Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

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Sado: Japan's Island in Exile Page 11

by Angus Waycott


  Looking back at the sweep of Mano Bay and the tip of Nanaura Kaigan, now half-hidden in the afternoon haze, I reckoned I had covered a good thirty kilometers during the day, perhaps more. My feet hurt and I needed a rest. But it seemed bad manners to lounge around in front of laborers sweating away to repair the road, so I forced myself to go on until I reached a narrow strip of stony beach below a tall cliff. I limped off the road and slumped thankfully down against a large rock. There was no-one around and no sound except for the slow, rhythmic chattering noise made by the tumbling shingle as each receding wave dragged more of it down the slope.

  An odd little "beep" above my head made me look up. It was the same unknown blue bird I had seen in Negai, a couple of days before. This time there were two of them: one was sitting above me on a telegraph wire while the other had flown higher up and was perched on a little ledge on the side of the cliff. The one on the wire, which I took to be the male, was watching his partner anxiously and chirping at her to come and join him. Evidently no soft touch, she wasn't taking any notice. Then, abruptly, she flew a little higher up and disappeared into some scrub growing out of the cliff. Occasional "beep beep" noises emerged, but nothing else. For a while the male watched and waited, his eyes fixed on her hiding place. . . And then suddenly out she came and he was off and following her, up the cliff and out of sight.

  A moment later, they were back. But now they had lost each other. The male resumed his position on the wire, almost exactly where he had been before, while the female was perched on the same wire, a little further up. She was squeaking excitedly and had something in her beak, something that looked like a worm. But the male wasn't taking any notice. This didn't make sense. Okay, so this female evidently wasn't a female, but another male, competing for her attention. Then I spotted the original female again, 50 or 60 yards further along the same telegraph wire; she was bobbing her tail and beeping away in a sharp, clear little voice. But the two males were now preoccupied with each other; they were edging cautiously along the wire, but in the wrong direction. And before they could sort it all out, a heavy truck laden with stones rumbled round the corner a bit too fast and dropped a football-size rock off the top of its load. It smashed as it hit the ground, and the noise frightened all three of them away.

  The stone-laden truck reminded me that I was in a part of Sado long known for masonry. In the 19th century, there were several actively worked quarries whose produce was hauled laboriously over the hills to Ogi for export to the mainland. The area was also home to a renowned mason called Gobei, maker of many roadside Jizos and a collection of 88 stone Buddhas that can still be seen at Iwaya Cave, near Ogi. A little way ahead, if my calculations were correct, I would come to a hamlet called Bentenmisaki where I could probably get something to eat. The main road left the coast at that point and turned inland, but according to the map there was a track that followed the sea toward the big beach at Sobama where I meant to camp for the night.

  Bentenmisaki turned out to be a rocky little promontory with a tiny shrine perched on top, high above the sea. The shrine was made of sandstone and looked fantastically ancient, but the ferocity of the rain, wind, and snow sweeping across the Japan Sea through the long winters could probably cause that much weathering in a dozen years. Inside the little shrine was a wooden tablet of the kind used to commemorate a departed ancestor. Usually such tablets are kept in the family home, so this one may have been made and deposited for the benefit of some nameless seaman who drowned here, far from wherever he came.

  Below the promontory and facing out onto a small sandy beach was a cheerfully dilapidated inn with the mud-crusted remains of two abandoned swallows' nests stuck to the wall in the entrance-way. The owner, a middle-aged woman in a dark blue kimono and worn-out beach sandals and with a mouthful of startlingly gold teeth, greeted me deferentially. She would be glad to serve me a meal provided I didn't mind eating with all the other guests — she had a coach load of gateball players over from the mainland to take part in a competition and would be serving them all together in a little while. Gateball is a simplified form of croquet much beloved of senior citizens in Japan, so I had a good idea what my fellow diners would be like. Sure enough, as I sat there nursing a can of beer and looking out of the window at the sea, they began to emerge from their rooms, a group of old men of whom the youngest could not have been less than 65, and a few looked well into their eighties. Despite their years, or perhaps because of them, and encouraged by the absence of their wives, they were behaving like unsupervised schoolboys, laughing loudly, pushing, showing off, and determined to make a night of it. They showed a polite interest in me, no more, as we took our seats at two long tables and tucked in to a prodigious meal of rice, soup, prawns, buri, squid and red snapper, buckwheat noodles with a hot mustard sauce, and sliced octopus on beds of dark, vinegar-flavored seaweed. A few of the more serious-minded gateballers were having a teetotal evening, fearful of spoiling their aim the next morning, but the majority were downing beer and sake as if tomorrow would never come. In between mouthfuls they cheerfully ragged each other, hiding a glass of beer when its owner was looking the other way, and picking out first this fellow, then that one, to make fun of. One timid little man, obviously the class wimp in his schooldays, sat nervously among them with rabbit teeth still protruding, eyes still blinking behind his glasses, still wanting to say funny things like the others but not quite daring, and being peremptorily sent, now by one, now by another, to fetch more rice or soup or beer from the sideboard. Laughter rang round the room, knees were slapped, spectacles were knocked askew, and snowy tufts of hair clinging precariously to the sides of balding scalps flopped into plates and wagged outrageously as the drink went down and the excitement mounted. I watched in fascination as one old fellow, his eyes dreamily focused on the mid-distance, slowly stuffed an enormous lettuce leaf into his mouth with his chopsticks, masticating each section in turn while the rest of the leaf drooped over his chin, for all the world like a giant tortoise.

  By the time I was ready to pay up and leave the inn, it was almost dark. But the wind had dropped and the clouds had rolled away, so that there was enough light from the moon and stars for me to pick my way along the rough gravel track towards Sobama. The sea had quietened down too, and I could see the lights of several little boats already making their way out into the bay. My legs felt stiff and painful and I was just starting to wish I had asked for a room at the inn when I spotted an odd little structure down on the beach below the track. It was a primitive shelter for keeping a small boat, scooped out of a sand dune, a bit wider than a double bed and about twice as long. The sides were old pine posts driven deep into the sand, and there was a roof of rough thatch covered by an old net and weighted down with stones. Perfect. Too tired to bother with making a fire, I pushed my pack into the shelter, unrolled my sleeping bag, and crawled inside.

  Day 5

  Music Through The Pines

  It rained in the night, but the next morning there were enough dry sticks under the eaves of my little shelter to get a fire going. The sky was completely covered by dull gray clouds except in the east, where dawn was cracking it open in thin streaks of pink, orange, and yellow. I made some tea and sat on the sand to drink it. Yellow speedwell, clover, and pink rock roses were growing in patches on the dunes, together with long, trailing arms of convolvulus that spread out in all directions and clambered over rocks, piles of driftwood, and even over the roof of the boat shelter, giving it the appearance of a neolithic cottage.

  Below me, the beach was scattered with enormous quantities of garbage — torn nets draped over black rocks, huge broken chunks of polystyrene, battered plastic containers, contorted tree roots, lumps of smashed timber, cable drums, rusty iron pipes, squid lures, rubber shoes. Not much of it looked local. This was debris from ships, slung overboard somewhere at sea, thrown ashore by violent storms, dragged out into the bay again and then thrown back once more. Among the plastic bottles that still had legible labels were sev
eral with Korean or Russian writing.

  My map showed a track running west behind the beach, but this had recently been upgraded to a proper tarmac road. Sobama has the biggest and best beach on the southern half of Sado, and plans were afoot to develop it. As well as a campground with its own bar-restaurant, someone had put up a brand new log house to provide tourist accommodation. A painted signboard hung out-side, inscribed with the word "CULTOPIA." Many Japanese words are formed by bolting two or more concepts together, and the same principle had been applied to the concoction of this chilling hybrid. Culture and Utopia! When all you wanted was a room! Still, it wasn't particularly unusual. Japan coins new words like tokens spilling out of a one-armed bandit. In Sawada I had seen a car dealership whose name was "Heartpia," probably coined by the same klutz.

  Beyond the western end of Sobama, every scrap of land was under the plough. There were some fields no larger than parking spaces, tidily planted with vegetables, and long tunnel green-houses full of peppers and tomatoes. Here and there were orchards of fig, peach, and plum: old paint tins weighted with stones were hung from the branches of the trees to keep them growing low down. Most of the larger fields were used for tobacco, which was grown on raised rows of chocolate brown soil and then cut and hung to dry in long, low sheds of corrugated iron. In late summer, after the harvest, men and women can be seen in every village along this coast, sitting on wooden tubs in shed doorways, sorting the leaves into piles and then carefully stacking them in layers in tall barrels.

  As the sun broke through the clouds, the sea swirled quietly round the black rocks and made dancing patches of purple, azure, and turquoise. Soon the early boats would be going out, including the circular tubs called taraibune, which the islanders use for collecting seaweed and shellfish from among the offshore rocks. Not many years ago there was enough and to spare for everyone, but today the right to gather this valuable harvest is jealously guarded by the villagers who depend on it for a living: a fading monochrome poster pinned to the side of a wooden bus shelter portrayed a group of guilt-stricken young holidaymakers clustered round a string bag full of shellfish they had collected while a handsome, muscular young islander admonished them to keep their hands off other people's livelihoods.

  In many places along this coast, huge, wide shelves of flat rock extend out into the sea, no more than a foot under water. The seaweeds that grow on them are easy to harvest in the sheltered bays, so the natural formations are copied by constructing huge, flat beds of concrete to serve the same purpose. Coming into the village of Etsumi, I found one of the natural ones, about 300 yards long and extending about a hundred yards offshore. It was crowded with seagulls, thousands of them, white-bodied adults with yellow feet and slate gray wings, and youngsters with gray-brown baby plumage who struggled to stay upright as they practiced folding and unfolding their wings.

  A pretty little shrine stood by the road in Etsumi, with two big old cherry trees, one on each side of the entrance, and an ancient stone column topped by a rough, moss-covered stone that looked like a mushroom cap. I stopped to give a tug on the red and white silk rope and say a short prayer. A group of three Jizo in knitted red caps watched impassively from their plinth on the left of the shrine and a large, glossy crow stared curiously down from the roof, its head cocked slightly to one side.

  Outside, I was hailed by an old man who was squatting on his haunches beside the road. He wore a plum-colored anorak, black canvas shoes with no laces, and a long-peaked, war-vintage army cap. We talked for a few minutes about who I was and where I was going, and then he told me about his own travels, how he used to go away to find seasonal work in big cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, liked them well enough, made some money, but always came back home because "life is better in the place where you are born."

  Across the road, the village harbor was busy with fishermen getting ready to go out in their boats. The old man began talking about the buri, about regular catches of up to 5,000 fish in a day, all weighing between 4 and 7 kilos, and the refrigerated trucks that came to pick them up and distribute them throughout Japan. With harvests of 20,000 kilos of fish a day, Etsumi ought to have been a wealthy place, but it certainly didn't look that way. Large catches were perhaps not quite as frequent as he wanted me to believe, and in any case were a brand new phenomenon. The fish, of course, had always been there, no doubt in even greater quantities, but no-one would have bothered to even try and catch large numbers in the past because there was no distribution system through which to sell them.

  "Are you going out to get buri this morning?" I asked him. The old man shrugged. "I don't know," he answered. This seemed a strange answer, but he rose to his feet, gestured for me to follow and walked over to where a group of younger men was stacking up empty fish boxes and sluicing off the boat decks with pails of seawater. "You can come out with us if you want to," he told me. "Just wait until the boat is ready."

  The sea lay in the harbor like glass, clear to the bottom and dappled here and there with rainbow colors where the men filling their tanks from plastic containers had accidentally splashed fuel into the water. Fish would be coming, and soon: I counted 35 kites on the harbor wall and about the same number on the telegraph wires overhead, all sitting still and bright-eyed with expectation. At a sign from the old man, I stepped aboard and took a place in the stern, out of the way. The engine coughed briefly, then started with a roar. We pulled away from the quay, swung round, and made for the open sea.

  At barely 20 feet long, the boat was much smaller than the ones used by the fishermen of Washizaki. The fishing method was the same, but on a much smaller scale: the net was hauled in, and since the boat had no hold, the fish were dumped straight onto the deck. At first we landed only iwashi (sardines), squid, and mackerel. Some were trapped in the holes of the net, and if they couldn't easily be disentangled, the net was given a rough shake that sometimes cut the fish in half.

  By the time we had hauled up the main net and tipped most of the contents on board, everyone was standing calf deep in fish. Most of them were little silver aji, or horse mackerel, but we also had several hundred sardines, some fat bream, a dozen snapper, some angel fish, a few flying fish, a black species called mejina and another with silver stripes, called shima-dai, or "island bream." "Look here," called the old man, tossing yet another fish towards me. "That's the inada you were asking about." Inada is what buri are called when they are young, so I now understood his answer to the question I had asked him when we were first talking at the roadside: they were going out fishing, yes, but wouldn't know until they got there whether they would get any buri or not.

  Less than an hour after setting off we were back on the quayside sorting out the catch. Someone drove up in a small truck laden with crushed ice, then pulled down the tailgate and shoveled the ice into a pile of shallow wooden boxes. We had about 50 large bream, two or three hundred steel blue mackerel, maybe 500 sardines, and a few thousand of the small, low-value aji. First the larger fish were sorted by species, laid carefully in the boxes, nose to tail, covered with a sheet of blue plastic, and marked with the name of the Etsumi Fishing Cooperative. The humble aji didn't merit the same careful treatment: they were just pushed willy-nilly into the boxes that remained. Finally, each box was weighed, given another shovelful of ice, heaved up onto the back of another truck, lashed down with rope, and driven away. The whole job took less than an hour. It was an ordinary day.

  I thanked the old man for letting me come out with them and indicated that it was now time for me to be getting on my way. He looked up in surprise. "What, without any breakfast?" he asked. While the others had taken care of the packing, he had been squatting on the quay in front of a wooden board laid on the top of an upturned bucket, cutting and filleting fish and throwing the offal into the sea, where the kites swooped down to recover it. "We eat after we finish work, you know," he told me, with a touch of severity. "Over there," he added, pointing toward a large concrete building behind me. "What's your hurry? You do
n't want to leave before breakfast, do you?"

  The building was a two-story affair made of unpainted concrete blocks. Next to the main room, which was piled high with fishing gear, there was a smaller room containing a table and a dozen chairs, and leading off that, a kitchen. The table was covered with a sheet of checkered plastic, and on the wall above it hung a long banner inscribed with a prayer for large catches.

  One by one, as they finished their tasks outside, the fishermen drifted in and joined the daily ritual of making their communal breakfast. To go with the rice, which had been cooking while we had been out in the boats and was now keeping warm in its electric pot, they prepared three enormous dishes — one each of raw squid, raw buri, and pickled radishes. From time to time, chunks of fresh mackerel and other fish were brought in and added to a thick stew that was bubbling away in a heavy, smoke-blackened saucepan on the stove.

  Everyone took part in these tasks except for one thin young man with a sharp, angular face, a mouthful of steel teeth, and shock of untidy black hair. His jobs were pouring everyone else's sake out into small glass tumblers and recording the morning's work in a ledger. As the others worked around him, he sprawled awkwardly over the table on his bony elbows, scratching his head doubtfully as he figured things out on scraps of paper. Having arrived at an answer, he would confirm it with the others before entering it carefully in the ledger. The talk of money was short and spare, conducted in monosyllabic grunts of which I understood little.

  Just as we sat down to eat, the door flew open and another fisherman — not of our party, but dressed in the same thick green waterproof suit and rubber boots — burst into the room, calling out that he needed to use the phone. He was obviously upset — had his boat just sunk? — but whatever the problem was, no-one felt the need to go out and investigate. Instead, they made a place for him at the table, urging him to sit down and eat. For a while he babbled on about his troubles, but the combination of sake and sympathy had its effect; soon he calmed down and even ventured a few sheepish grins.

 

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