Sado: Japan's Island in Exile

by Angus Waycott

  By the time the next village came in sight I had been walking for more than twelve hours and could hardly manage another step. My feet felt like lumps of raw meat and I was leaning my full weight on Snake Frightener, all snake-frightening and dog-bashing duties suspended. If I couldn't find an inn here, the hell with it. I couldn't go any further; if necessary I would scramble down to the beach and crash out on the stones.

  "Hey, what's happened to you? You look exhausted!" I looked up and saw a bespectacled young man in a green tracksuit leaning in the doorway of a small police box. He surveyed me with a friendly smile, a cigarette dangling from his hand. A battered red Suzuki compact stood parked on a strip of concrete beside the road.

  "Ha ha! Well yes, to tell you the truth I am a little tired. You know, walking along, enjoying myself, seeing all the sights of Sado — I do believe I lost track of the time! And now it's getting toward the end of the day so I'm looking for somewhere to stay."

  The policeman turned his head slightly and called over his shoulder "Oi! You!" Then he turned back to me. "Take that pack off and come inside. Sit down for a moment and have a rest. Place to stay? We'll fix you up." There was a scuttling noise from behind him and his wife appeared, wiping her hands on a cloth. "Look what we've got here," he told her. "A customer! He's walking round Sado, and now he needs a place to stay. I'm going to call Tadauchi-san. He's started taking guests, I know. I was down there this morning. Our friend here can sit down in my office for a few minutes and rest. Get some tea for him."

  "We don't get a lot of foreigners round here, you know," he went on. "Not at this time of year, anyway. Summer's different, of course. There's quite a few then. They like to go camping. I see you've been doing some camping too."

  "That's right, I have," I told him. "But today, seeing how hot it's been and everything, I'd like to get a room and a bath."

  The policeman's wife came in with two cups of green tea and two rice crackers wrapped in cellophane on a small, round tray.

  "Don't worry, we'll get you a room. Now where's Tadauchi's number?" He opened a drawer, flipped through a card index, and then punched a few buttons on the telephone. "Tadauchi-san? Kataoka here. Yes, and good evening to you too! Now listen — I've got a chap here in the police box who needs a room. Looks pretty tired. He's on some sort of walking tour. You can take him, can't you? You can? Good, good. Yes, I'll run him down shortly. Ten minutes? Fine. Oh and by the way — he's a foreigner. Speaks Japanese, though. Food? Don't worry about it. He's just been telling me — eats anything that's going. Thanks then — good-bye!"

  He replaced the receiver, looked up at me and grinned. "See?" he said. "That's how to do it. Get the room fixed up first and tell them you're a foreigner afterwards. Otherwise. . . Well, sometimes they're not sure if it will work out or not."

  After we finished the tea, this most excellent and unusual policeman offered to put my gear in the back of his compact and drive me down into the village. Just as we were setting off, a pickup whizzed by, missing the front of the Suzuki by inches, and careered down the hill and along the edge of the bay. "That Hanamura," said the policeman with a sigh. "I'll have to have a word with him again. The way he drives, he's just bound to have an accident sometime. But I suppose he's in a hurry — he's running a bit late for the ferry. They're going over to Niigata tonight, him and his wife." But I knew that already. As the pickup roared across the bay and disappeared up the hill on the other side, I could still see the brown fiberglass toilet firmly roped in place on the back.

  Day 8

  Rafts Where Seagulls Crowd

  There must have been a road somewhere round the back, but the policeman left his car on the main street of the village and led me to the front of the inn down a maze of narrow, stone-flagged alleyways where morning glories grew on flimsy wooden trellises and bushy hydrangeas sprouted in tiny, carefully tended gardens. Thanks to my official escort, the Tadauchis' welcome could hardly have been warmer; setting me up with a first-floor room that overlooked a sea of uneven, gray-tiled roofs, the husband bustled off to fetch cold beer while his wife, grinning broadly to reveal a phalanx of steel teeth, insisted on collecting all my dirty clothes in a basket and carrying them away to the washing machine.

  There was a TV set on the landing outside the room, and I slumped in a chair in front of it to drink the beer and watch the weather forecast. Just as it was coming on, there were footfalls on the stairs, and I was joined by a young couple who were also guests at the inn. The man had been to university in Canada and was delighted to find a foreigner with whom to resurrect his fragmented English. He worked for a trading company in Tokyo, he explained; some relative of his fiancee had died in Niigata so they had come up for the funeral and decided to stay on for a couple of days and visit Sado. They had arrived the day before and loathed it already. The food was too rustic, the hotels too small, the towns too dull, and the bus service too slow. This last complaint may have been true, especially for getting as far off the standard tourist circuit as they now were; I asked why they hadn't chosen to stay somewhere more convenient. "Recommendation, man," said the man with a sigh. "A friend recommended this place. What a dump. There's nothing here! Makes me wish I was back in Toronto — what a place that was! Ice cream, fries, burgers as big as this!" He rambled on in this vein for a few minutes, lying like a cheap clock about his wonderful experiences in Canada. "Never mind," he said at last. "This is our last evening." He jerked a thumb at the girlfriend. "She's got to get back to work. Night shift. So we're getting out of here tomorrow. Goddamn time too. I won't be coming back to this place, I can tell you." He stood up. "Well, better get ready for dinner. Then we'll get together. Have a few drinks. Talk some English. I like talking English. Whaddya say, hey?" He patted me on the shoulder, picked up their bags, and disappeared up the corridor. ". . . And that's all for now," said a voice from the TV. "The next weather forecast will be after the 10 o'clock news."

  After dinner, pleading exhaustion, I retired to my room and fell into bed. But I couldn't go to sleep. There was a strange noise somewhere in the inn — an insistent noise, maddeningly repetitive, familiar yet at the same time unfamiliar, because rarely heard in Japan. It was two young boys, aged about seven, arguing with each other in terrible whining tones — not just the usual short spat, but on and on, repeating the same slow, whining cadence, up and down, again and again. There was no making out the words, but the tones were clear enough: "Give that back, it belongs to me!" "No it doesn't, it belongs to me!" "It's mine — give it back!" "I'm not going to. It belongs to me!" I had half a mind to go and find them, give them each a good clout, but I was too tired to move. And eventually, when the noise refused to stop, when it had gone on even longer than the stubborn obstinacy of young boys could maintain, it dawned on me that it wasn't being made by children at all, nor even by two voices but only by one — an adult voice, it now seemed, a retarded aunt perhaps, shut away alone in some other part of the inn like Mrs. Rochester and abandoned to her compulsive, interminable groaning. No-One interfered or sought to soothe her. Why should they? They heard it every day, they were used to it. They probably didn't even notice any more. Groaning? Oh, that groaning.

  Brilliant sunshine streaming through the window early the next morning filled in the blank left by the missed weather forecast, and when I came downstairs all packed up and ready to go I found Mrs. Tadauchi waiting for me by the front door with my clean laundry. She hadn't had time to iron it yet, she told me apologetically, but would get it done while I was eating breakfast. I didn't feel much like eating, but Mrs. Tadauchi expressed such alarm at the thought of anyone starting the day without food that I felt obliged to change my mind. So I sat alone in the dining room, wading through fish, rice, pickles, and seaweed soup while she bustled back and forth with the dishes and made approving noises, pausing occasionally to give a good cackle that showed off her remarkable steel teeth. She particularly wanted to know why I was walking round Sado, and seemed disappointed to learn that the motive was
pleasure. "So it's just a holiday, then?" she asked. Typical of a foreigner! Foreigners are forever taking holidays. Not like the Japanese. The Japanese are a race of real workers. At it every day, from early to late. Except on Sundays, when they sprawl in front of the TV and get drunk. But Sunday isn't a holiday — just a day off work. Mrs. Tadauchi would have been more satisfied if I had been studying Sado dialects for my postgraduate thesis, or comparing rock formations, or measuring tides, or collecting sea-shells. Anything with a proper purpose would have been all right — even undertaking a pilgrimage. But I wasn't going through the pilgrimage conversation again. That joke was wearing thin. Although, as a matter of fact, the journey round Sado was feeling more and more like a pilgrimage every day. Especially now, with only 20 or so kilometers left to complete the full circle. Even if I dawdled, as I firmly intended, I would be back in Ryotsu by lunchtime.

  Beyond the narrow little alleys and across the main road, the harbor scene was bathed in golden light. The water shimmered with it, huge opalescent patches of sparkling yellow and peachy pink that slowly undulated on the swell, then broke into jagged dancing fragments as the boats cut through them on their way to the open sea. Even the walls of the Fisherman's Co-op shed a warm glow, burnt orange and dusty ochre scarred by streaks of rusty, chili-pepper red where the concrete had cracked and crumbled, exposing the steel rods inside to the corroding salt air. Beside the ragged line of pickups that brought the fishermen to work lay a pile of nets, a few coils of gray, fraying rope, and a jumbled heap of sea-blackened octopus pots. Somewhere out of sight an engine fired, and then a man in green overalls drove round the corner in a battered forklift truck and stopped in front of a tall stack of empty fish crates. Guided by levers, the forks rose up their shafts with a soft mechanical hum, picked a dozen crates off the top of the stack, and deposited them on the ground with a dry clatter. The sound disturbed a group of kites watching from the telegraph wire overhead; they shifted uneasily, half-opened their wings, and then hunched down again, their eyes toward the sea, patiently waiting for the fishing boats' return.

  The road climbed out of town up a tree-shaded gully, then swung inland and headed north with fields of young green rice on either side. An easy hour's walking brought me within sight of the last of the four great points of Sado. The first was Futatsugame, the islet at the northern tip; the second was the end of Nanaura Kaigan, at the northern extremity of long, sweeping Mano Bay; the third was Sawasaki in the far southwest, close to the enclave of the demon drummers; and this last was Himezaki, whose lighthouse marks the way for the ferries and fishing boats in and out of Ryotsu Bay.

  To reach the lighthouse I had to turn off the main road and follow a twisting, dun-colored track that wound down the cliff through dark pine woods. At the bottom of the hill it met a footpath that ran along the back of a stony beach and linked up with a system of sea-splashed bridges and walkways leading around the very tip of the point. Along the way it passed through a deserted cove with boats drawn up above the tide line and a pretty little shrine at the far end. The shrine doors were open, and on the shelf stood a dirty glass vase with a few dead flowers hanging limply over the rim. These I replaced with a bunch of scruffy buttercups, filling the vase with fresh water from a stream that trickled out onto the shingle nearby. Then I stepped back, bowed, and said a short prayer for the safety and well-being of travelers and good catches for the fishermen whose boats were drawn up behind me. Apart from routine mumblings of Church liturgy, praying aloud is rather against an Englishman's instincts — not the sort of thing one would, er, care to be seen doing, especially out in the open, on a beach, while bowing down to a graven idol. But after a week of doing it several times a day, I no longer found it strange. Quite the opposite: it felt good, refreshing even, just putting the hands together, bowing to the shrine, making requests and expressing thanks in an ordinary tone of voice. Some people, it's true, prefer the built-in gravitas of church surroundings, the reverential hush, the candles, the drapes, the choir stalls, the statues, the pictures, and the stained glass. These things work to concentrate the mind, confer solemnity, sharpen the focus on humility and truth. Japan's roadside shrines offer something quite different — something light, friendly, accessible, perfectly in tune with the ebb and flow of unchanging daily life.

  I clambered round the rocks at the end of the point and followed the path up onto the top of the headland. The view was stunning: a backdrop of steep mountains, the houses and wharves of Ryotsu spread out along the distant shore, fierce sunlight glinting off the sea, and the day's first ferry to Niigata, lightly loaded and high in the water, steaming past the harbor wall and out into the bay. All around where I stood the land was divided into the usual patchwork of paddies, and a short way ahead I could see a young woman struggling along with a wheelbarrow on which was balanced a large blue plastic tub of liquid fertilizer. As I watched, she turned off the path to cross a little plank bridge over a stream; but the wheel slipped off the plank and jammed in the ditch between the narrow banks. I went across and helped her haul it out again, watched in silence by a tiny baby who was strapped to her back in a quilted sling. When mothers on Sado have work to do, they go and do it; if there's no-one at home to look after the baby, then hup! the baby goes up on their back and comes along too. Out in the open all day, the infants start learning about their surroundings right away — the shapes of trees and rocks, the colors of things that grow, the sounds of the sea, the feel of the wind, the songs and movements of people sharing work in the fields. All other things being equal, it's no wonder that many of them still grow up to be simple and happy, rooted in a real life that they fully understand.

  On the outskirts of Nojo was a white-painted primary school surrounded by a high wall, but not high enough to conceal from the children that something weird was about to pass by. As I came clunking down the road, a line of grinning faces popped up along the top of the wall like so many Humpty Dumpties, giggling and calling out "America! Hey you, America! Good morning!" Immediately, from somewhere behind them, a teacher growled, and they all disappeared together, shrieking with excitement.

  Opposite the school, a concrete jetty with a dozen small boats moored to it extended out into the sea like a fat finger. It pointed toward an islet that was linked to the end of the jetty by an old-fashioned curved bridge painted a bright vermilion. A few stunted pines grew where their roots could find purchase in the stony soil, and a white-painted shrine, this one with the doors firmly shut, huddled as if for shelter in the lee of a large, badly fractured rock.

  At the far end of the islet, the sea was heaving gently, sloshing in and out of deep pools almost completely encircled by rocks. Here I came upon an old man in long green waders who was gravely raking seaweed from the water and loading it into a large plastic laundry basket. The fleshy stem of each plant was rooted in the seabed, from where it grew upward in long, thin strands. Bracing himself in position on the rocks, the man took up a bamboo pole about 10 feet long, with a rusty little sickle on the end, guided it down through the water, and made a quick cut through the base of as many plants as he could reach from where he was standing. In a few minutes the surface was covered with strands of weed, which floated there like huge tresses of hair. These he hauled shorewards with the sickle, switching at the last moment to a sturdy short-handled rake more suited to lifting them out of the water. It was a little living, he explained, to supplement his pension. Every morning he scoured the coast for this weed, which was called tsurumo, and in the afternoon he pushed it round on a handcart and sold it to anyone who would buy. Preparation was easy: the tsurumo was cut into bite-size pieces, bruised in a mortar for tenderness, then boiled and eaten in soup.

  Although it was still early the sun was already blazing — surely the hottest day since I had set out — so at the next opportunity I turned off the road on a track that led down to a beach, flung my clothes on the sand, and ran into the water. It felt good, but the cold made me gasp like a punch in the stomach; after a few min
utes I scrambled out again and sat on the ground to dry off. And while I was there I heard the sound of an engine and looked up to see a car bumping down the same track to the beach.

  Actually it wasn't a car but a Mitsubishi Pajero, one of those four-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicles favored by the rugged adventurer brigade. This one looked brand new: in the driving seat, hunched over the wheel in a purposeful attitude, sat a thin-faced man in a yellow baseball cap, chewing gum. Beside him was his wife, in a floppy, wide-brimmed hat that failed to hide the nervous look on her face. Two young children were standing up on the back seat, their faces glued to the windows and their mouths open in expectation. It was obviously family test drive time.

  First the man roared down the full length of the beach and made a sweeping turn at the far end. Spraying sand to left and right, the huge tires gouged deep tracks and passed across a patch of morning glories, mangling the pale pink flowers to pulp. Excellent. The man enjoyed that. The children too. Their mouths were open, wider than ever — they were screaming with excitement. So the man revved up the engine and did it again. The third run was the best yet: this time, the machine bounced across its own tracks, bucking like a donkey. The beach looked as though it had been under heavy mortar fire for hours. As for the morning glories, they had disappeared. Wonderful! The test drive was going well. Pajeros cost a lot of money, but were clearly worth every penny.