Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  In these circumstances, it would be surprising if the inhabitants of Japan had not developed a healthy respect for the power of nature, a respect quite possibly tinged with terror. Nor is it surprising that they claim a special experience of the earth and its forces and that they put a special value on staying in harmony with it, bending to its will, not fighting against it. The art of Japan does indeed suggest a close affinity with nature, an acute sensitivity to its moods and changes. But necessity may be at work here quite as much as virtue. And it seems entirely right and reasonable that the villagers here on this lonely coast of Sado should welcome the improvements that concrete has brought. Because of it they live more safely, their houses have stronger foundations and don't get washed away, their boats are protected from even the fiercest storms. And if that's not mastering nature...

  As if to emphasize the point, a serious landslide had blocked the road a little way beyond Kurohime Bridge. An untreated section of cliff — no cement coating, no wire netting — had collapsed from a point about 200 feet above the road and gouged out a basin some 150 feet wide. A chaos of boulders, soil, and broken tree trunks had tumbled down onto the road and over the edge on the seaward side. Several tetrapods lay smashed to pieces in the water below.

  Repair work, of course, had begun right away. A narrow channel had been cut to allow one car at a time to pass through, and three small mechanical diggers perched at crazy angles were shifting the brown clay bucket by bucket to reshape the cliff-side. I asked one of the men how long it would take to finish the job, and he told me they expected to have the road fully repaired in about two months' time. "It's been a few years since we had one as bad as this," he added with a smile. "Not like the old days. Then, it used to happen all the time."

  Beyond the landslide, not surprisingly, there was very little traffic. As I walked along in the early afternoon sunshine, it seemed as if I had the island all to myself. Occasionally the road avoided a dangerous section of cliff by disappearing into dark tunnels of rock, whose cracked walls and ceilings dripped with water. At the mouth of one of these tunnels I came upon the first snake of the day, its head neatly flattened by the wheel of a passing car. Only about a foot long, it was a young aodaisho, literally "Great Blue General" — the character sho is the same as the sho of shogun and signifies a military commander. The name also refers to the bluish slate-gray color of the adult snake's underbelly, but this was a youngster, earthy umber brown along the back and white as a fish on the underside. The reason for its failure to cross the road safely was easy to see: the stomach was swollen and distended by a recent meal, eaten but not yet digested.

  A roadside sign announced that I was approaching a fishing port called Kitakoura. The road led down a hill past a complicated network of small paddy fields. These had been carefully terraced in descending levels so that they could all be irrigated by the same mountain stream: the water filled each little field in turn before being fed on through a section of pipe to the one below. Here and there scarecrows had been set up, their bamboo limbs clothed in brightly colored shirts and straw hats jammed onto their heads. Empty plastic carrier bags flapped noisily in the wind from the ends of their outstretched arms, and the features on their padded cloth faces were drawn with fierce, angry expressions.

  Down by the harbor, the women of Kitakoura were hard at work. The task at hand was to fill up a pile of bags, each about the size of a large pillow and made of black, fiber-reinforced plastic, with coarse gravel, a heap of which had been tipped on the quayside from a dump truck. Two women held the top of a bag open while a third shoveled it full of gravel. Then they closed it by tying the top tightly with string. Each full bag was so heavy that it took all three of them to lift it, stagger a few yards, and heave it up onto the finished pile. They had already filled hundreds of these bags, which would be used as weights for the huge fixed nets offshore, and judging from the unused stack beside them, they still had several hundred to go.

  In spite of this heavy labor, the group appeared to be extremely cheerful. There was a lot of chatter and frequent bursts of laughter. They were all dressed in the standard outfit worn by the women of Sado when working outdoors — short rubber boots, dark blue trousers, a pink or blue smock patterned with flowers, a knee-length apron, cloth or rubber gloves, and a straw bonnet whose brim extended forward around the face and was held in place by a long headscarf tied under the chin. They also had a small audience of fishermen who had knocked off for the day and were leaning against the pile of finished bags, smoking cigarettes and handing out advice. The sight of a foreigner passing through with a rucksack and a large stick promised an amusing diversion. They called me over for a chat. "What do you think of this, eh?" said one of them, gesturing at the work gang. "Japanese women are hard workers, don't you think?" They wanted to know if women in England did similar manual jobs, and were pleased when I said no. The women asked where I was going. "Why are you carrying that stick?" said one. "Are you a pilgrim?"

  I hesitated, unsure exactly what an affirmative answer might imply. The journey around Sado is not a formal pilgrimage, as other routes are in Japan. There are two basic kinds. One is linear and follows a prescribed path between two specified points. The other describes a roughly circular journey around a sacred area, which may be tens or even hundreds of square miles in extent and is filled with sites of special significance to the beliefs, legends, and practices of a given sect. Both kinds require the pilgrim to climb high into the mountains, follow forest and riverside trails, ford streams, sleep outdoors or in simple inns, eat local food everywhere, and call in at shrines and temples along the way to burn incense, bow, and pray.

  "Well, not exactly a pilgrim," I answered. "The stick is to bang on the ground and frighten snakes away. Like this!" I struck the concrete quay a couple of times with Snake Frightener. They thought it was hilarious. "There aren't many snakes around here," laughed one. "Not here, but maybe in the mountains," said another. "Ah yes," said the first, more seriously. "Yes, maybe in the mountains. Be careful if you go in the mountains." She turned her head and looked away. The fishermen didn't want to talk about the mountains either. They wanted to tell me about the fishing. The season for the best tuna had just started, they said. Big ones, 50 kilos, even 100 kilos if they were lucky. A valuable bonus, to supplement their usual catch of buri, or yellowtail. "And how do you spend the day when the weather's too bad to go out in the boats?" I asked them. They looked a bit vague and mumbled something about repairing nets. "You mean you get to stay home and relax," I said, tipping my closed fist towards my mouth with the thumb extended in a gesture of drinking. They grinned sheepishly, and a few of the women chuckled in confirmation.

  At the first bend in the road beyond the village I stopped and looked back at them. Some people say that Japan is the only country in the world where communism works successfully, and here at Kitakoura it was easy to see why. On the surface it was Bolshevik theory put perfectly into practice — everybody pulling together, cooperating in their work and their social life, believing in the same things, laboring cheerfully, not demanding a lot for themselves. Lenin should have come here. He might have discovered how such a system really evolves — by consent, not by compulsion. Instead, when he fled the Tsarist police, he went the other way, to Europe. If you look at photographs of him, the piercing eyes, the jutting beard, the index finger stabbing the air to emphasize a point, you can see that he meant what he said, that he was driven by genuine convictions. But you can also see the obstinate side to his character, the determination to be right about everything. He looks like a dogmatic schoolmaster, just the sort of man who would change world history by taking a train in the wrong direction.

  The cliffs rose steeply from the roadside, thick with bushes and stunted trees, impenetrable except in a few places where tiny footpaths used by woodcutters and plant gatherers disappeared into the dark foliage. Mountains don't have to be high to evoke a sense of the unknown. Dark and steep is enough. And although few wild animals live
in these mountains — no bears, no boar, no foxes — there are other things to be wary of.

  I caught a glimpse of something red in the trees and ducked in behind them to take a look. It was a little shrine with an unpainted wooden mask hung outside on a nail. The mask had a fierce expression and a hooked beak, like a bird of prey. It was a mountain goblin, or tengu — not the long-nosed tengu whose representations can be seen all over Japan today, but its ancient, birdlike, and much-feared predecessor, the rare karasu-tengu. On a little shelf beneath it lay a dish with the well-pecked remains of a rice cake and a glass vase containing a single stem of white clover.

  Like most other supernatural creatures, tengu evolved in the distant past for reasons that have long been forgotten. Some people think that they originated as personifications of the unseen, arbitrary forces of nature. Others declare that their implacable hostility to humans carries a distant echo of active resistance by some vanished aboriginal people, driven into remote mountain areas by the invaders who colonized Japan from Southeast Asia in the distant past. Still others suggest a foreign origin, pointing out that the word is not Japanese, but a Japanized pronunciation of the Chinese characters T'ien kou, which denote an ancient class of demon, a sort of winged dog that swooped out of the sky in stormy weather to wreak damage and injury. But guerrillas or goblins, or both, must surely have been at large in the valleys and mountains of Japan long before the sixth century, when regular contacts with China began.

  Wherever they came from, the tengu arrived equipped with a whole arsenal of magical powers. They could fly immense distances through the air, hurl rocks, uproot trees, and appear or disappear at will. Earthquakes, storms, and landslides were blamed on them. So were personal losses and accidents, lost shovels, broken pots, unexplained pains and afflictions. They took special delight in arson attacks on Buddhist temples and random acts of kidnapping, in which the victims would be carried through the air to secret hideouts and later abandoned in tree-tops or on temple roofs, too stupefied by their experiences to speak or move for days afterward. A favorite variation on this theme was to abduct priests or children and "entertain" them with feasts and dancing in splendid palaces: but the next day, the hosts and their palace would disappear, the delicious food would turn out to have been nothing but the dung of animals, and the precious gifts they had bestowed would be revealed as worthless rubbish. In this deception they are a bit like the rowdy and thuggish kallikantzaroi of Greece, which, "should they come upon a benighted traveller," wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor in his book Mani, "force him to join in their loutish gambolling, leaving him, at cockcrow, battered and groggy."

  Descriptions of their appearance vary in the details, but rural folk knew them as having the body and limbs of a man, a mane of long shaggy hair, the face of a fierce predatory bird, wings of flesh, powerful claws, and a beak so strong it could "bite through swords." The mountains and forests they roamed had to be approached with caution and respect. Retribution for those who came to fell trees, hunt animals, or gather plants without making suitable offerings ranged unpredictably from minor annoyances like axe heads working loose or sandal thongs snapping to murderous attack and dismemberment on steep, inaccessible slopes or in jagged, rock-strewn ravines. Even up until modern times, charcoal makers and other mountain workers would start their day by placating the unseen tengu with gifts of rice cakes, prepared and set out a safe distance from human habitation. And as recently as 1860, official preparations for an excursion to Nikko by the shogun included posting notices in the surrounding mountains that peremptorily ordered the local "tengu and other demons" to immediately "remove elsewhere" for the duration.

  In later times, the proliferation of wandering priests and yamabushi (mountain ascetics) provided a rich new source of opportunities for the tengu's taste for trickery. Stories were told of traveling monks and nuns being abducted on the road, disoriented with intoxicating mushrooms, and corrupted by exposure to evil thoughts and obscene practices. Alternatively, the tengu themselves would take on the form of priests and roam among the people preaching false dogma and dispensing harmful advice. Distinguishing between real priests and tengu imitators became harder than ever; anyone who lived apart from conventional society was liable to come under suspicion. After all, when some strange, half-wild individual was glimpsed in the forest or came down from the mountains to the valleys and villages below, who could say whether he was a genuine hermit or a tengu in disguise? Yet to know the difference was important: one story, duplicated in several different areas, tells of a priest who was caught in the act of tossing pebbles onto peoples' roofs at night, hoping that they would ascribe the nuisance to tengu and pay him to perform an exorcism.

  But even tengu must evolve with the times, and eventually tales began to be told of more benevolent specimens. This new breed helped humanity by revealing secret spells that would overcome the power of their evil cousins, by rendering assistance to people in need, and by teaching arts like swordsmanship or calligraphy. Some turned aside from their fire-raising habits and became instead the protectors of Buddhist temples, typically lodging in large cryptomeria trees or on rocky peaks in the vicinity. As popular fear declined, they began to be portrayed with long, ludicrous noses instead of flesh-tearing beaks, and people wearing long-nosed tengu masks became a common sight at Shinto festivals all over the country. Today, such masks can be bought in virtually every souvenir shop in Japan, while the old, bird-faced variety is much more rare. But belief in their existence, and shrines where they may be propitiated, linger on in many rural communities.

  Dusk was beginning to fall as I rounded the last headland and came down the last hill into Washizaki. A few children were playing on the harbor wall, clambering around in the boats and jumping backward and forward across the mooring ropes. A man in a crisp white shirt, his day's work over, was locking up the post office with a large iron key. I asked him if he could recommend a place in town where I could stay. "You'll need one," he said with a smile. "Have you heard the weather forecast? There'll be rain tonight — maybe a big storm. No good for camping out. That's what you're doing isn't it — camping out? Now then, a place to stay. . . Let me see." He thought it over for a moment and then shouted across to another man who was passing slowly by in a battered white pickup truck. "Nozami-san has started taking guests, hasn't he?" he said. "Would you mind dropping this foreigner off there on your way home?"

  I heaved my pack onto the back of the truck, laid Snake Frightener beside it, and climbed into the cab. We drove past the harbor and out of the village a little way before coming to a halt in front of a shabby two-story building. The owner, a thin man with a bald head, dressed only in a set of long underwear, was sitting on the floor just inside the door. He was red in the face from drinking, and in a thoroughly welcoming mood. "Hello there," he said in a thick voice to the truck driver. "What's this?" I explained that I was looking for somewhere to stay. Did he have a room available? "A room? A room? Certainly we have a room," said the owner, waving his empty glass at me in a gesture of invitation. "Come in, please. We have lots of rooms. All empty — there's no-one staying here at all. It's too early you see, the season hasn't started. Well, it has started. That's to say, it's starting now. Come in, come in." He hollered for his wife, who came running out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. "Look, we have a guest," he told her. "He can speak Japanese. He's walked here, all the way from Ryotsu. He's an American. You are American, aren't you? Oh, English? Well, that's all right. We get all sorts of foreigners here in the summer — English, American. . ." he paused, but couldn't think of any other varieties. "All sorts. And you can eat Japanese food, can't you? That's good. Because we don't have any food from your country. What is it you eat? Beef? That's right, beef. Ha ha! Beef!" He laughed uproariously at the very idea. "No beef here. Just fish. And rice. Go on then," he continued, addressing his wife, "take him upstairs, show him the room." With which he turned away from me, seized a large sake bottle by the neck and poured himself out anoth
er glassful.

  Instead of a single room, I was given two that adjoined — one to eat in, with a table and a TV set, and the other for sleeping. The owner's wife confirmed what the man at the post office had said. A major storm was brewing, and was expected to break before morning. I didn't care. I was stiff and tired and my feet hurt. But after a bath I felt a lot better, and better still when dinner arrived. There was a large salad, a whole crab, several kinds of pickled vegetables, a dish of octopus marinated with thin slices of cucumber, a dish of ika somen (raw squid cut into long, thin strips like translucent bootlaces), tender and delicious slices of raw yellowtail (an inevitable part of any meal in northern Sado), a whole grilled bream, and a wooden bucket full of steaming white rice. It occurred to me that I hadn't had a proper meal for more than 24 hours. After eating it I sat beside the open window and slowly finished a second bottle of beer. It was dark outside, but not quiet. On the other side of the road, the newly planted paddies were full of frogs, all croaking in unison. The volume had been increasing steadily ever since I arrived. There must have been several thousand of them, droning gutturally on and on and on without a break. On Sado, people say that the noise is like priests reciting the sutras. When I went to bed, it seemed more mechanical than that — like trying to go to sleep during a busy shift at the ball bearing factory. Not that it made any difference. Within a few minutes, I was gone.

  Day 2

  Sounding Echoes

  The Mogami Trough, the deep channel between Sado and the mainland, is a popular traveling route for buri (yellowtail), and catching them is the main occupation in Washizaki. In some parts of the world, buri grow as large as a man, but the commonest size around here is about two feet long and six to eight kilos in weight. Their bodies are strong and streamlined, with short, bony fins and smooth, gunmetal colored skin. Much of their time is spent on the move, which gives the impression that they are abundant everywhere: from early May to midsummer they migrate northward, close to the coast, and then return south in the autumn and winter, when their flavor is said to be at its best. These journeys are made in small, fast-moving shoals, usually at depths of between 20 and 70 meters — too deep for fishing by line or spear.