Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  We talked for a while, and she asked where I was going, where I had come from, the usual questions. "I'm a foreigner too," she said. "I wasn't born here. I come from Nagaoka, on the mainland." She was just a young girl when she left her family to come to Sado. She could remember them lined up by the door of her home to say goodbye, her mother and sisters weeping, wondering when they might see her again. It made a sad little picture. I changed the subject. "It must be cold here in winter," I said. "I suppose you get a lot of snow?"

  "Snow? Here? Huh!" she snorted dismissively. "There's no snow here, nothing to speak of. The wind's cold, for sure, and strong, too. It blows the snow away, you see. Doesn't get much deeper than this." She held her hand out at knee height from the ground. "Now Nagaoka, that's a different story. That's real snow country. Why, the snow I remember when I was a child, it came right up to the top of the house." She gave a little cackle. "My father, he used to dig a tunnel for us, so we could get outside."

  After we had talked for a while, I asked if I could take her photograph. "You don't want a picture of a weird-looking old woman like me," she said. But when I got the camera out, she looked pleased and struck a pose against a bit of seawall, her two wrinkled brown hands clutched around her bunch of wakame and her bamboo pole propped up behind her.

  "Go on then," she said, when I had taken the picture. "Off you go now. That's your way, down that road to Hiranezaki. That's where I live, but I'm not going back just yet. And next time you come, look me up. Bring your wife, too, and your family. Two daughters, you said? Yes, bring them along. Bring them to my house. We'll have miso soup, with wakame in it." And with that, she smiled and waved me away.

  Hiranezaki is one of the "sights" of Sotokaifu and a popular place for tourists to stay because of its natural hot springs. Extending for several hundred yards, the shoreline consists of huge slabs of rock all tipped back at an angle of about 30 degrees to the sea, as if a long, straight, vertical wall of cliff had slowly toppled over backwards without breaking up. This may be exactly what happened, perhaps due to some volcanic disturbance: the rock is pitted with tiny sharp stones like lava, and there are many deep, round sinkholes and blowholes where water was forced up to the surface.

  At a bend in the road I could see the old hot spring bath-house, now derelict. Its door and windows were all boarded up and the iron bars embedded in the rotting concrete had rusted through and bled great brown streaks down the sides of the dirty cream walls. On the other side of the road stood its replacement, a big new tourist hotel with a few tall, air-conditioned buses parked outside.

  Around the corner, the road passed between two enormous rocks and onto a bridge that crossed a small bay. To the right lay the open sea, while the shoreward side was a steep cliff to which clung the hamlet of Tochu, its houses and shops and alley-ways stacked up one level above the next, like an alpine village. A newly completed concrete jetty thrust out into the bay, and by the seawall a woman was pegging ribbons of green seaweed to a long string, just like hanging the washing out to dry. Below her in the water, a man in a grubby red baseball cap was drifting about in a row boat half full of the same seaweed, poking thoughtfully at the water with a length of bamboo.

  A little way ahead was the pride and joy of the Sotokaifu coast, a dazzling series of coves, inlets, and islets known collectively as Senkaku-wan, or Senkaku Bay. This is Sado's most famous beauty spot, and no tourist trip to the island is complete without a couple of hours spent wandering its pathways, peering over the edges of its sheer cliffs, and poking about for gifts in its barnlike souvenir shop. Once again, it's a place where the coast is shattered to fragments by long-ago earthquakes, and the rock stacks that jut above the brilliant green and azure water are only the tops of mountain chunks jumbled chaotically together on the seabed. Tourists can go out in glass-bottomed boats, which, from the land, seem to follow an unnecessarily slow and tortuous route around the inlets; but on board, the passengers peering down into the long, rectangular viewing bay can appreciate the skill of their pilot. In some places, the rocks seem only inches below the boat and then they suddenly fall away, thirty feet, sixty feet down and more, down into the blue depths where shoals of kurodai, a kind of bream, swim straight ahead and all together, like dangerous bands of little black torpedoes intent on some unseen target.

  To see what else there was in the way of sea life, I went inside the Senkaku-wan aquarium. Despite its importance as a tourist attraction, the place was endearingly shabby: the floor was in need of a good sweep and paint was flaking off the graying plaster walls. In the middle of the large room was a big tank with a lump of concrete inside, around which dozens of fish were constantly circling. There were a few small sharks arrowing through the water, several species of bream, and a solitary ray with the rims of its wings flapping gently like the hem of a skirt in the wind and a blank, expressionless little face peeping out from the underside of its head. Around the walls stood separate tanks containing striped angel fish, a few gloomy-looking squid, an octopus hiding inside a piece of plastic drainpipe, and several sea urchins slowly waving their long, black spines.

  The sea theme continued at the souvenir shop, which was already filling up with the day's first arrivals. A dozen or so stalls set up outside were doing a brisk business in dried squid, seaweed, and jars of pickled fish. Among the souvenirs were some fine ceramic objects, including cups and teapots made of the smooth local red clay, but most of the rest were cheap and tawdry: key rings, bead-encrusted handbags, colored hats, little dolls made of varnished bamboo, ballpoint pens and plastic lighters decorated with badly drawn nudes, packs of postcards, electric clocks, and gold-plated teaspoons. One considerate exception to the atmosphere of fierce commercialism was provided by a rack of fifty or so yellow plastic umbrellas: if tourists should arrive and get caught in the rain, they could borrow an umbrella without charge while they wandered round the complex. An island touch, I thought, when the shop could just as easily have had them on sale.

  Senkaku-wan is a "quasi-national park," a category of protected area that recognizes the established presence of homes and local industry but (theoretically) prevents further development or anything else that might damage the environment. But at Himezu, the next-door village, these restrictions were either suspended or else simply ignored. There was another massive new harbor, which meant a bigger squid-fishing fleet (and extra revenue all round) and a quayside scattered with piles of timber, gray roof tiles and other construction materials. New houses were going up all over the place, replacing the decayed cedarwood shacks along the waterfront.

  I was several hours too late for the daily excitement at Himezu, when the squid boats returned at dawn, their decks splattered with inky gore and their catches packed away in polystyrene boxes ready for shipment to market. But there were several long bamboo racks on which hundreds of the translucent, milky white creatures were laid out to dry in the sun, and a subsidiary fleet of smaller boats whose litter of crab traps and empty sazae shells showed that their fishing was done closer to the shore. Above them on the dock, weather-wrinkled villagers were patiently untangling their nets and refolding them in readiness for the next trip. Swallows flew around busily working on their nests, flitting hither and thither with twigs in their beaks and zipping past me at ankle level. When they fly low like that, said an old woman, looking up from her work with a resigned smile, it means that the rain is coming. And in fact as I set off to rejoin the main road above the village, the sun had already faded behind heavy banks of cloud rolling in from the sea, some of them ominously tinged with gray.

  Ten minutes later I found myself standing on a high cliff above Tassha, the last village of any size before Aikawa, which was my destination for the day. A flight of stone steps led down from the road to a huddle of dark wooden houses at the base of a cliff that spread around a wide, curving bay with a beach of light shingle and coarse gravel. Two little boys, no more than five years old, were playing on the beach, dancing around a big bonfire that they had built
out of driftwood.

  The stone steps descended past a little cemetery where half the graves were decorated with bunches of big purple irises. A marmalade-colored cat observed me closely, without moving, as I went by. Down at the bottom, a narrow alley wound among the houses, and I came across a woman rinsing seaweed in a blue plastic bowl, then tipping the salty water into a deep gutter covered with roughly worked slabs of stone. Other people too were busy outside their houses or working away in open-fronted sheds; they were sawing wood, making baskets, tinkering with boats, repairing winches, sharpening tools, stacking firewood. There were no shiny cars, no offices, no computers or neon signs or modern shops, no evidence of anything but traditional occupations, a kind of local self-sufficiency, as though people had nothing that came from a packet, but obtained what they needed from neighbors who had made it or sewn it or grown it or brought it back from the sea.

  Even on Sado, such illusions rarely last much further than the next corner, and when I stepped out onto the beach I saw commercial reality reasserting itself in the form of three of Tassha's well-known "shark" boats, which lay moored together in a line beside a short jetty. These have nothing to do with fishing, but make up a small fleet of launches for carrying tourists along the rocky coast to look at the glories of Senkaku-wan from the sea. The cabin section of each one is an elaborate wooden superstructure, pointed at the front, with glaring eyes and a fierce toothy mouth painted on, rising in the middle to a tall, sharp dorsal fin on the roof and then sloping down at the back with another long fin on each side. From the outside, it looks as though the passengers are being carried along inside a big fairground shark. The blue one and the red one were empty, but a handful of tourists were quietly waiting in the green one for the next departure, while just at that moment the yellow one, returning from its first trip of the morning, rounded the headland at the other end of the bay. Behind the jetty there was a tourist center, with a car park, shops, and restaurants, so I bought a box lunch of rice and fish and pickles, plus a can of beer, and carried them down to eat on the beach.

  ***

  The sky hung lower as I walked the last few kilometers along the cliffs to Aikawa, and a few preliminary drops of rain made dark spots on the sidewalk as I clumped round the last corner and entered the town. Wooden houses lined both sides of the road, interspersed with dingy shops selling such practical items as work clothes, paint, gardening tools, fishing nets, and parts for boat engines. Before reaching the town center, I turned away from the coast and took a road leading up toward the cloud-shrouded mountains that loomed above the town. It was a quiet, narrow lane that wound this way and that as it climbed, past an old school with a badly overgrown playground, past a yard containing a few rusty mechanical shovels, past some garden allotments planted with flowers and vegetables. Finally I left the last one behind and plodded on alone up a forbidding-looking valley with forests of beech, maple, and mountain cherry on both sides. By this time the sky was black and glowering, the air as thick and heavy as treacle. From somewhere in the hills came a rumble of thunder. I wondered if I could reach my goal before the storm broke. It would be a close thing. A half-rotted wooden sign nailed to a nearby tree warned that I still had a little way to go. "Kinzan," it said, "1.5 km."

  Kinzan, or "Gold Mountain," is Sado's most famous landmark, and the mine from which it took its name — the biggest and most valuable ever found in Japan — redefined the island's place on the national map. From the time it was discovered in 1601 until it finally closed in 1989, work went on practically without interruption. On the backs of men and pack-animals, the recovered ore was lugged down the narrow, rainy little valley into Aikawa for smelting and refining. The pure gold was then hammered out into sheets, and the sheets were cut up to make flat, oblong "coins" called koban. Packed in boxes, 1,000 at a time, the koban were transported across the island to the southern port of Ogi and loaded onto special, vermilion-painted ships that took them to the mainland for transport overland to Edo. More than half the total yield in the mine's history was obtained during the Edo era, and the wealth it produced made a vital contribution to the stability and continuity of the shoguns' rule.

  Mixed deposits of gold, silver, and copper, according to geologists, are often to be found in areas of "intense tertiary volcanic activity" — and in the case of Japan, that means pretty much every part of the country. Sado certainly had its share. By the twelfth century, and probably much earlier, the islanders already knew that there was gold in their rivers and streams. Small amounts were often recovered by panning.

  The first serious attempt at mining took place in 1542, when a merchant from the mainland province of Echigo organized the exploitation of a vein of silver at a place called Tsurushi, east of Aikawa. But the discovery of Kinzan was on a different scale altogether. The apocryphal tale recounts how a fisherman was rinsing his net in a stream one evening when his eye was suddenly caught by moonlight glinting on a nugget embedded in a rock. Following the stream back up into the hills, the man found other rocks with similar deposits, and eventually traced their source to a mountain called Doyu-no-Wareto. Today, the peak of this mountain is split by a deep "V," a formation explained in Sado's tourist literature as having been brought about by a mythical miner who, "in his feverish zeal for gold, drove a spike into the top of the mountain and split it in two!" This dramatic suggestion is not as fanciful as it sounds: the spot is an old open cut working of one of the main veins, probably among the first to be discovered.

  When the news about Sado's mountain of gold got out, things started happening fast. The island's provincial status, which dated back to the eighth century, was summarily revised by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the ruling shogun, who immediately placed it under his direct control. Two years later he appointed a certain Okubo Nagayasu as bugyo, or commissioner, with instructions to organize and increase mining output, administer the island, and ensure security by maintaining strict surveillance over neighboring parts of Japan. Successive bugyo carried out these duties until 1867, assisted by a staff of civil servants and police.

  At the same time, the gold rush was on. The population of Aikawa, until then a sleepy and insignificant fishing village, rose from a couple of hundred to about 120,000 in only ten years. Miners, carpenters, foundrymen, tool-makers, workers of all kinds — and workers to serve the workers — flocked in from all over Japan, bringing with them songs, dialects, and customs whose traces survive in the dances and festivals held in Aikawa today. But like other big-money booms, this one was short-lived. In less than thirty years, the richest and most accessible veins had already been exhausted.

  Even so, there was still plenty of gold in Doyu-no-Wareto, and thirty years was long enough for the bugyo's surveyors to have formed a good idea of where it was. Three hundred shafts were sunk, some as much as 800 meters below the surface of the mountain. The main veins ran more or less parallel, separated by as little as 10 meters or as much as a couple of hundred, and each one had several minor veins running off from it. Some were of white quartz, in which the gold showed up as specks or streaks of black. The quartz, of course, had to be recovered with simple hand tools — hammers, picks, chisels and wedges. Usually, such quartz deposits are surrounded by weak wall rock, but the rock of Doyu-no-Wareto, principally liparite and andesite, is unusually hard — bad news for the miners who had to hammer at the tunnel faces with crude iron tools, but at least relatively safe from the dangers of earthquakes. Another unusual feature was that the mountain contained two different types of deposit: the white quartz lodes, which occurred on the end of one main vein and in one branch vein, and a more common type in which the gold was embedded in a lead-gray silver sulfate called argentite.

  The proximity of a productive gold mine to a handy pool of political exiles and convicted criminals has led many to assume that Kinzan was worked more or less exclusively by slave labor. The mine is depicted as a hell of cold and damp where half-starved prisoners picked, shoveled, and clawed gold ore from the walls of freezing rock galleri
es until they shivered to death from pneumonia. This, at least, is a familiar part of the story that tour guides tell to the busloads of visitors they escort round Sado, and foreign writers, for whom the account dovetails neatly with wartime Japan's record of cold-blooded cruelty, have generally been content to give the same impression.

  But although conditions inside the mountain were certainly bad, and must have cost many lives over the years, Kinzan was far too important an operation to have been entrusted to convicts. First, turning convicts into slaves was not as simple as it sounds: those who were on the island when the mine was discovered had already been tried and sentenced, and then as now, Japanese judicial decisions and conditions of detention could not easily be reviewed or altered. Second, and more to the point, mining for gold is much more technically complex than, say, for coal. Relatively few kinds of work, even inside the mine, could be performed properly by unskilled slaves, since their incompetence, whether deliberate or not, might result in incomplete recovery of the precious deposits. Third, the rapid growth of Aikawa into a boom town, with its documented residential districts, bath-houses, shops, brothels, bars and so on, makes it obvious that most of the workers were paid. And fourth, there is the surprising evidence of the water-carriers' memorial.

  Of the many technical problems inside the mine, one of the most persistent was flooding — and the deeper the operation descended into the mountain, the worse the problem became. Dozens of drainage tunnels were dug over the years, and these were fed by pumps that operated around the clock. The pumps were fantastic contraptions consisting of long cedarwood troughs, angled pipes made of sections of bamboo slotted together, and stubby little wooden handles that had to be cranked by hand. It was a monotonous, exhausting job and, in the early days, a well-paid one. Cash-hungry new arrivals literally queued up to do it. Later on, however, when output declined and the mine administrators sought ways to improve profitability, drainage work was an obvious area where costs could be cut. Homeless vagrants and others on the margins of society were arbitrarily arrested in big cities like Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, ostensibly for reasons of "security," and sent to Sado to work as mizukae ninsoku, or "water carriers." The standard length of service was set at five years, after which they were to be released, but considering the cold, damp conditions in which they lived and worked, most can be assumed to have died before their time was up.