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 sea was shallow, they’d put a boat on either side of a rock. Then they’d lay down a log across the two boats, and the strong fellows among them would dive into the water with a large rope made of wisteria vines and wrap it around the rock. And last, they’d tie the other end of the rope to the log which they’d slung between the boats. When the tide came in, the boats would rise and the rock too would float free, suspended in the ocean. Then they’d row their boats out and drop the rock in a deep spot. Using two boats and one turn of the tide, they could only move one rock. But working patiently, they managed to make a place where the boats could moor. All of us celebrated when the work was done but then a big storm came, bringing the rocks up with it again and making a mess of the harbor.
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
