The fishermen had dumped the rocks in a bad place and it was decided they had to take them much farther out. And so they did. That was no ordinary effort. As a child, all I could do was watch, but in my own childish way I was impressed by how hard they worked. And you know, they did all of that between fishing runs.
In that way, the New Year passed and about the time the trees were coming into leaf we returned to Kuka. Back there, I was once again in Masamura’s keep and, as before, I helped out with the making of confections at my grandmother’s house. Then, when fall came, I came to Tsushima as a meshi morai. I repeated this until I turned ten, and since somehow or other I’d learned how to prepare meals, after that I went along as the cook. This work was for children who had yet to come of age, or for men who were over sixty. You’d eat what you were given and the pay was scanty, but poor families would send their children from early on to be cooks on fishing boats so that they’d have fewer mouths to feed.
By that time, I’d come to understand most of what was going on around me. It would have been fine to be a confectioner in Kuka, but since I had very few kin and could do whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, I decided on the life of a fisherman and set out in earnest to learn how to fish.
After that, Azamo became more and more civilized. Everyone had a saw and hoe and they cut down trees and turned the soil. They cleared small plots and took to growing vegetables, and somehow made this place livable.
In only five or six years, between 1876 and 1882, Azamo changed beyond recognition. And while I’d thought of it as a very distant place, around that time boats were made stronger and their sails bigger, so they could go from Kuka to Tsushima in five or six days. Azamo became a place you could go to easily, in no time at all, as if you were going next door. And that happened with only a few small changes in the way boats were made. On top of that, in Azamo, though they were only sheds, we had homes. The more crude among them had knotty log posts and walls made from the branches of chinquapin trees, but when we came in from the sea at night, we had a place to sleep.
We weren’t educated. We didn’t know how to read or write and could hardly count money. We knew nothing of how they were keeping the accounts at the Kameya storehouse, and we asked Master Kameya to make Masamura Kunihira of Kuka the clerk there. Do you know of Kunihira? He was a great man. In Kuka, he could have lived with his hands in his pockets. After all, he was a gentleman. But he came to this remote place and became the storehouse clerk. The storehouse may have been Master Kameya’s, but being a man of understanding, he employed Kunihira. And we worked and left everything up to Kunihira.
Kunihira told us, “This storehouse should be owned by someone from Kuka. Things aren’t going well these days because Kameya doesn’t know how to do business. Living in Tsushima, he doesn’t understand the outside world, so he’s losing out all the time. It’s not like in the days of the feudal lords. People these days are shrewd, and nothing will come of this business if it’s handled in Kameya’s large-hearted manner. We must bring someone competent from Kuka to handle the business here. I can look after things, but I have work to do in Kuka, so I can’t devote all my energies to this place.” It was agreed that what Kunihira had said was quite reasonable and so Goshima Shinsuke was brought here to replace him. This guy came along and gave a kind of structure to Azamo. He was a deep thinker too and he said, “No doubt, in the future, things will open up as far as Korea. When that happens, Azamo will be right in the middle between Korea and Japan. All the fishing boats going to Korea will pass through here. To prepare for that time, we must all settle here. Nothing will come of going back to Kuka whenever winter comes. Those who can bring their parents and siblings should do so.” And saying this, he built himself a house with dirt walls.
Eventually everyone built houses. I was still young, so I was going back and forth between Kuka and Azamo, and in those days it was popular to leave Kuka for Hawaii. While a day of work in Kuka only paid thirteen sen [100 sen = 1 yen], in Hawaii you’d get fifty. Saying they wanted better earnings, people left, one after the other. But I was now a fisherman and had decided to spend my life catching fish, so I didn’t change my mind. And besides, I was catching a lot of fish. Try catching 150–250 pounds of sea bream in a day. Your fingers and arms start to hurt. They’re all big fish. You feel one on your line and try pulling, but it doesn’t come up. Just when you think you’ve snagged a rock, the fish starts jerking on the line. It’s no easy task to handle and humor it, and pull it up to the side of the boat. It’s like persuading a woman who hates you. You try this trick and that, letting the line out and pulling it in, and if you’re not careful, the line will be cut. On the other hand, there’s no greater happiness than when you bring one up. Try catching ten such sea bream in a single day. You’ll generally feel pretty good, and at night you’ll want to have a drink. At times like that, you don’t think about things like making money. I just felt that fishing was fascinating. It was a mystery to me why everyone in the world wouldn’t want to become a fisherman.
You know, it’s not like catching little sea bream off the coast of Kuka. Before long we weren’t just fishing at Ose. Twelve to fifteen miles farther out was another shoal, and we discovered lots of sea bream there too. I couldn’t believe my eyes. And it wasn’t just sea bream. We found an incredible number of swordfish—lots of big ones swimming with their fins up out of the water. But we didn’t know how to catch them, and we talked it over, saying “If we caught these, who knows how much money we’d make.”
There were lots of yellowtail, too. But Kuka fishermen specialized in sea bream, so we didn’t know how to catch yellowtail. If only someone could come and catch them. The whole situation was really frustrating.
Then, when I was coming back from Kuka, I met some fishermen from Okikamuro (in the Towa Township, Oshima District, Yamaguchi Prefecture) in Hakata. I asked them, “Do you want to try going to Tsushima? There are fabulously large fish. You catch them, and you catch them, but there are more than you can catch.”
“Are there yellowtail?” they asked.
“You want yellowtail? I said. “If you went to Tsushima you’d be amazed. When the yellowtail come, there are so many that the water level rises.”
“Is that true?”
“Would I lie?”
So it came to be that fishermen from Okikamuro came to Tsushima. That was 1887, and I’d become a competent young man. Those guys from Okikamuro knew how to fish yellowtail, and they came here and caught an appalling amount. They needed a storehouse, so they got Kuranari of Izuhara to be their wholesaler. He was a good man and treated them well. The yellowtail fishing spot was off Teppo Point, but they worked out of Azamo and developed Naka Azamo.
Just as it had been in Little Azamo, it was hard work clearing rocks out of the inlet, but by that time people knew how to get dynamite and break up the rocks with it. More fishing boats were also coming to these parts, and they made sure that each boat that came into the harbor slung a rock onboard and took it offshore, so clearing the harbor was easier than it had been in Little Azamo. Once the rocks had been cleared away, the harbor in Naka Azamo was larger and deeper, a good port.
You can’t build a harbor all at once, and though I said it was easier, it probably took about thirty years for it to get like it is now. A harbor that only held four or five boats when the fishermen from Okikamuro first came sheltered more than five hundred by the middle of the 1920s, and larger boats were able to come in too. You know, the energy and drive that fishermen have shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Azamo,