Sado: Japan's Island in Exile by Angus Waycott

Author:Angus Waycott [Waycott, Angus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

Day 5

Music Through The Pines

It rained in the night, but the next morning there were enough dry sticks under the eaves of my little shelter to get a fire going. The sky was completely covered by dull gray clouds except in the east, where dawn was cracking it open in thin streaks of pink, orange, and yellow. I made some tea and sat on the sand to drink it. Yellow speedwell, clover, and pink rock roses were growing in patches on the dunes, together with long, trailing arms of convolvulus that spread out in all directions and clambered over rocks, piles of driftwood, and even over the roof of the boat shelter, giving it the appearance of a neolithic cottage.

Below me, the beach was scattered with enormous quantities of garbage — torn nets draped over black rocks, huge broken chunks of polystyrene, battered plastic containers, contorted tree roots, lumps of smashed timber, cable drums, rusty iron pipes, squid lures, rubber shoes. Not much of it looked local. This was debris from ships, slung overboard somewhere at sea, thrown ashore by violent storms, dragged out into the bay again and then thrown back once more. Among the plastic bottles that still had legible labels were several with Korean or Russian writing.

My map showed a track running west behind the beach, but this had recently been upgraded to a proper tarmac road. Sobama has the biggest and best beach on the southern half of Sado, and plans were afoot to develop it. As well as a campground with its own bar-restaurant, someone had put up a brand new log house to provide tourist accommodation. A painted signboard hung out-side, inscribed with the word "CULTOPIA." Many Japanese words are formed by bolting two or more concepts together, and the same principle had been applied to the concoction of this chilling hybrid. Culture and Utopia! When all you wanted was a room! Still, it wasn't particularly unusual. Japan coins new words like tokens spilling out of a one-armed bandit. In Sawada I had seen a car dealership whose name was "Heartpia," probably coined by the same klutz.

Beyond the western end of Sobama, every scrap of land was under the plough. There were some fields no larger than parking spaces, tidily planted with vegetables, and long tunnel green-houses full of peppers and tomatoes. Here and there were orchards of fig, peach, and plum: old paint tins weighted with stones were hung from the branches of the trees to keep them growing low down. Most of the larger fields were used for tobacco, which was grown on raised rows of chocolate brown soil and then cut and hung to dry in long, low sheds of corrugated iron. In late summer, after the harvest, men and women can be seen in every village along this coast, sitting on wooden tubs in shed doorways, sorting the leaves into piles and then carefully stacking them in layers in tall barrels.

As the sun broke through the clouds, the sea swirled quietly round the black rocks and made dancing patches of purple, azure, and turquoise.

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