Sado: Japan's Island in Exile Read online

  An old wooden clock behind the counter began to strike the hour. At the same moment, the shop owner's wife emerged from the kitchen with two grilled fillets of fugu on a plate, which she set down in front of me with a smile of triumph. There was no way to refuse. It seemed insane to die for the sake of good manners — a peculiarly English fate — but by and large I had had a happy life and had greatly enjoyed my final few days, walking around Sado. Here was as good a place as any for the curtain to come down. I picked up the chopsticks, separated a section of the soft white flesh and put it into my mouth. Nothing happened. There wasn't anything unusual about the taste, either. This was the great delicacy? I finished the two fugu while the shop owner regarded me with an air of unconcern. "You see?" he said. "It's all right, isn't it? We sell a lot of that. There's nothing to worry about."

  "Even so," I said, "some people die in Japan every year from eating it, don't they?"

  "Not in this shop," he answered simply.

  At that moment, the door opened and three men came in. Already quite drunk, they seated themselves a little way down the counter from me and shouted for beer. Presently, the one nearest to me looked round and noticed something strange in his favorite sushi shop. "Hey!" he cried. "What's this? American! Hey, you! Me Japanese!" He touched the tip of his nose with his forefinger, so that I should know who he was referring to. "Me Yamamoto! Me Sado!" The man next to him pulled gently at his shoulder to shut him up, but Mr. Yamamoto shrugged him roughly away. "Hey, you GI, hey. . ." He paused, forgetting what he wanted to say. Then it came back. "America no good," he said sternly. "Japan good, America no good."

  "You could be right," I replied evenly. "I hardly know the place."

  This wasn't in the script. Mr. Yamamoto gaped stupidly, his mouth hanging open. He stank of whisky.

  "He's not American," said the shop owner. "He's from England. You got that wrong, didn't you?"

  His opening gambit having backfired, Mr. Yamamoto felt embarrassed. He also realized he had been rude. It was time to buy me a beer. As we drank, he told me his story. As a young man, he had left Sado and gone to Tokyo to find work. He had hated it, living in squalid lodgings, laboring in jobs where pay and work availability were controlled by gangsters, despised by the city boys for his uncouth manners, laughed at for his country accent. "But I stayed," he said, with a touch of pride. "I stayed for fifteen years. And then one day, I knew I'd had enough. I just knew. I wanted to come home. So I quit my job and back I came!" He looked at me with an air of defiance.

  "So what do you do now?" I asked him.

  "Anything! I do anything! Woodwork, roofing, farming, a bit of fishing — anything. I don't care, because I'm back here. This is my home. I was born here, I'll die here. My children, they want to leave. When school is over, they want to go to Tokyo. 'Go to Tokyo, then,' I tell them. I've been there. I'm not going again. I want to stay right here."

  I felt glad for him. Drunk as he was, he conveyed the frustration of life in Tokyo very clearly — screwing up his face at the thought of it, raising his voice, bunching his shoulders, clenching his hands, jerking his head. But when he reached the part about giving it up and coming back to Sado, his whole body relaxed, his gestures became wide and sweeping, he tossed his head and laughed, his eyes sparkled. He must have been in his late forties, with no trade, no steady employment, no idea what job he would do after the present one was finished. What's more, he didn't care. I do anything! Cured of city-worship, he was home for good. If there was a job around, he was ready to do it. If not, he stayed in bed, or got drunk. Whichever it was, he was happy.

  Day 4

  Among The Exiles

  Oka Genzaburo chose a beautiful spot to commit suicide. A samurai from Echigo province, he had fought in one of the long-running clan wars that used to punctuate life in medieval Japan and had ended up on the losing side. With most of his clan wiped out and his lord captured, Oka Genzaburo had no options left but death by seppuku, or self-disembowelment. So he set off to return home, intending to say farewell to his family and do the deed on familiar ground. But his enemies got there first; by the time he arrived the house was burnt down and there was no sign of his wife and children. In a final, futile gesture of defiance, he escaped across the sea to Sado, made his way to Aikawa, and thence to Kasugamisaki, the first headland south of the town. Here, all alone on the grassy tip of a narrow promontory that juts sharply out into the sea like the point of an arrow, he sat and waited for the dawn, then cut open his abdomen with a dagger and died.

  My visit to the sushi bar the night before had involved more beer than originally intended, and when I stumbled up to Kasugamisaki in the early hours of the following morning, it seemed a good place to stop and clear my head. There was a stiff wind blowing off the sea, and I stood on Oka Genzaburo's grassy knoll and took several deep breaths while watching the long, foam-tipped breakers roll steadily in and smash into the black rocks below. It was a wild, desolate-looking shore, with more than a touch of the west coast of Ireland, and the sense of confronting the very limit of the world was sharpened by the low roar of the wind as it rushed through the long, tussocky grass. Close by was a memorial to the dead hero, a four-sided stone structure that rose to a narrow platform topped off by a stone lantern. I took my camera out of the pack and composed a photograph of it that would capture the drama of the setting, with plenty of sea and coastline in the background. After carefully packing the camera away again, I turned round and discovered that the real memorial was behind me, a big mound marked with a slab of smooth granite on which was carved Oka Genzaburo's name. The lantern, as I should have guessed from its position on the cliff edge, was exactly what it looked like — a lantern, probably once used as a warning beacon.

  Kasugamisaki marks the beginning of a stubby little peninsula that extends to the southernmost point of O-Sado and forms one arm of Mano Bay, the long, sheltered crescent of beach on the west side of the island's central plain. The interior of this peninsula is rugged and undeveloped except for a few rice paddies, and the shore is punctuated with long, shoestring villages built along the narrow strip of land between the base of the cliffs and the edge of the sea. Even a century ago, some of these villages were more than a mile long and in one place, near the tip of the peninsula, the road passed between a double line of houses that extended without a break for seven miles. Away from the central plain, virtually all Sado's settlements are on the coast, and are outgrowths of the same original design — long and narrow in form and only occasionally including two or three other streets, parallel to the through road, where the cliffs stand far enough back from the sea to provide the necessary space. With the shoreline road as its only accessible part, the peninsula as a whole is known as Nanaura Kaigan, or Seven Bays Coast.

  Modern engineering, however, has been employed to modify these traditional arrangements, as the road through the old villages is in many places too narrow and twisty for tourist buses to pass through. Most of the villages are now bypassed by a new road cut out of the mountainsides above them. The local people are probably delighted, but strangers on foot find it confusing because they can easily pass by a village without realizing it is there at all.

  A sudden squall of rain sent me scurrying for cover under the eaves of an old farmhouse. I waited in silence, hoping that the people it belonged to would stay sensibly indoors until the weather cleared up and not come out to discover a foreign lunatic flattening himself against the side of their home at seven o'clock in the morning. Despite the brisk rain and the clouds scudding across the sky, the sun was doing its best to come out; I could see a brilliant rainbow arching into the sea behind a grove of pine trees. Looking around at the cultivated fields close to the house, I also noticed how much darker and richer the soil was here than further north. The landscape had more and bigger trees, including figs in fruit, and a wider variety of vegetables: broad beans, french beans, peas, tomatoes, spring onions, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, and eggplant could all be seen from where I was standing.


  Setting off as soon as the rain stopped, I rounded the first corner and discovered a signpost informing me that I had missed the village of Oura, but was now entering Takase, its immediate neighbor. Takase's tourist attraction was a pair of large gray rocks at one end of the beach, called Husband Rock and Wife Rock. They stood side by side like twins, miniature mountains with the same conical shape and a few scattered patches of green lichens on their flanks. Husband Rock was solid, while Wife Rock had a long vertical gash right through from one side to the other, offering an oval window on the open sea beyond and a piece of natural symbolism comprehensible to even the dimmest tourist. They made a picturesque sight, in a postcardy sort of way, and were the reason for a big hotel and restaurant complex on the same beach, with a fifteen-slot coach park. Inside, a group of tourists were already getting up strength for the day with a hearty breakfast while their driver was busy outside cleaning his coach with a bucket of soapy water and an instrument like a windscreen wiper on the end of a long bamboo pole.

  The next hamlet was another with a bypass, but this time I was ready for it. Taking the old road down toward the sea, I found myself in a gray, weather-beaten village with a single winding street bordered by dark, irregular wooden houses whose upper stories, supported by heavy wooden pillars, jutted out above the ground floor. In some places, they leaned close enough together for a neighborly cup of rice to be passed from one side of the street to the other. Dozens of swallows were flitting backward and forward between the great outdoors and their half-built nests in the eaves.

  The village had no beach to speak of, only a jumble of rocks at the sea edge below a sturdy concrete wall. A few yards out to sea was a low rock stack with a tiny shrine perched on top of it, and at its foot stood an old woman in rubber waders and a red headscarf. Up to her thighs in the water, she was hauling away at floating clumps of seaweed with a wooden rake and stuffing them into a large basket slung across her shoulders with a white rope. The choppy sea didn't seem to bother her, even though the waves were surging round her and threatening to knock her off balance.

  Across the street from the seawall was another shrine, much bigger and completely bundled up with straw matting. It looked as though someone was halfway through gift wrapping it, intending to send it to an old friend through the mail. I went up to it, lifted the edge of one of the mats, and peeped in to see what was going on. The shrine had deteriorated somewhat, due to age and weathering, but still retained all its elaborate carvings of magic birds and snorting dragons and didn't appear to have anything seriously wrong with it. Around its sides was a sturdy scaffold of old pine logs lashed together. The crosspieces were long, thick bamboo poles, and the tightly woven straw mats, long enough to reach from the top of the roof all the way to the ground, were tied onto the scaffold with string. They formed a sort of giant coat, blocking out the weather completely. Perhaps the shrine was being dried out before having some preservative applied to the timbers. Whatever the reason, it was wonderfully warm and snug in there; outside, the wind was still coming off the sea at a brisk clip, but not a breath came through the curtain of heavy mats. If it had been the end of the day instead of the beginning, I would have been tempted to lay out my sleeping bag on the shrine's verandah and stay for the night.

  Beyond the village, the road resumed bypass mode and climbed back up the mountainside. Soon it emerged onto a plateau that had been divided into a network of small paddies separated from each other by low, narrow embankments. Ten or twelve figures were standing around, up to their ankles in water, and I stopped to watch them at work. But whatever they were doing, there was evidently no hurry: they just stood there, looking at the fields, as though undecided about which task to tackle next. Then the penny dropped — they were not people, but scarecrows. One was dressed in bright red pajamas and a battered old lampshade hat, another in blue trousers and a white shirt, a third in the remnants of a dark brown suit. Their heads were made of cardboard, or silvery colored sacking, shaded by hats or bound with head-scarves, and several had crude, Halloween pumpkin faces painted on both sides. Dangling from the ends of their outstretched arms were various bird-scaring devices — plastic bags shredded into strips, stiff plastic flags, rusty bells dangling from wire loops, colored umbrellas, or red and silver metallic streamers twisted to catch the sun. Apart from these flapping accessories they were still, and their stillness gave them a sinister, almost menacing air. A solitary scarecrow may be a scarecrow, nothing more, but this group seemed to share some consciousness beyond their innocent function as deceivers of birds. They stood like waiting presences in league with the unseen, ghostly incarnations of Sado's benevolent magic, these servants of Sohodoro-na-kami, god of scarecrows and protector of the fields.

  Having crossed the plateau of rice paddies, the road began to wind back down the mountainside toward the sea. Occasional breaks in the trees gave a view over Kuninaka, Sado's central plain, the whole wide sweep of Mano Bay, and beyond, to the southern half of the island and the yellow sand at far-off Sobama Beach, which I aimed to reach by nightfall. At the foot of the hill, where the plain began, my road turned right, along the coast and through Sawada and Mano, two towns that have grown into one and now make up the biggest urban settlement on the island. But first I had a detour to make.

  A little way inland from Sawada are two temples associated with a powerful Buddhist sect whose founder was a 13th-century priest called Nichiren. A combative man of fiercely held opinions, Nichiren was exiled to Sado for persistent public criticism of the government and for making outspoken attacks on rival sects of Buddhism. Something of the same antagonistic attitude still animates the Nichiren sect today, which is regarded with bug-eyed devotion by its adherents and with something between discomfort and distaste by everyone else. Like Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, contemporary followers are seen by outsiders as aggressively evangelistic, cliquish, and irritatingly self-satisfied. At the same time. their lay organization is populous and wealthy, and while the modern message is universalist — "May Peace Prevail On Earth" is a favorite slogan — the posture is right-wing, authoritarian, and sharply focused on adulation of the current leader. It seems unfair to blame Nichiren for this situation, 700 years after his death, but people do; his name still arouses pretty much the same emotions, for and against, as when he was alive.

  After an initial period of deprivation on Sado, Nichiren was "adopted" by a sympathizer and allowed to live at his home. This place is now a temple complex called Myosho-ji, complete with ornate gardens, gateways, tall slabs of stone inscribed with quotations from the master and clear pools of water planted with lilies and spanned by tiny stone bridges. But Myosho-ji lies enclosed by trees in a hollow on the mountainside, with no view in any direction, so every morning, it's said, the exile would walk half a mile down the track to the edge of a steep escarpment overlooking the Kuninaka plain. Here he would perform his devotions as the sun rose over the mountain ridge to the east and flooded the plain with light.

  A second temple, Jissho-ji, now stands on this escarpment, and I spent some time exploring the grounds. In the middle of a large graveled area bordered by neat flowerbeds stood a massive statue of Nichiren set up on a concrete plinth. The plinth was inscribed, in English and Japanese, with the words "May Peace Prevail On Earth."

  The statue showed a tough, stocky man with a craggy face, hands clasped together, beads slung over his left wrist, and dressed in a kimono covered by a short coat. As I was studying it, I was approached by the temple guardian, a garrulous old woman who launched without introduction into a rapid account of Nichiren's life and history. Didn't I think he was an amazing man? Did I know that he worked miracles? Had I studied his doctrines? Did I realize that thousands of devotees came here as pilgrims every year? And finally, seeing that I made no answer, did I understand what she was saying? "No," I told her amiably, to shut her up, "hardly a word."

  Here as elsewhere, the striking feature of temples dedicated to Nichiren is the enormous care, effort,
and expense undertaken to make them look impressive — not just the immaculate gardens, but the temple interiors with their lavish gold ornamentation, the extravagant use of lacquer, the glittering statuary, the plaster angels, the elaborately carved throne. This is not a form of Buddhism that delights in the ordinary, but one that seeks to elevate. It's as though association with the simple preoccupations of simple people risks lowering the leader in the eyes of his followers, as though he could be made more glorious by a vigorous personality cult placing him at the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty. The followers apparently find it convincing, but for the uninitiated it looks tasteless and vulgar, as if Christians, in telling the story of the nativity, sought to give it a bit of spurious gloss by re-siting it in the Tiberius Suite at the Bethlehem Hilton. Yet no attempt is made to hide the fact that Nichiren was on Sado as an exile. His privations are remembered with pride. And here on the Kuninaka plain, Nichiren was in exalted company; banishment to Sado was a fate shared at various times by aristocrats, generals, ecclesiastics, artists, and even emperors.