The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  On the sixteenth of June, 1964, a submarine earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale occurred near Awashima island, sixty kilo-meters north of Niigata city. Although the earthquake was directly responsible for only twenty-six deaths and fewer than two thousand houses destroyed, it provided telling evidence that the real dangers of an earthquake arise not so much from the jolting itself as from the natural and domestic consequences.

  The first natural consequence of the Niigata earthquake was a tidal wave that hit the city at a height of five meters, flooding 10,500 houses and causing damage to dozens of other towns along the coast. The second consequence was a disastrous rise in the water table along both sides of the estuary of the Shinano River, the other river upon which Niigata stands. The land here had been reclaimed from the sea some three hundred years earlier by the simple process of quickening silting with bucketfuls of sand; but as the land shook, the subterranean water percolated to the surface. Ironically, the lighter wooden buildings floated and survived, while of the reinforced concrete structures in the city, more than a fifth were ruined. A third consequence was a major fire in a large oil refinery caused by crude oil sloshing about and being sparked by static electricity. The fire consumed ninety-seven oil tanks, a company dormitory and shops, 290 neighboring houses, and burned for a fortnight.

  Perhaps the most sobering lesson of the Niigata earthquake was its total disregard for human "progress." The Bandai Bridge across the Shinano River had been built in 1929 and was considered a crude affair. Its concrete piles had been pronounced too heavy for the soft, sandy riverbed on which they stood, and its rigid, load-bearing construction, it was feared, would snap in a major tremor. By contrast, the brand new Great Bridge of Enlightened Peace, which had been opened to the public only fifteen days before the quake, was designed by experts to be earthquake-proof It had neat, slim piles of tubular steel and was constructed independently of its supports so as to withstand the strains of shaking. The Bandai Bridge survived intact; the Great Bridge of Enlightened Peace collapsed.

  Today, the buildings on the east bank of the river are conspicuously new. There are restaurants, department stores, plazas, arcades, and a vast shopping complex known locally as Bandai City. But if you cross the Bandai Bridge and stroll through the streets to the west of the river you are quickly among the narrow shops, the two-story houses that learned to float, the temples, and the dark, inviting little bars with their red paper lanterns swinging outside them. It is here, in the maze of these older streets, that the Niigata carnival is most delighting.

  Like the city itself, the Niigata carnival is a striking mixture of the old and the new. The floats that trundle through the narrow streets with their portable shrines and tubs of sake on them are preceded by an American-style marching band in red dragoon tunics. The carnival controllers who walk beside the floats wear pale blue-and-yellow kimonos. In their right hands they carry paper fans to direct the floats; in their left hands they carry walkie-talkie radios to direct each other. At every street corner the policemen, who astonishingly permit traffic to cross the procession, blow their whistles and wave their arms in blithe independence of the traffic lights. The result is that drivers, having no idea whether they are supposed to obey the whistles, arms, lights, or paper fans, end up obeying none of them, the floats slowly jam themselves into an immovable line of buses and trucks, and the entire event begins to resemble the aftermath of a major natural disaster.

  The pavements were so crowded on the fifty-fifth afternoon of my journey that movement along them was out of the question. Since early morning, people had been camping on plastic mats at the side of the road, but by the time the procession had reached their mats, several hundred trouser legs were blocking their view, and so the campers were forced to stand with the other spectators in ranks five deep across the pavement. The thousands of amateur photographers were more mobile, darting from side to side of the road, eliciting blasts from policemen's whistles, cracks on the head from violently flapped fans, shouts from irate taxi drivers, and long deep wails from the horns of buses that grew louder and more desperate as the disaster progressed, till eventually the scores of taiko drums were audible only if you were standing next to them.

  On one of the floats sat Miss Niigata, a pretty girl in a long pink dress, perched on a throne with a crown on her head, smiling radiantly and waving at the crowds. Photographers climbed onto her float to snap her, policemen blew their whistles at her, taxi drivers suggested novel ways of broadening her education, and pimply youths serenaded her at the tops of their voices. Nothing disturbed her. She would continue to smile just as serenely should an earthquake strike, should the street catch fire, should her terrifying father sneak up and steal her navel. She was still smiling thirty minutes later and her float was still as hopelessly stuck.

  By evening the streets were quiet again. August was three-quarters over and the summer festivals were coming to an end. The taikos and the lanterns were disappearing, and the people in the mountain villages were preparing to cut their rice. Farmers were going back to their fields, city workers were going back to their cities, Miss Niigata had gone back, serene, to her father, and the dead were asleep for another year.

  The Niigata carnival ends with fireworks. I watched them from below the Bandai Bridge. There were no drums now, no whistles, no horns—only the shouts of children and the crack of the fireworks as they exploded high over the dark river.

  "Look, it s a star!"

  "Look, it's the sun!"

  Bright bunches of color splashed onto the night sky and slowly fell in rains of fire to vanish in the black water under the bridge. The stars and the suns were green and gold, and the last firework of all was a willow tree.

  5

  The Back of Japan

  In the sand dunes that stretch from Niigata to the sea the villagers had planted watermelons. There was no soil that I could see, and they had ploughed the thin sand of the dunes into furrows where the dark melons lay rotting. When the wind blew, it troubled the melons and they lolled like drugged heads. The wind sucked the light sand into the air and flicked sharp grit into my eyes so that I had to crouch by the side of the empty path and try to clear them with a towel. Three times the path through the dunes forked without warning and ended in a stringy tangle of barbed wire. My map was a mess of lanes that seemed not to exist, but I followed the distant whistle of a train and, in the late afternoon, came out of the dunes to find myself on a paved road in front of a ryokan that looked completely deserted. In the entrance hall the morning paper lay untouched, and the wind riffled it as I held open the door.

  "Hello. Is anyone there...?"

  Nothing, no sound, not even the usual telltale rattle from the kitchen.

  "Hello.... Excuse me..."

  No sound from outside the ryokan either, as though a sleeping sickness had come down with the end of summer. I shouted for two minutes into the silent building before a small dumpy woman slid open the door of her parlor and stood breathing heavily with her back against the doorpost.

  "I'd like to stay..."

  She shook her head.

  "...if there are any rooms free."

  "I'm sorry, we're full."

  She bent down and picked up the unread morning paper. The stillness of the building around her was broken only by the ticking of a clock in the parlor. She turned the newspaper over in her hands and blinked.

  "Full."

  "I see. Is there anywhere else?"

  "Kakudahama."

  "How far is that?"

  "Ten... fifteen minutes' walk."

  I closed the front door very quietly so as not to disturb the innkeeper's peace and walked down through the dumbstruck village. The map showed bold straight roads where only desolate paths wound into the dunes, and I took my bearings from the distant sea. The little bathing beach of Kakudahama was eight kilometers away. It took me an hour and a half to reach it, cutting back across the darkening swathe of waste sand, ploughed and dotted with innkeepers' heads.<
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  Of the twenty or thirty plywood minshukus that lined the beach only three had lights on. The sun had set behind the minshukus and they stood still and battened like boxes. In one of the three lighted buildings an old couple squatted, tormented by flies, eating their dinner in the middle of a vast, empty room that had been built for a summer full of bathers. One corner of the room housed a dusty souvenir stand where a bundle of unsold children's windmills spun raggedly in the draft that lifted the matting as I gingerly slid open the door.

  "Yes, of course you can stay, only all we've got is the trout we caught in the river this morning, but it's nice trout, and some squid from Sado if you can eat that. From Sado island. I'll be glad to cook it for you. And some rice. And some tea. And there's beer, of course, and sake if you like that. We're on our own. There's only the two of us and I'm afraid my husband's rather hard of hearing. There's two guests coming from Tokyo the day after tomorrow that have booked and we've put in the register. They'll stay a night and then we'll close. Most of us have closed now and gone back to the village to spend the winter. It's up the coast, not much of a village. The old ones do no work in the winter. They sit and drink tea and watch the young ones fish. We'll close down on Saturday. I'll cook your trout. It's been a short summer, hasn't it?"

  The breeze dropped and in the heat of the night I slept with the

  windows open onto the sea and woke up in horror to discover that the mosquito coil had gone out.

  The next morning, after a swim and a shower, I began to walk along the Shiisaido Rain (Seaside Line), a toll road through what the guide-book describes as the Sado-Yahiko Quasi-National Park. From the height of the toll road the beaches below looked gray and bare this twenty-fourth of August, devoid of any trace of holidaymaking. Rows of the same thin plywood shacks, shuttered and boarded, lined each small bay. Yet the day was fine. The only clouds were the cream-white halo that capped Mount Kimpoku on distant Sado. The light August breeze in the pine groves teased out their fragrance and sent it scurrying with me up toward the low hills. Ahead of me a car stopped and an irate-looking man climbed out and began to scoop a space for me on his cluttered back seat.

  "It's all right," I called out. "I prefer to walk."

  He looked at me as though I were mad, as though no one in his right mind could possibly want to walk along a route singled out for its scenic attractions.

  At lunchtime young mothers with babies strapped to their backs fetched their sons and daughters home from school on motor scooters.

  "Mummy, what's a gaijin doing here?"

  "I expect he's come for the culture."

  On the outskirts of the town of Teradomari two small black-and-white kittens sat shivering by the roadside, their bellies distended, wailing at the cars. The car cemeteries gave way to shiny car show-rooms, and near the town center the tenants of a block of flats called Colony Niigata, from which the two dying kittens were probably abandoned, sat on their balconies drinking orangeade and watching a fisherman's family trying to maneuver their heavy old boat along the dusty main street. The boat creaked as it swung from side to side while the young men cursed it and hauled it on chains, the women scuttled round from stern to bow with the wooden logs on which they were trying to roll it, the old men smacked the logs with mallets, and the Niigata Colonists grinned down at the antics of these oilskinned bump-kins and fiddled with the dials of their transistor radios.

  Ever since encountering the Japan Sea in Yamagata I had been weighing its reputation, a reputation for grayness and gloom which long ago earned this coast the name that still derides it: Ura Nihon, or the Back of Japan. (In fact, the name is considered so derisive that you are not allowed to utter it on NHK, the national broadcasting net-work.)

  Strictly speaking, the coastal strip from Niigata to Fukui is part of the Chubu ("Middle") District, a geographical division that stretches across the full width of Japan to include much of the industrial sprawl that has ravaged the Pacific side of the country. The Pacific coast is the most densely populated, the most commercially important, the black-est, noisiest, smoggiest, unhealthiest, most ruinously developed area in the country. The shinkansen, the famous "bullet train," provides glimpses of it between Tokyo and Hakata—a seemingly unending belt of gray oil tanks, of docks, of factories that cloak Mount Fuji with dust and curtain the islands of the Inland Sea. The cities of the Pacific coast sprawl one into another: Tokyo indistinguishable from Kawasaki, Kawasaki from Yokohama, Osaka from Kobe.

  In comparison, the Japan Sea coast is a backwoods. True, it has its industrial centers: Niigata is one of the largest, and in a few days' time I would pass through the city of Naoetsu with its sprawling steel and fertilizer plants. But these are nothing compared to the Pacific squalor, and a part of its reputation for gloomy isolation must stem from this area's tardiness in "modernizing."

  A greater part, though, stems from pure geography, for the Japan Sea coast was never on the main route to anywhere. The chief artery of communication between the old imperial court in Kyoto and the seat of real power in Kamakura—and later Edo (Tokyo)—was the Pacific-coast highway called the Tokaido. That was the great trunk road of history, an inspiration to writers, painters, and adventurers, and for eight hundred years the spinal cord of japanese civilization. The Japan Sea coast was a world away from it on the other side of the mountain range that slices through central Honshu and is now called (since it was so christened by a German missionary) the Japan Alps. So inaccessible was this backward, benighted Ura Nihon that people were sent here as a punishment. The offshore island of Sado—the largest of japan's many minor islands—was notorious from the twelfth century as a place of exile, and its rocky shores and misty valleys have furnished a prison for some of the glummest characters in Japanese history.

  Mongaku was one—a sort of twelfth-century Japanese Rasputin. He began his career by lusting after his cousin and killing her by mistake (he had meant to kill her husband), for which piece of carelessness he shaved his head, became a monk, and religiously persuaded the powerful general Yoritomo to wage all-out war against his rivals at court. Yoritomo was successful, and for a while Mongaku enjoyed the fruits of victory. But, alas, not content with provoking mere war, he went on to hatch a plot against the emperor Gotoba, and when his protector Yoritomo died in 1199, Mongaku was whisked off to Sado, where he fretted away the rest of his life.

  The other famous clergyman to suffer in Sado was the militant evangelist Nichiren, less a Rasputin than a thirteenth-century Ian Paisley. Nichiren insisted on a firm bond between church and state—so long as it was his church, and his alone, that the state paid any attention to. So vehemently did Nichiren denounce all other Buddhist sects (he once exclaimed that the government would have done better to execute the "heretic" priests than the emissaries of Kublai Khan) that he was packed off" to Sado in 1271, where he passed two years in a mud hut and suffered from chronic diarrhea.

  The highest-ranking exile was the emperor Juntoku, sent to Sado in 1221 for attempting to overthrow the military regents. He spent 20 years there, died on a hunger strike, and had 650 years to wait before he was officially reinstated. The founder of the Noh theater, Zeami Motokiyo, lived eight of the last years of his life in Sado. The courtier Hino Suketomo, who had tried to raise an army on behalf of the powerless emperor Godaigo, was shipped to Sado in 1324 and assassinated there by the glum governor. And as late as the mid-nineteenth century a penal colony was working the dreary Sado gold mines.

  The afternoon grew overcast. I sat on the beach at Teradomari—the beach from which all these exiles had set sail—and stared across at the gray mounds of the island, remembering my walks there, the meadows and caves and the lingering snows of Mount Kimpoku in May, and thinking of my own seven-year exile in Tokyo.

  Ah, toward Sado

  the trees and the grass bend.

  Ar'ya ar'ya ar'ya sa.

  Near Izumosaki a bent old woman was scrubbing out a dusty little wayside shrine and lighting candles. The houses in the village
s had been battered by the wind and salt to a uniform gray-brown. They were fenced off from the sea by gray bamboo palisades, the tops of which were rough and frayed, and the houses were so patched and weatherblown that they looked as if they had been camouflaged for an invasion. Between the oily, littered beaches the sea pounded on high stone walls and in the first shower of rain I went for a swim and cut my foot on a broken whiskey bottle.

  The shops in the town of Izumosaki displayed four or five sticks of baked flyblown fish in each of their windows and little else. Down the coast towards Kashiwazaki a solitary gas rig straddled a small patch of rain-pocked sea, and in one tiny village an incongruous Hotel Japan loured over its own private bit of beach where three young girls paddled aimlessly about under torn, wind-whipped umbrellas.

  "What are you doing, arubaito?" asked a toothless woman pushing a wheelbarrow. (Arubaito is the German word arbeit, which the Japanese have commandeered to mean a part-time job.) The rain had blown over and I was sitting on a beer crate under the awning of a grocer's shop.

  "No, I'm not doing arubaito. I'm having a rest."

  The woman stopped, and the three dogs that were following her lurched, yapping and sniffing, into the grocer's rubbish bins.

  "You speak good hyojungo (orthodox Japanese). Where did you learn it?"

  "I live in Tokyo."

  "Ah!"

  The woman brushed away a bluebottle that was caught in her head-scarf

  "I was born in Tokyo. In Toyo-cho. I bet you don't know where that is."

  "I bet I do. I had a friend who owned a futon shop there. We used to go drinking at a folk-song bar in Asakusa."

  The woman's mouth dropped open so wide I thought she was trying to catch the bluebottle.