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, Tsushima, Nagasaki Prefecture.
July 1950.
Up until late in the 1890s most of the homes in Azamo were sheds. They were truly crude. Then, in the same year that there was a war, in 1894 or 1895 [the years of the Sino-Japanese war], a big wind blew. I’d never seen a wind like that. Little Azamo is in a hollow so it wasn’t hit so bad, but in Naka Azamo the wind was channeled right in, and a lot of houses were blown over. I heard tell of a family who was sitting by their hearth when a huge gust suddenly came, picked their house up, and carried it eight to ten yards. The house was flattened. It’s said that the family suddenly realized they were sitting outdoors. That’s just how bad the typhoon was.
Well, things couldn’t go on like that. Typhoons would come again in the future, and stronger homes had to be built. There’s a place called Sare, near Okikamuro, and we brought a tile maker from there and had him make roof tiles. While there were stone roofs in other parts of Tsushima, this was the only place with tile roofs from early on. Tsushima was known for its hawks, crows, and stone roofs, but only here in Azamo we had tile roofs and plaster walls and rows of nice homes. People came from Tsutsu to have a look.
People really started to settle here late in the 1880s. In those days one could often see fox fire burning over on the other side of the inlet. It was rather unsettling. And on a really quiet night, there was sometimes a sound like the world being torn apart. People said this was probably Priest Tendo taking flight. By the late 1890s, the number of houses had grown to a hundred, and about seventy boats came from the Kii Domain to fish yellowtail every year. The harbor became lively, and we stopped seeing the fox fire or hearing the sound of Priest Tendo in flight. It seems that in this world we live in, people are at the top.
Around that time I got married and decided to live out my life here, and because we couldn’t get by on fishing alone, I taught my wife what I’d learned as a boy about how to make sweets. I’d go out to sea while my wife made sweets at home and sold them. In that way, we made a humble living.
There was a lot that was interesting and much that was sad. But as a person with no talents, fishing was about all that interested me. As for what was sad, the time when my wife suffered a loss was about all. Fifty years living with her, that was the happiest thing of all.
I’ve been talking for quite a while. Shall we take a break?
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