Washed Up

by Skye Moody

  Today’s consumer may find marine-based cosmeceuticals and body therapies at their local drugstore or order them from the squealing Shopping Channel ladies whose inflated testimonials cause grown men and women to weep and spend.

  I’ve had a seaweed body wrap. To be perfectly honest, I felt like a sushi roll. The afterglow, though, started me wondering: What if I went down to the beach in front of my house, gathered seaweed from the wrack, and made my own seaweed wrap? I could save $250, not counting tip.

  Several days after the alginic eureka, a particularly rich wrack formed on the beach. I slipped into my skimpiest two-piece bikini and aqua socks and tripped down to the wrack, bent over, and lifted a slimy green ribbon of seaweed. I felt the supple collagenic nature of the plant, which causes skin to plump out when it’s applied. I felt the zest, a pleasant sting that awakens the flesh on contact. I thought how much seaweed was out there, hundreds of varieties, how the mounds of seaweed continually pile up along the tide line, at the very least, a lifetime supply of body wraps, facials, body creams. Nature is generous, I mused, staring into the wrack.

  It was early morning. The summer sun had not yet risen high enough to heat the wrack and dry it up. I looked around. Two beach visitors clutching Starbucks cups like lifelines sat chatting on a nearby log; otherwise, the beach was deserted. I stared down the Starbucks couple until they got annoyed enough or scared enough to leave the beach. Alone now, I lay down, positioned myself on the damp seaweed, and gripping one end of the wrack to my waist, rolled over until my body, shoulders to knees, was encased like a rice ball in heaven.

  Almost instantly my body enjoyed a stinging sensation. Ah, the stuff’s working, I thought. The thrill of proving my wrack-wrap theory drove a chill along my spine. I could launch a seaweed flotsam revolution; everyone would learn to appreciate a good wrack. Soon the world’s beaches would be cheek to cheek wrack wrappers. But wait a sec. I’m a loner, don’t like sharing the beach with anyone. Better keep this secret, I told myself, and, turning over, I noticed a Camel cigarette pack tangled in my décolletage, then the oily sheen of some engine fuel—or was it tar?—clinging to my arm. Barnacles, little sticks of splintered wood, sand, and, yes, it was tar. I sat up, and that’s when I saw the divers who had surfaced off the tide line—the local diving school trains in front of my house. One of them had spotted me and gestured to the others. Now they waved. I pretended not to see them as I peeled off my seaweed overcoat. What for criminy sake was I thinking? Puget Sound is seething with pollutants, not to mention diving students.

  Swimming Pigs Meet the Big Wooden Phallus in Emperor Ishii’s Office

  Japanese are known—even revered—for their culture’s perceived eccentricities. Actually, I believe Japanese are simply better at executing eccentric affect than other folks. Japan’s anime far outstrips any similar artistic effort tried in the West. Tokyo, so technologically advanced, is so creatively electrified that no nuance escapes its luminous fingers or the artist’s lightning-bolt interpretation. Tokyo is anime: outsized, stylized, colorful, and futuristic, edged in sex and violence, pulsing, pounding, driven.

  The world of anime seems far-flung from the world of Flotsam Emperor Tadashi Ishii and his passion for beachcombing. But that’s only if you haven’t ever been immersed in Ishii lore. Ishii’s passion for his subject is outsized and colorful. What he discovers along the beaches of his country often are remnants of violence or strife, occasionally nuanced with a sexual significance the polite man chastely refers to as Yin and Yang. On Japan’s beaches, Ishii inevitably discovers fascinating trinkets, many speaking of humankind’s foibles and nature’s freaks. And Ishii navigates the world of flotsam as a loner, appearing at an instant on beaches like flashes of magic light dancing off the glistening tide. If Ishii missed it, it isn’t there. If you blink, you’ll miss Ishii.

  Ishii has collected hundreds of wooden objects off Asian beaches—among the more fascinating, three carved phalluses. One phallic reproduction is small and thick. The second, measuring a healthy fifteen centimeters, is made of lauan wood and washed up on a Fukuoka beach in southwest Kyushu. The largest phallus Ishii has so far found measures twenty-one centimeters (a bit over eight inches) and is made of Japanese cedar. This big guy Ishii plucked off the tide at Eguchi Beach.

  Usually made of stone, phallic fetishes date back as far as ancient Greece. But carved wood phalluses have for centuries been attributed to Tantric and Buddhist sects, including worshipers of the Thai Goddess Tuptim, whose shrine in Bangkok is unique for its erotically charged Tantric-style influence. Chao Mae Tuptim is a fertility goddess, and her shrine is visited by women wishing to bear children. A sign at the shrine explains that Tuptim has received thousands of phallus-shaped gifts “both small and large, stylized and highly realistic. Over the years they have been brought by the thousands, and today, fill the area around the shrine.”

  Virtually nonexistent as a fetish symbol in other East Asian Buddhist sects, the wood phalluses may likely have traveled ocean currents via the Gulf of Thailand, northeast into the South China Sea, northward into the East China Sea, and branched off into the Tsushima Current to wash up at Eguchi and Fukuoka. Ishii doesn’t pretend to know the stories of the three washed-up phalluses, and neither do I, but oh, what fun to speculate.

  In December 1966, Ishii found a root carving of a sea lion washed up onto a Fukuoka beach. He has also found dolls, many made of wood. Ishii explains that there are two kinds of doll flotsam, toy dolls and religious dolls. On February 11, 1981, Ishii was walking on the beach at Shiraishi when he found a doll’s body with religious clothing wrapped around it and Buddhist scriptures on the body. A few minutes later, he found another, then another, for a total of ten. Ishii said he found the experience scary, but that’s not the scariest that things got for the Emperor of Flotsam.

  In April 1996, Ishii found a severed wooden head washed up at a beach in Fukuoka, an especially scary find, because a few days earlier, a beautician had been murdered and the killer had scattered her body parts around the prefecture. The severed head that rolled ashore gave Ishii the willies, but there’s more: In June 1997, in an incident that sent shivers around the world, a Japanese junior high school student methodically cut off the head of a young boy, then placed the head on a wall near the school. That same day, at a beach not far from the murder scene, Ishii found yet another wooden head washed up. Ishii wanted to photograph the head for his flotsam cataloging, but his family, fear some indefinable yet palpable repercussion, wouldn’t permit it.

  Ishii says he doesn’t much enjoy finding flotsam heads, or dolls. But Buddhas are something else, and he’s found more than his share of the Enlightened One upended and meditative at water’s edge. On December 7, 1979, at Katsuuma, Ishii found a carved wood Buddha. From its condition, Ishii concluded the old statue had traveled numerous times around the North Pacific Ocean, riding surface currents that bleed into each other. Ishii compares the Buddha to the wandering monk who constantly travels, begging his rice and sake. The old wood Buddha appeared to have traveled the ocean for decades, if not hundreds of years, before floating ashore at Katsuura. Ishii says old Buddha statues aren’t usually thrown away, but are returned to their temple or shrine, or—and this may explain this old fellow—they are brought to the seashore, placed in a small boat, and set adrift. Today the old Sailor Buddha sits in Ishii’s office so that whenever Ishii feels a need to petition, Buddha’s handy.

  Among his other wood findings, Ishii once found a box that had washed up on the beach in northern Nigata Prefecture. The box was lettered in Russian and had presumably traveled across the Sea of Okhotsk from Russian Siberia to Japan. The lettering identified it as a “bomb box.” No bomb inside. Because so much Russian flotsam arrives on Japan’s northern beaches, Ishii believes the post-Soviet Russian population chucks all the old propaganda into the sea.

  Another among Ishii’s favorite finds is a toy horse made of yoki-zukuri, or particle wood. The horse washed up at Kitahara seashore. Where
it came from Ishii couldn’t say for sure, but one thing was certain: The sea gods had sent the Emperor of Flotsam a horse—an auspicious sign.

  Ishii also has collected a multitude of plastic toys. Among his most interesting are the reproductions of anime heroes, usually made in Taiwan, and a collection of military-themed toys from North Korea, including soldiers with parachutes, tanks, and guns. In 1996, Ishii found several plastic piggy banks washed up on a Taiwan beach. Blue, yellow, or pink, the piggies ranged in size from nine to thirty centimeters. Ishii isn’t the only one finding pigs on the beach: In September 2002, author and flotsamist Ed Perry found a yellow piggy bank washed up on a Florida beach. Another piggy bank, this one green, was found by Florida beachcombers. Then there’s the cigar-smoking piggy with the bowler hat plucked off Florida’s Sebastian Inlet by Robert Nordstrom. Based on a manufacturer’s code on the pork belly, Nordstrom’s five-inch-long smoking-swine savings bank may have been manufactured in the Dominican Republic by the now defunct cigar maker Sabrosito.

  Pursuing the smoking theme, let’s consider the 100 Yen lighter, a brand of cigarette lighter that’s like a skinny Bic with ribs, usually clear green or blue plastic and about eleven and a half centimeters long (just over four and a half inches). During my early China days, at any given time, I owned half a dozen 100 Yen lighters, because back then I smoked. I coveted a red 100 Yen; they’re scarce. In fact it may have been a red 100 Yen I lobbed overboard on a trip down the Yangtze shortly before I kicked the habit during a hellish two-week withdrawal in Hong Kong.

  The 100 Yen is ubiquitous; it seems to clone itself in China’s streets and alleys, and even on the beach. I have found numerous 100 Yen lighters of the common variety washed up on Hong Kong’s back harbor on the China Sea, and on the beach at Macau, where even lungfish choke.

  Ishii has a huge collection of 100 Yen lighters. In his flotsam encyclopedia, he explains there are two sizes of 100 Yen lighters: the ones that are eleven and a half centimeters long, and a less common model that’s just over eight centimeters, presumably for toddlers’ hands. When searching an agricultural drainpipe at Yazikimachi, Ishii found sixty of the lighters. Five were from Korea; twenty-five were green, eight were blue, and—wait a minute—none were Chinese.

  While flotsaming at the Shiraishi seashore in November 1990, Ishii found a plastic doruharubana washed in from Korea. Ordinarily carved from stone, doruharubana are statues placed in villages to protect residents from disease. The nine-centimeter pink plastic statue caused such a sensation in Japan that a television crew covered the event. Then, in 1994, Ishii found another plastic doruharubana, this one black, washed up at Japan’s Katsuura seashore.

  Ishii, the scientist, meticulously maintains records of his finds, including date, time, and location, the information critical to its value as evidence of ocean current shifts and weather patterns. Among his more spectacular finds is a commemorative bowl made of silver and engraved in gold, which Ishii found washed up on a beach on Fukuoka’s east side. The bowl, dated 1923-1924, was a presentation piece celebrating the warship Izumo’s first circumnavigation of the globe. The Izumo was built by British shipbuilding company Armstrong in 1897 and launched in 1899. What I want to know is why anyone would jettison such a keepsake into the sea. My romantic impulse suggests it must have gone down with a ship.

  Dragon Lagan

  Tadashi Ishii is perhaps proudest of his collection of more than four hundred ceramic, porcelain, and celadon bowls. He’s found many ancient rice bowls and vegetable bowls of varying sizes and decoration, some from the Edo or Tokugawa period (1600-1868) in Japan. Besides these incredible treasures, Ishii has collected numerous nikkeisui bottles—decorative vases from the Meiji period (1868- 1912). Nikkeisui, extremely rare flotsam finds even on Japan beaches, are made of handblown glass, blown into three or four connected global tiers with simple long beaks, and may have been used in ikebana. The rarest nikkeisui Ishii has found is a six-tiered vase.

  Having invented pottery making around 4000 BC, the Chinese also hold the record for the most pottery flotsam and jetsam. When in the fifteenth century AD, Spanish galleons began hauling China’s pottery urns, dishes, decorative pieces, and rice wine jugs around the oceans, the seas swallowed up thousands of tons of pottery that went down with wrecked ships or were jettisoned in storms. Packed in Spanish Manila trade ships bound for New Spain (Mexico), some intact urns and millions of pottery shards began beaching along North and South America’s coastlines. Some urns were etched with Chinese characters. Meantime, massive jugs of Spanish wine went down with ships in hurricanes off both American coasts.

  A few lucky American beachcombers have recently stumbled across great pottery urns that rolled ashore between 2001 and 2005 along the U.S. West Coast. Some of these have been exhibited at beachcombers fairs at Long Beach and Grayland in Washington State, including the mysterious unglazed stoneware urn found by Steve Sypher two miles north of “beachcomber’s heaven,” Tokeland, Washington. When he found it, the urn wore a light barnacle coating, an indication it had not traveled for a long time in the ocean, and yet it is probably the most primitive urn of the eighty or so urns so far found along the West Coast.

  The oblong, slightly buoy-shaped urn stands nearly two feet high and is just over sixteen inches in diameter at its broadest section, very narrow at the bottom, its opening apparently plugged with clay. The light brown urn is etched with primitive diagonal lines across most of its girth. Its narrow bottom is etched with circular bands. It’s empty, although Sypher says it rattles as if a small stone or pebble has been caught inside. When I saw this object at Grayland’s forty-first annual driftwood show, where it claimed first place, I was told Sypher had found the urn only on the previous day, May 14, 2003. Since then, several more urns have been reported washed up along the Washington coast, although none as ancient looking as this.

  Some flotsamists single-mindedly collect only ceramic originating in Asia, shards of broken objects found along tide lines. These are particularly abundant on Pacific Rim coastlines. A pottery shard can be dated by the formula of clay, porcelain, or celadon used to make it, or by the decorative images on it. While Asian beaches receive the vast majority of pottery flotsam, the U.S. West Coast and Alaska also attract these tiny shards of history, each holding a memory of its creator and a question about how it came to be flotsam. But a pottery flotsamist quickly learns that most of what washes up in exquisite little shards is either recently manufactured or the work of clever antiquarian pottery forgers. China daily pours out millions of clay, porcelain, and celadon reproductions, which are pawned off to tourists who are under the impression they are acquiring genuine antiques. No one fakes antiques better than the Chinese.

  In 2001 a Chinese diving team of twelve underwater archaeologists visited the remains of a thousand-year-old shipwreck. Dubbed, “Shipwreck No. 1 in the South China Sea,” the news media are fond of calling it “China’s Titanic.” The team salvaging the site works hard to keep the shipwreck out of the news. That’s because Shipwreck No. 1, a hundred-foot-long oceangoing wooden vessel, contains as many as sixty thousand relics from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). No doubt during the thousand or so years the wreck has lain on the sea floor, some of the cargo broke loose and went adrift in the currents to wash up on beaches around the region, if not around the world. Already the salvagers have recovered more than ten thousand items, including priceless ceramics and porcelain bowls. Among the ceramics salvaged were a large number fashioned in distinctively Arabian styles. Based on this evidence, and on the history of merchant vessels traveling from China throughout the world, the team thinks the ship was en route to the Middle East when it went down, likely in a typhoon.

  More important for flotsamists, the South China Sea is believed to hold the remains of more than two thousand shipwrecks. Officials at the government’s South China Sea Research Center based in Hakou, Hainan Province, worry that the amazing treasures lying at the bottom of the sea risk “being damaged or endangered by mus
hrooming illegal salvages and ensuing dealings in the international art markets,” says the center’s director, Wu Sicun.

  He Shuzhong, a cultural heritage government official, worries because “the world’s treasure hunters have turned their attention to ancient sunken vessels in the past decade. They can often make greater profits with fewer risks out of the commercial salvages than out of tomb raiding.” He refers to a massive salvaging of shipwrecks in the South China Sea by one British salvager, who racked up $20 million at a Christie’s auction in Amsterdam selling the ceramics and gold from a Chinese ship that sank in 1752. The auction was in 1986. A year later, China began protecting its ancient lagan. One official remarked, “In art markets of major Chinese cities we can often see antiques with shells clinging to their surface. They have been taken from shipwrecks.”

  Not necessarily so. As the informed flotsamist knows, a clever antique dealer can make anything look old, including flotsam; gluing seashells to a fraudulent flotsam or lagan find is a piece of cake. Just ask the shell seekers who have wrestled with barnacle glue.

  Flotsamists will be interested to learn that Shipwreck No. 1 was discovered just a hundred feet offshore at a river mouth, where presumably the placement and angle of the wreck combined with the force of the river’s flow helped keep the boat from being buried too deeply in sand. However, if a flotsamist plans to violate international law, or perhaps take advantage of its gray areas on salvaging undersea treasure, he or she would best refrain from imitating the bands of Chinese fishermen looking to get rich: They bomb the shipwreck sites with explosives, retrieving whatever’s left intact.