GRANDPA KAJITA’S TRAVELS
When the gun was fired from Teppo Point, the rowers in Tsutsu Bay would ready themselves. When a second shot was fired, they’d come out rowing. Nearly all the fishing boats were caught. And when they were caught, they were taken to Izuhara and subjected to water torture. They’d force the fishermen’s mouths open and pour water in and they’d choke. It was more painful than a person could bear. Fearing that, the fishermen did their best not to go west of Ko Peninsula.
As it happens, nearly three miles out from Ko Peninsula there was a place called Ose, the number-one fishing spot for sea bream in Tsushima. There were big fish there. At times they caught sea bream there that were three feet from eye to tail, bigger than any you might see these days. It was that kind of fishing spot, so everyone went. And before they knew it, the wind and tides would take the fishermen out to the west. A gun would go off, the longboat would come along, and they’d run for it, scattering like baby spiders. Those who fell behind were caught, and though they’d committed no crime, they too were subjected to water torture. It was like dancing on the edge of the boiling pot of hell.
When night fell, the fishermen would anchor and spend the night east of there, off the coast from Naiin, in the shadow of Naiin Island. They called that place “Sails Down,” and it was the best-hidden anchorage.
Then, after the Meiji Restoration [1868], fishing boats were allowed west of the Ko Peninsula. The Kuka fishermen jumped for joy. The sea bream there were coming from the west so, without a doubt, there were even more sea bream off the coast from Tsutsu, and that’s where all the fishermen rushed to be. Sure enough, the fish were there for the catching. The ocean was full of them. The people of Tsutsu allowed fishing offshore, but didn’t permit people to moor their boats there, so when night fell these fishermen would go back to Naiin Island.
Well, one day something terrible happened. It was December 15, 1872. The sun had sparkled a bit in the morning, and when it sparkles, a wind will come up. Not thinking much of it, though, the Kuka fishermen headed out, offshore from Tsutsu. Past noon, a terrific northerly began to blow. They say the air grew damp and salty, and Tsutsu, right there in front of their eyes, grew dim and hard to see. They rowed for Tsutsu with all their might, but nearly everyone was swept out to sea and died. Altogether forty-four people went missing, and the great Katsuemon was among them. The man was thought to be a fishing god. Katsuemon could look at the weather, the tide, at fish . . . he was never off the mark about anything having to do with fishing. But even Katsuemon died, and to this day that storm is referred to as the Katsuemon Storm.
Most everyone living along the sea between Kuka and Tsushima knew Katsuemon. If someone mentioned “Katsuemon from Kuka” others would think, “Oh, the fishing god.” If someone asked Katsuemon, “What’ll the weather be tomorrow?” ten times out of ten it would be as Katsuemon had said. But even Katsuemon was capable of an oversight. Apparently he’d said, “What an unpleasant day!” on his way out, and he never came back.
The people of Tsutsu were hard on outsiders, but they were all good people and they held a memorial service at the Eisen Temple for the forty-four who had died. And to this day, the souls of the dead are enshrined there. Sometimes, on the night of December 15, the people of Tsutsu see the spirits of the forty-four fishermen walking in from the sea, towards the Eisen Temple.
But even after such a large accident, the people of Kuka didn’t stop coming to Tsushima. It’s said that on that day, one of the boats had capsized and drifted away with a father and son clinging to it. They were exceptionally lucky, for they drifted and drifted, to the ocean off Hirado, and were saved by the people there. This father and son returned to Kuka and told others, “Our boat capsized because waves came in over the bow and stern. Mount wide boards in your bow and stern, and your boats will be stronger in the waves.” After hearing this, fishermen started doing just that. And when waves rose up they spilled back to the sea and didn’t swamp the boat. In any case, after that, there was never an occasion when as many as forty or fifty people died.
There’s an explanation for why we came to live in Azamo. The year before I came to Tsushima, in December of 1875, an eight-oared longboat from Tsutsu went to Izuhara to make a payment to the authorities there. When they were on their way back, a terrible westerly blew, and they were beaten by waves and overturned off the Ko Peninsula. They were found by a large fishing boat from Kuka which, after uprighting the longboat, rowed back to Naiin, nursed the crew, and brought them back to Tsutsu. The people of Tsutsu were overjoyed and they said, “We’re truly in your debt. As a token of our thanks, we’ll do whatever you ask of us.” So the people from Kuka said, “In that case, can you allow us to live along the Azamo Bay?”
“We can do almost anything you ask for,” they replied, “but that place is shige and you’d be cursed.”
To which the Kukans said, “It doesn’t matter if there’s a curse. Besides, now we’re living in an age where a living god, the emperor, rules Japan, so Priest Tendo won’t do us any harm.” So, with permission to build a shed in Azamo, they returned to Kuka.
The following year, the year they built a shed here, that was when I first came. When I say we built a shed, that was not something we fishermen could do. First, a merchant from Izuhara named Kameya Hisabei came, felled trees, cleared the land, and built a shed. The roof was made of cedar that had been cut down and split into boards. Bamboo was then placed over these cedar planks, with rocks on top of that to hold it all in place. The shed’s posts were made with logs that were sunk right into the ground, and its walls were lined with straw mats. There wasn’t a floor—just straw mats placed on the ground—but just the same, the place made me feel like a lord. Until then, every day I’d only been living on waves. I’d wake to the sound of them striking the side of the boat. It’s nothing when you get used to it, but as a child of seven I wanted to try sleeping in a house on land.
I’ve been calling it a shed, but it was really more like a storehouse. A clerk and apprentice came from Kameya’s store in Izuhara, and they’d buy the fish we caught, gut them, salt them, and take them back there. Most every day a boat would come from Izuhara, and when they did, they’d bring the kind of things fishermen want: rice, miso, tobacco, and the like. We’d come back from sea, enter the shed, and buy the various things we needed. After that, everyone would sit indoors by a fire that burned quietly in the sunken hearth and talk late into the night.
All the talk was frightful for a child, for fishermen’s stories are all about encounters with rough seas. And in the old days, for some reason, there were lots of monsters. Off the coast of Kuka, on a drizzly night, like clockwork, a voice would come up from deep down in the ocean, saying, “Give me a ladle, give me a barrel.” That was the cry of a sea monster, and if you gave him a ladle, he’d use it to fill the boat with water and sink it. And Genkainada [a stretch of ocean between Tsushima and the Kyushu mainland] was a place where sea spirits often appeared. Everyone delighted in the telling of such stories, but we small children were seized with fear.
I wasn’t the only orphan who had been brought along. Every boat had a meshi morai, so there were probably seven or eight of us. I’d go into the shed and there’d be others, so I had someone to play with and wasn’t bored.
The thing that caused the most trouble for the fishermen was the harbor. Countless big rocks along the shore left no place to moor a boat. The inlet at Old Azamo was large and could have made for a good harbor, but there were only a few of us, and it was just too hard for us to clear, so we decided to use Little Azamo, and set to clearing a harbor there.
Clearing a harbor meant removing the rocks that were lying around in it. People are resourceful, and after some thought the fishermen came up with a way to clear out the big rocks: When the tide was out and the