Day 14 in Japan: Nearly stranded on Sado

Despite waking up at six o’clock in the morning for a seven-fifty bus, the last leg of our journey was a nail-biter. Because I had done my laundry on our first night in Kanazawa (which spent the next day drying around our rooms), Brent and Joel had to do theirs on the second and pack it in the morning. It dried faster than mine, as I had tried to complete each stage manually with my knowledge of Chinese characters while Joel simply used the five-hour automatic wash and dry cycle. Still, Brent and Joel had to collect all their clothes in the morning from across the room, which took a fair bit of time, and Joel’s decision to repack his entire bag did not help.

We ran out the door with little time to spare, but our taxi was stuck in traffic. This blunted Joel’s jibes at Brent for his increasingly frustrated attempts to lock the door behind himself and put the key in the lockbox – a process that took what felt like half an hour but realistically could not have been longer than two minutes – though this came as a consolation to Brent only. As we boarded the taxi, our estimated arrival time was exactly 7:50. We groaned at every red light we caught and at every pedestrian crossing full of schoolchildren, both of which suddenly seemed much more frequent than ever before. Still, we pulled up at the station at 7:49. As Brent and I unloaded all our things, Joel ran to the bay where our bus had already closed its luggage doors and entangled the driver in halting conversation to buy us time. In the end, we only cost the bus a minute’s delay.

We arrived in Niigata after a lovely long bus ride during which I caught up on all my correspondence, finished writing my diary, and added up my expenses from this trip. I also bought a little vegetarian sushi box and soaked eggs during one of our two rest stops and patiently waited to eat them until the bus had pulled out of the parking lot and I could watch the snow-capped mountains roll by. We ate lunch close to the ferry terminal in Niigata and visited the observatory with its views of the city’s port, tall chimney stacks, and river. Our ferry to Sado Island left at two-forty in the afternoon. It was a highspeed jetfoil ship that lulled me to sleep with its smoothness despite my constant fear one of its hydrofoils would snap and plunge us into the sea.

Sado is difficult to approach from the Japanese mainland, facing Honshu with a menacing array of steep cliffs on its southeastern coast. It is shaped like a pair of conjoined tadpoles dancing around each other or like two grains of sticky rice being pulled apart, with a thin layer of film still stretched between them. A ship sailing to Sado must loop around this first hilly grain and dock near the flatlands in between it and its twin. These flatlands, forming a saddle between the two sets of mountains, are where most of Sado’s population lives. Given the difficulty of reaching Sado even in the modern day, it comes as no surprise that the island served as a place where dissidents and other politically uncomfortable people were exiled throughout the ages, including Emperor Juntoku and the Mahayana monk Nichiren.

It took a while for us to find the car rental office when we deboarded the ship. First, we all had to go to the restroom despite having gone once during each rest stop of the bus ride and once before lunch. We then had to leave the ferry building to actually find the place. Our little five-minute journey took us through the quiet but well-maintained streets of Ryotsu with its statues of mermaids and shops with displays of dried fish and squid. When we reached the car rental office, however, our sunny idyll dissipated.

When Brent and Joel first set off on their trip around the world, they did not bring an international driving permit. It turns out that when someone’s driving permit is written in English, car rental companies often simply do not ask for one, which came as a huge surprise to me as someone who never drives abroad without it. The two drove through much of the Balkans, Jordan, and probably a few other places without this ever being an issue. In preparation for Japan, however, where the rules are stricter, Joel had his international driving permit posted to his hotel in Tokyo but then lost it somewhere on the way to Fuji. The backup plan then became for me to use mine. When I showed it to the car rental employee, however, she frowned and opened a thick rulebook lying on her desk. It said that international driving permits based on the 1968 Vienna Convention – i.e. the one I have – were invalid, and that the only recognised form of permit was based on the 1949 Geneva Convention.

With our plans to rent a car dashed, we scrambled to find an alternative. A taxi would not really help in the long run, as we would need to get around the island the following day, and taking a bus would run into the same problem. We considered renting bicycles, but the distances seemed formidable and we would have to figure out what to do with our luggage. We told our host of our dilemma, hoping to get some advice, but to our surprise she responded that she was running some errands in the city and would be able to pick us up. She was a sweet older woman with glasses and a big boxlike car. As she drove us to her home, she offered that for a small fee, she could drive us around the island the following morning. We tried our best to communicate how much we appreciated the offer.

Hearing that we were interested in religious sites, our host (whose name we never learned because we were not sure how to ask for it politely) stopped by an ancient Buddhist temple on our way to the house and told us to take a look around. Its wooden gateway building led to a trail of stone steps among the mighty trunks of an old forest, ending at the gate of the complex itself. The air was quiet and smelled of pine. Behind the second gate began a grassy courtyard, at whose upper end stood an old wooden temple built into the hill, with pillars supporting its terrace. It rose just above a blossoming sakura. When we climbed the stairs to the temple, we thought it better to remove our shoes to walk its creaky wooden floors despite their clearly not having been swept in a long time. In the very corner of the temple sat a deity – perhaps a Buddha – with a stern face that seemed almost alive.

We walked back to the car past a small bamboo grove, impressed by the silent and ancient majesty of the place. I made sure to save the place on my map so that I could research it later: its name was Seisuiji Temple, and it was founded in 808 by a priest the emperor had sent to spread Buddhism in Sado. The temple was modelled on Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, with its name even employing the same characters but following a different pronunciation. It is among the oldest temples in Sado.

Our host also took us to Hiyoshi Shrine in Kaminiibo. She did not mean us to tour the shrine itself but told us that we might be able to spot some crested ibises there. Walking us through the grove at the far end of the shrine, she pointed at the trees, where occasional movements indicated the presence of nests. We stood around for a while as the birds squawked and scattered pine needles on our heads. After some waiting, the vague movements erupted into a beating of wings, and we saw from far below the rosy feathers of the ibises flying between the pines. The crested ibis, we learned, once became extinct in Japan, but was successfully reintroduced with significant international help.

Once we had properly checked in, we put ourselves into the capable hands of our gracious host once again for dinner. Learning of my vegetarian diet, she recommended a place in the neighbourhood and drove us there herself, but we made sure to reassure her that we would be capable of walking back ourselves.