Nakashima Smells, The Town of Gates and a Broken Bathing House
01 July 2006, by Alana Picone
There is a place, south of Fukuoka, a place called Nakashima … where all the old ladies look like turtles. Nakashima is a fishing town, south of Fukuoka, on the Nishitetsu Omuta line, between Yanagawa and Omuta. In Gate 6, there is a home that consists of four houses engulfing a garden. Inside the main
house lives an ageing Japanese family. In the next part, a library; the third part, this is where I live, together with all the empty
rooms, and the fourth, a house full of baths, a bathing house for the fishermen in the 50s, It's no longer in action, just an empty tiled wall, starving
condensation, “poor walls, tiled and all, mostly uncracked, holding hope, craving moisture”. “Poor dry air, the air is so dry in here
there are no words to be found to be remembered, dry enough so that my eyes become thirsty." The lids on the baths have not been
properly put back on, the setting just screams abandonment.
The fishermen still exist on the skinny Yabe River Inlet that divides Nakashima and Takata, and the town is surrounded by smelly fishing nets and muddy water. The town and river are separated by a cement wall that runs for two kilometres. The wall has 14 gates
which define a section of the town. At every gate there are chairs. For who? Spectators, people, people eating nuts. The chairs are
empty; sometimes no-one is sitting on them as I walk to my gate. Gate 2 is full of restaurants and hustling with turtles washing the
day’s sellable produce. At Gate 6, Astro boy leans up against the wall next to the empty chairs. I don’t know why he is there, he just is. These days I walk
past him unquestioningly. I guess we have become indifferent to each other. Caution: Its not worth looking through Gate10 unless you want to be
hit by the fishing nets, oozing putrid fish. Amusing nevertheless, each gate is different and I guess each holds its own secrets.
To explore the gates in Nakashima, ride the Nishitetsu Omuta Line. First take the Express train to Yanagawa, on the same platform jump
on the local train heading in the same direction, Nakashima is the third stop. Once you are outside the station, your back facing the
station, walk left. As you begin walking left you will notice up ahead the first gate which brings you along the river. From there
you can search gate to gate.
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