Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  Adjoining the garden was a yard with a couple of battered pickup trucks and three trail bikes parked together. A bare-chested man with a long ponytail was building a line of wooden steps from one edge of the yard down to the door of a long, two-story building — "the residential block," said Morita. There were two other buildings as well, one of which served as an office. The other was the group's practice hall. Morita pushed open one of the tall wooden doors and gestured to me to follow.

  Inside, the hall looked like a cross between a gymnasium and a church. From the tops of heavy timber pillars against the walls rose multilayered glulam beams that curved up to form a row of five giant arches supporting the ceiling. The beams, floor, and walls were all made of some light-colored wood, evenly grained and smoothly varnished, and the windows were flanked by long, heavy curtains of dark blue velvet. All around, neatly stacked in readiness for the next session, were the tools of the group's percussive trade.

  At the back, mounted on heavy black frames with solid wooden wheels, stood the two colossal o-daiko, or "great drums," each one the size of an asteroid, hewn from the trunk of a mighty zelkova tree and covered at each end by the hide of a whole cow. Their awesome size gave them the otherworldly aspect of sacred clan totems and a sound to match — a thunderous, bone-quivering boom like the pulse of the cosmos itself.

  At a suitably respectful distance, junior members of the arsenal were stacked along the walls like military subordinates: fat, shiny brown chu-daiko (middle drums); matt black o-kedo (marching drums), built of separate staves bound tightly together to give a lighter, sharper sound; and the smaller shime-daiko (tie-up drums), whose skin tension is adjustable, and has to be tightened each time they are used. To demonstrate what this involved, Morita picked one off the top of the stack and sat on the floor, gripping it with his feet and hauling on the thick ropes while an imaginary partner pounded them into submission with a heavy club.

  "It was wonderful, playing the drums," said Morita when we stepped outside. "You can't compare it with anything, the way it takes you over, body and soul. But it's harder work than anything I'd ever done before. I still play now and again, informally, but I couldn't manage it full-time anymore. Arthritis," he added with a grimace, pointing to his knees, "or something like that. But I like messing about in the garden, working at my own pace. And my place is nearby — just a few minutes' walk away."

  "You don't live here?"

  "No, I moved out when I stopped playing. Rented a little house in a village down the road. Three rooms with a balcony on the top floor, overlooking the sea. It's quiet, of course — too quiet for some, I suppose. But I like it. And it doesn't cost much."

  "Could you find a place to buy if you wanted to?" I asked him. "Are houses cheap here?"

  He laughed. "Well yes, they're cheap enough. Very cheap, in fact. The problem about buying a place isn't the money. It's that people who own property don't want to sell it. All these new roads being built, and new harbors — it makes the islanders think that prosperity is coming. Crazy to sell in that situation. And although locals can find a place to buy easily enough — a young couple getting married, for instance — it's not the same for outsiders. I mean people from the mainland wouldn't get anything. At least, not until everyone in the village agreed. And that could take years. I daresay I could buy a place in a year or two — that's to say if I had the money, and if I really wanted to. But I don't."

  There was a moment's silence, a moment in which Morita looked at me with his head bent slightly to one side and a quizzical look of enquiry on his face, as if to ask if there was anything else I wanted to know. Then he took Snake Frightener from where I had left it, leaning against the wall of the rehearsal hall, and handed it to me.

  "Here you are, pilgrim," he said with a grin. "Don't forget this. You'll be going on to Ogi now." It was a gentle dismissal, not a question. "Used to be the most important town on Sado, Ogi did. In the old days, I mean. Because it's the only place with a really good natural harbor. And that made it the main port in every other way, too — bars, flophouses, gambling, girls. . . Everything. Lots of trade — not just gold from the old mine, but everything else as well. Not any more, of course. Nowadays Sawada is the administrative capital. Mano has most of the hotels, most of the tourists, and I suppose Ryotsu would be the principal town, the "biggest" town, because it's the main ferry port. Funny thing, though — Ogi still has more life, more action, than any of them. Late at night, it's the only place on the island with anything happening."

  I shouldered my pack, thanked him for showing me round, and shook his hand. Then we each took a pace back and bowed to each other. "Send me a postcard sometime," he said. I turned away and set off up the track through the pine trees to the road on the ridge above us.

  A couple of hundred yards ahead, the road swung to the left, but there was a narrow path that went straight ahead, directly toward the sea, signposted to a place called Inukamidaira. I followed its steep downward slope, between clumps of blue hyacinth and wild strawberry just coming into fruit, until it emerged into a tiny, sheltered bay with a wide, curving wall of pitted lava on one side. Below this wall was a broad ledge of rock where an old fisherman in a grubby singlet and khaki shorts was patiently untangling a large, russet-colored net and hanging it up on a bamboo frame. On the other side of the bay were three tiny paddies planted with young green shoots of rice. One of the paddies had eight kites standing around its edge, obviously waiting for a frog to show itself: they stood stock still, deep in concentration, as brown and sinister as a bunch of Chicago hit men in raincoats, waiting for their target to come out of a restaurant. They ignored me as I passed quietly by on the path, which wound this way and that among the rocks for a short way and then climbed back up the cliff and back onto the road, a little way short of a brand-new bridge marked with a sign that said "Shiomibashi."

  The bridge spanned a pretty little bay formed by the curve of craggy lava cliffs topped with grass, wild flowers, and a few stunted pines. At the far end, a flight of concrete steps led down to a narrow, stony beach and a patch of glassy-smooth sea decorated by three or four tiny islets. I ran down the steps, threw my clothes in a heap on the shingle, and plunged into the water. It was cold and clear, falling away to deep chasms between the islets. Every rock was studded with shells, and when I dived to examine them I startled a fat brown octopus from its hole beneath a ledge; it wriggled away and moved briskly off with strong, pumping strokes of its muscular body, trailing long tentacles in its wake.

  The old port of Ogi, where I planned to stop for the night, was now only a few miles distant — near enough to be in sight if not for the intervening cliffs and headlands. Rather than climb back up to the bridge, I continued along the shore, clambering over rocks and jumping over inlets, crossing the widest by means of a heavy log jammed across it like a bridge. The rocks here were pure lava, as sharp and gritty as compacted cinders, and eroded into the most fantastic shapes I had seen anywhere on the island so far. Two or three times I stopped in amazement at what looked like prehistoric relief carvings with hieroglyphic captions on distant patches of cliffside; but each time I approached them they turned out to be natural formations, jumbles of bumps, gullies, and crevices chiseled out of faults in the rock by storm-flung waves and tearing winter winds. Here and there at my feet were fissures and sinkholes, some as small as teacups, where enough soil had collected to sustain anemones, asters, and a new, southern species of lily with short, tough, leafy stems and a speckled, reddish orange flower. Eventually the shore widened out into a broad ledge where old lava flows had run down to the sea and been frozen in their original form by sudden contact with the cold water, leaving successions of low, stony, jagged-edged wavelets as bare and dusty as the surface of the moon. This ledge continued round the base of the cliff into a small bay and rejoined the road from Shiomibashi Bridge at the little village of Shukunegi.

  Even by Sado's standards, Shukunegi is a relic from another era. Once renowned as a shipbuilding c
enter, it's now more like a ghost town, still and silent, with old wooden houses packed together along streets too narrow for any vehicle wider than a bicycle. Some are deep gullies covered by slabs of stone with streams gurgling beneath them, others no more than alleys cobbled with smooth boulders and bordered by chilly patches of deep green moss. The houses are ramshackle, of unpainted timber split by the weather, with ill-fitting doors, cracked window shutters, and walls that lean inwards or outwards at alarming angles. The single modern building is a combined general-store-and-post-office beside the road; I called in to buy a can of beer and sat to drink it on the only patch of open ground I could find, a small grassy spot outside a temple. A sign in front announced the presence of a statue of the goddess Kannon, made by the mason Gobei, and the grave of Shibata Shuzo, a famous local cartographer.

  There was no-one around except a large black-and-white cat sitting on the bridge in the sunshine licking an extended hind leg. After a few minutes, two elderly women carrying battered straw baskets shuffled quietly past me but didn't look in my direction. The absence of modern development in the village is deliberate, and the studied indifference to strangers likewise; yet despite its neglected appearance, Shukunegi is more than accustomed to the attentions of outsiders. Like other out-of-the-way places on Sado, it is often used by television companies in need of old-fashioned locations for shooting period dramas, and although this brings welcome revenue, it also brings coachloads of eager fans who want to stop, explore, and photograph the actual spots (some even marked with plaques) where they have seen innocent maidens pursued and kidnapped, and top-knotted villains cut down by the flashing swords of samurai heroes.

  Just outside the village I came to a long, low wooden building that looked like a schoolhouse, with a painted signboard inscribed with the words "Sado Folklore Museum." An old man with round glasses perched on the end of his nose sold me a ticket and waved me inside to explore. There were no signs for visitors and no coherent attempt to sort things into categories: the exhibits were simply crammed together in a succession of dusty, cavernous rooms. Like many provincial museums, and not only in Japan, this one contained a handful of valuable and interesting items mixed up with large quantities of junk. One room offered a display of daily work-tools: mattocks, harrows, winnowing baskets, huge black-toothed logging saws, battered old lanterns crusted with rust, and several long tridents for fishing. An old sepia photograph pinned to the wall showed half a dozen women brandishing these instruments as they waded up to their waists in the sea, while in the background, others were shown collecting seaweed, apparently scratching it off rocks with fingers curved like claws.

  The next room contained several elaborately made wooden chests with tiny drawers, two large looms, and, without any obvious connection, a vivid display of paintings which illustrated the horrors of hell. One showed half a dozen monstrous snakes, grinning with hideous delight at the sight of people being dropped upside down into a deep pit; another pictured screaming victims being boiled alive in cauldrons of hot oil. Elsewhere, sinners were shown being pounded flat by demons with huge hammers, others staked out and sizzling away on red-hot grills, and still others being chased naked through a forest of spiky trees by ferocious, fire-breathing dogs. One unfortunate, chained to a tree, was having his guts slowly extracted by a horned figure with a pair of giant pliers, another was being carefully chopped into small pieces by a goblin with an axe, and a final group, some of whom looked remarkably like members of the incumbent government, were being slowly squashed between two enormous flat rocks by a pair of laughing demons.

  Immediately adjacent to this bloodthirsty display was a collection of shrine paraphernalia: old images of Buddha, their paint cracked and chipped, some ceramic bells, a few battered drums, eleven candlesticks still crusted with wax, and, curiously, two beautifully carved wooden penises, considerably larger than life, and two wooden forearms with closed fists of exactly the same dimensions. That the penises were fertility-cult objects I could easily accept, but the forearms had me baffled. In the absence of explanation, instruments of masturbation, real or symbolic, was the best guess I could make. If I was right, then local standards of decency were perverse: on the wall above were several old photographs of islanders at work, yet the old custom of women working bare-breasted out of doors, which was still normal practice on Sado up to World War II, was not shown — vetoed, perhaps, by some modern-minded functionary who considered the idea improper.

  Outside in the afternoon sunshine, the road to Ogi swung round in a long curve through neat paddies where young rice plants stood in gleaming rectangles of water as still and orderly as companies of soldiers on parade. At a track that led off to the left, a signpost proposed a short diversion to Iwaya Cave, the other end of the trans-Sado tunnel supposedly excavated by the miracle-working priest Kobo Daishi; the other end, at Iwayaguchi, was the cave where I had stopped on the second day of my journey and seen the mysterious broken-necked doll seated by the edge of a dark pool of water. The distance between the two caves was nearly the length of the whole island, so it seemed worth-while to stop off and see what kind of terminus Kobo Daishi had supplied at this end of his masterwork.

  The path climbed steeply through a thick forest and came out on an open area of grass with Gobei the mason's 88 stone Buddhas ranged round its edge in a semicircle. The cave was a tall crack in the cliff opening into a high-ceilinged chamber with shelves cut into the stone walls and crammed with hundreds of Jizo figures. I examined them as best I could in the dim light and noticed that they were all slightly different; perched together on their stone ledges, with heads inclined this way and that, some with their hands folded in their laps and others with a hand or arm upraised, they looked for all the world like a gathering of ancient ecclesiastics who had come to the cave for a conference and been turned to stone in the midst of their discussions. As at Iwayaguchi, the depths of the cave were in complete darkness, making it impossible to tell how far it extended.

  Another path led off into the forest from near the mouth of the cave, heading back toward the road but signposted to "Shiawase Jizo." This turned out to be an enormous statue, some 25 feet high, that stood on a plinth at the top of a steeply sloping enclosure. Being recently made, it still had a hard-edged, machine-finished look, but a few seasons of exposure to Sado's weather would soon give it the patina of age appropriate to its position and significance.

  Just what that significance might be was hard to guess; apart from the main statue, the compound contained a number of tiny huts, shaped like shrines, surrounded by hundreds of Jizo figures and also penis-and-testicles talismans. Made to a consistent pattern, the penises were short and chubby, pointing upwards at a slight angle to the vertical, like missiles ready for launching, and resting on bases formed by the two balls. Some even had little faces carved between the balls, which stared back at me with cheerful grins when I bent to examine them. One of the shrines appeared to be dedicated to the local tengu; as well as the standard masks there was a beautiful old head of the original member of the species, the birdlike karasu-tengu, with holes for the eyes, two sharply pointed little ears, and a good, strong, flesh-tearing beak. By chance or design, the same altar was also furnished with several more of the now-familiar penis emblems, including one magnificent specimen carved from some dark hardwood, about three inches in diameter, with every knotty vein in the stalk and every fold of skin at the base of the helmet carefully, even lovingly, defined. At the bottom of the hill stood a wooden shack that contained the shrine shop, but it was closed; peering through the window I could see racks of post-cards, pens, dolls, and key rings dangling white or black plastic versions of male genitalia to the standard design. Before the war, shrines like this where women could pray for a successful pregnancy were common all over Japan, but today they are seen less often. Still, if this one was typical of the enthusiasm with which fertility was usually invoked, the power of suggestion must surely have had some effect. With interestingly erect penises in such profus
ion, many of the supplicants must hardly have been able to wait until they got home.

  The sun hung low in the sky, spreading red and peach-colored streaks through the clouds on the horizon, as I turned the last corner on the plateau above Ogi and started down the hill into the town. Coming the other way was a young teenage boy in his black school uniform, pushing a bicycle with one hand and concentrating deeply on a magazine held in the other. He passed by without noticing my presence, but close enough for me to see what he was reading so intently; it was a full-page cartoon depicting a schoolgirl, her uniform torn in shreds from her body, spreadeagled on a table, and being ingeniously violated by four or five blue-jawed psychopaths at the same time.

  From the top of the hill, Ogi's suitability as a port was immediately obvious. A great arc of cliff lay round the south side of the harbor, like an encircling arm protecting it from the weather, and the sea in the bay lay smooth and still with opalescent patches glinting on the surface. The shore here continues flat, or gently sloping, well back from the sea, and the town gives the impression of being built on just the right scale: not cramped and poky like Shukunegi, nor dank and gloomy like gold-mining Aikawa, nor with the sprawling, unplanned, municipal-bus-station look of Sawada, but with streets of a sensible width and plenty of open spaces. On a bluff overlooking the sea is a large park with shady walks along tree-lined pathways surrounding an area of open grass — the site of Kodo's annual Earth Celebration — and at the foot of the same hill stands Kisaki Shrine, a beautifully proportioned building roofed with curving, reddish brown tiles, decorated with ceramic chrysanthemums, and flanked by two stone lanterns half-covered by gray-green lichens.

  Despite occasional signs of halfhearted repair and refurbishment, the buildings along Ogi's main street were recognizably made in the old Echigo style, using heavy wooden boards for the walls and thick wooden shingles weighted with stones for the roof. The older shops occupied the front rooms of long, slim houses built at right angles to the street and with the kitchen and living area at the back, reached by a narrow, dirt-floor passage. Stopping off at a grocery store where oranges, cabbages, pumpkins, bananas, and fat shoots of young bamboo were displayed in boxes on the street, I went inside and called out to the owner; a few moments later she hobbled out along her dark, low passage, sold me a couple of oranges, and gave me directions to a little inn down by the port. I found it next door to a souvenir shop. The rate was cheap, and cheaper still if I didn't want a meal provided.