Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  My own plan had been to continue north along the coast, but since the weather was fine and I was in no particular hurry, I decided to make a detour of my own and retrace the exile's route. Back in Oda I turned off the main road and took the concrete-paved trail along the bank of a stream and up toward the mountains. On one side stood the village school, its playground bordered with cherry trees, and on the other a small sawmill where a clean, fresh smell wafted out from a newly cut stack of heavy pine boards. A few frogs were having an early-morning rumble by the edges of the paddies and from a telegraph wire above my head came the guttural bark of a crow. Two old women in white bonnets and short rubber boots were already at work in a field, tipping tiny heaps of powdered fertilizer out of a bucket and raking them over the dark soil.

  Beyond the last houses, the Matsugasaki Kaido described a long curve to the left, skirting a group of paddies, and then disappeared into the forest. The pass ahead was neither far nor high, but the climb was steep: here and there among the trees I could see glimpses of the road, which snaked its way up in long loops to right and left. By the look of it, several kilometers of uphill walking lay ahead, so I stopped and dug out the map to see if there might be any alternative. Sure enough, two other tracks were marked, both with steeper gradients but both cutting off a lot of distance, so I took the first one I came to, turning off the road beside a concrete bridge. This new route began as a paved road but reverted to an unmade track within a couple of hundred yards and narrowed sharply as it climbed up into a deeply shaded gully beside a tumbling steam. Soon it was no more than a footpath; here and there it crossed and recrossed the stream on fantastic old log bridges, rotten to the heart and with a profusion of flowers and grasses growing out of their sides like mops of tangled hair.

  After a while the path turned away from the stream, climbed through some trees, and crossed over a grassy shoulder of the mountain to a dilapidated farm where a hunchbacked old woman was busily weeding a small vegetable patch. She raised her head and nodded politely, but without curiosity, as I passed. Farming up here on this exposed, steeply sloping escarpment looked like a strictly subsistence affair; there were a few small paddies on carefully cut terraces, a fenced-in area of stone-bordered beds for vegetables, a few peach trees, and a little black hut fronted by a wire chicken run. Two white ducks with brilliant orange beaks waddled quickly ahead of me along the path and flapped to one side as I went by.

  The path continued to climb, mostly enclosed by trees — pine, chestnut, ash, and an occasional wild cherry — and with so many twists and turns, to say nothing of intersections with other trails, that I kept losing my sense of direction and had to keep checking the map. The accuracy of detail in Japanese maps tends to be patchy at best, but this one had it about right: the path turned obediently east and west where bends were marked and changes in gradient matched the contour lines. Certainly I could never have found my way without it: many of the intersecting trails were omitted for the simple reason that they had never been surveyed. It's easy to think that satellites have solved the problem of surveying on the ground, and it's true that the general picture they give has taken some of the work out of modern mapmaking. But every landscape has some features that don't show up on satellite photos — a path through woods is an obvious example — and others that can be seen but not identified (is it a house? a hotel? a post office?). To get the job right you need corroborative surveying on the ground, and although the tangled mountains of Sado are less rugged than ranges elsewhere in Japan, it would still take 100 surveyors 100 years to map them properly. Which makes it a job that's never going to get done.

  A long, straight stretch followed by a sharp dogleg, faithfully marked, turned up on cue, and I came out of the woods onto another steep escarpment. At its foot, among flowering azalea and dangling bunches of purple wisteria, stood another decrepit-looking farmhouse. Oddly angled timbers provided a frame for cracked and flaking wattle-and-daub walls, tall bunches of grass sprouted from the mangy thatched roof, and a thin plume of smoke curled up into the sky from a crooked chimney. Surrounded by nothing but forest, it looked like the original witch's cottage; for a few moments I stood and stared, as though waiting for a crone in a pointed black hat to hobble out and put a spell on me. But then I spotted a single telegraph wire leading from its terminal under the eaves up into the trees ahead; and following its course I scrambled up the last couple of hundred yards of my shortcut and came back out onto the Matsugasaki Kaido by a small wrecking yard with the rusty corpses of a dozen cars piled together beside a tin shed. There was even an automatic drinks machine by the road with a line of winking red lights along the front panel, inviting me to insert a 100-yen coin and sample the delights of Lotte orange juice; but when I complied, nothing happened.

  The top of the pass was now only a mile or two ahead and the road wound gently up toward it through a forest of pines whose tawny orange trunks were streaked with shadows cast by their own branches. There was little traffic, but the road had been widened here and there so that cars could pass — mostly by blasting chunks out of the mountainside on the sharpest corners. The summit itself was entirely enclosed by trees, so that there was no view in any direction, but I stopped to pass the time of day with an old man who had toiled up from the other side in the company of a ragged, gray-brown mongrel with a long, brushlike tail. The man lived on the central plain, in the town of Hatano, but had been making this journey on foot for years, ever since he had started courting his wife, who was born on the coast in Oda. The idea of a foreigner walking around Sado for pleasure struck him as highly amusing. "What are you carrying that stick for?" he wanted to know. I told him it was to protect myself from fierce dogs and he cackled so loudly that his shoulders shook. "No need for that," he gasped between spasms. "You won't be bothered by dogs here. Not this one, anyway. He's never bitten anyone in his life." Ha ha! Of course not. I was only kidding. Except that — what was it I read in that old book about travel in Japan? "The Japanese dog," wrote the author, F. W. Brinkley, "is a valueless brute. A few months of life suffice to convert him into an ill-shapen, unsightly and useless cur." Of course Brinkley was writing in the wild old days of the 19th century, so he wasn't around when pets in Japan ceased being animals and evolved into fashion accessories. He was too early for the era of the pampered poodle, the carefully groomed beagle pup, the mollycoddled chihuahua, and the plastic pooper scooper. But on Sado, that era had not yet begun. From what I had seen, most of the island dogs were the Brinkley type. I eyed the old man's mutt and it glowered back at me, panting, with a long pink tongue dangling from one side of its slavering jaws.

  700 years ago, when Nichiren came this way in the freezing cold of early winter, dogs were probably the least of his worries. After toiling up to the top of the pass, he came down alongside the Ogura River and stopped to rest at a place called Oumedo. I did the same, slumping on the ground by a huge slab of granite set up to mark his passage. Across the road, the river had been dammed to make a small reservoir for the settlements in the valley below; yellow irises were growing in patches around its banks and an old wisteria dangled its flowers over the surface of the muddy water. There were houses around now, one with the windows already flung wide and a leathery-skinned old man lying on the floor with his head on a small pillow, dozing in the warm, early morning sun.

  Two hours down from the top of the pass, I came to Chokoku-ji, a grand old temple approached up a long flight of wide stone steps flanked by two massive cedars at the entrance. The grounds were crowded with stone lanterns, Jizo statues, and engraved tombstones, all surveyed from the top of a plinth by an image of Fudo Myoo, the "Immovable Wisdom King" and patron of the yamabushi. The statue portrayed a ferocious character scowling angrily, with one fang pointing down and another up, a braid hanging down one side of the head, holding a sword, and surrounded by leaping flames. Fudo is a familiar sight in remote parts of Japan; travelers come across his images along rocky shores, beside waterfalls, in deep gorges, and little-vis
ited mountain valleys. He is an aspect of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and his fierce aspect, somewhat paradoxically, denotes his opposition to violence and his determination to quell it wherever it occurs.

  At the top of the steps, beside the main temple, was a structure like a miniature sports stadium, and inside, completely filling several long shelves, stood hundreds of stone Jizo. They looked exactly like a crowd at a football match, the more so because all their faces were different: some had round heads like Halloween pumpkins, some looked wasted and thin, some were smiling cheerfully, some stared coldly ahead with severe or gloomy expressions, and a few were praying with heads angled slightly forward and their little hands clasped around strings of stone beads. Having come to the temple as a visitor, I felt more as if the roles had been reversed, as if they were spectators awaiting some sort of performance from me.

  Whether Nichiren stopped off at Chokoku-ji is not recorded; if so, it must only have been a brief visit because his guards had orders to deliver him without delay to a village called Tsukahara. Here, it was hoped, he would soon die — and the place of detention at Tsukahara, namely the local cemetery, was just the spot to set the mood. Most of the dead were interred in the usual way, but the bodies of paupers and executed criminals, which no-one had either the money or the inclination to bury, were simply dumped on open ground and left to rot where they lay. There was a small, semi-derelict hut on the site and this was where Nichiren and his one permitted companion were installed.

  That first winter, with little to eat and only straw and rags to ward off the cold, their situation was desperate. A letter scribbled two months after his arrival describes the exile's first impressions. "An icy wind blows here all the time," he wrote, "and although there are some days when the snow does not fall, we never catch so much as a glimpse of the sun. The mountains are infested with robbers; the seas are alive with pirates. The local people are as savage as wild animals. They know nothing of ethical standards, not even the most basic. How could they tell the difference between heresy and truth, between a good teacher and a bad one?"

  Another note, written at about the same time, struck an even more hopeless tone. "A man called Nichiren was taken to Tatsuno-kuchi at midnight on the 12th day of the ninth month last year. There he was beheaded, but his soul remained and afterwards came here to the island of Sado. It wrote these words, surrounded by snow, in the second month of the following year, and leaves them to posterity."

  It is very likely that Nichiren would not have survived that first winter had he not been saved by a characteristic incident in which he won over an enemy who wanted to kill him. An ardent Pure Lander, this man decided to get rid of Nichiren for good and took to hanging around the hut armed with a sword, looking for a suitable opportunity. But after a while he began to feel ashamed of lurking in the bushes, waiting for a chance to kill an unarmed man; and when he overheard Nichiren reciting the scriptures, he decided to try reason instead of violence. Face to face, he would argue things out and cure the dissident of his errors. Of course, the outcome was the opposite: Nichiren soon converted the man, whose name was Abutsubo, and also his wife Sennichini. The couple then took on the dangerous responsibility of supplying him with food. In a letter written to Sennichini some years later, Nichiren remembered their courage and their kindness. "The authorities and the Amidhists kept watch to stop anyone visiting my hut," he wrote, "but you loaded food onto Abutsubo's back and sent him to me time and again during the night. I felt as if my own dear mother had been reborn there on Sado."

  Other people on Sado also had plans for disposing of the newly arrived heretic. Some of the local priests favored the direct method: they wanted to take advantage of his unprotected status and put him to death. So they approached the local lord, Homma Rokurozaemon, and asked him to do the job for them. But he refused to allow it, telling the priests he had received an official government directive that specifically stated Nichiren should not be harmed. Instead of an execution, he proposed a debate. That way, Nichiren's poisonous doctrines could be exposed to the public ridicule they deserved.

  After some consideration, the priests accepted this suggestion and the debate was arranged. A large crowd attended — ecclesiastics of all ranks from the island's temples and monasteries, Homma Rokurozaemon, several local notables, and a good-sized lay audience as well. Naturally, the situation was meat and drink to an experienced debater like Nichiren. "One by one, my adversaries came forward and expounded their doctrines," he reported later, "while I patiently answered them in turn, establishing precisely what their propositions were and then cross-examining them. I only needed to ask one or two questions at the most to shut them up completely. They were quite pathetic, far inferior even to the priests in Kamakura — I defeated them as easily as a sword cutting through a melon. In their ignorance, they muddled not only quotations but also sources of doctrine, unable to distinguish between sutras, treatises, and commentaries. As I demonstrated their errors, some exclaimed in amazement while others turned pale and could not answer. Some even renounced their beliefs on the spot, taking off their robes and beads and throwing them on the ground."

  The tide of Nichiren's affairs had started to turn, and when spring came round, a new optimism bloomed with it. The official restrictions on his life were eased; he was allowed to move from Tsukahara to a village called Ichinosawa, where he became the houseguest of a prosperous local farmer. Every morning he walked down the hill to the little temple of Jisso-ji to greet the rising sun, and although he complained that "there is very little writing paper here on Sado," he managed to acquire enough to begin composing his well-known mandalas, in which the names of Buddhas, boddhisatvas, and other aspects of the godhead are inscribed in a circular form around the familiar title phrase of the Lotus Sutra.

  From time to time he engaged in fresh debates with the local monks, which usually led to him gaining new converts. After 1272, he was allowed to begin receiving visits from his disciples, who had cautiously started to regroup as the persecution against them in Kamakura abated. With their support, his evangelical efforts were increasingly successful, and pictorial evidence of this can still be seen in some of Sado's principal temples: many contain votive paintings of him at work, preaching in the snow to groups of ragged islanders with spiky white beards, or receiving their petitions in rocky shoreside caves.

  The name Tsukahara is now only in occasional use: today the village is called Niibo and a large temple called Kompon-ji now stands on the site where Nichiren was first detained. At the front is a large, carefully laid out garden that illustrates aspects of paradise, centering on a clutch of lotus flowers in the Pond of Mercy. "All about the Pond," as one account describes it, "wondrous flowers bloom, each one like a different-colored jewel. The blues and yellows sparkle, the reds and whites vibrate, and all shimmer in response to the slightest breezes. Palaces and pavilions, trees decked with blossom, trilling birds and celestial angels playing heavenly music complete the brilliant and colorful scene."

  What with the numerous Ponds of Mercy, the cute little bridges and waterwheels, the variegated patches of moss, and the neatly fenced pathways, the brilliant and colorful scene was altogether too contrived for this outsider's taste. To some degree, all religious sects consist of caged people who spend a lot of time congratulating each other on the quality of the bars; but in the context of Japanese Buddhism in general, Nichiren-shu's love affair with ornamentation seems excessive to the point of perversity, in striking contrast to the cool austerity that dignifies the temples of its rivals. However, this view is not wholly just: the sect's association with wealth — but not privilege — is a direct legacy of its peculiar history. Originally favored by the poor, by Edo times it had become dominant among merchants and traders, then legally defined as the lowest of the four social classes; and when Japanese cities were ravaged by fire and earthquake, as happened all too often, it was not Pure Land ritual or Zen serenity that repaired the damage, but Nichiren-shu money. Today, aware
ness of the practical value of wealth persists, along with a vigorous popularity: I counted 14 large, air-conditioned buses outside Kompon-ji, from which eager groups of smartly dressed followers with notebooks and cameras were led round the grounds by elegant young women in crisp dark blue uniforms and snow-white gloves. These guides conducted their tours at a brisk pace, stopping at all the right places to explain the architectural features and other points of interest described in the brochures. A complementary building of some kind was being constructed on a patch of land next door to the temple, and, although it had not yet taken shape, I felt sure that it was destined to be a Nichiren Lecture Hall, a Nichiren Training Center or possibly even a five-star Nichiren Hotel. Lavish spending, fueled as ever by contributions from compliant devotees, proceeds side by side with the ardent evangelism that is Nichiren-shu's oldest tradition. Outsiders disapprove: such behavior is immodest, vulgar, un-Japanese. Affecting a calm indifference, the followers ignore them.

  Inside the temple, the glitter had been slapped on in bucketfuls. Gleaming with gold and glowing with red lacquer, the focus was a complicated multilevel altar structure made up of boxes and shelves, drawers and lecterns, drapes and ribbons, golden flowers and golden bells. And while I was standing there looking at it, feeling faintly sick, a young monk sidled up beside me and inquired where I had come from. From Matsugasaki, I told him. I walked here over the mountains, the same way Nichiren had come. At this he took a step back, looking completely amazed.