尾道を訪ねてRevisiting Onomichi: Echoes of a Fading Port Town

After a long while, I am in Onomichi, in Hiroshima Prefecture. The Japanese archipelago is surrounded by rough seas, but Onomichi faces the Seto Inland Sea, relatively warm even in winter, and in its distinctive climate it remains a region where an old Japanese port town survives. Onomichi is the mainland gateway to the Setouchi Shimanami Kaido, a route of about 60 km linking Hiroshima Prefecture on Honshu with Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. It is well known today to people who enjoy cycling, but beyond its quiet, beautiful scenery it is known as the location of one of the representative works of Japanese cinema.

That is Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953). Set in postwar Onomichi and Tokyo, it portrays superbly the relationship between an elderly couple living in Onomichi and their children working in Tokyo. Tokyo Story captures the townscape lined up along the hillsides that is peculiar to Onomichi, views toward Mukaishima in the Seto Inland Sea, and trains running through the town, and it is also a beautiful piece of film in which the whistles of ships echo through a quiet port town.

A feature of this area is that shipbuilding has long flourished, and Innoshima in particular, home to the shipyard that has belonged to Hitachi Zosen from before the war to today, has developed greatly. Its roots lie in a local shipyard founded in 1896 by people born on Innoshima, which boomed on wartime demand in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 but fell into depression when the war ended and closed in 1908. In 1911 Osaka Iron Works, a company from Osaka, set its eyes on Innoshima's shipbuilding, moved in, bought the closed yard and started a new one.

In the First World War, the ships built at Innoshima's yard ranked first in the country, and a great age of prosperity came. Shipbuilding rises and falls with the economy and world affairs, and it repeated growth and decline afterward, but it revived with the Manchurian Incident and the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1943, during the war, Osaka Iron Works changed its name to Hitachi Zosen. Hitachi Zosen went on growing, but when from the late 1980s it cut staff by several thousand, the effect was so great that people said “the island will sink” (Innoshima will perish). In effect, the economy of the Setouchi region was the same thing as shipbuilding.

In the 2000s, Japan had a shipbuilding boom on the strength of China's economic growth, but Hitachi Zosen gradually withdrew from new-ship building and finally stopped building new ships on Innoshima. Last October, 2024, Hitachi Zosen, with a history of more than eighty years, changed its company name, which was much talked about.

Mukaishima, near Onomichi, also began shipbuilding in 1906, and Hakatajima, now famous as an island of salt, was originally an island where shipbuilding flourished. Many of the Seto Inland Sea's outlying islands are thus deeply tied to shipbuilding. Many ships still lie at anchor in Onomichi, and you can see shipyards such as those on Mukaishima. Where ship sounds echo through the quiet town, the atmosphere of Tokyo Story still remains.

There is one more historical reason shipbuilding developed here: pirates. On the islands of the Seto Inland Sea a band of the Murakami family, called the “Murakami Suigun,” once held sway. The representative pirates were on Innoshima, Kurushima and Noshima; they had roots in one kin but acted autonomously. Goods coming from China and Korea into northern Kyushu had to pass through the Seto Inland Sea to reach the capitals of the time, Kyoto, Osaka and Nara. The pirates ambushed those ships, gained wealth and built castles on the islands. For the emperors and aristocrats living in Kyoto, winning over the pirates who controlled this sea route was extremely important.

Wars with the pirates therefore broke out many times, and the warriors of Kyoto, who rose while the aristocrats still held power, were often sent to fight them. But the area near Onomichi, for all its interesting history, reached a turning point before the war when the building of warships such as large battleships moved to Kure in eastern Hiroshima Prefecture. Tokyo Story filmed the sight of Onomichi as that history ended and decline began.

The islands of the Seto Inland Sea then were not linked by bridges as they are now, so contact with the mainland was extremely limited. The islands with industry developed quickly, and as gaps with neighboring islands widened, young people from other islands moved to one island as labor. Then, to make matters worse, after the war the islands' young people were sent off in group employment in the name of securing labor for the mainland. Most of them did not return home, lived on the mainland and started families, and life on the islands grew harder still.

On this trip too, islanders told me the decline is serious, and that in two more years the farming on most islands will be wiped out. Because neither shipbuilding nor farming is an attractive job in Japan now, the decline of the Setouchi region is advancing at a startling speed.

The Shimanami Kaido, linking Onomichi on Honshu with Imabari on Shikoku, opened along its whole length in 2006, thirty-one years after construction began. But because it took longer than expected, it did not keep pace with the speed of the islands' decline, and it has become a miniature of the problem of modern Japan, with a super-aged society on each island. Going around the area, I met almost no one except people in their seventies and older. And not every island got a bridge. Many were left behind, and the situation there is worse.

The Setouchi region of postwar Japan clung to shipbuilding, did not put effort into developing other industries, and as a result many young people left their hometowns. Ironically, it is because Onomichi missed the chance of its age and declined that the scenery of Tokyo Story, from more than seventy years ago, remains.

Watching Tokyo Story in the sea breeze of the Seto Inland Sea, looking at Onomichi's dusk and night views, I feel both a deep nostalgia for the past and complicated thoughts about Japan's future.