The wind across the stern brought with it a little relief from the heat. The wind was generated by the motion of the boat of course, for air had lain still all day. A typhoon was holding the heat over the mainland, but luckily the storm was still a week off. The motion of the boats across the water was almost jaunty, optimistic.
It wasn't just the heat that was forbidding. Access to my next island, Ōshima, had always been restricted, due to its having been used as a leper sanitarium for over a century. While leprosy is better understood today, and those stricken are no longer forced into isolation, all of the island's residents still carry the disease, and continue to live there because they have nowhere else to go. So while I've often written how certain places feel like the end of the earth, for these islanders it was certainly the case.
The boat is a strange construction, with most seating down on the lower deck, well below the windows. It is impossible to look out, but probably more importantly, difficult to look in. I presume that this is to allow the patients a bit of privacy, but upon my return trip later, I find that in fact they get the better seats up top. It is we visitors who are forced to ride steerage, and the overwhelming smell of disinfectant adds to the claustrophobia. I decide to ride up above in the doorway, feel the wind on my face, and watch the steel body of the ship frame the asymmetrical mounts of rock jutting from the blue.
Ōshima is a pleasant island, far prettier than most in the Setō Naikai. There is little concrete here, and the walk to the hospital is shaded by modest sized pines. I see some children out playing on a long stretch of pleasant beach, middle schoolers on a study trip, to judge from the identical uniforms. What looks like a flying saucer on a hill above them is the crematorium, and squinting into the trees I see the surrounding graves, which go a long way to telling(?) this island's sad history.
In the cafe I find more recent testaments, in the form of hand-drawn scenes from the island, each with some simple text. Despite the sparsity, each drawing stuck a powerful emotional chord. Even more poignant were the crochet(?) stories lining the tabletops below. These tales were of the older residents, their stories going back to the time of the war. Oddly, a lot of these stories are of joy, and I suppose this island would have been a idyll of sorts, when compared to the certain hell of Japanese cities at the time. In his Inland Sea, Donald Richie mentions a beautiful young girl from Kyoto, with a very mild form of Hansen's, yet destined to remain here. That would have been fifty years ago, and I wonder if any of these pictures were hers.
As for any of the current residents, I see none. In general, Ōshima only welcomes guests one Saturday a month, but my visit falls during the Art Triennelle, when the staff offer tours thrice daily. I join a young woman who leads us around, cribbing from small handheld cue cards. We are led up to the cemetery, and the shrine and temple which flank it. We drop next down the opposite side of the hill to find rows of former housing, each broken into small single room dwellings. Most residents now live on the southern part of the island, away from the visitors. As it is the art festival, there are a half dozen exhibits here, showing a varying of talent. The most impressive is a video installation of a scuba clad man who filmed his swim out to the island with a GoPro. His progress is visible on one side of a screen, filmed overhead by a drone. But it his own footage, at waterlevel, that haunts somehow. On the one hand it reveals just how close the island is to mainland Shikoku, yet the slow, laboring progress through the water, helps to add to the feeling isolation.
The biggest installation is the mountain itself, divided into sections with poetic names like Head of the Cow or Head of the Horse. I wend my way along the trail, past multiple Jizo that must form a mini 88-temple circuit, as if common in the Inland Sea. I'm surprised somewhat to see a wild-boar trap, and the cicada scream all around me. The full circuit would take 20 minutes, so I;d have to hurry in order to catch my boat back. The day is too hot for rushing, so I compromise with a view over the sea, then turn back.
At the ferry, a middle-aged woman is saying farewell to an older woman in a wheelchair, probably here mother. The older woman waits for the younger to board, but she won't go just yet, stopping to tell the other that it's okay, to go back. It creates an interesting tension, their mutual stubbornness almost funny, if not over shadowed by the poignancy of the farewell, drawn out as is usual in Japan, the bonds of relationship severed................
On the turntable: Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, "Pure Jerry Keystone Berkeley, September 1, 1974"
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