Sado: Japan's Island in Exile Page 10
Exile has a long history in Japan and, like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, traces its authority to divine precedent. According to an early history called the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), the dispositions made by the country's original creator, the god Izanagi, included directing his capricious son Susa-no-wo to assume responsibility for the tides, currents, and living creatures of the oceans; but the son had other plans and set off instead to visit the land of his mother, leaving the "mountains to wither away and the rivers and seas to dry up." In anger at this disobedience, his father expelled him from the High Celestial Plain with "a divine expulsion."
Before the coming of Buddhism to Japan in the 7th century, serious crimes were normally punished by death, but contemporary Chinese historical records mention that their island neighbors made frequent use of banishment and flogging as well. The first systematic code of Japanese law, which was promulgated in 668, specified three grades of tsuiho, or banishment — near, medium, and far — for different degrees of offense. Much later, in feudal times, the shogunate's stricter social regime extended these categories to seven, ranging from tokoro-barai, which barred the criminal only from his own village or community, to a kind of blanket ban that expelled him from all the fifteen provinces around Edo and Kyoto and, for good measure, denied him the use of major highways as well. Persons condemned to death could also have their sentences commuted to banishment as a result of intervention by influential third parties. Islands, which offered security as well as isolation, were ideal destinations, and Sado's first exile, a poet called Hozumiason-no-oi, arrived as early as the year 722.
As Buddhist influence continued to grow, particularly the belief that the ghost of an executed person could return to exact revenge, use of the death penalty as a judicial instrument declined. In fact from 818 to 1156, it was abolished altogether, although lawbreakers still faced other severe punishments. Exile became the maximum sentence, and not only for transgressions of the law: individuals who fell from official favor could be effectively banished by being appointed to some post in a distant province. Others became exiles by choice, to put themselves and their families beyond the reach of powerful enemies.
In 1185, the Heian Period ended and authority passed from the imperial court into the hands of the military clans, who were much less squeamish about taking life. Common law was strict and categories of criminals were numerous. But for Japan's robbers, pickpockets, murderers, arsonists, rapists, adulterers, blackmailers, and disturbers of public order, plenty of harsh summary punishments were available. Relatively few such people were reckoned to merit the extra administrative work involved in dispatching and supervising an exile. The new growth area was the category of political exiles, once-powerful individuals removed for backing a wrong horse, for ideological deviation, or for belonging to outlawed sects or organizations. Far from being tough, street-hardened villains, these were often persons of culture and education, well-born, intellectual, with artistic or professional skills. No wonder that when they arrived at their place of exile they weren't feared or scorned, but admired and respected as bringers of new knowledge.
Exiles were allowed a good deal of freedom within their assigned area. The highest classes (certainly a small minority) could even bring goods and servants with them, build homes, and pass their time much as they liked. Although they were supposed to work for local people, doing fishing and farming chores, in practice they lived however they could. Such freedom of choice was forbidden, but the rule was ignored, so that remote, backward Sado had a more or less permanent pool of teachers, actors and musicians as well as craftsmen like masons, carpenters, and builders.
Sometimes, exiles were allowed to bring their children with them (to protect them from dangerous enemies, for instance), but wives were almost always banned. This led to many taking island mistresses, known as mizukumi-onna ("water-drawing women") because liaisons commonly began when the women helped out with domestic chores. The unions were not binding, however long they lasted, and such rights as existed were in the exile's favor: when his sentence was over, he could decide whether or not to take his island "wife" and children with him. If he chose, and some did, he could just take the children and leave the "wife" behind.
With this degree of social freedom, acts of violence were rare. So were attempts at escape, since failure meant death and failure was almost certain. Nevertheless, some still tried. One of the strongest motives was pure despair, since the duration of an exile's sentence was decided at the trial but not disclosed to him, the government preferring to keep its sentencing policy for different offences known only to a few high officials. Others chanced escape out of resentment at an unjust conviction, or the obligation to repay a blood debt.
But most of Sado's exiles had a full-time job just staying warm and getting enough to eat. Food was short even for the islanders, and new arrivals without land to plant or skills to gather often went hungry. What was available was poor in quality: there were a few starchy root species, a notorious soup based on seawater, and rough gruels made from pounded millet, barley, or vegetables. Sweet potatoes, which grow well even in poor soil, were not introduced until the early 18th century. Rice would have been a rare treat, probably available only at festivals and even then only to the rich and privileged. Edible wild plants were another possible food source, and so were the fruits of the sea; but sometimes, in their ignorance of local conditions, exiles sickened on poisonous berries or slipped off slick wet rocks and drowned while foraging on the shore in bad weather.
It was midmorning now, and I was getting hungry myself, so I walked back to Sawada to find something to eat. The main street ran parallel to the shore and was lined with nondescript shops. At a small, dusty little grocery store I bought some rice balls, a couple of apples, and a small bag of cherries. The old woman at the till, observing my stick, warned me off the mountains. "Take care if you go up there," she said. "The weather today could turn nasty — please make sure to come back safely." This sounded like good advice, so I carried my purchases down to the beach, and ate them sitting on the sand as the wind gusted around me and blew wreaths of murky colored cloud on and off the tops of the distant mountains.
Someone else who spent time on this beach at Sawada, and described it in his Book of the Golden Island, was another famous exile, Zeami Motokiyo. Zeami was one of the founding geniuses of Japan's Noh theater, a brilliant actor, playwright, and critic who was born into a distinguished Kyoto family in 1363. As a teenager, he became a protege of the ruling shogun, who encouraged the boy's education and advised him to make a study of Zen. He is credited with having written about ninety Noh plays, including several that were rewrites of earlier pieces, and such critical works as the seven-part Fushi Kaden (Transmission of the Flower of Acting Style) and Shikadosho (Essay on the Way to the Flower). Zeami used the term "flower" a lot, to denote the invisible genius of performance, the ability to act out something familiar yet make the audience feel and see it as if for the first time.
Zeami dominated the development of Noh theater until 1422, when he retired and took up the contemplative life of a Soto Zen monk. The theatrical mantle passed to his gifted elder son Motomasa. Soon afterward, things began to go wrong. A new shogun took power and made known his preference for the Noh interpretations of Zeami's nephew, a man called On'ami. Zeami and Motomasa were barred from the shogun's court, and when Motomasa died in 1432, On'ami became supreme in the world of Noh. Two years later, Zeami was banished to Sado. The precise charge is not known, but he may have angered the shogun by disdaining the nephew who had supplanted his beloved son. Some believe that he died on the island, others that he returned eventually to Kyoto.
Coincidentally, Sado itself has long been closely associated with Noh, more closely than almost any part of Japan. This has less to do with Zeami than with the discovery of gold at Aikawa and the government's dispatch of Okubo Nagayasu to take charge of its exploitation. The Okubos were a family of actors, and the newly appointe
d bugyo brought a troupe of performers with him as part of his entourage. With its dramatic recitals and subtle, mannered enactments of scenes from famous tales and legends, Noh caught on in a big way. Before long, villages all over Sado were competing among themselves to build their own stages and put on their own plays. To cover the costs, each village set aside the income derived from one community-owned rice field. This system lasted until after World War II, when government reforms lumped the old irregular landholdings together and then redistributed them among the former tenants. This undermined the financing system, pushing Noh into decline and posing the danger that it might one day disappear from Sado altogether. For the moment, tradition is holding the line and there are still thirty or forty stages in active use. These are all that remain from a onetime total of over 200, and compares instructively with present-day Tokyo, where there are ten. Tokyo's theaters, of course, are in modern buildings with comfortable padded seats, electric lights, coffee lounges, and shops where patrons can buy copies of the text of the play they have come to see, plus fans, cushions, and anything else they can be persuaded to need. Sado's stages are all in the open air, as they always used to be, with the audience sitting on mats on the ground.
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Flicking the last few cherry stones into the gutter along the lane, I left the beach and headed on through the town. It was a dull sort of place, not much more than a shopping center, but one building, a whitewashed, half-timbered house, caught my eye. At roof height, a large signboard inscribed "Obata Shuzo" announced the place as a sake brewery. I went inside and found Mr. Obata himself, a balding, fit-looking man in his mid fifties. To judge from the decor, he seemed anxious to present not only an excellent product but also evidence of his acquaintance with the great and famous. The walls were hung with framed color photos of him meeting this and that dignitary, politician, and royal personage. The biggest one was of him kissing the hand of the Pope.
As a rare foreign visitor I was taken under his wing and treated to a tour of the premises, where huge vatfuls of fermenting rice were being thoughtfully stirred amid clouds of steam by serious-looking men armed with wooden paddles. There was more to interest me when the tour ended up in the tasting room, where tiny samples were poured out from several bottles for the appraisal of a foreign palate. A few of these bottles had something that looked like a snake curled up at the bottom, and so it proved: some islanders, including Mr. Obata, use the standard commercial product as the base for a powerful home brew called mamushi-zake, taken now and again as a pick-me-up, restorer of flagging male potency, and general cure-all. The method is simple: just catch a mamushi (adder), and pickle it in ordinary sake for a year. Then drink the sake and shift the mamushi to a fresh bottle. One medium-size mamushi is good for up to three years' brewing.
From the doorway of his brewery, Mr. Obata pointed down the road towards Yawata, a place he seemed determined I should visit. Yawata is one of many alternative names for the Shinto sword-god Hachiman; according to Zeami's Book of the Golden Island, there was once an important shrine there. Today the site of the old shrine is occupied by a large modern hotel set back from the road among a stand of red pines. As I passed by it began to rain, so I ran for shelter under the archway of the building next door, which turned out to be the Sado Museum.
The archway led through to a garden containing half a dozen old buildings that had been taken down at their original sites and reassembled here. One was an old farmhouse, thickly thatched, with a gable window looking out from the upstairs storage area and a ground floor that visitors could go inside and explore. Held up by massive beams and pillars of cedar, the silent, faintly dust-scented interior was built to an open-plan design with no doors except those to the outside. The kitchen was filled with traditional implements, including ladles, a giant mallet, and two or three tubs for pounding rice to make the chewy derivative called mochi. There was also a firepit sunk in the floor with a black iron kettle suspended above the powdery ashes on a bamboo contraption with iron levers to adjust the height.
Inside the museum, the exhibits were jumbled together without much organization. The portrayal of Sado's early history was vague, with a dramatic tableau showing the island's geological formation amidst volcanic explosions and heaving seas and another depicting naked, panic-stricken primitives running in terror from a forest engulfed by flames. These imaginative works were balanced by one very definite fact in the shape of a skeleton labeled Desmostylus mirabilis nagao, evidently some prehistoric creature. About the size of a baby elephant, it was eight or ten feet long from nose to tail, stood about four feet at the shoulder, and had an enormous rib cage, which looked easily big enough to accommodate two, or even three, well-chewed human adults. Other animals on display belonged to more recent times: there was a colossal eagle with eyes as big as coat buttons, various stuffed birds and snakes, a few stoats and weasels, and two different species of tanuki, the shape changer. One was a woolly looking little fellow like a puppy with pale fur fringing a black nose and dark eyes surrounded by haloes of dark hairs which made them look huge. The other type had long, soft, fluffy fur and was the size of a cat, although with sharper features — a fox-cat, maybe. This collection of creatures stood side by side in a glass cabinet across from a display of theatrical masks. One glowered back at them with particular intensity; it was a Noh mask, portraying a very old man with thick eyebrows, long gray hair, a straggly white horsehair beard, and a zanily colored cloth draped over his head. On top of the cloth was a black hat shaped like an inverted Wellington boot. The vacant eye sockets added a final touch: the mask looked like the stoned-out distillation of a thousand rock festival veterans.
A little way up the road was another museum, better organized and, to judge by the size of the parking area, more attuned to the interests of contemporary visitors. This was Toki-no-Sato ("toki's home"), named after the Japanese crested ibis, a plump, ungainly, slow-stepping bird with a long, red, down-curving beak, and vivid pink flight feathers. Once it was indigenous to Sado but is now right on the edge of extinction, as attempts to get the last surviving pair to breed have so far failed. Instead, visitors can buy a life-size plastic toki in the souvenir shop, or else an ashtray, dishcloth, paperweight, or T-shirt bearing its picture.
The upstairs floor of Toki-no-Sato was devoted to the work of Shodo Sasaki, a wonderfully talented artist who was born in Sawada in 1882. As a young man, he left the island and traveled to Tokyo to study painting but was forced by health problems to return a few years later. He then apprenticed himself to a local teacher and became expert in wax casting, a technique in which a pattern is first made with beeswax and then covered with clay. The wax is then melted away to leave a finished mold. Using this system, the artist produced a huge body of work as daring and inventive as anything by his famous contemporaries in Europe: super-realistic rabbits and birds in ceramic and bronze, enamel deer with strange arcane designs on their bodies, dragons and cats decorated with deep streaks of red, blue, and golden glaze, and an extraordinary series of smooth, aerodynamic flying fish with complex patterns of dots along their glistening flanks. These works, along with his many paintings, sketches, and designs, made him famous. Before he died in 1961, he was awarded Japan's top accolade for artists, designation as a Living National Treasure.
By the time I emerged from Toki-no-Sato, the rain had stopped and I was eager to get back on the road. But before leaving, I took a path into the woods behind the museum to visit the Mano Mausoleum, last resting place of another famous exile who ended his days on Sado, the emperor Juntoku. Juntoku came to the throne in 1210, only 25 years after the Heian Period ended and effective power passed into the hands of military clans. The usurpers cared little for the Kyoto court and showed their disdain by setting up their capital in distant Kamakura. Imperial resentment simmered quietly until 1219, when the sudden murder of the third Kamakura shogun encouraged the notion that things at the top were shaky; the incident was seen (rightly) as evidence of internal conflict among the d
ominant Hojo clan. Sensing their chance, nobles at the old court urged the emperor to take action and reclaim his authority.
What happened next came to be known by the splendid euphemism "The Jokyu Disturbance." After cogitating for two more years, Juntoku abdicated in favor of his infant son and dispatched an army to depose the regent in Kamakura. But the Hojo struck back hard, defeating the forces of the aristocratic party, confiscating their lands, and placing the imperial court under even stricter surveillance than before. The leaders of the revolt were sent into exile: Juntoku was shipped off to Sado, where he lived in the picturesquely named Palace of Unhewn Timber until he died 22 long years later. The stone mausoleum in which he is buried lies in a copse of tall cedar trees and can be observed at a distance, from behind a fence, but not approached, even today.
Leaving history and culture behind, I walked away from the town of Mano and out onto the road along the coast of Ko-Sado. Clumps of wild lilies sprouting from the cliff side glowed orange in the bright sun, but the wind off the sea was chilly. Waves slammed into the rocks below, and dismal swathes of cloud swirled low over the mountaintops behind me. I remembered the warning of the old woman in the grocery and was glad I had decided to stick to the shore road.
Up ahead, the road was being widened and new tarmac laid by a work gang of both men and women. Trucks arrived one after another, depositing huge piles of fresh black gravel, which were then spread out with shovels and flattened with steamrollers. There was a clear and definite division of labor: men operated the machines, women did the shoveling.