Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  At the next village, Osaki, there was a small open square with a new concrete supermarket at one side and a drinks machine by the door where I stopped for another can of iced coffee. Groups of teenage students were gathering in the square and setting off down the hill in twos and threes on their bicycles, heading for school in Hamochi. One of them, bolder than the rest, came over to me and pointed to a sign beside the shop that read "Bunya Ningyo no Sato." "Bunya, bunya," he urged me. And then, to the accompaniment of guffaws from his pals, he broke into English. "You go now, yes, very good!" An old woman came out of the supermarket carrying a crate of empty beer bottles. "You can't go yet," she said. "It doesn't open until 10 o'clock." I decided to skip it, although the museum might well have repaid the wait; Sado's bunya has a national reputation and even official designation as An Important Intangible Folk Art. Essentially a rustic version of bunraku, Japan's classical puppet theater, it developed a distinctive local character after being brought to Sado from Kyoto in the early 17th century. The stories are sung or chanted by a narrator offstage, while puppets, operated by human attendants, perform the action. Originally the stories were expressed in ballads, often with a moral theme, but later the repertoire grew to include specially composed bunya-bushi, more complex political tales or war stories.

  A little way beyond Osaki, the road climbed a final slope and crossed a level plateau dotted with outcrops of wild flowers — buttercups, yellow chrysanthemums, a few deep blue hyacinths, clumps of ox-eye daisies and orange lilies. It was just 9 o'clock when I reached Shimakawano, the junction with the main route across southern Sado from Akadomari to the central plain. Right on the corner stood a bus stop and hunched over their sticks beside it, like Macbeth's three witches out for a morning excursion, were three old ladies in baggy work trousers and identical olive green cardigans. They called out to me as I went past — what was I doing? Where was I making for? The idea of someone going any distance on foot seemed to astonish them, as though reviving memories from another era. They listened in silence while I explained myself, and when I had finished they threw up their hands in polite amazement and then bowed low in unison, saying "Gokurosan!" — "thank you for taking the trouble!"

  It was easy walking to Akadomari, downhill most of the way, and a recent road improvement scheme had added a pavement along one side where I could keep out of the way of the passing traffic — or would have been able to, had any traffic gone by. The banks on each side had been planted with bushes of pink, trumpet-shaped flowers called utsugi: the light green, oval-shaped leaves had serrated edges tinged with red, as if dipped in blood, and the flowers grew in tight clusters, 20 or 30 bunched together on a single stem. Passing the last of these bushes, I rounded a corner and found myself beside a deep pond fed by a stream that gushed out between two rocks. Instantly there was a loud plop! followed by several more as a group of frogs, which had been basking in the sun, dove out of sight into the muddy water. Perhaps it was exactly the same experience that inspired the poet Basho to compose his most famous haiku:

  The old pond

  A frog jumps in -

  Sound of water.

  The coincidence was pleasing and not, I thought, over-presumptuous — although in his book Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki warns the "uninitiated" against daring to assume any such mutuality of perception with Japan's greatest poet. "What," he asks, "can most people who are not educated to appreciate a haiku generally see in the enumeration of such familiar objects as an old pond, a jumping frog and the sound resulting therefrom? . . . I am afraid that the uninitiated may not be able to recognize anything poetically enlivening in those seventeen syllables so loosely strung." The answer, I guess, is that you have to be there. For a more encouraging (not to say more cheerful) point of view, you can't do much better than the Zen master Sengai, who lived a century or so later than Basho. One of his paintings shows a frog crouched beneath a banana tree (basho in Japanese) with the following haiku brushed above it:

  If there were a pond here

  I'd jump in

  So Basho could hear!

  Still chewing over this tasty morsel of Zen humor, I came to Togo-ji, a modest temple set back from the road on a hillside above Akadomari. Tall clumps of yellow and blue irises were growing in a watery garden of rocks and pools, but the temple door was firmly shut and the windows covered with blue-painted shutters, as if the priest and his acolytes had all gone away. Close to the entrance gate was a red torii gate and others beyond that with a narrow footpath passing beneath them; the path climbed steeply up to a shrine in the form of a small, glass-fronted hut set on concrete blocks. Inside lay an old drum and two drumsticks, implements for summoning another member of Sado's badger-god family, the mujina Zentatsu.

  Togo-ji is a Zen temple, and local folklore depicts Zentatsu as an amiable dunce who spent his time making unsuccessful attempts to catch out the abbot with Zen-style questions on the nature of reality. Taking up a position in the kitchen doorway one day, he called out "Hey, Master! What would you say I'm doing — coming in or going out?" Whichever answer the abbot gave, Zentatsu planned to say he meant the other. Instead the abbot picked up a heavy stick and said "Tough question, Zentatsu. Here's another, to help you find the answer yourself. Am I going to hit you over the head with this stick or am I not?" Another time, Zentatsu peeped through the shutters in the early morning and saw the abbot making fire with a flint and steel to light the lanterns for the morning service. "Which one produces the fire?" called out the pesky badger. "The flint or the steel?" "I'll tell you," replied the abbot, "if you can answer this: are you the child of your father or of your mother?" Like other mujina, Zentatsu inspires more good-humored tolerance than irritation: even now, the monks of Togo-ji keep a fire burning day and night in the kitchen so that he can come in and warm himself, and every year on September 5 they troop down to his shrine by the gate and conduct a little ceremony in his honor.

  By the time I got down to Akadomari it was close to midday and the sun was burning hot. What I really wanted was a meal, but there was no place to get one: I found three restaurants between one end of town and the other, but with the tourist season not yet under way, they were all firmly closed and shuttered. Even the port was still and quiet except for a group of wiry men in army caps and green rubber boots, who were busy unloading polystyrene boxes of prawns from a fishing boat. Business was evidently good: many of the houses nearby were large and finely built, with deep porches, heavy slatted doors, latticed windows, and newly double-glazed verandahs overlooking well-kept gardens where climbing roses clung to the walls and crimson azaleas flared up from the depths of varnished wooden tubs. One verandah had a long bamboo pole slung between two supports: at one end was the family washing while at the other were three huge fish, of different varieties, gutted and hung up by strings through their gills to dry in the sun. Next door, the neighbors were building a garage: ready-mixed concrete was being unloaded from a mixer truck under the supervision of a thin-faced man who slouched against the doorpost with a cigarette glued to his bottom lip, while a woman who was sixty if she was a day labored away bent double, spreading out the heavy gray sludge with a shovel.

  Eventually I found a small food store that sold me two rice balls and a large can of beer, which I consumed while looking in at the window of a nearby carpenter's shop. The owner was preparing planks of cedar with a long wooden plane, leaning into his strokes and singing along with the radio at the top of his voice. Above his head, several bunches of onions dangled from nails driven into the beams of the ceiling. When I called out and asked him for some water to refill my empty bottle, he stopped planing and looked at me suspiciously, then pointed to a long coil of green hose attached to a tap by the door. He watched while I filled the bottle, and then, without asking my destination, pointed down the road that led out of town. "That way," he said urgently, "that's the way for you!"

  A signpost announced that the distance to Oda, the next place of any size, was exactly 8 kilometers. For no pa
rticular reason, this suddenly struck me as an immensely long way. The sun was still blazing down, I was tired from walking through the mountains, my feet hurt, and I could see the road stretching ahead along a coast as empty and desolate as on the day of creation; on one side an unscalable wall of steep cliff and on the other an empty expanse of glittering blue sea. The idea began to come over me that I was entirely alone here, that there was no-one around, nor ever had been, or that at least all the local inhabitants had gone away in a body, perhaps to avoid some impending calamity of which only I was ignorant. No traffic passed by in either direction, no children played in the cottage gardens, no graybeards sat out in the sunshine, no-one was working in the fields — there were no fields — and no birds flew past in the sky, not a seagull, not a kite, not even a crow. Trudging along with my head down, I passed into a kind of stupor tinged with melancholy. I sensed the sadness of Sado, island of exile, dumping ground for Japan's Unwanted, and of the peculiar desolation in which they dug in, waited, and hoped — many to molder and die, only a few to survive and return home. Scratching out a daily existence was a full-time occupation, an achievement in itself, made harder and lonelier by the perception of spiritual doom, of remorse, guilt, and shame, of agonized longings, bitter memories, blighted destinies. Whatever their situation, many exiles must have at least started out with hope and resolution, fired perhaps by the bitterness of perceived injustice, thirsty for revenge, determined to survive and one day recover their place in the world. . . But as months and years went by and no hint of pardon came, the realization would have grown that they were truly abandoned, that exile meant more than separation from society — it meant oblivion. In time, as memories dimmed, ties with the past began to fray and snap; the tough business of daily survival would absorb all their attention, bitterness would fade, vengefulness dissolve, hopes decay. To an educated, sophisticated individual, the mental damage would be severe and permanent; descending at a stroke from the heights of privilege to a life no better than a goat's, deprived of familiar culture, quarantined from all intercourse, and condemned into the bargain to cold, hunger and fear, the mind would shut down or go mad. Skills and abilities withered from disuse, forms of behavior lost their relevance, blocks of knowledge fell away from the brain like pillars of ice crumbling from the face of a glacier into the sea.

  There was no sound in the still air but my own labored breathing and the sharp, regular clunk! of my stick on the tarmac. Rain-blackened wooden shacks sagging with age, nets spread out to dry on the seawall, battered dinghies drawn up on the shingle, all passed me by as though in a film, as though I was watching all this happen to someone else. And it was while I was in this soporific state, not miserable exactly but weary and dulled, that my eye was suddenly caught by a movement on the road and I stopped in my tracks as if frozen.

  It was a snake, not three feet in front of me, with half its body in the grassy verge and the rest stretched out across the asphalt to investigate what looked like a dead vole. Dark, fat, and shiny, it had distinctive markings along its back, but I couldn't remember what they signified: was it the poisonous mamushi or some other, harmless species? I had come across some fairly big snakes before in Japan, though not on Sado, but this was a whopper — six or eight feet long, perhaps more — how much was hidden in the grass? — and as thick as a good-size drainpipe. In a flash, my torpor evaporated. I was as wide awake and tightly wound as a spy crawling at night through an enemy camp. For a few interminable seconds we stared at each other without moving; then I gingerly took a couple of paces back, gripping Snake Frightener with both hands and wondering whether I would do better to try and get in a good clout on its head or simply fling away the stick and run for my life.

  Neither expedient proved necessary: as I moved back, the snake unfroze and began to turn away. Raising the front half of its body slightly from the ground, it swung round 180 degrees toward the verge, undulating and slithering as its glossy scales struggled for purchase on the paper-flat tarmac of the road. In what must have been only a few short seconds, it had slid away and disappeared into the coarse grass with a whispery rustle, as smoothly as toothpaste squeezed from a giant's tube.

  For a long moment after it had gone, I stood there holding Snake Frightener in a tight grip. Several times over the last few days I had teased myself for the slightly ludicrous, even melodramatic, conceit of carrying along this pilgrim's staff, and more than once had been made to feel sheepish by the good-humored banter of others. Not any more. No sir, not for another second. Without any doubt it was the sound of the stick that had told the snake I was coming and caused it to make that first slight movement that had caught my eye. But for that I would certainly have taken one more step and trodden right on its sleek, fat body before realizing it was there.

  A good sharp fright changes everything, and I walked on in a completely renewed and cheerful frame of mind. Now it seemed that there were birds and flowers around after all, and people too: as I came abreast of a substantial modern house fronted with large picture windows, a battered blue pickup pulled off the road into the driveway and a middle-aged couple got out and bade me a cheerful greeting. "My, you look hot and tired!" exclaimed the woman. "Here, come inside with us and take a rest. We've got some warabi — look, we've just been up to pick it in the mountains!" And she held out a piece of newspaper on which lay a small pile of little green plants that looked like young shoots of bracken.

  The house was an inn, and although they hadn't yet opened for the season, the man said they would gladly put me up if I wanted to stay for a few days. While the wife scuttled about preparing the warabi and bringing ice-cold cans of beer from the fridge, the husband dug an old school atlas out of a cupboard and fumbled for his glasses. "America," he muttered as he thumbed slowly through the pages, "America. . . Now where has it gone? Ah! Here it is. America. And here," he added triumphantly, pointing with his finger, "is Ohio. Ohio is a state. There's a university there. That's where our son is, right now. He's studying English. When he comes back, he's going to be a high school teacher."

  I thought they might be disappointed to find that I wasn't American and had never even been to Ohio, but it didn't really register. As a foreigner, they expected me to know all about it anyway. I struggled to remember something — anything would do. There was a big river in Ohio, I knew that. And steel mills. Pittsburgh — was that right? Or was that Pennsylvania? And that other place — what was it called? Ah yes, Cleveland! They were pleased when I mentioned Cleveland. And presidents. More American presidents had come from Ohio than from any other state. That must signify something. But what? And anyway, which ones were they? I couldn't recall a single one. But it didn't matter. I was a foreigner — an honorary American. By showing hospitality to me, they could pay something back to all the nameless residents of Ohio who were even then showering their son with kindness and generosity.

  While we ate the warabi and drank the beer, the wife announced that they had a dog that could sing. I had already noticed a sandy colored mutt out in the yard — I was keeping half an eye on it because it had come over to the verandah a couple of times to have a good sniff of my boots, and I wanted to make sure it didn't piss on them as well. "You watch," she said. "I'll just tell it to sing, and then it will. Go on, then!" she called. "Sing!" And sure enough, the dog stood back, threw his muzzle up vertically toward the sky, opened his jaws, and let out a ghastly, high-pitched, crooning wail. "Do it again!" commanded his mistress, as the sound died away. So the dog did it again.

  "That's enough now," interrupted the husband. "It's time for that TV program. Let's switch it on." So we all poured out more beer and swiveled round to face the TV. At first, I couldn't understand what was going on — the program seemed to be some kind of sales pitch, delivered by a matronly lady in a white pharmacist's uniform. For the first few minutes, her ample face filled the screen, but then the camera panned back to show her standing by a table and introducing the products. They were all items of equipment to cope with
incontinence in the elderly: bottles and tubes, balloon-like undergarments, folded pieces of soft plastic, absorbent pads, and mysteriously shaped containers.

  The husband watched with rapt attention, but his wife soon got bored. "Have you got a map?" she asked me. "You can't walk about on Sado without a map, you know." I assured her that I had a map, but she didn't take any notice. "Here, you can have this one," she said, reaching for a brochure that lay on top of a pile of magazines. "It's the one we give to all the guests who stay here. Otherwise they wouldn't know where to go, would they?" She opened the brochure out on the table. It showed a schematic outline of Sado with smiling little cartoon fish marking the best fishing places, smiling little swimmers indicating the best bathing places, and brightly colored little boats showing where you could catch a tourist launch and go out sightseeing along the coast. As a map for driving it was useless and for walking, completely useless. I thanked her profusely and stowed it carefully away in a pocket of my pack.