‘Sampan?’ suggested the man pointing to his boat. ‘Yung Shue Wan – sampan.’ Now that boat was rotten; foul, slippery with oil and the debris of the pig food. But I couldn’t walk over the hills again so we made a bargain and he decently placed a little stool on the fungicidal deck so that I would have somewhere to sit.
It took half an hour, around several capes and headlands, bouncing on the lively sea (I abandoned the stool because it kept slithering from beneath me) always with the thought that one extra bump would deposit me among the nameless muck in the hold of the boat. At last we reached the jetty at Yung Shue Wan and in my eagerness to disembark I all but ended up in the harbour.
Thankfully I got on the ferry and sat there trying to imagine what a gin and tonic was going to be like in the bar of the Hong Kong Hotel. Exploring islands is all very well, but there’s nothing like a gin and tonic in comfort.
On the following day I found myself again on a small Chinese boat, but this time voyaging only across a creek barely fifty feet wide in the middle of a fishing village on the island of Lantau. The island is the largest of the congregation around Hong Kong at the foot of the Chinese mainland. It is green and serrated with roads climbing steep gradients enabling you almost to look down the chimney pots of the valley houses. It reminded me of the vales and vantage points of Madeira.
At the small town of Tai O, the sea comes right into the main street, making it necessary to cross by a ferry operated by a formidable Chinese lady who pulled it on a rope slung from one side of the creek to the other.
The weather was odd, the unsure combination of fog and wind in the mountains and along the coast. The fishing junks and sampans in the harbour at Tai O were webbed with mist. It came on to rain and the propelling lady on the ferry put an umbrella above her head and pulled the rope with one hand.
I was glad I visited Tai O because, again, the day was a special one. Not a festival, but the day when the registrar from the main island travelled across with his assistant and all the people who had married or had children over the past months gathered to complete the documents for him. They clamoured about a long trestle table in the council chamber in the town’s slight street, sitting and standing three or four deep, like an overcrowded dinner party. The registrar, a young studious man who wanted to know how his profession worked in Britain, sat and dealt patiently with the customers. Many could not read or write and there was a nice moment when a married couple had to press their thumb prints onto a document which proved that their union was legal. Small babies hung on their mother’s backs while their entry into both the register and the world was noted. It was an animated room and very hot. Every so often the registrar would decide to halt and his assistant brought him a dainty bowl of pale tea. Refreshed, he would then call on the next thumb to be pressed to paper.
The police station at Tai O has an altar to the god Kwan Tai who is the deity of policemen, and also of television people. Before a new television film is produced the whole company pray to Kwan Tai and hope for success.
Religion is an everyday matter in such places, however. I went up to Po Lin Monastery in the hills for lunch at the monks’ rest house, where the food was vegetarian, and excellent, and eaten in the company of a solemn servant and a large television set, topped by a reclining Buddha. It was wonderful there, not for all the usual brass and bronze objects of such places, not for the ornate altars or temple bells, but for the weather. Fog fell in relays, thick around the curly roofs at one moment and then blown swiftly off by a following wind. Then it would abruptly return and the whole scene would be enclosed in mystery.
Back in Tai O there is another temple, a much more intimate place, just a door off the street by the post box and then into a decorated room with two altars to the Goddess of Fish, Tin Hau, and another to the policeman’s god, Kwan Tai. What was pleasing about this shrine was that it was not only in constant use, as much as the stalls selling fruit and fish and vegetables, but that its custodian, a cheerful man in a vest whose name was simply Mr Chan, lived in the temple. He had a side-chapel all to himself with his table and chairs, his cuckoo clock, and his bed. He was pleased to have me take his photograph in this unique domesticity. The registrar poked his head into the temple and explained to me that Mr Chan was the happiest man for miles around. Who wouldn’t be, living like that in the same room as the gods?
LAMMA situated latitude 22°9’N and longitude 113°52’E; area 5 sq. m (13 sq. km); population approx. 10,000. LANTAU situated latitude 22°37’N and longitude 114°30’E; area 55 sq. m (142 sq. km); population approx. 30,000. Both part of territory under lease agreement between Britain and China
Ōshima
Among the Seven Isles
In the hustle of the marketplace there is money to be made – but under the Cherry Tree there is rest.
Japanese Proverb
The Seven Isles of Izu drop like a pendant below the city of Tokyo and the wide Bay of Sagami, the most distant some 160 miles out into the Pacific Ocean. On that furthermost island, Hachijo, there are touches of Polynesia; the people build outrigger canoes and grow bananas. They also enjoy a safe kind of bullfighting – the bulls contest each other, goaded on by men banging gongs and drums.
From there, going back towards the mainland of Japan, each one distant from its neighbour, are the isles of Mikura, Miyake, Kozu, Niijima, Toshima and Ōshima. They were once the summits of mountains in the range that has its roots in the snows of Mount Fuji, and is continued down the jewel of land known as the Izu Peninsula.
It was very strange for me to be flying from the old Tokyo airfield, Haneda, on a fresh spring morning in an aircraft of Nihon Kinkyori Airlines. In all my travels to the varied islands of the world, I had always found something familiar, people who spoke at least some of my language and whose lives I was able to understand. But – beyond Tokyo – this was a foreign place indeed.
Your intrepid explorer had made his first error the previous midnight when arriving from Taiwan. Like the seasoned traveller I must surely be by now, I marched from Narita Airport with my single suitcase (for once first off the plane) and tossed it wearily at a taxi driver who caught it and smiled when I said, ‘New Otani Hotel.’ It was only when this globetrotter had settled back that I remembered Tokyo had a new airport and saw a sign which said, ‘Tokyo 75 Kilometres.’ It was too late to go back for the bus, which all the unseasoned travellers take. It took an hour and cost a great many yen.
On this, the following morning, determined to regain my self-respect I got to the now secondary airport of Haneda by monorail, which made me feel a lot better. On the other hand I missed the plane. Three hours later I was on my way, over the springtime sea, down the leg of the Izu Peninsula, and looking out eagerly, as I always do, for my first sight of the island. The strangeness of it came home to me at once because I was the only non-Japanese on the plane. The stewardess, however, paid me the courtesy of repeating all announcements in English (‘We shirtry be randing in Ōshima’).
I could not see the island at all. This seemed odd because its active volcano is said to be visible for twenty-five miles, sending out puffs of vapour like an old lounger smoking a pipe. Sailors are reputed to use it as a mark, but here we were, shirtry to be randing, and there was not a sign of it.
It turned out to be there all the time, skulking under a great bundle of cloud, formless and grey as a bag of laundry. The vapour reached from the mountain top down to the skirts of the sea. We dropped across the approach; coves and fields and buildings began to appear and, judging by the exclamations, to everyone’s relief, the runway of the airport. I remembered that this used to be a favourite excursion for people from Tokyo bent on suicide. More than a few one-way tickets were bought for Ōshima. So many visitors, in fact, went up the volcano and took a spectacular last leap from the world, that now anyone who goes to the top must apply at the police station if they want to walk the final fifty yards to the lip of the crater. Provided they seem to have a passable excuse they are given perm
ission and an escort, who accompanies them to the edge, just in case. Ōshima was getting a bad name.
My arrival set off a small sensation. A relayed message, which had been understandably misinterpreted, had resulted in a whole posse of taxis and drivers waiting for me, waving banners and flags of various colours and shouting variations of my name. Since I had missed the earlier plane they were overwhelmingly glad to see me, a joy that was quickly drained when they realized that ‘Resrie’ Thomas was only one person and not some kind of club outing which they had patently been expecting. The banners and flags drooped sadly and the taxi drivers stood bowing gravely as, to my embarrassment, I had to choose one to take me to the hotel. I picked the oldest, but I was told later that although this was a nice recognition of age, he could not bow as low as the others. (This bowing business is wonderful. You find yourself catching the habit at once, the art being able to coordinate yourself with the other bowers in the group so that heads do not collide and spoil the effect. Everybody bows. Years ago in the mountains of Japan I was entranced to witness how the people on the wayside stations bowed the train on its way, and at Haneda that morning the mechanics who had been servicing the plane lined up and bowed beautifully as we taxied off, as if we were going on some important or perilous flight.)
By the time I left the sole room of Ōshima’s airport the clouds had gone further up the slopes, the mountain pulling them up like a large woman hitching up a voluminous skirt.
Red camellias grow all the year in Ōshima and the early way to Mount Mihara was bright with hedgerows of many flowers. In springtime the cherry trees make the island glow. Some are very ancient; one is said to be 800 years old and is held in reverence. There was a formal grove of palm trees leading from the airport, an announcement that the climate is mild, as it undoubtedly is. It is also misty and wet.
As we progressed up the windy road so the vegetation became thicker and greener. It filled every space of the wayside and descended into choked jungles. Then, abruptly, as though we had reached the frontier to another place, we drove into the clouds. They devoured us at once, so that it was like flying, the sides of the way scarcely visible. The driver muttered something that sounded like a Japanese apology but found the many bends without difficulty. He was obviously used to it. I did not know we had reached the hotel until I saw a vaguely coloured patch of azaleas through the mist and realized we were in a garden. I stumbled towards the door, I could see a foggy figure bowing just ahead and he took my bag. England, he said, he liked and Scotland more because he enjoyed the sound of the bagpipes.
Looking around at the fog lolling across the mountain I had the thought that the bagpipes would not have sounded out of place.
*
The man who liked bagpipes was tall and anxious to help. He was porter, waiter, driver and translator at the hotel. Only he and the lady who was at reception had any smattering of English and my Japanese was confined to ‘Sayonara’, which (since it means ‘goodbye’) is a poor way to begin a conversation. They were excessively kind and courteous. Susumu, the man who drove me around in the hotel’s van, conversed in an amazing sequence of words he had learned from American Country and Western songs.
The ingenuity of this language was astonishing. He had a line or lyric for almost any eventuality. When we were driving up the lanes towards the hotel he would repeat John Denver’s words ‘Country roads, take me home . . .’ He judged any travelling time by how long it took to get to ‘Phoenix’, and the great waves that pushed against the rocks of his native island instantly recalled ‘Galveston, Galveston, I can see your sea winds blowing . . .’ He stretched even further back into the genre as we took the road to the volcano . . . ‘She be coming round the mountain when she come.’ He did not always get the pronunciation quite right, but it was original and entrancing.
At the hotel I had a Japanese room and ate Japanese food. The reception lady, Ōshima’s other English speaker, said, ‘This-o your Loom-o. Prease take-o shoes-o off-o. Breakfast-o eight-o-crock-o.’
The room had a coconut-matting floor, but was devoid of other furniture except for a cushion propped up on a stand in the centre, a television set, a refrigerator and an elegant dish containing the implements for Japanese tea-making. Outside the window the fog swirled and I felt suddenly homesick for a comfortable bed. I’m renowned for taking a nap on first arriving in a hotel anywhere. It helps you and the room get accustomed to each other. I felt quite helpless; there was nowhere to sit, nowhere to be. I kept wandering aimlessly. Then I found some neatly folded Japanese clothes, a black-and-white kimono, and a short, heavy, wide-sleeved coat. They were obviously meant for the guest so I put them on. Then I found a tin of mandarin oranges in the fridge and some processed cheese, plus several small bottles of whisky. I had not eaten since breakfast so I sat on the floor in my kimono and ate the oranges and the cheese. Outside the fog swirled ominously. I began to feel very sorry and solitary, like a Japanese marooned in the Shetlands. But (as he might well have discovered) the whisky was all right.
That evening I went down to dinner in my European clothes. Everyone else was clad in the hotel’s kimonos and the waiter hinted heavily by bringing me a huge, comic, pelican-type bib, the sort that is hung around the necks of babies to catch the scraps. I bowed out and returned in my kimono which met with everyone’s approval.
There was a group of about a dozen Japanese men, who, as far as I could tell, were all occupying the same room. I went along the corridor in my new clothes and one of them kindly tore himself away from the television (where, unless I am mistaken, a lady was singing the weather forecast) and took a photograph of me. Later that night the men got immensely drunk on Suntory whisky and at some stage I joined them and taught them to sing the English West Country folk song ‘Widdecombe Fair’. Their rendition of the chorus ‘Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and All’ was both unique and endearing.
Mount Mihara not only dominates Ōshima, it is Ōshima. It reclines, 2,700 feet up, occasionally huffing and puffing, with the rest of the island merely its attendant foothills. Its crater, a baleful eye deep down, has been measured at 328 feet, although I doubt if anyone has been to the bottom to check. Throughout history it has abruptly lost its temper and given vent to mighty eruptions, lava rolling down through the houses, sending people hurrying out to the safety of the sea. Its last great fling was in 1942 when fiery debris was thrown up almost 1,000 feet. In Tokyo they thought it was the Americans getting their own back.
The top of the mountain is a desert of cinders and ash, giving way to the vegetation, thick and green, on the lower slopes. It is said that, for all the desolation up there on the cone, with the sulking winds and the barren dust, it is the home of many nightingales.
The clouds that clothed the top of the volcano prevented me getting there (like the Blue Grotto of Capri it is something that Nature denied me and will have to be visited on another day). Susumu drove me up the mountain road as far as the barrier, where you pay your entry fee of 800 yen (a strange business paying to get into a volcano) and move on to a twilight village which cowers below the business end. Susumu pointed out the path which leads to the top but no one was allowed to venture further today – even with the police escort. I had to content myself with a visit to the little cinema at the edge of the village where a film of the volcano and its various moods is shown. It was odd sitting there, alone, with the lamp burning on an altar at one end and the wind banging against the wooden sides of the building. The film showed men dressed as Martians lowering themselves into the crater (for what reason was unclear to me) and there was a shot, like something from a bloodthirsty Japanese drama, showing the distant, sprawled body of someone who had either fallen or jumped in.
Fortunately there was more to do than sit alone in a cinema on the side of a volcano. The lowlands were benevolent and sunny, the windy sea coming in, gathering its shoulders for its assault on the land. I walked into the small town of Motomachi where there is a wooden jetty along which the ocean rolled and lic
ked. The place was clear with sunshine but rifled with the sharp wind and there were few people about. An old lady trotted delightfully through the gusts by the seashore, wearing the traditional Ōshima chequered headscarf adorned with a red camellia. Once all the women and girls on the island wore the distinctive draughtboard kimono, the white socks and this headdress, but now it is normally only seen on festive days. On the jetty were some men trying to fish and keep on their feet at the same time. Two jolly schoolboys came along, in their high-collared pageboy uniforms. They were delighted to pose for a photograph and, round faced, laughed and made Churchill-like V-signs. One of them, particularly, looked inordinately like Churchill in his early cadet days.
The town was nondescript, a few shops, clean and packed with sweets and gifts for the first of the expected summer visitors. I bought a bar of chocolate and by the fuss that was made I might well have been the initial customer of the season. Motomachi has a large anchor and chain at its centre, a memento of a shipwreck, and nearby a much more fascinating exhibit, a shrine to the legendary twelfth-century archer Tametomo, who was exiled to Ōshima.
An embarrassment to the Japanese emperors, this Oriental Robin Hood was shipped to Ōshima but eventually escaped to the Ryukyu Islands, the long tail of Japan that runs southwest towards Hong Kong. There he married a princess and attained power and respectability.
The shrine was a surprise. It was in a room which also accommodated a table-tennis table. Tametomo stood at one end, behind a sort of shop window, wearing his fearsome armour and with his powerful bow at hand. Two ladies stood demurely at his side. It was tempting to think that when things were quiet at night they climbed down for a game of table tennis.
A nice bony old lady showed me the hero and then staggered ahead up some steep steps to a lookout place which she indicated Tametomo had used to spot the approach of enemies. There was also a stone, impressed with his fingerprints, which he had once hurled at someone he did not like.
My World of Islands Page 25
