Sado: Japan's Island in Exile Page 14
After a long soak in the bath and a couple of beers, I went out again to explore the town. Although I had covered less distance this day than on any other so far, I must have been more tired than I realized: no coherent memory of the evening remains but only a succession of fragments — a plate of gyoza dumplings in one place; a sake-drinking session in another; some deep red slices of tuna on a long, oval dish with scalloped edges; beer in a dingy, smoke-filled den where men with rags round their heads were shouting at each other; and somewhere, connected to nothing in particular, an enormous porcupine fish, stuffed and mounted in a display case, staring into the distant distance, as if dreaming of the sea, with a single bulbous, green glass eye.
Day 6
Ship Horse Picture
Right in front of Ogi port there's a large open plaza, and in the middle of the plaza there's a museum, and upstairs in the museum, occupying a wall 30 feet long, there's a map that illustrates the sailing and trading routes used in medieval times along the whole coast of the Japan Sea. From Hokkaido in the north to Shimonoseki in the far southwest, 61 separate ports are shown, plus Ogi itself, the only sizable link in the chain that is not sited on the mainland.
What's immediately obvious, given Japan's rugged geography and limited system of roads, is that most goods and passengers with any distance to travel had to be moved by sea. The map shows half a dozen regular, direct routes between Sado and the mainland (compared with only three today), but Ogi was evidently an important stop-off port for a lot of the long-distance traffic as well: ships calling in to discharge or take on part of a load, to replenish supplies, and to seek shelter from bad weather. A display board in the museum claims that Ogi harbor could accommodate as many as 500 ships at one time, and often did so — all of them, of course, with harbor dues to pay. 500 may be an exaggeration — certainly it seems a fantastic number today — and it's not at all clear what kinds or sizes of vessels were counted as "ships" in order to arrive at such a total. But from the early 17th century, when gold from the Kinzan mine was shipped to the mainland from Ogi, and probably for centuries before that, the town must have enjoyed a level of prosperity and importance vastly out of proportion to the relative poverty of the island as a whole. Provincial Japanese ports in medieval times had plenty of opportunities to grow rich as the quantity and variety of trading goods increased and as local outbreaks of civil war made them useful as bases of military supply. Construction flourished, especially of premises concerned directly or indirectly with distribution — warehouses, wholesalers, inns, and pawnbrokers — and, if trade was sufficient, commercial guilds were established to protect the interests of merchants specializing in particular categories of goods, from hats and furniture to fish and salted vegetables. As well as carpenters, shipwrights, and greengrocers, even a place like Ogi would have had its pharmacists, hairdressers, tailors, dyers, and drapers, as well as separate dealers for products like oil, soy sauce, vinegar, rice, fertilizer, and fancy goods. Today, only the faintest traces of all this bustling enterprise remain. Sado has reverted to its natural status as a commercial backwater, and a first experience of Ogi's slow, subdued atmosphere, dusty streets, dilapidated buildings, and general air of benign neglect makes it hard to imagine that the past was ever any different.
The standard coaster that plied between Ogi and the mainland was a tough, solidly built little vessel about 60 feet long, with three masts, of which the tallest, in the middle, was about the size of a modern telegraph pole. All three were rigged with sails kept taut by bamboo rods inserted through loops or sleeves, which also allowed them to be easily turned this way and that. There was no shelter on deck beyond a simple awning: the helmsman stood in the stern, steering by means of a heavy wooden tiller slotted into the top of the rudder and altering course in response to shouted commands from a navigator in the bow. A large hatch in the deck gave access to a capacious hold in which to carry the island's exports: bamboo, clay tiles, stoneware, bundles of firewood, straw sacks of rice and seaweed, jars of miso paste and sake, pottery, tools, articles of furniture, and quantities of dried fish.
Longer journeys required more substantial ships, and these were built with a high, curving prow and a raised stern section incorporating a large cabin with "windows" of heavy latticework. Here the crew could cook meals and boil water for tea in a kettle suspended from the galley ceiling. The captain's own cabin was built inside the first; here he could keep his chests, books, writing materials, and navigation instruments. Ships of this type can be seen in several pictures hung inside Ogi's Kisaki Shrine, all painted on wooden tablets and all to the same formula. Making its way from right to left across a mauvy blue sea, with the mountains of Sado in the background and the sun rising behind them, the ship is shown in full sail, with the crew on deck all facing toward the bow and the captain alone in the raised stern, also facing forward and apparently shouting orders. These paintings were not made for amusement, nor for art's sake; they were votive pictures, called funaema (literally "ship horse picture"). A separate painting was commissioned for each ship and stored in a temple in its home port. There it stayed, an iconographic representation of the "soul" of the ship and its crew, which could be directly addressed when praying for their protection or preserved as a memento in the event of their loss at sea. Dependent since earliest times on fishing, the people of Sado have always been devout worshippers of sea deities, forever praying for calm seas and big catches. Even today, no-one rescued from some peril of the sea would fail to go straight to a sea god's shrine to give thanks and make as generous an offering as he could afford.
Despite the excesses of the night before — or whatever it was that happened — I was lacing up my boots by the inn's front door soon after 5 o'clock the next morning. Even that wasn't too early for my hostess, who shuffled out in her carpet slippers to bid me farewell and ask where I was headed. "Akadomari," I told her, mentioning the name of the next substantial port up the coast, and she brought her hands together in a gesture of pleased anticipation. "Oh yes, Akadomari," she repeated with a smile. "Well that's a nice walk for you. The coast is really beautiful."
In truth, the coast road north from Ogi is not "really beautiful" at all, but singularly monotonous, which was why I had already made my mind up to leave it at Hamochi, the next village, and make a looping detour to Akadomari through the hills. "Are you sure you know the way?" the old lady asked anxiously when I explained this modified plan. "Do be careful now — make sure you don't get lost. People do get lost in the mountains, you know. I'm afraid to go up there, haven't been for. . . Why, twenty years or more. It's better down here, close to the sea."
A thin mist hung over the straits as I walked down to the harbor and then out of Ogi along the road to Hamochi. On the landward side was a low, crumbling cliff and on the other a smooth expanse of water where a couple of rust-streaked trawlers and the last stragglers from Ogi's squid-fishing fleet could be seen making their way back to port. Now that I had rounded the southern corner of the island I was back on the Uchikaifu coast; and like the northern section where my journey had begun, this southern part consisted of long, narrow rock-strewn beaches separated from each other by stubby, semi-accessible headlands and marked off from the road by a thick concrete seawall. But away to the left I could see the low, green foothills of Ko-Sado bathed in the early morning light, and I pressed on eagerly to the junction at the mouth of the Hamo River. Here I could turn away from the coast and cross the patchwork of rice fields leading to the village of Hamochi and the wooded hills beyond.
After Kuninaka, Sado's central plain, the south-facing Hamochi lowlands rank second in rice production and, thanks to plentiful fresh water from the river and higher average temperatures than anywhere else on the island, provide the highest yield per acre as well. Before the war there were two big miso factories here as well, each employing around 200 people and producing upwards of 600 tons a year. But supplying the ingredients for such large-scale enterprises was far beyond the capacity of the impoverish
ed local farmers: the soybeans and even the salt were imported from the mainland, and virtually all the finished miso exported right back again. The reason for conducting the operation on Sado was simply that the islanders' labor was cheap — around 75 sen a day, compared to a whole yen or more elsewhere. The business folded in Japan's post-war economic chaos, leaving rice as the end of Hamochi's prosperity as well as its beginning; but today, with support from big food companies like Marudai, local miso is making a comeback.
Despite the early hour, a few old women were already at work in Hamochi's fields, bending double to thin out the young rice shoots by hand or moving as lightly as birds along the narrow, grassy embankments dividing the paddies. The village itself was deserted: I stopped to buy a can of iced coffee from a machine and sat to drink it with no-one for company but one of the life-size plastic policemen that local forces set up along country roads throughout Japan to remind motorists to observe the speed limit. Between us in the road, flattened from end to end by a passing truck, lay a long brown snake with black zigzags along its back. I examined the snake and the policeman examined me, while from a doorway up the street a sad-eyed and very elderly beagle swung its head slowly from side to side, examining both of us.
Beyond the village, the road rejoined the bank of the river and wound along to a fenced-in enclosure with a large sign marked "Sado Botanical Gardens" above its firmly locked gate. Next door, shaded by a grove of tall trees, was a temple where preparations were evidently being made for some ceremony. Here and there in the graveled forecourt were a huge stack of sake barrels wrapped in straw, a large drum, a heap of lion-dance masks and costumes, the front half of a wooden horse, several flags and banners, and a pair of long bamboo poles linked by strings from which hundreds of twisted papers, each one inscribed with a prayer, dangled like so much washing hung out to dry. I wondered what kind of occasion these objects had been set out for — a performance of tsuburosashi, perhaps. This ancient ritual is supposed to have originated in Hamochi and is still danced from time to time at some of the village shrines. Tsuburo is a large, cucumber-shaped vegetable, and the meaning of sashi is "to penetrate." The male dancer, his face concealed by a mask, lumbers about holding the base of a long wooden phallus to his groin with one hand and rubbing it lasciviously with the other, while his two female partners, representing a pair of goddesses called "Shagiri" and "Zeni Daiko," skip nimbly this way and that just out of his reach. Another possibility was a rehearsal of harukoma (or, as the island dialect has it, harigoma) in which the celebrants set off round the village carrying a wooden horse (koma) on their shoulders and dance from house to house collecting money or offerings for the shrine. The principal dancer wears a special mask whose features are grotesquely twisted to one side, supposedly in the likeness of a wealthy local of long ago who suffered from some facial paralysis; copying his appearance is a device to emulate his success in amassing money.
To one side of the forecourt was a tiny shrine hut, and standing on the altar among the standard offerings of fruit and flowers was a curious object that appeared to combine elements of both dances. It was a little horse made from a short, knobbly cucumber with toothpicks stuck in to represent the legs. The front pair had been set on a scrap of dried bark, which had the effect of raising the front of the horse as though it were preparing to set out on a journey. The head — a short section snapped off from the end of another cucumber and impaled on the "shoulders" with another toothpick — seemed to be looking out through the trees and up the road that curved ahead into the mountains. Opening my account for the day with a short prayer, what more natural than to ask if I could clamber up onto its back and take a ride?
Beyond the temple the valley ended abruptly and the road began to climb. In less than a hundred yards the river had narrowed by half and now ran chattering down over smooth brown boulders below a steep, thickly wooded slope. On the opposite verge stood a small orchard of plum trees, each one hung with old cans full of stones to keep the branches growing low. Clusters of new leaves sprouted from the branches on little red stalks, and the young green plums peeped out from among them, no bigger than cherries as yet, but already marked with a soft blush of pink on one side.
At the next corner a deep channel gouged from the top of the embankment to the bottom showed that there had recently been a serious landslip. Nothing had been done to prevent it happening again, but a sturdy barrier of steel girders and heavy wooden boards had been erected to contain the worst of the next fall, whenever it might come, and at least prevent the debris from blocking the road. And after still another long bend I came to the site of a roadside quarry, long disused, with all its sorting and loading apparatus, huge wheels, chutes, and conveyors, rusted, broken, and derelict. Beside a few last piles of rock, now abandoned and overgrown with weeds, the river Hamo tumbled cheerfully past and an old wisteria tree bent low over a swirling pool, dripping with bunches of pale, mauvy purple flowers.
The quarry was the last sign of commercial activity, as if the lowlanders ventured this far and no further; beyond, the road narrowed and climbed steeply through deep shadows cast by old cypresses and thickly packed copses of firs. Here and there between their trunks I could make out the shapes of isolated houses, set back from the road and huddled in the half-darkness of somber clearings. Occasionally the road curved and dipped, opening into tiny valley basins where ancient scarecrows stood guard over lilliputian rice paddies lying like droplets of rain-water collected in an upturned leaf; then it plunged on into the shade of the next damp and gloomy patch of forest. On the face of it, there was nothing in these hills to justify the fear voiced by the old innkeeper in Ogi; yet this was undeniably a different world from hers, almost its polar opposite. The towns and villages along the coast gave the impression of being exposed, without secrets, open to their inhabitants and to the elements; gardens lay in full view, clothes fluttered from washing lines, squid and seaweed were hung out on long racks to dry in the sun, windows and doors were left open, and you could look across vistas of fields or far out across the sea. Up here in the mountains, only a short distance away, everything seemed latched or bolted, secretive, clamped down: doors and windows were firmly closed, long heaps of neatly cut firewood lay stacked under low shelters, and plants raised in narrow beds of black soil or gathered from the tangled mountainsides were carried carefully home to be preserved in salt and packed away in jars beneath the farmhouse floor or hung on nails from the rafters of sturdy little barns. Every homestead looked preoccupied with making provision, with laying in stores for the next bout of hard times. Long isolation, it seemed, had bred a kind of siege mentality.
Not that the mountain people were cold or unfriendly; quite the contrary. Those I passed, working in their fields or cutting bamboo along the roadside, greeted me with polite interest and no sign of disquiet at my foreign appearance. Once a car pulled up beside me and its driver, a young housewife taking her two young sons to school, leaned across to ask if I wanted a lift. As I thanked her, explaining that I was content to walk, the boys looked up at me with interest from the back seat, clutching their satchels to their chests and smiling shyly from under their yellow school hats. They wanted me on board. It would have been an adventure, something to tell their friends.
After the car had pulled away, I took off my pack and sat in a patch of dappled sunlight by the verge for a rest and a smoke. From up ahead, an old man appeared through the trees, plodding slowly along with the aid of a tall stick. When he saw me, no expression of surprise crossed his face; he stopped, leaned on the stick, and inquired where I was going. Satisfied that my explanation made reasonable sense, he nodded in silence and turned his head away toward the rice paddies on the other side of the road. The skin on his face was deeply lined, his hands were wrinkled, and half his teeth were gone; he wore an old fashioned collarless undervest beneath a frayed jacket, and a battered army cap was perched on top of his narrow head. He was a charcoal maker, he said, just turned seventy, and had been doing the same j
ob for more than fifty years. I asked where he worked, and he waved a hand vaguely at the mountains. "Up there," he said, "in the winter. I used to cut firewood in the summer, but I don't do that any more. I'm not doing anything now." Making charcoal, he explained, was hard, monotonous work: cutting timber from the steep hillsides, roping the logs onto a homemade sledge he had mounted on a pair of cut-down skis, dragging the sledge through the snow to his kiln in a nearby valley, firing the timber, and then waiting till the heat died down and the charcoal was ready to be raked from the kiln and spread out to cool. "There's not much other work to do around here," he said, "and I'm no farmer. Never have been. No land, you see. But I didn't want to move away and live somewhere else. I like it here. So I took up charcoal making. It's best to live where you were born," he added philosophically, "and do your own work in your own time. Not be owned by someone else." I asked what other work options there were locally. "Okaiko [silkworms]," he answered with a shrug. "At least, in the old days. When I was a child, they took over the whole house. There was hardly even any space to sleep — we youngsters used to lie down on the shelves where the trays were, or curl up in any odd corner. In spring we'd cut young shoots from the mulberry trees, and then in the autumn we'd gather whole branches, stripping the leaves off with little blades attached to rings that we wore here," he explained, holding up his two index fingers. "It was a good business when everything went well, but that wasn't often. Too many things to go wrong. You had to give the worms the right amount to eat — not too much and not too little. You had to keep them clean, keep them in the temperature they liked, with the right amount of humidity and everything. After a while, their skin starts to go transparent, and then you have to keep a specially careful eye on them — watching until just the right moment, until they're ready to be moved onto a frame. Then, if we hadn't made any mistakes, they'd settle down happily and start spinning. But like I said, there were just too many things to go wrong. . . And in the end, the business just died. The big firms stopped buying from people like us. They could get silk more easily from foreign countries — China, Korea. They told us it was cheaper, and better quality too. So little by little, everyone around here gave it up. But you have a look as you go along this road. You can still see houses where they used to do it. Some of the bigger ones had a special extra story built on top, just for the silk." He took a last drag on his cigarette and ground the stub into the gravel with a dusty shoe. "Well, I must be getting on," he said. "Take care now!"