An indication of prosperity hailing from ancient cargo ships

“Toward Sado, toward Sado, everything flutters toward Sado, even the trees and the flowers – yo -- arya, arya, arya-sa!” So goes the chanting chorus of Sado Okesa, sounding like a folk song steeped in a sepia-toned past, but apparently back in the day it was a production as popular as today’s wildly successful idol girl group AKB48, enthusiastically appealing to the public with the vision of Sado Island as a paradise. We sometimes need to reflect on and recognize how the kitamaebune, cargo ships that plied the Japanese islands during the Edo era (1603-1687), revitalized the Japanese archipelago. During the 200 years of national isolation from foreign powers, trade was limited to domestic commerce, leading to a depth and breadth of inter-island exchange that stretches our powers of imagination to conceive of today.

On the southwestern tip of Sado Island is a village known as Shukunegi, which seems to have stopped in time, unchanged from the Edo period. When I visited, I came upon rows of wooden houses crowded eave-to-eave into a space of about one hectare. These are not the kinds of houses that have gardens. As one would expect from a village of boatbuilders, I noticed that some parts of the houses are constructed like boats. Following the narrow alleys and canals, the wooden outer walls of the houses are sometimes curved, and in some cases, “ship-shaped” triangular houses are built on wedge-shaped parcels at the intersections of narrow alleys.

Judging by the closely packed rows of houses, we can imagine that it must have been a very lively place. This area was the location of a community founded by emigrants from the northern region of present-day Fukui Prefecture, formerly known as Echizen Province, and was at first a port. However, the port of Ogi, developed four kilometers to the east, began to prosper as an anchorage for the kitamaebune, leading the people of Shukunegi to switch industries to shipbuilding and shipping. Thanks to carpenters who, understanding where things were going at the time, built the large junks known as sengokubune and shipowners who operated their own vessels in the shipping business, the island prospered as a center of ocean trade.

Culture doesn’t just have its roots in place and natural features. I believe that the charm and appeal of culture is in the intermixture and jumbling together that comes from exchange and interaction. Just as mainland Japan’s culture was revitalized by the stimulus and even shock of the forms of knowledge imported from modern western culture as they collided with the cultural artifacts that were brought from the Eurasian continent, cultures from areas all over Japan flowed into Sado and intermingled there. Today, when travelers from around the world are creating new cultural effusions, we can learn quite a bit from the evidence of past cultural prosperity.

I was shown into one of the village’s houses, known as Seikuro, and it was not at all what I had expected of a fisherman’s home; it was a grand, sophisticated residence. On the first floor, a spacious hall surrounded a sunken hearth, and in the rear was a Buddhist altar. On the second floor was a parlor with an exquisite alcove post and fine chigaidana [a built-in staggered shelving unit], an elegantly crafted space reminiscent of a Kyoto sukiya-style home. This residence, made out of materials that came by way of the shipping industry, vividly conveys the fact that objects and information obtained from travel throughout Japan were brought to this locale.

Sado Island's Ogi Folk Museum, established in Shukunegi following a proposal by Tsunekazu Miyamoto, a folklorist associated with Sado, preserves 30,000 tools used in daily life during that period, among which are more than 1,200 pieces of fishing equipment and almost 1,000 pieces of shipbuilding equipment, as well as surf boats, many designated as Tangible Folk Cultural Properties of Japan. The museum building, the former Shukunegi elementary school, is from the Taisho era (1912-1926). Next door in the Sengoku Ship Museum is an actual size restored sengokubune cargo ship, the Shiroyamamaru. Upon entering the ship, one finds that the ceiling is unexpectedly low and narrow for a sengokubune capable of carrying about 1,000 [sen] goku worth of rice (more or less 150 tons of rice).

I stayed in a ryokan called Hananoki while I was on the island, a comfortable lodging built out of impressive materials used for old Japanese-style houses known as kominka, and thoroughly enjoyed the proprietress’ delicious home cooking. The proprietress and her husband, a potter, run the inn together, and the detached lodging house was also quite attractive. The simple interior of the guest rooms is agreeable, but there’s room for improvement, especially considering the expected influx of travelers from abroad. Shukunegi is not a village living in the past, but one that has a future, and more cultural exchange is definitely on the horizon.

2023.2.6

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Shukunegi, Sado City, Niigata Prefecture