Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

  The aurora borealis of my childhood? Being robbed at knifepoint in Amsterdam? (A terrific anecdote, that, but in truth a horribly emasculating experience.) A certain pub in London’s Soho. An apartment in Quebec City. The week I spent camped in that large bog sometimes referred to as Scotland. And what else? Korea. Indonesia. The Great Wall. Just postcards, really, when all is said and done. And the thought gnawed at my heart: everything I had done, a collection of postcards, like a zoetrope made to resemble motion while turning in circles.

  “I once worked for a short time in South America,” I said, “and I lived with a family in a village at the top of the world. I was nineteen years old and I was going to live forever.”

  Hitoshi said: “When you remember that village, what do you remember best?”

  I thought a moment. “The sound of roosters in the morning. The smell of sugar cane, like wet grass.” And it all came back again, like an echo returning from across a bay, the town of Malacatos high in the Andes of Ecuador. The sound of guitars in the town square in the falling dusk. Myself at nineteen, a spectator speaking in broken Spanish. “Hey, Gringo!” Gringo. Gaijin. Outsider. And suddenly it seemed as though I had spent half my life as an outsider in someone else’s land.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just that: roosters, the smell of sugar cane.”

  “Malacatos,” said Hitoshi. “It seems far away.”

  “No. It isn’t far. It isn’t far at all.”

  Rice fields spread before us, as flat as a table at eye level. “And you,” I said. “Who are you? What places are part of who you are?” My syntax was tangled, but Japanese is a language of metaphors and it makes certain allowances. He understood what I meant.

  “I trekked the Himalayas,” he said. “I spent a month there, in Katmandu, in the mountains. But that is not who I am. Later, I went to India. Calcutta. Have you ever been to Calcutta? No? So many people, such energy. Beggars. The Untouchables.”

  “Like Japanese burakumin?”

  He held up a cautionary finger. “Other places,” he said, reminding me of the pact we had made. “Spain,” he said. “I went to Spain. It was what we say in Japan, an ‘Art Tour.’ Spain and Portugal, to see Picasso, El Greco, in the original. But it isn’t the art I remember best. It is the people.”

  He looked into the middle distance.

  “I remember Nazarre,” he said. “In Portugal. The women waiting at the cape for their fishermen husbands to come home. They came together every evening, when the sun is low. Like gold. They were so beautiful, these women by the sea. They are there now, maybe at this moment. Waiting. Waiting for someone. Not me.” He laughed. “Too bad.”

  We rounded a long slow corner and the landscape shifted to the left. The far mountains were white with age.

  “You know,” he said, “if I had the courage, I would never have come back. I would be in Nazarre now, painting. Maybe fishing.” And then he asked me, “Have you ever seen the dance called flamenco?”

  “Just in the movies.”

  “Spain and Portugal, very different. Portugal is strong. The heart is strong. But Spain? For me Spain is like the flamenco. Women, dancing. The body is moving fast, strong, angry even. But if you look at their eyes, they are sad. The action is not the real Spain, the dance is not the real Spain. It is the eyes. That is Spain.”

  “And India?”

  “I was alone in India,” he said, as though that answered some unasked question. “I was alone, solo travel. It was before Nepal. I was sweating, my shirt is like a bath. They said to me, India has three seasons: hot, hotter, hottest.” He smiled.

  “Is that all you remember of India, that it was hot?”

  “No,” he said, and there was a long pause. “India. Calcutta. So many poor people, hands like this, out for money please. ‘Rupee please, you give rupee please.’ One day I was in the feeling to joke. And this little girl, she is a beggar, maybe Untouchable. She asked me many times, rupee please, rupee please. I saw her every day in front of my hotel. So I wanted to make a joke, you understand? Just a joke. So I said to her, ‘Why I give you money? I am poor too. Why—’” and his voice cracked. He was staring hard at the road ahead. “—I said, ‘Why I give you money? You should give me money, I am poor,’ I said to her.”

  He filled his chest and let it out slowly, a long, extended sigh. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.

  “So what happened?” I asked. “What did she do?”

  “She gave me some money.”

  Much is made of Japan’s insularity. Too much. Commentators tend to treat the country as though it were disconnected from the rest of the world. But no nation looks as longingly or with such mixed emotions to the outside as does Japan. Japan was never a crossroads of civilizations, it was always on the periphery, and the elements of other cultures, particularly Western cultures, have been imported painstakingly and at great cost. Today, as the world tilts toward the Pacific, Japan finds itself in the one position she has never prepared herself for: a crossroads of kingdoms, the meeting point of great cultural and economic currents. Worlds have collided and Japan is suddenly a pivotal point. It has been a trauma as much as a triumph.

  The Japanese can never forget the world that exists out there, like a fog bank, beyond their islands’ edge. It is their obsession, their neurosis, their fantasy. If Westerners have an ambivalent attitude toward Japan, then the reverse is doubly true. To the Japanese, we are legion: we are conquerors, barbarians, superiors, inferiors, dreams projected, lives unlived, icons, buffoons, the purveyors of greater ideas and nobler arts, taller, louder, faster, less refined, more sophisticated. We are all this and more, compressed into a ball the size of a fist that sits in the stomach of the Japanese.

  Arrogance is always an overreaction. So is self-loathing. The Japanese have been overreacting to the West since the day the American commodore Matthew Perry sailed his Black Ships into Tokyo Bay in 1854 and forced Japan to open up its ports for trade. Until then, Japan had been cloaked in a world of shōguns and clan lords, the longest totalitarian rule in human history. Japan’s vaunted insularity ended with Perry’s crusade. It was date rape and it set the tone, back and forth, between Japan and the West that has continued right through to the present. If the West loves and hates Japan, Japan LOVES and HATES the West. Japan can do everything but forget us, we who exist out there.

  The Japanese attitude to the rest of Asia is even more problematic. On the surface, they treat the rest of the continent like embarrassing country bumpkins, related only distantly to themselves. They are proud to be Japanese; they are ashamed to be Asian. This conflict runs right down the centre of their soul. India, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Korea: they lie like a stone beside the heart.

  Travellers and commentators rarely place Japan in an international context because it is in their interest to make Japan seem more exotic and otherworldly than it is. We all want to be mystic explorers, but Japan is not otherworldly. Neither is it near at hand. It lies somewhere in between. Chiemi was right: Japan is caught in a permanent mid-step, one foot in Asia, one in the West.

  It wasn’t until much later that I recognized the convergence of the worlds inhabited by old Nakamura, Chiemi, and Hitoshi. Three people and three places. Saipan. Arabia. Calcutta. Japan as a prisoner of war, as a young woman dreaming, as an artist in motion. The world from three views: the inescapable, the unattainable, and finally, the authentic.

  Japan may yet become a nation of travellers; we may yet meet her, walking the same road, hitching the same rides. Calcutta is as much a part of Hitoshi’s landscape as Ecuador and the Amakusa Islands are a part of mine: the places that make and unmake us. The places that define us.

  Hitoshi pulled over at an intersection. To the left, in the distance, was the angular mass of Toyama City. To the right, fields. Beyond that, mountains. I climbed out and strapped myself into my backpack. We shook hands through the car window.

  “I have one question,” he said. “Why do you hitchhike?
It’s not the sakura, is it?”

  “No. It’s not the sakura.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I wanted to find something. Something more.”

  “About Japan?” he said.

  “Among other things.”

  “Then I am sorry for you.” He smiled. “I didn’t tell you anything about Japan.”

  We lingered for a moment at the contact point of hitchhiker and driver—the roadside—like people in a doorway at the end of a party.

  “Any last questions?” he asked me, half in jest. “You know, Japanese ancient secrets. Such things. It’s your chance.”

  “Yes, actually. Answer me this, it’s a question that has always bothered me. Inside, in the deepest point, under all the layers, are the Japanese arrogant or insecure? I mean the kernel. The hard centre.”

  He gave me a shrug. “Insecure, of course.”

  “Did you hear that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “The way you said of course, it was very arrogant.”

  “Was it? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

  “Now you sound insecure.”

  He laughed. “American humour,” he said, but I wasn’t joking.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t get a chance to paint anything,” I said.

  “That’s okay.” He looked at the landscape that fanned out before us. “It’s not so interesting.”

  “I thought you liked open spaces, the emptiness, wabi-sabi, all of that.”

  He shrugged. “Hard to paint.”

  15

  HITOSHI DROVE AWAY and was soon lost among the gridwork of Toyama City. The road pointed north like a compass needle, and ahead of me the lines of perspective came together. I turned my face into the wind and walked toward the vanishing point.

  early spring—

  a single road,

  vanishing

  A truck rumbled by, chased by a few cars, but other than that, the traffic on the Toyama perimeter was slight. A vehicle suddenly pulled over. It was a hatchback with a company logo on the side.

  “Going north?” I asked.

  Inside the car was a woman who had surprised herself by stopping. She was in her middle years, but had a bobbed girl’s haircut that defied the arithmetic of age. She was all afluster. “What have I done?” she said aloud.

  I opened the door and was halfway in when she said, “Wait! Stop!”

  “Yes?” I was in limbo, my head in the door, my buttocks thrust out into traffic.

  “Are you dangerous?”

  “What?”

  “I said, Are you dangerous?”

  I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly. “Who? Me? No, I’m not dangerous at all.”

  “You promise?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “You can get in.”

  And that was how I met the unsinkable, irrepressible, wholly undeniable Kikumi Otsugi, a woman who believed in bad men but not bad dishonest men. I had given her my word of honour that I would not harm her, and she was satisfied.

  The car was cluttered with catalogues, magazines, stacks of brochures bound in rubber bands, road maps, file folders—as though a small tornado had recently passed through. She leaned over and shuffled some of the papers to make room for me, but all she succeeded in doing was stirring everything around. I nestled in and waited for the car to move. It didn’t.

  She looked over at me, then, laughing at herself, said, “What am I doing, asking a stranger into my car?”

  “Would you like me to get out?”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” and she shook her head, less in disagreement and more as though she were trying to shake some sense into herself. “Why are you out here?” she asked. “So far from town? Is that too personal? Maybe it is. Anyway, I suppose you have your reasons. I mean, I’m curious, but it doesn’t matter. Before we begin, my name is Kikumi, it means beautiful flower.” Then, laughing at her own immodesty, she said, “It was true once, many years ago.”

  “My name’s William. It means very safe person.”

  “There,” she said. We shook hands and her hand felt small and fluttery in my palm, like a bird’s wing. “Now then,” she said. “We know each other’s name, so we are no longer strangers, right? I can give you a ride.”

  She put the car into drive and pulled out, checking afterward to see if any vehicles had been coming. It seemed to sum up her approach to things: act first and then check later to see if it was all right.

  “I know what I’ll do!” she exclaimed. “I’ll take you into Kurobe City. We can have an early lunch. Well, a late breakfast. Anyway, we’ll have coffee—if you like coffee. I think most Americans do. Or is that just a stereotype? Who knows? No matter, I like coffee. I have a friend that speaks English. At least, she says she does. Who knows. I can’t tell one way or the other. Now then … what was I saying?”

  “Kurobe City?”

  “Oh, yes. You’ll like Kurobe. Very famous, you know—” she said, and suddenly pointed toward my groin. “Zippers.”

  “Zippers?”

  She nodded gravely. “Kurobe zippers. Very famous.”

  We skimmed the edges of Toyama, a low, wide city of the plains framed by distant mountains. The entire area, as well as the city, was part of the regional Toyama culture. The Toyama region, according to Kikumi, was one of commerce. Prosperous, upbeat, hard-working. “Toyama women are famous,” she declared. “They work. They don’t just live off their husbands. Everyone says it, they say, ‘Toyama women are strong willed.’”

  She used the word erai, which is difficult to translate. The word has a slightly nasty edge to it, but it was clear that Kikumi took it as a compliment.

  “Toyama women are rich—very rich. Not me, but most others are. I have one friend who played the stock market, and—you know what you should do? You should marry a Toyama girl, then you wouldn’t have to hitchhike. You could take the Bullet Train, first-class—except she probably wouldn’t let you. She would say, ‘Save the money and take economy class.’ Oh, yes,” said Kikumi. “Toyama women are very strong.”

  “Are you a Toyama woman?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I think I am, but my husband is not so sure. Often he asks me, ‘Are you sure you are really from Toyama?’”

  “Maybe he married a fox?” (Foxes often assume the guise of women to ensnare men.)

  “Yes!” she said. “Maybe I am a fox. You should have been more careful, to ride with a fox, it can be dangerous, but of course, I’m not a fox. We are only joking. Really, I am a—here, it is somewhere—no, that’s not it—here! My business card. Do you see, there is some English on it. Very sophisticated, don’t you think?”

  Kikumi worked for a life insurance company in Kurobe, and she had been returning from a recent meeting when she saw me.

  Kikumi called from her car phone and arranged to meet some of her friends at a hotel restaurant. She dropped me off at the entrance. “You get a seat, I’ll find a parking spot.” As she drove away, I realized I had left my backpack, my camera, most of my money, and all of my underwear with this flyaway woman. I had often marvelled at how Japanese drivers would leave me sitting in their cars with the keys in the ignition and the motor running, but here I was doing much the same thing.

  The dining room was sunny and surrounded with greenery. The menu included seafood-spaghetti, a dish that is inexplicably popular in Japan but which always reminds me of a collision, as though one waiter, carrying a plate of octopus and oysters, ran headlong into another waiter carrying pasta. The coffee bar was one of those elaborate chemistry sets where coffee is weighed out like gold dust and then boiled in beakers and poured carefully out, cup by cup. Through painstaking preparation like this, the Japanese have managed to justify charging seven hundred yen (eight bucks!) for a single cup of what is, basically, overpercolated sludge.

  I choked back the java and basked in my celebrity. Three ladies, in varying ages from early thirties to late forties, were held rapt by my pres
ence. We had a freewheeling discussion that ranged from whether perms suited Japanese women, to whether beards suited Western men, to whether Kikumi’s recent decision to take up downhill skiing was well advised. The consensus on these issues was: no, yes, no. It turned out that Kikumi’s friend Mami did not speak English, but she had been to Australia and that qualified her to act as translator. One of the ladies would ask Mami a question about me, Mami would ask me how to say it in English, I would tell her, she’d repeat it in English to her friends, and I would answer in Japanese. Everyone was happy.

  When I told them I was heading for Sado (the distant island of the round-washtub boats) Kikumi told me the same folk story that Mr. Nakamura had told me, about lost love. But in her version the woman was escaping Sado, to visit a lover on the mainland. It was a slight shift in emphasis, but the difference was revealing. In one version the woman was trying to visit her exiled lover—a sad tale of sacrifice and womanly fidelity. In the other version she was simply restless and wanted to get off her island. When I asked them about this discrepancy, one of Kikumi’s friends said, “It doesn’t matter. In both cases, she drowned halfway across.”

  I wasn’t allowed to pay for lunch. Kikumi waved it onto her tab with an empress-like gesture, only to have the waiter give her a strained smile. The manager soon appeared and he and Kikumi had a long, heated exchange about some other past unpaid bills, after which it was settled that (a) Kikumi was right and (b) the manager was very rude. As we left, Kikumi gave me a sour look and whispered, “Toyama men—obsessed with money. It’s terrible.”

  Kurobe City, it turned out, is the zipper capital of the world. It is the home of YKK, which stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha. The YKK Corporation has made its name and its fortune with the humble zipper. Except, of course, they aren’t called zippers; that was a brand name introduced by B. F. Goodrich in the 1920s. The name zipper later became generic, but in the city of Kurobe, or at least within hearing range of YKK, zippers are still officially referred to, not as zippers, but rather as “slide fasteners.” It seemed like such a strange industry to build a city around, zippers. I tried to imagine similar versions—the Shoelace Metropolis, the Button and Tie-Clip Capital of the World, String City—but I couldn’t do it.