Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  But up to about fifty years ago, line and spear were how most of the fishing on Sado was done, so catches were small and buri were only ever caught one at a time. The modern method is a lot more effective. A vertical wall of net is laid straight out to sea, at right angles to the shore, topped with glass or polystyrene floats the size of footballs, and weighted at the bottom with bags of stones like the ones I had seen the women at Kitakoura filling the day before. The buri feed along reefs or in rock holes near the shore, so sooner or later they come up against the net wall and find their way barred. Naturally they then turn toward the open sea and follow the line of the net, looking for a way round. But by the time they arrive at the end of it, they have already entered a complex, multilevel maze of traps from which there is no escape. All the fishermen have to do is go out every morning, winch in the nets that form the trap and haul the buri on board their boats. It's a lot easier than most forms of commercial fishing, and as long as the fish keep coming, it pays better too. There are a lot of new houses in Washizaki.

  I emerged from the inn the next morning into a cool and cloudy dawn. It was 5.30 — the right time to go down to the harbor and watch the morning catch being gathered in. There was no sign of the storm I had been warned to expect. The ground was wet, so evidently some rain had fallen, but there was no wind and the clouds were pale gray, puffy, and light. The surface of the rice paddies was smooth and still: above them in the sky, a few kites wheeled slowly on out-stretched wings, looking for something warm and bloody for breakfast. The frogs were well aware of this program, so their clamor of a few hours before had been replaced by a stony silence, broken only by a single nonconformist that was provoking the kites with occasional hoarse croaks. The kites didn't have it all their own way in the air, either. One, surprised in an act of thievery, suddenly appeared over the treetops and flew rapidly across the fields with two angry crows hot on its tail. Barking fiercely, they chased it long enough to make their point and then flapped haughtily down and perched together on a telegraph wire, glowering at the direction in which their quarry had disappeared.

  Down at Washizaki's substantial new harbor — way too big for the village fleet and therefore essentially another monument to the splendid possibilities of concrete — a few squid-fishing boats had come in during the last hour and were sorting out their catch. Some distance along the quay, far enough away to emphasize their owners' view that they were a different breed entirely, lay four battered work boats made of green-painted fiberglass, some 60 feet long and about 10 feet wide. Each one had a small wheelhouse in the stern and a flat, open deck with a large hatch providing access to the hold. Their crews, dressed in heavy-duty waterproof suits and rubber boots, were taking on fuel, loading gear, checking their winches, or just standing around smoking cigarettes.

  I asked if they would take me along, and they agreed willingly. We set off in a convoy, steering through the gap in the harbor wall and out into the open sea. A cool onshore wind was blowing, and the waves slapped the bottom of the boat with an irregular rhythm. Ten minutes later we arrived at the nets and took up positions that formed a rough square, with 100 yards of sea between each boat. A young fisherman in the prow leaned over the side with a hook on the end of a long pole and recovered a black, greasy lead rope from the water. Someone else attached it to the winch, whose diesel engine sputtered a couple of times and then broke into a steady roar. All the fishermen then formed a line along the side of the boat facing the net and began to haul it on board, handful by enormous handful. Slowly the boats drew closer to each other as the great net was raised from the seabed. Soon the catch became visible — first the flying fish, jumping anxiously out of the water, then the buri, darting hither and thither like powerful silver torpedoes with their distinctive yellow-edged tails.

  By the time the four boats came within touching distance of each other, the square of sea between them was churned to froth by thousands of panic-stricken fish. There were far too many for the net to be lifted completely clear of the water, so each boat now set up a simple block-and-tackle arrangement to which they fixed a scoop net, shaped like those that children use on the beach but much bigger, about four feet across, with a handle like a small tree trunk and netting like chain mail. Four men operated each one, lowering it into the main net, scooping up 20 or 30 buri and then swinging it round above the open hatch on the deck. Once it was maneuvered into position, they released a rope, and the bottom of the scoop fell open, depositing the fish into the hold. Using this method, it took nearly an hour to get the whole catch on board. The strays that fell on the deck — some sardines, some flying fish, a few squid, and a number of spiny, goggle-eyed porcupine fish — were thrown back into the sea. I picked up one of the flying fish and examined it as it lay gasping in my hand. It had a long, slim body, bulging round eyes close to the front of the head, and powerful pectoral fins, which also served as wings, emerging from the shoulders. Was it male or female? Now was their season for spawning, when the females swim close to the shore and lay their eggs in clutches that anchor themselves by means of sticky, trailing filaments to some handy stand of seaweed until hatching time. I studied the fish carefully, not knowing what to look for, then threw it back.

  But for the buri there was no escape. As more and more of the net was drawn in, they found themselves with less and less space to move; packed together, they thrashed desperately at the water while waiting their turn to be heaved on board. Even more dramatic was the scene inside the boat's hold, which was half full of sea water and contained several large blocks of ice. Recognizing by the darkness and the smell of blood that this was the condemned cell, the buri responded to being dropped inside by going completely berserk. At first they barged up and down the hold in blind panic from one crunching collision to the next, until finally, too exhausted to continue the fight, they gave up and rolled over, lying still on their sides with staring eyes and blood trickling from their mouths as more new arrivals churned the reddening froth around them.

  The task completed, the fishermen reset the empty net and turned for home. Between the four boats they reckoned they had caught about 3,000 buri — a good haul, although they said the number was often higher in winter because the catch would build up during days when the weather didn't permit them to go out. Back at the harbor, they unloaded more huge blocks of ice from a truck and dropped them through the hatch into the packed hold. Then, having stowed a bottle of sake in the wheelhouse to enjoy on the way home, they set off to sell the catch to dealers from the mainland who would already be waiting for them at the market in Ryotsu.

  I stood for a few minutes and watched them go, then turned away and climbed back up to the coast road. The sky was lightening and the sun was trying to come out. One strap on the pack had worked loose, and I stopped to adjust it beside an old, ivy-covered cherry tree with a deep cleft in its trunk a few feet off the ground. Suspended from the top of this cleft were thousands of large, fat ants all stuck together in a ball. They were clambering all over each other in a purposeful manner, as if convinced that they would finally find a way through the crowd to wherever they were going.

  At the northernmost tip of Sado is a lighthouse, and a narrow road that follows the cliff top a little way before dropping down to a village called Moura. At a bend in the road at the top of the cliff was a graveyard for used cars; their owners had got rid of them by just pushing them over the edge into the undergrowth below. There were six Honda pickups that I could see, and one Subaru compact, all badly rusted and heavily overgrown, their corpses decoratively entwined with flowering convolvulus and pierced here and there by young saplings that looked like the shafts of spears.

  The villagers of Moura were evidently less well off — or perhaps just less energetic — than their neighbors at Washizaki. There was an air of incipient dereliction, a cheerful disorder of frayed ropes, blackened old nets thrown casually across the seawall, piles of barnacle-encrusted floats, wooden boxes, barrels, a lead water tank, assorted bits of pipe, and
other ironmongery lying around as though abandoned. The street was quiet, with a line of well-weathered wooden houses, some barely more than huts, on the landward side. A door opened among them and a toothless old woman with straggly gray hair hobbled out with a bucket in her hand. She looked at me curiously and asked where I had come from, where I was going. When I told her, she nodded in a satisfied manner and then limped across the road and down toward the long, stony beach. Tourists use the beach in the summer, and their arrival has encouraged a few of the more enterprising villagers to abandon their former pursuits and go into the accommodation business instead. As old houses fall into disrepair, new ones are going up to provide bed and board to the visitors. Individual fishing is in decline, the business passing to well-organized cooperatives like Washizaki's, although small boats still go out from Moura every day to scour the offshore rocks and islets for shellfish and seaweed.

  At the end of the village I took a path that followed the shoreline around the point. At least it used to be a path but had now been upgraded to a concrete track, just wide enough for a car or a small truck. The shore below it was littered with rubbish, not thrown out by the village but thrown back by the sea: the rusty door of an old refrigerator, some faded plastic bottles of sun oil, frayed scraps of rope, old shoes. Around and among them were growing the fleshy green leaves and cloudy purple flowers of wild vetch, which sunk its shallow roots into the pebbles and spread out in random patches like tattered rugs laid out in the sun to dry. The rock roses were also in flower, their deep pink blooms nodding gently on short, spiny stems, and stubby red pine trees clung to the rocks with scaly roots that gripped the ground like lizards' claws.

  The path wound along the shore to Futatsugame (Two Turtles), a substantial offshore islet with two humps, joined to the land by a low-lying bar of pebbles and coarse gravel. Futatsugame is one of Sado's official beauty spots, pictured in all the tourist brochures, and no effort is spared to exploit it. The old hotel at the top of the cliff has been enlarged and modernized, and its grounds have been converted into an "autocamp," complete with hot-and-cold showers and flush toilets. Another campsite, for tents only, has been established in the pine woods just above the gravel bar. From here a flight of timber steps zigzags down to the sea. The bar effectively provides two beaches, one on each side, and in summer becomes crowded with families, beach umbrellas, flippers, and inflatable alligators. Sometimes storms cut the farther, narrower end of the gravel bar, making Futatsugame a true island; and then, days or weeks later, other storms put it back again.

  There was a tent on the beach — the first sign so far that there were any outsiders on Sado apart from me — but the firmly tied flaps and the pile of empty beer cans outside told me that it was too early to stop and say hello. I walked softly around it and continued along the beachside path, which was narrower now and hemmed in by trees and undergrowth, so that I sometimes had to duck to avoid hitting my head on the low branches. A few wagtails strutted briskly along the rocky shore, batting the air with their long tails, and two kites launched themselves with slow, labored wing beats from the tops of two adjacent pines as I passed. But there were signs of human agency too: here and there I saw small heaps of stones piled carefully up on flat ledges of larger rocks and then some little clay figures, only two or three inches high, of Jizo, the patron deity of travelers. At first there were only one or two. Then more, groups of ten or a dozen, many overgrown by climbing plants and stained by growths of lichen.

  Jizo is an all-purpose kind of deity who turns up in several different forms. As well as watching over travelers, his other manifestations include the Jizo of longevity (Enmei Jizo), the Jizo of pulling thorns (Togenuki Jizo), and the Jizo of stillborn, aborted, or miscarried children (Mizuko Jizo). Japan being a country where abortion is still a common form of birth control, he is very widely petitioned in this last-named capacity: people who have lost a child in any way often buy a small image of Jizo and dedicate it at a temple or some other holy place as a way of asking the god to guide the dead infant's soul safely across the Sanzu River, the symbolical border between this world and the paradise beyond. Another common form of the god is Migawari ("Scapegoat") Jizo, whose function is to take upon himself the earthly sufferings of those who petition him. When people pray to this Jizo to grant them a wish, and it is subsequently fulfilled, they also make or buy a little statue of the god and leave it in some sacred place as a token of their gratitude.

  As I continued along the path, I came upon more and more of these tiny figures set up on the rocks. There were hundreds of them. Finally the path crested a rise between two big boulders and came down to a tall cave in the cliff side whose walls were cut to make shelves and ledges, all crammed with Jizo figures. In the middle, on a plinth shaped like a lotus leaf, stood a larger statue of the boddhisattva with an infant in his arms and two others tugging at his robes in imploring attitudes. Around him were Jizo of every size and made of every material: stone, concrete, plastic, ceramic, even wood. Many were dressed in faded red hats and robes and some had tiny rosaries draped over their clasped hands. At their feet were offerings of coins and little dishes that had once contained food, along with hundreds of pathetically touching memorials to individual children — cans of orange juice or cola, a brand-new baseball, colored windmills on sticks, dolls, paper cranes threaded onto strings, well-known cartoon characters made of plastic. As I wandered round and examined them, a large crow flapped down and stood in the cave entrance behind me, croaking in mournful tones.

  The cave was called Sai-no-Kawara, which is also the name of the place on the shore of the Sanzu River where the dead must stop on their journey to the beyond and wait to be allowed to cross. Those who have done evil in this world must pile up stones as a penance until they are deemed fit to pass over the river and enter the afterworld. The spirits of children must also pile up stones, their "fault" being that while alive they did not have time to repay their parents for the gift of life. Out of his boundless compassion — and helped along, in the Buddhist tradition, by gifts and offerings from the living — Jizo eventually intercedes for them so that they too can cross the river.

  All those Jizo, all those piles of stones, no sound but the waves curling and hissing in the rocks below — it was a strange, almost magical place, curiously beautiful, poignant, and touching, mystically sad. And yet. . . Much as I profess respect for the religions of others, I couldn't feel right about Sai-no-Kawara. I tried. I sat and thought about it long and hard. But the end of every train of thought was the same: the theology of this thing sucks. This duty of children to "repay" their parents for the gift of life, as if it were some kind of transaction, smacks more of earthbound thinking and Confucian sociology than divine authority. More than once, people have explained to me why this view is wrong. They talk about eternal concepts beyond the individual, about cosmic continuity, about the wheel of life and death, about transmigration and reincarnation, about karma. In the abstract, it sounds good: too well-established to refute, too venerable to challenge. I don't really understand but that's all right, I'll buy it anyway. But here, seeing it in action, as it were, I realized that I didn't buy it. The main statue of Jizo inside the cave, with the children tugging at his robes, wore a faint smile of compassion on his lips, a smile that suddenly looked to me like the smirk of a complacent idiot. It made me feel like kicking him. Here are all these children waiting to cross the river! I wanted to shout at him. What are you waiting for? What else are you doing that's so important?

  Beyond the cave there was a thick rope tied between two rocks and slung loosely across the path, a gateway to signify the boundary between this sacred place and the everyday world outside. It was a relief to pass under it and out into the village of Negai, where I restored my good humor with a cheerfully secular conversation about fish with a man who was arranging his tiny catch in a couple of boxes in the back of a truck. He didn't have a tooth in his mouth, which made his words almost impossible for me to understand, so while he name
d all his fish, described their characteristics and estimated their value — or perhaps told me about his wife's bad back — I looked behind him at an old bamboo frame set up for drying nets. Perched at one end of it was a bird I had never seen before, a bird with a splash of bright chestnut brown on its chest that made a dazzling contrast with the deep, slaty blue of its head and back. For a few moments it sat upright on its bamboo perch, loosely swinging its tail, and then suddenly flew off, low over the ground, and dived out of sight behind some rocks. I pointed it out to the toothless man and asked him what it was called in Japanese, but could only understand something that sounded like "Aaghphrk."

  Up the hill from Negai was the headland called Onogame (Great Turtle), which crouches above the sea like a huge beast, its back and flanks clothed in coarse green grass that fades raggedly away to sheer cliffs the color of buffalo hide. The grassy area was temporarily transformed into a field of blazing yellow by the flowering of kanzo lilies, which grow wild all over Sado in late May and early June but nowhere so profusely as here. You don't so much walk through them as wade. The path to the summit of Onogame begins as a zigzag, as the slope is steeper than it looks, but straightens out beyond the point where the lilies finish and heads directly for the summit through a patch of dwarf oaks. From the top, marked by a stone lantern, there is a fine view back past Sai-no-Kawara to Futatsugame and another straight down the precipitous sides of the headland to some sharp rocks jutting out of the water like dragon's teeth. And away to the south stretches the long coast of Sotokaifu, the "Outside Coast."