Sado island - toshiyuki ihira (cool books to read txt) 📗

This is a promo for my ebook, “Sado island,” that is on sale at Amazon for Kindle, Windows PC and iPhone for $0.99. Sado is an isolated island like any other island. It is so naturally due to its remoteness. But for a quirky turn of events it becomes a part of world event and espionage. Following is the first half of the story. Enjoy and hope you can leave me a feedback. Thank you.


Sado island


Copyright © 2010 toshiyuki ihira

ISBN 978-0-9816760-4-3


It is a modest island. As far as an island goes, it is not small nor large. Only fame to its existence is its gold mine. Convict labor worked that mine 100s of years ago. A mountain where the mine is located is cut in two right in the middle with a wedge shaped trough almost all the way down to the ground level. All by human power.
We take a ferry to that island. Just a few hours choppy ride. Summer sun is bright enough but over on open ocean, sunshine is even brighter. Usually there is an anticipation when we step on a boat that takes us to a remote island for a tour but we know there isn't much to see at all and most recreation we can have is looking for a good eat that we can have on the mainland anyway. Our spirit is listless and looking for a way out. The entire tourist industries on the island are busy drumming up, more like making it up, merits of coming to the island. It's gotten so intense that their tone of wanting you to come is practically badgering. All souvenirs have a feel of a copy of some other place or hastily cooked up trinkets. By the time we get to the island's port, we are already worn out a bit and weary. A ferry ride takes up a good chunk of the morning and ride back takes about the same so we don't have time left to do much if we go back to the mainland on the same day. A whole point of even coming to this island is contentious then. We are staying the night. It's only a night stay and the island's closeness to our home town makes us feel we haven't left our home. We didn't pack anything for the trip. Without securing a hotel room, we start to look for a restaurant. It's lunch time. We have to make this trip worthwhile. We look for eats that we can't have on the mainland. But, … . Seafood? Our home town is a port town. We can have freshly fried, grilled, poached fish of all kind and shellfish, too, without coming here. After looking over few restaurant's entries made in wax and plastic displayed in a window case for patrons to see - they look really lifelike, you can smell them - we decide it is worthless to look for something indigenous and keep looking only adds to our miserable feeling. We settle in the nearest restaurant and order whatever we want. We don't even talk over what's good to eat. We focus on gabbing and try to shake off this let down and salvage this trip. As we gab, it seems just an ordinary afternoon at home, except our surroundings. New place and different locale are interesting in itself to young people since they haven't had a chance to venture out but we are a lot mature, extra mature some might say. More we gab, more we notice the unfamiliar scene around us and this makes us uneasy and uncomfortable. Casual gabbing among friends and new locale don't mix. We are drawn to scenes around and outside. Coastal scenery is delightful enough but staring at it for two minutes we have seen plenty. Sea rapping and rocks jutting out of it and trees on top don't, can't seep down into our person deep enough, not today. As we grow older with keen mind that hasn't gone senile, we are interested in bustle and hustle of people's lives and what come out of it, not scenery. See the possibilities of other lives than our own and appreciate them is amusing and entertaining. Lure of the gold mine, slave labors toiled in harsh conditions that's what we came here to see. But my companion, she had been here before and when you see a particular tourist haunt, you have seen it. You are filled with memories of that trip that predictably makes you recoil with the thought of going back to the same tourist destination. She came here because of me. This trip is a chore for her.
“So, what do you want to do? Find a hotel? Or take a bus trip to the gold mine this afternoon?” She asks me.
“I don't know. I am not in a good mind right now to take a tour. I am disappointed in good eats already.” I think about what to do a bit more but it's like not having enough sleep. “Do you have anything you want to do this afternoon?”
“No, … I don't want to spoil your fun.”
“No, tell me. What's on your mind? I sure can't think of anything.”
“Well, it's you who is insisting now. O.k.? I want to go back tomorrow morning instead of afternoon. That's all I am thinking.” … “Ah, don't scrunch your face. We are here so we are going to have fun. Right? … We can stay an extra day if you want. I don't mind it.”
“An extra day? What are we going to do? We can't even think of what to do for this afternoon.”
Lure of gold mine is a bit tarnished. (“An image of gold tarnishing? Ah, it's fake gold.”) The museum and all exhibits associated with this island and the gold mine are rather tourist exhibits. Historical details are preserved as much but academic pedigree doesn't really exist in those exhibits. I was looking, hoping for a revelation among those tourist exhibits. There must be something that tells me even in those glossed over and sanitized displays a vein and a layer of something that can make me feel, connect with what was there in real life. Standing in the actual location would certainly help to conjure up images of their lives on this island and in the darkness of the gold mine. We decide on taking a tour in the morning. Now we have to find a hotel and hunt for semi private seats in a restaurant so we can peck at foods and drink very slowly to whittle away the long early evening. We would like to consider it an early evening instead of late, or rather mid afternoon.

The morning is clear, just like yesterday. The tour bus is taking us into a mountain road on a taller mountain peek of two peeks on this island. This is another tourist shtick. Since there is only few of note on this island we might as well go through a higher mountain peek to get to the gold mine. Coast line tour is also available but we chose the mountain route. We have seen enough of coast line. We have seen enough of mountain scenes, too. The mainland is nothing but coasts and mountains. Going up is uneventful. It is a lazy straight away with few turns. … On the way down the mountain I start to hear squeal of tires and I am jostled. And frequency of squeals are increasing. The tour guide is telling us how many accidents there were last year on this mountain road. I look over the edge of the road and notice a steep drop. I can't see the bottom. If we fall, we are done for.
(“Is this another tourist shtick? … I don't need a scary ride in the morning like this.”) I almost yell out to the bus driver to slow down. But my excessive pride keeps my mouth shut. For every squeal of tires there is a jostle. A jostle to the right, to the window of the bus, I am almost thrown over the edge of the road. A jostle to my left, to my napping companion, I am faced with a concrete retaining wall on the side of the mountain. If the driver loses his control and slip over the edge of the road - some places there are no guardrails - we are finished. If the driver loses his control and hit that retaining wall we would bounce off the wall at this speed and go over the edge of the road. This is a safe trip to the end or else. There doesn't seem to be anything in-between. A minor accident? That would be too modest of a tour.
We make it. We passed the winding mountain road. The gold mine isn't far now. The tour guide is talking about the mine.
“The Spanish ships could only make 1 or 2 trips a year from America but we could make many trips to China. … … “
What? Spanish? What do they have to do with this gold mine? I wish I was listening more. I always thought this island was isolated from the rest of the country, much less the rest of the world.
“It was in the 1500s. The local lord, who also was in charge of this island, didn't like the foreign influence over the East Asia. At the time Spanish were trying to ship silver mined in Central and South America to China for a profit. The lord decided to rump up the production of gold here. Silver was considered to be the byproduct of gold mining but nevertheless produced in abundance along with gold. He shipped those silver to China. All he could produce. Glutton of silver in China became so much that they stopped minting them into coins. They would have lost money trying to make coins out of silver at the time. They passed around the silver ingot as their currency instead. You can see a mold of those silver ingot here at this mine. They are the same shape as the ingot Chinese traded with for a time.” …
“Boy, they spin tails to impress you.”
“Oh, you are awake.” … “I don't think she is weaving tales.”
“I know you are going through some kind of soul searching. But, don't get hooked into believing wild tales. I don't like to see you like that.” She yawns and stretches her arms out over her head. “Along with the mountain road we just took, the tour company have to sell their tour. Isn't the story a bit inflated? There is nothing about it in the tour brochure.”
That's true. I only skimmed through our brochure and it is very genial and cordial account of the tour. There is nothing, no revolutionary story in it. They went through pain to take anything like that out of it. No, I want to keep my interest going, now that I found some of it. I get myself excited, seeing a way to rescue time and effort we spent already on this trip. “I know Chinese passed around silver ingots as their currency, not coins for a time. … It's a famous anecdote in history of how badly they managed their economy. It's true, too, it was more expensive to mint coins than coins made out of those silver. It was that bad, you know.” I trail off to a whisper. I had to admit I didn't know much beyond that. … “Let's go see the mold of those silver ingot. Right? We don't have to pass any