Sado: Japan's Island in Exile Read online

  Now the man looked around for a fresh challenge. At one end of the beach was a wide area of rock littered with loose boulders and scooped out here and there by rock pools that contained delicate water plants, red and yellow anemones, crabs, and tiny fish, all waiting together for the returning tide. This looked ideal. The Pajero bumped up onto the rocks as eagerly as a dog bounding up a staircase. A couple of good-size boulders bounced off the bull bars in front with a clang. Fractured shards of rock squirted out from under the tires and pinged off their neighbors or sailed skyward before stabbing soundlessly into the churned-up sand. One wheel smashed through a rockpool in a cloud of spray, thrillingly fast but just too fast for me to spot any broken claws, legs, or other bits of crab spinning through the air. And then, just when it seemed that there was nothing left to wreck, fate came up with one last suggestion.

  Having brought the Pajero to a sudden, shuddering stop, the man leaned out of the window, chewing fiercely on his gum, and glanced casually back over his shoulder. He was feeling tough as hell and looked it — like Marlboro Man with a fresh pack of smokes in his jeans and a pint of good ol' rye whisky in his gut. Slamming into reverse, he gave the steering wheel a good twist, kicked on the throttle, and lurched backward a few yards, banging two pumpkin-size rocks out of his way as easily as if they were tennis balls. But behind them, unfortunately, was a much deeper pool than any he had sampled so far, and his offside rear wheel now dropped straight into it with a sickening metallic crunch. The Pajero sat there at a drunken angle, apparently resting on its springs. Even the adjacent door sill, I noted with pleasure, had a bad dent underneath.

  At first, the man tried to look on the bright side. This was the kind of thing the four-wheel-driver had to expect. Mitsubishi's engineers certainly expected it — that was why they had made the Pajero as tough as a tank. Didn't it say so in the brochure — on page 4, beside that picture of the All-Terrain Wizard battling up a rock-strewn mountain slope at 45 degrees? He settled into position, slipped the gear back into first, and tried to move forward. The machine strained a bit, but didn't budge. He tried again, revving harder. Nothing. Then a third time. The engine screamed, smoke blasted from the exhaust pipe, but the Pajero stayed where it was, stuck fast. Of course, it would come out eventually. But it looked like a tractor job to me.

  For a brief moment there was silence. Then the doors opened, and the family stepped gingerly out to study the situation. Daddy didn't need to be told that it was serious. All the toughness had gone out of him in a rush, like steam out of a fractured pipe. He sidled cautiously toward the problem, like the office weed presenting himself for a bawling out from the section chief. There was a short conference with his wife. She was holding the children's hands, one on each side, and shaking her head in a censorious manner. The man hung his head, listened, and nodded. Then he stumped off up to the road to get help.

  Seeing that the drama was over, I decided to get dressed and carry on to Ryotsu. I wouldn't take the road; the path looked more inviting, at least to begin with, as it continued along to the end of the beach and rounded the point. I put on my clothes, heaved on the pack, and was just about to set off when I noticed the Pajero driver's wife down on her haunches, looking intently at the front wheels. They were turned at a sharp angle, so she climbed up into the driving seat, twisted the steering wheel a couple of times, and straightened them. Then she started the engine, leaned on the accelerator, and let out the clutch. With a tremendous effort the Pajero heaved itself upwards, paused for an agonizing moment on the edge of the hole, and then rolled forward to safety. The woman got out and looked at it with satisfaction. The children ran to her, laughing with pleasure. How happy they were! And what a nice surprise it would make for Daddy when he came back with the tractor!

  From the point at the end of the beach I could see all the way round the bay to Ryotsu. The path meandered along the shore, skirting little coves divided from each other by low, rock-strewn headlands and passing through semiderelict hamlets with a few battered boats drawn up at the tide line. Most of the larger buildings, store sheds and boatbuilding premises, were falling to bits where they stood, their doorways choked with wild flowers, their windows smashed, and their roofs festooned with moss, ivy, and tufts of yellow grass. Despite this dereliction there were a few signs of occupation — crinkled ribbons of greeny black seaweed strung on ropes between gray, sea-bleached poles, and neatly piled stacks of firewood tied in bundles with rusty wire — but the villagers themselves must all have been out in the fields. The only ones I met were a small boy contemplating the loss of his kite, which had got badly tangled in a pair of telegraph lines, and an old woman filling a 20-kilo plastic rice sack with coarse, gritty sand from the beach. She was planning to repair a pathway beside her house, she told me. A neighbor had given her half a bag of cement and now she was collecting the sand. What would she want with clean building sand when there was plenty of sand right here, to be had for nothing?

  There had been an earthquake here a few days ago, the old woman told me, and the local temple had been damaged. I remarked that it must have been a very small one, as I hadn't been aware of it, but she gestured toward the temple with her trowel and told me to go and take a look for myself. Apart from being overgrown with buttercups and nettles the front looked normal enough, but there was another access path at the back that passed along the base of a deep gully and was now blocked with heaps of rocks and clay, the debris of a considerable landslide. Two pairs of torii gates had been knocked over and the path was impassable. It certainly looked recent: the leaves on the fallen trees and plants were wilting, but still green. There was a week's work for 3 or 4 men to put things right, but no start had been made because everyone was busy with the rice planting.

  Eventually the path along the beach turned aside through a copse of firs and rejoined the coast road. As I walked the last couple of miles into Ryotsu, the town came out to meet me: a couple of supermarkets, a gas station, a school, a truck depot, an advance party of new buildings straggling along the shoreward side of the road, extending the town's boundaries and marking out the area where tomorrow's more serious urban development would follow. The old village communities watched helplessly as Progress encroached on their territory. Outside a tumbledown cottage, two old men were sitting together on fish crates, drinking beer: when they called me over, I went to join them. It was a bit early in the morning to start drinking, but it reminded me of other early mornings with my father-in-law, who also believed that beer for breakfast was the right way to fight off a hang-over. The old men wanted to know where I had walked from, and when I named the place, barely 20 kilometers away, they expressed astonishment and disbelief. Like the coming of the supermarkets, things were changing, changing so fast that for even the oldest generation the idea that anyone would cover that distance on foot when they didn't have to was almost incomprehensible. What used to be ordinary, unremarkable, the stuff of daily life, was now draining out of the common memory like water from a leaky bucket.

  While we sat there, a truck pulled out of its depot opposite, signaling to turn right onto the main road. He ought to have checked to see if any other traffic was coming, but his attention was distracted by the sight of something unexpected — a foreigner! — and he pulled out without looking to left or right. Of course there had to be another truck coming, and of course they managed to avoid each other, but it reminded me again that even today, whether driving, walking, or just sitting still, a foreigner in rural Japan is always a potential traffic hazard.

  On the outskirts of town, I turned away from the sea and followed a dusty track down to the edge of Lake Kamo. It was a bright, sunny noon with a light wind and just a few wisps of cloud scudding across the sky above the rocky peak of Kimpoku-san, the mountain that towered over the far side of the lake. There were gulls everywhere, some hanging almost still in the air, slowly beating their wings against the wind, some bobbing on the ruffled surface of the water, and others crowded together on the oyster rafts.
A good half of the lake, it seemed, was given over to oyster farming. The rafts were double-bed-size contraptions of bamboo poles tied together in rectangular frames, anchored to the bottom to stop them drifting and kept afloat by heavy glass globes lashed to the underside of the cross-pieces. A dozen or more thick ropes hung vertically down below each raft, with oysters growing on them in clusters; dividers were attached to keep about six inches of clear rope between each cluster, and there would be six or more clusters per rope depending on the depth of the water beneath. From time to time the farmers came chugging out in little boats to inspect the oysters' progress and perhaps gather in a load; day after day, the gulls came to do their own fishing or just stand on the rafts and wait for something to happen.

  Beside the lake was a square building of cracked concrete that belonged to an old acquaintance of mine called Fukuda. Tall and heavily built even as a boy, Fukuda had been picked out by a visiting talent scout and sent to Tokyo at the age of 13 to join a sumo wrestling stable. For 5 years he endured the ferocious discipline but by that time it had become clear that his ability wasn't up to the demands of a professional career; so he had come home again to Sado and set up as a boatbuilder. Things went well, and he had made other investments — a couple of bars, a vegetable shop in Aikawa, and this building beside the lake. At first he used it for storage, but later, after opening a new, larger boatyard on the other side of town, he kept just the ground floor for storage and converted the two floors above into apartments. One was for his own use, a place to retreat from his family and relax with his pals. The other was sometimes occupied, sometimes not. Fukuda liked to keep it handy, rent it out on short lets to help someone in a jam, or lend it to old friends who came to visit him on the island.

  I found him inside the storage shed having a spat with a young assistant. The bench between them was littered with tools — curved and straight planes, drill bits, wedges, pliers, and three or four traditional saws, the double-edged kind that cut on the upstroke. Fukuda was annoyed because the lad had wasted a valuable length of timber by cutting it too short. The mistake had been made because he had been calculating in centimeters instead of the traditional unit of measurement, the ken. Japan went metric way back in 1885, but the old system of weights and measures refused to die — even after 1959, when the government tried to stamp it out by prohibiting the manufacture and sale of the necessary tools. This was bad enough for ordinary carpenters, but crippling for the craftsmen who specialized in rebuilding dilapidated shrines and temples. The components of such structures were always sized in multiples of the old units; if the job was done in centimeters, something would always come out wrong. Twenty years later the obstructive law was repealed, but in the meantime the carpenters had been forced to struggle on with their old units inconveniently and inaccurately expressed in centimeters: one ken was 182 cm, one shaku (a sixth of a ken) was 30.3 cm, and one sun (a tenth of a shaku) was...well, whatever it was, the metric system was a damned nuisance, that's what Fukuda thought. The new generation of apprentices would just have to sideline what they learned in school and relearn the old ways. "Use this next time!" he said fiercely, brandishing a long wooden shaku ruler at his assistant. "We're building boats here, not lunch boxes!"

  Fukuda had to deliver some boat registration papers in town, so we went into Ryotsu together. I waited for him in the car, parked outside the municipal offices in a wide, graveled forecourt under a huge old cedar surrounded by protective railings. Then we drove along the arcaded main street and out beyond the town on the other side, turning away from the sea up a green valley that led into the mountains. Along the way we passed a huge quarrying operation: a whole mountainside had been literally torn away, stripped of its topsoil so that it looked like a huge, half-skinned carcass. The rock beneath was blasted loose, shuttled down the hill on a system of covered conveyors and sorted into enormous piles of stone and gravel, graded by size and quality. A procession of heavily laden dump trucks passed us on the narrow road, bearing this valuable cargo to construction sites all around the island. I remarked that it was sad to see a mountain torn open like that, its insides so ruthlessly plundered, but Fukuda just laughed. "I know the man who owns that quarry," he said. "He's called Mimura. We were at school together. In those days, there was nothing up here. At weekends, a group of us would get together and walk over these mountains to the other side, camp on the beach there, and then walk back again the next day. We knew all the birds then, and most of the plants too. There was always something to collect and bring home — mushrooms, berries, warabi shoots. Then I went away to Tokyo, and by the time I came back, Mimura's family had started this quarry. It was just a small-time operation then. But now that there's money around, construction grants from the prefectural government, it's gone crazy. People tease Mimura about it — they call him "The Man Who Sells The Earth." He doesn't like that much, but he doesn't stop either. You can't blame him. It's a good business. And it's necessary too. Sado needs to be improved. Why, even when I was a child there were villages here that could only be reached by boat. No roads at all in some places."

  The mountain road climbed up in a succession of steep hairpins, some so tight that they had to be taken in first gear. Eventually, close to the top of the pass, we stopped at a white-painted hotel called the Osado Lodge and ordered a lunch of grilled fish, rice, and beer on the outdoor terrace. The hillside around us was clothed with bare turf and tangled scrub — juniper, thorn trees, and bushes of wild azalea with deep peach-pink flowers. From the terrace we could look down on the whole of the Kuninaka plain, still mostly in paddy with long, straight, water-filled ditches and clusters of shabby farm buildings, but punctuated now with modern buildings as well, auto franchises, out-of-town DIY stores, supermarkets, fast food concessions and tracts of new, identical concrete houses. I told Fukuda my theory that Sado would always escape the worst excesses of development because of its short summer and fearsome winter, but he was unimpressed. In his opinion no building program, present or future, could be held responsible for "spoiling" the island. Such changes were inevitable, and very much to be welcomed. Likewise the tourist trade: already there were something like a million visitors a year, and no good reason why that number should not go on increasing. Their money created jobs, sustained inns and hotels, even revitalized old industries like pottery and local sake-brewing. Quick, easy connections with the mainland secured reliable markets for Sado's produce — fish, rice, vegetables, and now building materials too. Islanders could come and go at will, even commute to work on the mainland if they wanted to. At last they belonged to modern Japan, were linked for the first time to everything that was going on, no longer left to rot in poverty. If that was what I meant by "spoiling" Sado, I ought to stop worrying. Sado was "spoiled" already — vitiated by modern drugs like cars, fashion, and pop music or, as Fukuda preferred to think of it, rescued at last from oblivion by the nation's newly discovered genius for creating wealth and technology. In any case, what I feared was "lost" was not lost but transformed. Some aspects declined, others prospered. All that was happening was change, and every islander with any sense was glad to see it. The clock could never be turned back, but no-one who remembered the old days would want it turned back. It was all very well for me, Fukuda said, coming to Sado as a visitor. To be foreign, tied to nothing — that was easy. Living here permanently was something else. And change in Japan, he reminded me, should never be thought of as permanent. Things could fall apart any time — an economic collapse, a big earthquake, even another war. People said that was impossible, but nothing was impossible. Right now, the name of the game was prosperity, development, improvement. Tomorrow might be different. As far as he was concerned, Sado should cash in now, get all the harbors and roads that were going. Then, whatever happened in the future, nothing could take them away again.

  The sound of a ship's horn blasted up to us from Ryotsu harbor where the afternoon ferry had just come in to dock. In a couple of hours she would be pulling out again and retu
rning to Niigata. It was time to go.

  We drove back down the mountain, past the quarry, and out of the green valley to the coast. I looked across toward the mainland but as usual there was nothing to be seen. The horizon faded imperceptibly into a misty haze. It occurred to me then for the first time that Sado, singled out so long ago as a place of exile, had always been exiled itself from the rest of Japan, exiled by natural circumstances that made it seem farther and more remote than it really was. Out of sight, out of contact. In truth, Sado is not really far — only 40 miles offshore — just as Japan is not really far from the mainland of Asia; but history and geography have combined in both cases to create the impression of isolation, an impression entrenched over centuries in the national psyche. Now, it would appear, things are changing. The future is knocking at Sado's door, bearing bouquets of long-awaited improvements, and Sado, impatient to end its long seclusion, reaches eagerly out to receive them. This is the only way exile ever ends on Japanese islands, by intervention from the mainland. Already the new prosperity has seeded Sado's revival, brought hope for a more rewarding, comfortable life. But like other agents of growth, prosperity needs time to establish strong roots. For now, the island's sense of remoteness still lies deep, guarding the old ways. It won't be dissipated any time soon.

  Before taking me to the ferry terminal, Fukuda had to make another quick trip in the opposite direction, to deliver a progress report to one of his customers. I asked him to drop me off at the beach where I had camped the first night, and then pick me up again on his way back into town.

  After he drove away I clambered down the clover-covered embankment, picked my way across the stones, and stood by the edge of the flat gray water. Apart from the slow, rhythmic "plish" made by tiny waves breaking on the shingle, there was no sound at all. I laid Snake Frightener down at the tide line, somewhere close to where I had first found it, and then walked slowly back up to wait beside the road.