Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  The contrast with the "Inside Coast," where I had walked the day before, could hardly be more striking. The "Outside Coast" has no shelter at all: it faces northwest, straight toward Siberia, where most of Sado's weather comes from. Every winter, starting around early November, arctic winds scream across the Sea of Japan, sucking up moisture along the way and looking to dump it on the first bit of land they come to. The wind bites like a tiger and buffets like a bear, the snow whirls along horizontally in big flakes that stick to your clothes and blot you out, and the rain pours remorselessly down for days at a time. Clawed at by the sea, shaped and reshaped by earthquakes, battered by typhoons, Sotokaifu has been smashed and pulverized as though by a giant hammer. Everywhere there are bays and coves, pocket patches of shingle, boulders tumbled together, craggy offshore islets, tall stacks of fractured rock, shaded pools, and deep, narrow inlets. Few of these places are easy to get to and many are completely out of reach unless you approach from the sea. Others can only be reached by climbing, or lowering yourself on a rope.

  With no industry to pollute it, the water along this part of the coast is always brilliantly clear. Beneath its surface, awabi (abalone) and sazae (a bitter-tasting shellfish commonly translated as "wreath shell" or "turbo shell" because of its spiral shape) cling to the rocks — both species, incidentally, may only be gathered by the islanders for whom they provide a living — and you can see shoals of yellow-and-black-striped angelfish, rainbow-colored wrasse, and perhaps a solitary octopus slowly pumping itself along beside you when you swim.

  The worst enemy of the people who live along Sotokaifu is the bitter winter, evidenced by their custom of building houses low to the ground and end-on to the sea, in an attempt to mitigate the effect of the wind. Yet the climate is also a valuable friend, because although the summer is hot and sunny and richly productive, it is also short, too short to make tourist development worthwhile except in a few places that can be easily reached by road from the principal towns. No matter how much more wealth Japan may accumulate, no matter how much the tourist industry may expand, Sado's peculiar geography and weather patterns work to protect its natural features and traditional way of life.

  With these satisfying thoughts in mind, I turned my face to the south and followed the wide swing of the road at the foot of Onogame. High in the cliffs, a waterfall was pouring out of a cleft in the rock and running down a steep channel to irrigate a network of paddy fields below. Automatic planting machines had already laid their rows of rice plants, but in order to get the maximum yield a few extra shoots were now being added by hand. An old woman in a wide-brimmed lampshade hat and thigh-length waders was slowly walking down each line and pressing a new plant in wherever she could find a space. She carried the shoots in a basket slung behind her, a broad basket with a narrow opening at the top to prevent the contents from spilling out when she bent down to the ground. We greeted each other, and she asked where I was going. "You've got a long road ahead of you," she said. "So do you," I answered, and she laughed.

  There was an elderly soda-dispensing machine beside the road in Kitaushima village, but it looked as though I would need more than money to get a drink out of it. The labels of the different brands were faded to a mottled brown, and the money slot, change lever, and other visible components were crusted with salt and eaten away by rust. Nor was it aware that prices had gone up everywhere else in Japan. With more hope than confidence I dropped a 100-yen coin through the slot and pressed one of the buttons. A tinny, mechanical gurgle, like a voice crying out for a drop of oil, could be heard from inside, and then a cold can of plum juice rattled down a chute and fell into the collection slot with a clunk. I sat on the ground to drink it. An old lady with a white cloth round her face and shod in split-toed jikatabi workmen's boots plodded by, as if in slow motion, trundling a wheelbarrow full of firewood. There was obviously nothing to hurry for in Kitaushima. Nothing to do each day but get on with the tasks of life while the sun slowly wheeled its way from one end of the sky to the other.

  Faced by a sheer wall of cliff at the end of the village, the road ran out of shoreline options and turned up into the hills instead. A short climb brought me to a hamlet surrounded by low, grassy slopes where the local farmers supplemented their inevitable rice paddying by raising a few head of dairy cattle. A rich odor of cowshit wafted through the air and bunches of freshly cut green grass were laid out across the road in neat rows to dry in the sun. An old woman in dark, Jizo-red clothes and a round straw hat was cutting fistfuls of the tall stalks from the roadside verge with a small, hand-held sickle. Another, having tended a mattress-size flowerbed in front of her vine-covered cottage, was carefully sweeping the uprooted weeds into a short-handled shovel. Water from a mountain stream gurgled down an old stone culvert into a patchwork of tiny fields whose earthen borders were crowded with buttercups.

  One way or another, the land hereabouts seemed saturated with water — the still pools in the paddies, the invisible waterfalls splashing noisily among the rocks on the hillside, and droplets of moisture gleaming like gems in the folds of leaves. Flowering wisteria dangled from the branches of trees like grapes on a vine, and dragonflies darted around me in flashes of red, green, or electric blue, flying in short, arrow-straight lunges, changing direction, stopping and hovering, then darting off again. It seemed an odd way of flying. Was all that abrupt swerving to help them catch food on the wing, or were they trying to avoid predators? When they stopped to rest, it was always on top of a plant or a fence post, anywhere out in the open that left a clear flight path in all directions for rapid getaways. Not that their getaways were always successful, as the occasional crushed corpse in the road made clear. And, as I now saw, they also had to contend with human pursuers: a little way ahead of me, two small boys were busy trying to catch a couple to play with. The modus operandi was to wait for a likely prospect to settle somewhere, then approach it from behind, slowly and in silence. Then, very cautiously, the would-be captor stretched out a hand until his thumb and index finger were poised directly above and below one of the dragon-fly's wings, without touching either; from this position he suddenly snapped them together, seizing the wing firmly between his fingertips but without damaging it. Then, while he held on tight to his vainly struggling prize, his pal carefully tied a length of cotton around its slender body. When they had each got one, they turned and strolled cheerfully back toward the village with their captives flying and buzzing on the end of the lines, like model airplanes or helium balloons, but far more interesting than either.

  A sign beside the road announced that I was now approaching Kaifuohashi Bridge, an even more remarkable piece of engineering than Kurohime Bridge, which I had passed over the day before. Built of steel girders painted bright scarlet, it spans a deep, rocky, steep-sided gorge that winds far back into the mountains, too far for a mountain path to have been a viable way of getting to the other side before the bridge was built. The predecessor must have been some kind of ropeway, an unnerving thought in view of the 100-yard distance from one side to the other and the 200 foot drop to the boulder-strewn streambed below. On the seaward side of the bridge, the cliffs fell almost sheer to a long, narrow strip of shingle beach with rocks and caves at each end — inaccessible, as so often on Sado, except by boat.

  Beyond the bridge, the sea could be seen through the clifftop pine trees in brilliant patches of azure and purple. The road passed through a short tunnel and then began to descend in long, tight zigzags to a village called Iwayaguchi, which is strung out along a wide, curving bay with a sandy beach. Halfway down I stopped for a rest beside Ozaretaki, Sado's most photogenic waterfall, where a mountain river gushes out over a lip of rock and tumbles for fifty feet in a curtain of foam into a clear, circular pool. The road makes a hairpin beside the falls, crossing on a narrow bridge with an old stone parapet. Far below, another solitary farmer was hand-planting rice in a group of paddies irrigated by the river.

  At the bottom of the hill, the road straightens out
to run alongside Iwayaguchi's beach — the widest, sandiest beach on the whole Sotokaifu coast. The word kuchi means "mouth" and the compound form, guchi, as in "Iwayaguchi," is commonly used to signify an entrance or an exit. The allusion here was to a tall, deep cave in the cliffside across the road from the beach. Yet another of the many miraculous constructions attributed to the roaming eighth century wonder-worker Kobo Daishi, this cave was believed to be one end of a magical tunnel that extends almost the whole length of Sado to emerge close to the southern tip in a similar cave called Iwaya Dokutsu.

  At the entrance to the cave was a circle of drystone wall that looked like an ancient sheep pen. There was also a statue of Kobo Daishi on a concrete plinth, several tablets of stone with the master's sayings inscribed on them, some mold-stained figures of Jizo, and two vases of dusty flowers. Inside, a few steps across the muddy floor brought me to the edge of a pool of water, whose extent was impossible to see in the darkness. But I could just make out the stalks of a few dead flowers set up as offerings in front of a low wooden platform. On this platform sat a doll, about eighteen inches high. Once it had been dressed as an elegant lady, in a fine kimono of red and gold, but after years in the cold and darkness, the clothes had all but rotted away. The body leaned unnaturally to one side, and the head lolled forward as if the neck was broken, the remains of the black hair dangling down as though from a corpse. It reminded me of a shaman’s tool for summoning spirits. Very likely it had been placed in the cave with some beneficent intention, but neglect had reduced it to something eerie and inexplicable, strangely appropriate to this dank, chilly place. I backed out of the cave and returned to the road, glad to get away.

  But at the village of Seki, thirty minutes down the coast, something even stranger was awaiting me. Between a thick, twisted old cherry tree and a tall fir, a stony footpath led off the road toward a shrine. The dilapidated torii entrance gate was made from roughly-sawn cedar branches now falling apart, crumbling at the edges into broken chips and fragments. Beyond it, the path turned a corner and disappeared into thick undergrowth. As I followed it, I found that it was spanned by a succession of similar torii, around a dozen of them, all equally twisted and cracked with age, some with crosspieces dangling from broken joints, some leaning drunkenly to one side, some thickly entwined with ivy, and all so low that I had to duck my head to pass beneath them. On both sides of the winding path, half-hidden by shrubs and bushes, massive boulders were tumbled together in piles; occasional gaps yawning between them disclosed nothing but darkness below.

  The tunnel of torii emerged into a small clearing surrounded by trees that blocked out the daylight and threw murky shadows on the ground. There was a faintly sweet, woody smell, an aroma of decomposition, dead leaves, and fungus-covered logs mixed with the musty odor of animals.

  Looking around, I could see that the place was — or had been — someone's home. Now in an advanced state of rot and decay, it presented a scene of almost medieval squalor. There was a derelict hut whose roof had partially fallen in, although a few old clay tiles were still attached by rusty nails to slimy green rafters. Through the broken windows I could see that the interior was a chaos of old garbage, plastic wrappers, discarded cans, and torn boxes. In front of the hut lay an open firepit and beside that a primitive shelter with a roof but no walls, erected over a stone trough that could be filled with well water for washing. In another dark hollow was a tiny wooden structure with air holes cut in the door, evidently a privy; two rotted boards on the floor had a rough hole cut in them above a deep cavity in the rock. The skeleton of an ancient bicycle, so badly rusted that it could certainly not have been ridden for twenty years, lay at an angle against the base of a tall tree. The wheel rims had almost completely disintegrated and the fragments of perished rubber that had once been the tires crumbled in my fingers like dust. Two or three hundred empty sake bottles lay in a large heap where they had evidently been tossed when their contents were consumed.

  The centerpiece, as it were, of this pitiful hovel was a group of three or four large boulders. The top of one of them provided a low, flat ledge on which lay the remains of old offerings — a few stained coins, a heap of pebbles, a plain glass jar, and some grimy little dishes. At the back of the ledge was the opening to a deep, dark hole whose floor, ten or fifteen feet below, was littered with more discarded rubbish and more sake bottles. A huge cedar branch, split off from its parent trunk, lay across the pathway almost parallel to the ground. I ducked under it, rounded a corner, and came face to face with a gray, rain-stained timber shrine. Along with the tunnel of torii, the presence of the shrine showed that this was indeed a place of worship. But of what kind? Why was everything so dilapidated? Elsewhere on Sado, people worked hard to keep their old shrines in good condition. They repair damaged woodwork, replace roof tiles blown away by storms, even add stone lanterns and other ornaments when they can afford them. What was different about this place? Why had it been allowed to fall to pieces? Hidden away at the end of its overgrown path, it had an air of secrecy, as if it lay outside conventional boundaries, deliberately set apart from the ordinary life of the local community.

  I climbed the steps to the shrine and examined the objects attached to the front wall. Hanging from a nail was an old man's cane, with notches cut roughly into the handle and some characters in faded black ink inscribed on the shaft. Pinned beside it was a faded paper that looked like a list, though whether of names or appointments I couldn't tell. Plaited cords of faded red and white silk ending in tassels dangled sadly from the eaves on either side of a thick, grubby white rope. Three moldering bags of some brocaded material were attached to the top like coconuts at the top of a ragged palm: when I shook the rope, they swayed slightly from side to side and emitted a soft, dry rattle.

  My curiosity now thoroughly aroused, I made to open one of the shrine’s sliding doors. It moved easily to the side, revealing an inner door with two large panes of glass. Pressing my face up against it, I peered into the gloomy interior. What I saw gave me such a start that I nearly fell back down the steps.

  In the middle of the tatami floor was an old couple, staring back at the intruder with expressionless faces. They were quite still, as if posing for a photograph. The woman was standing, dressed in rough working clothes and holding a small hand towel as if she had suddenly stopped in the middle of some domestic chore. Even in the poor light I could see that she looked dirty, and her unbound hair was tangled and unkempt. Her eyes glittered; she seemed tense, wary, watching carefully to see what I would do next. The man was sitting upright in an old wicker chair at her elbow, dressed in a simple blue and white cotton kimono. His hands were folded together in his lap. Beside him on the floor was a glass-fronted box shaped like a little house, containing an ancient-looking drum with a short, stubby drumstick and a wand with white paper streamers folded in a zigzag pattern. Like his companion, the old man stared at me without moving. His brown eyes were close set and beady, his face was narrow, with pointed features, and his neat silver hair, combed smoothly backwards from a peak in the middle of his forehead, lay over his skull like a close-fitting cap.

  Embarrassed by having almost forced an entry into what was apparently their home, I bowed quickly, muttered my excuses, and stumbled down the wooden steps back into the clearing. But the old couple's appearance, especially the man's, had solved the mystery. They were the resident guardians of a shrine to a mujina, the supernatural form of the tanuki, or Japanese badger. The tunnel of torii leading to the shrine represented the tunnel of a sett. The deep holes under the rocks were presumably present or former lairs, while the rock shelf on which offerings were set out was the iwakura, the place to which a spirit is summoned by rituals. The wand with paper streamers and the old drum were props used in the rites. So, no doubt, were the sake bottles.

  "The tanuki," wrote Engelbert Kaempfer, a Dutch doctor who stayed in Japan for a while in the late seventeenth century, "is a very singular kind of Animal, of a brownish dark color with a s
nout not unlike that of a Fox, and pretty small: it seems otherwise to be of the Wolf's kind." This inaccurate description accords well with the general confusion that seems always to have surrounded the mysterious tanuki.

  The animal itself is real enough, though belonging to a species that is only found in Japan and a few places along the Amur River in Siberia. It is something like a raccoon, something like a badger, and is often called "raccoon dog" in English, for lack of a precise translation. In an otherwise light-colored face, the fur around the eyes and along the sides of the snout is dark brown, giving a raccoon-like appearance, but the tanuki is smaller and has a thinner, fuzzier tail. It eats anything and everything, berries, roots, snails, birds, fish, vegetables, and fruit and is nowadays increasingly seen in cities, where it comes to forage for food. It also raids farms and fields, showing plenty of ingenuity in evading capture: one farmer described to the local press how he had tried to protect his crop of Indian corn by covering the plants with netting and digging pits to trap the raiders. "I tried many tricks," he reported wistfully, "but they all failed."

  No Japanese would be surprised by that, since the tanuki has long been known in legend and folklore as a deceiver with supernatural powers, as a trickster, and shapechanger. Sassy and impulsive, it is also endearingly simpleminded and often fails in its attempts to deceive people due to some foolish error, such as allowing its tail to stick out from an otherwise convincing disguise.