knobs and temperature controls, which he checked and adjusted.

  Behind the door was a dimly lit room about twenty feet square, entirely filled with shelves mounted on steel racks. A thermometer on the wall read ten degrees centigrade. Each shelf held several dozen plastic bags filled with a mixture of sawdust and rice
husks, from which little brown buttony mushrooms were growing in clumps. They were nameko, a common, inexpensive species available in any supermarket.

  "These are the laughing mushrooms?" I asked. "Yes, these! Ha ha! OK, laughing mushroom just joke. These nameko, we eat in soup, also with radish. Very delicious. You like?"

  "Sure, I like them. And you sell them in Tokyo? You send them down in a truck?"

  "Yes, I send, sometimes I take. . . Tokyo, Yokohama, Shizuoka, Kanazawa, anyplace. This my business. Come on."

  We went out of the room, closed the door, and returned to our tea.

  "You come to Sado next time in. . .," he flipped one page back on his wall calendar, ". . . April. You come, we get kogome."

  "You grow kogome too?" Kogome is a mountain plant, picked in spring as a young green shoot about the size of a little finger. You pay quite a lot for it in the cities when you can find it, which isn't often.

  "Not grow, find," said Mr. Togashi. He explained that he knew a good picking area in the mountains, a place where other people didn't go. It was his secret, he added, raising a finger to his lips. The season starts around the beginning of April. The first shoots are found at about 50 meters above sea level, after which you progress upward by 20 or 30 meters a day, depending on the weather, up to a maximum of about 600 meters. Mr. Togashi spent most of every April in pursuit of kogome, gathering 10 or 20 kilos in an average morning. Then he would carry his harvest home, eat lunch, and spend the afternoon washing, packing, labelling, and dispatching. He lived in a very old farmhouse with a thick thatched roof a little way down the road. It was a comfortable enough life, but. . . Well, a little lonely. Restricted by having to remain at home and care for his aged mother — who else would do it? — he nevertheless wanted very much to get married and raise a family. But up to now, he hadn't been able to find a wife on Sado. The local girls wanted to move away, to live in towns and work as hairdressers, hotel receptionists, or shop assistants. The laughing mushroom talk, the stickers, the brochure, the letterhead, were simply to attract attention — attention that would expand his business, bring him new friends, introduce him to a potential bride. Could I perhaps suggest anything? We sat in the shack for an hour or so and talked about it. That is, he talked about it and I listened.

  The problem was that entrepreneurial types like Mr. Togashi, although now becoming more common, were still the exception. Most of the people born along this coast either left to improve their prospects — that took care of nearly all the young women — or else resigned themselves to the traditional routine of village life, which meant long monotonous days of labor in the fields or at sea, leavened from time to time by seasonal festivals and ceremonies.

  What happens when natural and economic conditions cause a remote community to stagnate in this way is very simple. Nothing happens. Evolution simply waits for a solution to happen by itself and break the deadlock. What solution would that be, here on the Uchikaifu coast? A few minutes after leaving Mr. Togashi's shack, I came upon the answer.

  The next village, which was called Uragawa, showed evident signs of prosperity. There was a brand new post office, several old houses with shiny new roofs, several others in the process of being rebuilt, and a brand new harbor wall that reached out into the water and then curved back on itself, creating a safe, sheltered anchorage for 40 or so fishing boats. The brash newness of everything was softened by a riot of early summer flowers; there were beds of marigolds, blazing orange, some cherry trees on which a few pink blossoms turning brown at the edges were still stubbornly hanging, azaleas coming into flower, buttercups, clover, and heavy bunches of wild purple wisteria hanging from the branches of their host trees. Beside the houses stood rows of hagaki, tall racks made of weathered pine logs lashed together with rope and used at harvest time for hanging up sheaves of newly cut rice to dry.

  But the key to Uragawa's fortunes had nothing to do with nature or tradition. Its identity was revealed by a large, thick, beige-colored stain spreading out in the sea below, the sludge from a cement works. A dozen men in yellow hard hats were moving briskly around the site, filling and emptying molds for the production of concrete tetrapods.

  The drive to modernize Sado, spearheaded by businessmen who want to expand the tourist trade and supported by local people who welcome the new jobs, has led to a boom in two industries: quarrying and concrete. Working in tandem, these are transforming the island, bringing wider, better roads, new harbors, and massive seawalls to even the remotest areas. Many sections of coast are now defended against erosion by long heaps of concrete tetrapods set up to absorb the force of the incoming waves. Most islanders approve of the changes: the aesthetic argument, which would preserve the landscape as it has always been, carries little weight. So eagerly has the gospel of concrete been adopted that the Uchikaifu coast is getting to be an aesthete's nightmare: more than half of it has already been "improved," and the pace of the improvements is continuing to increase.

  I stopped to buy a couple of rice balls at a small store in the middle of Uragawa, refilled my water bottle from a tap outside in the street, and then walked on a little way to Kurohime Bridge. If there is a god of concrete on Sado, this bridge is his best and newest shrine. It's about 100 meters long and spans a small bay where the curving cliffs fall sheer to the water. The old road that was used before the bridge was built can still be seen. It passed through a low, narrow tunnel cut through the wall of the cliff, just wide enough for the passage of one small vehicle. Under incessant pounding from the sea, parts of the cliff have fallen away so that you can see into the remains of the tunnel; some sections were walled with timber and others, when the timber rotted or collapsed, with concrete struts. By contrast, Kurohime Bridge arches regally across the bay on massive concrete supports, turning the most difficult stretch of road on the whole coast into the easiest.

  I sat on the bridge with my legs dangling over the side and munched a rice ball, recalling all I had heard about Japan's unique love affair with nature, the special affinity that enables the people to confront its benefits and drawbacks with the same unruffled composure. This is contrasted with the attitude of the less sensitive Westerner, nature's implacable opponent, dedicated to controlling, fighting, mastering, and enslaving it. The Japanese, it's said, never make that mistake. They appreciate their surroundings exactly as they are, live with them in a state of blissful, almost mystical harmony.

  To walk up the Uchikaifu coast of Sado is to get a rather different picture. In Japan, like anywhere else, the enthusiasm for living in harmony with nature depends a lot on exactly which bit of nature you're obliged to live with. Urban Japanese, especially those whose homes include traditional rock gardens, patches of delicately colored moss and attractive little waterfalls, tend to be keen proponents of the harmony-with-nature theory. Outside the cities, people are more practical. Island fishermen who can find no better shelter for their boats than dragging them up on a shingle beach, whose roads crumble without warning into the sea, whose homes are regularly flooded out by spring snowmelt, don't have much to say about living in harmony with nature. They prefer to talk about concrete and the benefits it brings them. If you ask what they feel about the loss of aesthetic beauty, they shrug. It's a small price, they seem to imply, for such a vast improvement in comfort and security.

  There is nothing unique about Sado in this respect. During the 20th century, civil engineering may well have wrought more changes to the countryside in Japan than anywhere else in the world. There is hardly a river left in the country whose flow has not been diverted, channeled, and controlled by the installation of dams, concrete embankments, or both. Sheer cliffs by roadsides are routinely sprayed with a coat of wet cement and then covered with heavy wire netting, bolted into place, to prevent landslides. Operations designed to control nature — or, more precisely, to limit its capacity for causing damage — can be seen everywhere.

  The reason is very simple. Japan's location and weather patterns have made it a land of dangerous ins
tability. Volcanoes still cause devastation and death, typhoons still drag houses off mountainsides and smash them to matchwood, rain still bursts river banks and floods villages, minor earthquakes are still frequent and the next really big one is always just around the next corner. People who object to artificial interference with the landscape sometimes forget that effective civil engineering has a short history in Japan and that what went before it was enough to make anyone prize concrete above gold. What's interesting about the following sample of pre-engineering-era disasters is not only the extent of the damage caused, but also the brief time scale:

  July 1888: Bandai volcano erupts, 400 killed.

  Oct 1891: Earthquake, 10,000 killed, 300,000 homeless.

  Sept 1892: Typhoon on Tokushima, 300 killed.

  Oct 1894: Earthquake in Yamagata, 400 killed.

  July 1900: Bandai erupts again, 200 killed.

  Sept 1902: Earthquake in Yokohama, 200 killed.

  Oct 1906: Typhoon in Kyushu, 1,000 killed.

  Nowadays, such disasters are equally frequent, but meteorology, engineering, and more efficient, fire-resistant methods of building have dramatically reduced the degree of destruction. This is illustrated by a comparison with more recent earthquakes:

  June 1964: 7.5 mag. quake off Niigata, 26 killed.

  May 1968: 7.9 mag. quake off Hokkaido, 52 killed.

  May 1974: 6.9 mag. quake off Izu Hanto, 30 killed.

  Jan 1978: 7.0 mag. quake off Izu Oshima, 25 killed.

  June 1978: 7.4 mag. quake off Miyagi Pref., 28 killed.

  May 1983: 7.7 mag. quake off Akita Pref., 104 killed.

  Jan 1993: 7.8 mag. quake off Hokkaido, 1 killed.

  July 1993: 7.8 mag. quake off Hokkaido, @ 250 killed.

  For other kinds of disaster, the effect has been the same. When southern Japan was struck by a typhoon in September 1991, half a million households had their electricity cut off, but only 6 people lost their lives. A week later, 15 people were killed by another typhoon in Tokyo while 28,600 houses in the city were evacuated because of flooding. But the massive earthquake that struck Kobe in January 1995, killing more than 5000 people, shows that even today nature has the last word.