Ohayou
July 2024
Shikoku island was one of my destinations for this trip. I approached her in 2018 when I visited the islands of Naoshima and Teshima and in 2019 when I stopped in Fukuoka and Hiroshima, but I had never been further away. I don’t plan my trips when I travel, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage, but I chose stages and Shikoku had never been one of them.
四国
Shikoku – four countries.
Of the four main islands that make up Japan, Honshū, Kyūshū, Hokkaidō and Shikoku, Shikoku is the smallest, with 18,800 km2 and 3.7 million inhabitants. The island is separated from Honshū by the Seto Sea, which is dotted with hundreds of small islands, the most important of which are connected by impressive bridges with elegant architecture. The particularity of the island is that it contains no volcanoes, but it is very close to the Nankai fault, where the tectonic plate of the Pacific Ocean comes to insert under the terrestrial plate on which Japan rests. This fault is responsible for major earthquakes in Japan.
Takashi described Shikoku as the least developed island of Japan which gives it an additional charm but this is a disadvantage, just like in Hokkaidō the travel by train or bus are complicated and take a lot of time. The ideal is to rent a car, but as I did not take it in advance it is impossible to do on site, everything is already booked. The same goes for trains that allow you to cross beautiful places on trains that are just as beautiful, apparently you have to book two or three weeks in advance to get a seat. This will be a goal for a future trip, better prepare my trip to Shikoku.
This is the disadvantage when I improvise, the advantage being to give me the freedom to do something else than visit Shikoku itself and that other thing was Hisae who informed me. When we met in Kanazawa we quickly talked about Yasujirō Ōzu because she lives in Kamakura where he is buried and where he lived. When she heard that I was going to Shikoku, exactly in Matsuyama, she told me that it was absolutely necessary for me to go to Onomichi the city from where the parents are leaving in the masterpiece of Ōzu, 東 京 物 語.
東京物語
Tōkyō monogatari – Tōkyō Story.
The title is rather poorly translated into French as “Voyage à Tōkyō” for reasons I cannot explain. Of course, the film tells the story of parents traveling by train to Tōkyō to visit their children, which is an adventure for them. But if Ōzu chose this title, he had his reasons. He could do nothing to ensure his choice was respected since he had been dead for ten years by the time his film was discovered by Western audiences. The French must have thought they knew better than the filmmaker, or their translator was simply incompetent. In English, it is Tōkyō Story, as in almost all other languages, sometimes with a variation such as Conte de Tōkyō in certain languages. Three countries translated it as “Voyage”: France, Germany, and Italy.
When I am in Japan, Ōzu, Oshima, Teshigahara, Imamura, Kore-Eda for cinema, Mishima, Kawabata, Tanizaki for literature, and many others, accompany me. I feel them around me; I see them in a detail, an attitude, an expression, a landscape, or even a smell that evokes so many emotions experienced while watching their films or reading their books. This year, a foreigner joined them: Wim Wenders. I was already aware of his passion for Ōzu and his interest in Japan, and his film Perfect Days reminded me that cinema still exists in Europe, for which I am grateful to him. I am also seeking out the locations of this masterpiece in Tōkyō, dragging Takashi along on long walks across his hometown.
Wenders joined me in Onomichi, as through some research on this small fishing town, I discovered that he had visited it and produced a book of photos and poems titled Journey to Onomichi. This time, it is indeed about a journey. The book was published in 2009 in English, consisting of 64 pages and 24 color photographs. Before becoming a filmmaker, Wenders was a photographer, though he never really made it a profession.
One of Shikoku’s beauties, which I had already witnessed when visiting the islands of Naoshima and Teshima in the Seto Inland Sea separating it from Kyūshū, lies precisely in these hundreds of islands scattered across the sea. They vary greatly in size, from mere rocks to larger islands that sometimes host villages or even museums, as is the case with Naoshima and Teshima.
It is on one of these islands that Kaneto Shindō’s exceptional film, 裸の島, takes place. This 1960 black-and-white film, with sound but no dialogue, tells the story of a couple of farmers and their children who cultivate fields on a waterless island. Several times a day, they must fetch the water necessary for farming from the main island, which they reach by boat, without a sail or motor.
裸の島
Hadaka no shima – The Naked Island.
The scenes in this film are forever inscribed in me and I can’t help but think of them when I’m on the Seto Sea, looking for that naked island, Susuke. On these the ashes of the director and his wife were scattered upon their death. There are not only magicians, gods, dragons or demons in Japan, there are also ghosts.
