I
Under a bright sun the old fishing-town of Yaidzu has a particular
charm of neutral color. Lizard-like it takes the grey tints of the rude
grey coast on which it rests,—curving along a little bay. It is
sheltered from heavy seas by an extraordinary rampart of boulders. This
rampart, on the water-side, is built in the form of terrace-steps;—the
rounded stones of which it is composed being kept in position by a sort
of basket-work woven between rows of stakes driven deeply into the
ground,—a separate row of stakes sustaining each of the grades. Looking
landward from the top of the structure, your gaze ranges over the whole
town,—a broad space of grey-tiled roofs and weather-worn grey timbers,
with here and there a pine-grove marking the place of a temple-court.
Seaward, over leagues of water, there is a grand view,—a jagged blue
range of peaks crowding sharply into the horizon, like prodigious
amethysts,—and beyond them, to the left, the glorious spectre of Fuji,
towering enormously above everything. Between sea-wall and sea there is
no sand,—only a grey slope of stones, chiefly boulders; and these roll
with the surf so that it is ugly work trying to pass the breakers on a
rough day. If you once get struck by a stone-wave,—as I did several
times,—you will not soon forget the experience.
At certain hours the greater part of this rough slope is occupied by
ranks of strange-looking craft,—fishing-boats of a form peculiar to the
locality. They are very large,—capable of carrying forty or fifty men
each;—and they have queer high prows, to which Buddhist or Shintō
charms (_mamori_ or _shugo_) are usually attached. A common form of
Shintō written charm (_shugo_) is furnished for this purpose from the
temple of the Goddess of Fuji: the text reads:—_Fuji-san chōjō
Sengen-gu dai-gyō manzoku_,—meaning that the owner of the boat pledges
himself, in case of good-fortune at fishing, to perform great
austerities in honor of the divinity whose shrine is upon the summit of
Fuji.
In every coast-province of Japan,—and even at different
fishing-settlements of the same province,—the forms of boats and
fishing-implements are peculiar to the district or settlement. Indeed
it will sometimes be found that settlements, within a few miles of each
other, respectively manufacture nets or boats as dissimilar in type as
might be the inventions of races living thousands of miles apart. This
amazing variety may be in some degree due to respect for local
tradition,—to the pious conservatism that preserves ancestral teaching
and custom unchanged through hundreds of years: but it is better
explained by the fact that different communities practise different
kinds of fishing; and the shapes of the nets or the boats made, at any
one place, are likely to prove, on investigation, the inventions of a
special experience. The big Yaidzu boats illustrate this fact. They
were devised according to the particular requirements of the
Yaidzu-fishing-industry, which supplies dried _katsuo_ (bonito) to all
parts of the Empire; and it was necessary that they should be able to
ride a very rough sea. To get them in or out of the water is a heavy
job; but the whole village helps. A kind of slipway is improvised in a
moment by laying flat wooden frames on the slope in a line; and over
these frames the flat-bottomed vessels are hauled up or down by means
of long ropes. You will see a hundred or more persons thus engaged in
moving a single boat,—men, women, and children pulling together, in
time to a curious melancholy chant. At the coming of a typhoon, the
boats are moved far back into the streets. There is plenty of fun in
helping at such work; and if you are a stranger, the fisher-folk will
perhaps reward your pains by showing you the wonders of their sea:
crabs with legs of astonishing length, balloon-fish that blow
themselves up in the most absurd manner, and various other creatures of
shapes so extraordinary that you can scarcely believe them natural
without touching them.
The big boats with holy texts at their prows are not the strangest
objects on the beach. Even more remarkable are the bait-baskets of
split bamboo,—baskets six feet high and eighteen feet round, with one
small hole in the dome-shaped top. Ranged along the sea-wall to dry,
they might at some distance be mistaken for habitations or huts of some
sort. Then you see great wooden anchors, shaped like ploughshares, and
shod with metal; iron anchors, with four flukes; prodigious wooden
mallets, used for driving stakes; and various other implements, still
more unfamiliar, of which you cannot even imagine the purpose. The
indescribable antique queerness of everything gives you that weird
sensation of remoteness,—of the far away in time and place,—which makes
one doubt the reality of the visible. And the life of Yaidzu is
certainly the life of many centuries ago. The people, too, are the
people of Old Japan: frank and kindly as children—good children,—honest
to a fault, innocent of the further world, loyal to the ancient
traditions and the ancient gods.