“Really, you’re from Nishigata? You’ve come a long way,” he mused. “It’s been ages since I’ve been to Kuka. I imagine it’s changed a lot.”
The old man spoke entirely in the language of my home, so right from the start he didn’t feel like a stranger. And when I said, “I was thinking maybe you could tell me about things from the distant past . . . ” he started to speak without hesitation.
It was long ago that I first came here. I was seven at the time, and I didn’t know east from west. I’d had bad luck with my parents. My father had died on me when I was just three and my mother around that same time. My brothers all died young as well, so, as for relations, I had just one grandmother and she took me in. Then, as it happened, there was a man named Masamura Jisaburo who didn’t have any children; he said he’d try raising me, so I went to live with him and stayed until I was seven. I don’t recall much from my childhood. My grandmother’s family, they were confectioners. Sometimes I’d go there and be given a toffee to lick, and I looked forward to that.
You ask how it is that I came here to Azamo? Well, they had what were called meshi morai [literally, “food receivers”] on Kuka’s large fishing boats. It was custom to put five- or six-year-old orphans on these boats, and I was placed on one too. As fishing boats go these were large, with five or six people on a vessel. But they didn’t fish off the coast of Kuka. Instead, they all went far away. Since way back, Kuka’s fishermen had been going to Tsuno Island in Nagato to fish for sea bream, half a dozen boats to a group. The oldest among these fishermen would become the “big captain” and when they went over to Tsuno he did all the bargaining with the people there, and decided both where they’d fish and where they’d lodge at night. After that everyone worked as they pleased. Then, when it came time to return, all of the crews and the locals would gather together to talk and the big captain would address the people of Tsuno Island, saying, “There were no troubles, so all went well.” And the fishermen would all return to Kuka. On the way, their boats traveled in pairs and helped one another out when there was an accident.
They didn’t just go to Tsuno Island. Some fishing crews went to Karatsu, too, on the west side of Kyushu. And in time they were even able to go to Tsushima. The Kuka fishermen were the first to make the journey. I’ve heard that, long before I was born, a feudal lord from Hiroshima married off his daughter to Lord So Sukekuni in Tsushima. After that, people started to go back and forth between Hiroshima and Tsushima, fishermen included. Crews from Hiroshima would come and fish off the coast of Kuka and probably the guys from Kuka heard their big stories right there because the Kuka fishermen came back with some tall tales. The visitors claimed there were fish in Tsushima that were fabulously large, and that the sea was filled with fish. Well, if there were that many fish, the Kuka fishermen wanted to go too, and so they followed the crews from Mukainada, in Hiroshima, and crossed over to Tsushima. That was all more than thirty years before I was born.
As it happened, the boat I was put on was going to Tsushima. I’ll never forget. It was in 1876. We left Kuka and it took any number of days before we arrived here. On windy days, we’d attach a tiny sail to the bow of the boat. When there was no wind, we’d put the oars in. When we got as far as Hakata, we took on miso, soy sauce, salt, and rice. Then we waited for good weather on Genkai Island, at the mouth of Hakata’s harbor, and when we thought the weather would hold for a few days, we departed. My young mind couldn’t believe that the first boat I’d ever been on was suddenly going to Tsushima. The little town of Kuka had been my playground, and now wherever I looked there were only waves. The boat wouldn’t stay still. We were rocked up and down and it was more than I could bear, so I held on to the side and just watched the big waves. The adults were something else, rowing along on the tops of those big waves. They rowed even at night, and I was relieved when we arrived at Iki Island. Climbing up on the hill at Katsumoto, on Iki, we could see mountains far to the north. When I was told that this was probably Tsushima, I was discouraged to think we still had that far to go.
Boy sleeping on fishing nets. Yamaguchi Prefecture.
August 1962.
As an orphaned child taken aboard, I didn’t have any work to do. I was supposed to just play quietly on the boat. It was so small, though, and there was really no way to amuse myself so it did get boring, but the fishermen all doted on me and I somehow made it through. On the boat, when night fell, I’d take a cloth patchwork kimono from the stern and, covering myself with that, would burrow down under the rush mats. On rainy days, I’d make a roof of these rush mats and do nothing but sleep all day.
We were in Katsumoto for a number of days waiting for fair weather again, and then after a full day at sea we arrived in the castle town of Izuhara [on Tsushima]. I was amazed to find a town like this on an island at the other end of the sea. In those days some of the homes in Izuhara had tiled roofs but many still had rocks on their roofs. The feudal lord made his rounds of the island on horseback. He wore a hat and an open-backed half-coat and was a truly splendid sight.
It must have been around the time of the fall festival that we arrived in Tsushima. We’d left Kuka after Bon, but the weather was bad and it had taken the better part of a month.
We contracted with a seafood wholesaler in Izuhara, and because he was going to build a storage shed in Azamo that year, the boat I was on came here. Nowadays, Azamo is a fine, civilized town, but when I first came here, this bay was all dark and grown up with trees. See that grove of chinquapin trees across the bay, those big trees growing packed close together? In these parts, trees like that were growing all over. And there were big rocks in the bay, so it wasn’t the kind of place you’d moor a boat. What’s more, there were no people. The trees grew right down to water’s edge, so close that their branches touched the sea. There was just one shed atop the promontory at the border of Azamo and Little Azamo, and it looked like it might blow over. Someone from Hirado had put in a net for yellowtail just below, and the shed was for the net’s caretaker.
Properly speaking, Azamo was in a forest dedicated to Priest Tendo, so people were not supposed to live here. Around here, such places were called shige, and the people really feared them. They’d say, “That’s Tendo’s shige so you shouldn’t live there, you mustn’t do anything that will defile it.” The beach in the back of the bay was called “No Admission Beach” and no one was permitted to go there.
You ask why it was that people from Kuka came to live in such a place? There were a lot of samurai in Tsushima, and traditions were strictly observed in all the villages. We fishermen didn’t have etiquette or manners, so we weren’t able to associate with others there. It didn’t matter to us if we suffered divine punishment, and figuring it would be best to just live amongst ourselves, with people who got along well, we decided to build a shed in Azamo and live here.
So you want me to talk a bit more about what happened before that? Well, anything earlier was from stories I heard from the grown-ups so I don’t know much. Tsushima is near Korea, and I heard that the Japanese often went to Korea secretly [because Japan was still closed at the time], to buy ginseng. I often heard about ginseng. It was really costly, and what you could hold in the palm of your hand was worth many gold pieces. It just wouldn’t grow in Japan, so people went secretly to buy it.
The moneychanger Gohei was the boss. People would refer to “the moneychanger of Kaga,” or to “Kaga where the moneychanger is.” Gohei was a shipping agent and the wealthiest man in Kaga. When he came to Tsushima, he wore a Japanese kimono and raised a Japanese flag, but when he’d passed Tsushima he raised a Korean flag, wore Korean clothing, and, having become a Korean, made the crossing. Aside from the moneychangers, there were more Gohei imitations than could be counted. Eluding government officials located in Tsushima, they went to Korea as well. And there were far more of them than the government could handle.
The government placed a lookout on Teppo [Gun] Point, west of Azamo, on the southwest end of Tsushima. When they sighted