Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

  2

  THE EARLY MORNING revealed a landscape of mist, muted in faded green and gold, the wisps of steam hanging low like dragon’s breath across the fields. I hiked back into town, down to Ogi Port. The only business open was an agricultural co-op, but they had a coffee shop upstairs, so I sat, sipping sludge, and watched the sun break across the bay. I had arrived one step ahead of the tour buses. The town was apparently overrun at the peak season, but here in early spring, without so much as a whisper of cherry blossoms on the wind, I was the only visitor in sight.

  “Next week, very busy,” said the man behind the counter. “This week—nothing.”

  “Well, I’m here,” I said brightly, but it didn’t seem to console him.

  Ogi Port is famous for the washtub tarai-bune boats of folk legend. These large wooden tubs, steered as they are by shifting your weight and churning the water with a single oar, are almost impossible to manage, yet the elderly ladies in their bright-sashed peasant kimonos and bonnet-like hats were having no trouble at all. The washtub boats, meant for gathering seaweed and shells, are still in use farther along the cape, but here in Ogi the tradition is kept alive primarily as a folk attraction—a sort of living theatre staged for spectators. By making a small donation, you can even try your hand at it, which I did, with the tub tilted over ridiculously to my side and the sweet little lady—her smile decidedly strained—giving me doomed advice on how to shift my weight and wield the oar. We ended up (here’s a surprise) turning in circles. My shoulder was soon aching and I was feeling vaguely dizzy. The lady, her face hidden by her wide-brimmed straw hat, giggled and giggled. What I failed to achieve by sheer will and muscle, she deftly did with rhythm, taking over control and skimming us back to shore (we had spun dangerously far out to sea under my tutelage). It was a dance form, really, a swaying of semicircles acting against each other, motion through misdirection.

  When we got back, another lady came bumping up to the dock and called over to me, laughingly, “She is a terrible teacher! I can teach you much better.” And so off I went again, around and around and around and around and around and around. “Jōzu desu ne!” she cried. My arm socket was throbbing by now, and my knees were drunk on the motion, so once again I handed over control to a lady three times my age and half my height. A dozen other washtubs were waiting at the pier when we returned, and everyone agreed I was the best rower they had had all day. This buoyed my spirits slightly until I realized, as I walked wobbly away, that I was—so far—the only rower that day.

  I was heading north on the road out of Ogi, past an automobile graveyard, when—flying around the corner—came a bright white car. As soon as the driver saw me, the vehicle came to a skidding, spontaneous stop. I didn’t even have my thumb out.

  “Hey, man!” a voice called out to me in what can only be described as California-cool “I remember you from the ferry boat!”

  It was the same carload of energy I had seen the night before, the one that had raced the ferry and won. The driver was a tanned young Japanese man. He was wearing an earring, mirrored sunglasses, and a fluorescent orange T-shirt. Beside him was his girlfriend, an American, with tumble-brown hair and beautiful features. In the backseat, even more youthful good looks: a Japanese woman they called Abo, and beside her, sprawled out in heavy slumber, an athletic and drowsy young man named Say Ya. (At least, that was how it sounded.) I wedged into the backseat, disturbing Say Ya, who woke up, eyed me with foggy resentment, and immediately lolled back to sleep.

  “My name is Atsushi,” said the driver and obvious leader of the group. He turned around to shake my hand and insisted that everyone in the car do likewise. Say Ya was less than enthusiastic, waking long enough to offer a limp palm before rolling over, knees and arms forming a rubbery tangle, face into the backseat.

  “He likes you,” said Atsushi. “As for me, atsui—that means ‘hot.’ So you can call me Hot Sushi, if you like. All my friends do.”

  I was flattered that he had automatically included me in their circle, but his girlfriend Michelle was obviously not so immediately inclined. It would take her a long time to warm to me, which puzzled Hot Sushi because he had assumed—since Michelle and I were both North Americans—that there would be some kind of instant rapport between us. There wasn’t. Ironically, Westerners are far more suspicious of other Westerners than the Japanese ever are. For all his exuberance and surprisingly good English, Hot Sushi was still Japanese—which is to say, trusting, innocent, and a little naive.

  Michelle was from Delaware, which is apparently a city or a state or something somewhere in the United States, but I wasn’t exactly sure. (Later, I learned that most Americans can’t find Delaware on a map either, which made me feel better.)

  Hot Sushi and the gang were ski instructors from the mainland, which explained their healthy tans and almost sexual vigour. Next to them, I looked like—well, like not a ski instructor. As we drove out of Ogi, Hot Sushi chatted enthusiastically about skiing, a sport that has always seemed slightly Sisyphian to me. Go up a hill. Ski down. Go back up again. So why not just stay at the bottom in the first place? No matter, I had once skied in the interior of British Columbia, which gave me much-needed credentials.

  “Skiing is a rush,” said Hot Sushi, and on this they agreed.

  The hedonism of ski instructors seems universal. I have no doubt that this foursome would get along just fine with any other ski instructors from any other country. Hot Sushi went one better: during the winter he was a ski instructor; in the summer he flew to the island of Guam, the American protectorate in Micronesia, and taught Japanese tourists how to scuba dive. That was how he met Michelle. They both worked in Guam at the Pacific Island Club, a high-end resort with its own “swim-through” aquarium.

  “Ever been to Guam?” asked Hot Sushi. “You’d like it. Lots of sun, lots of surf.”

  “It’s like Hawaii,” said Michelle, “but without the culture.” Michelle had studied at a university in Hawaii and had come to Guam not long after. “Guam is a gaijin zoo,” she said. “Japanese tourists go to Guam so that they can feel they went to a foreign country, but everything is geared so they don’t have to speak to foreigners and don’t have to eat anything but Japanese food. Even the karaoke is in Japanese. They go to Guam to look at the gaijins.”

  Hot Sushi sighed, but had to agree. “It’s true,” he said. “Japanese want to see gaijins in their natural habitat. But they don’t want to have to actually deal with them directly.”

  “You could get a job easily in Guam,” Michelle said to me. “You speak Japanese. You’re like a tame gaijin.”

  It stung, but her observation was true. Many foreigners had made entire careers out of being a tame gaijin. Japanese television was littered with them.

  Hot Sushi and the gang were touring Sado Island to mark the end of the ski season.

  “Sado Island is dying,” said Hot Sushi. “It’s beautiful. But it’s dying. The young people are leaving. No one is staying. It’s an island of old people.”

  Just then, as luck would have it, we passed a young boy running beside the road, which Michelle quickly—and maliciously—pointed out. “There’s a young person right there. Look.”

  But Hot Sushi was not fazed in the least. “Sure,” he said. “But he’s running to catch the last ferry off the island. It just proves my point.”

  The road twisted along the coast, through clustered villages where the sea and wind had leached colour from the wooden buildings, leaving them washed-out and grey.

  “This car has no radio,” said Hot Sushi. “But that’s okay, because I will sing for you.” Michelle rolled her eyes, but Hot Sushi was undeterred. “Do you know—where you’re going to—do you like the things that life has shown you—”

  This woke up Say Ya. In spite of being a robust young man, he looked an awful lot like a grumpy child. “He’s singing,” he muttered. “He’s always singing.”

  And so it was, we cruised through the rolling hills and slow curves of Sado acc
ompanied by an off-key but spirited rendition of “Mahogany.”

  Where are you going to—do you know?

  3

  ONE OF SADO’S most illustrious exiles was a man named Zeami who lived from 1363 to 1443. Zeami was the Shakespeare of Japan. As an actor and a playwright, he codified the art of Noh theatre, fusing traditional dance with the sublime austerity of Zen philosophy. Central to his aesthetic was yōgen, “that which lies below the surface, that which is hidden but always present,” a concept that is as difficult as it is vague. Yōgen, the world beyond words, lies in the resonance and beauty of pure experience. It was a theory of art that was remarkably advanced for its age, especially when lined up against the literally minded morality plays that were standard fare in European courts at about the same time. (“Oh, no! Scratch the Devil is eating Lazy Child! Only Virtuous Son and Loyal Daughter can save him.”)

  Zeami was heralded as a genius during his lifetime, a legend of truly theatrical proportions. Mind you, it helped that Zeami—as well as being an artistic genius—was also the homosexual lover of the reigning Shōgun. In a very real sense, Zeami slept his way to the top. Alas, when the Shōgun died, Zeami lost his patron, and the next ruler was—ahem—less enamoured of the artistry of Zeami than was his predecessor. On the pretext that the upstart Noh master was hoarding artistic secrets for himself, the new Shōgun sent Zeami into exile, to the island at the edge of the world. Zeami spent his last years in obscurity, chilled to the bone and bitterly lonely. Zeami died on Sado, a broken man. His art lived on. And on and on and on and on … If you have ever tried to sit through an evening of Noh theatre, you will understand what I’m speaking about.

  Noh has been described as “total theatre,” combining as it does music, mime, dance, poetic recitals, masked costumes, and tonal chants. It is also a theatre of restraint. The tension comes not from plot but from atmosphere, much of it supernatural. The performers are usually masked, they walk with a gliding, hesitant step, and the scenes unfold like slowly transforming tableaus—all to the accompaniment of shrill flutes, sudden yelps, arbitrary drumbeats, and slow, boiling moans. Noh is haunting and disturbing and deep—for about ten minutes. After that, the hours slow down to a glacial pace and the movements appear to be made under deep water. It is beyond somnolent. It is boring. Profoundly, exquisitely, existentially boring.

  Zeami’s texts on Noh, once groundbreaking and avant garde, have fossilized. It is a theatre of ghosts. A museum piece. The plays revolve around the cycle of karma, of death and rebirth, and the longings that tie us to this world of illusions. Certainly, the performances proceed at about the speed one expects eternity to move.

  A friend of mine was studying theatre in Japan and he was constantly trying to convince me that I did in fact love Noh. This friend—who was English, naturally (the English have an almost heroic capacity for boredom)—would drag me to touring performances and gasp and gush over the way the lead player would hold his fan. “Do you see that!” he’d say. “The lead actor is holding his fan upside down.” My friend was, like most hardened fans, disdainful of the competition. “Noh is far deeper than the type of cheap catharsis you get from melodrama or kitchen-sink realism. And it is not simply spectacle, either. Kabuki, with its blood-and-thunder excess and extravagant costumes, is crass. But Noh … Noh is meditative.”

  “And seditative,” I said.

  “And yet,” he would insist, all empirical evidence to the contrary, “it is very exciting. Noh operates on many levels. Underneath it is tension—this tension that is almost unbearable.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  My friend was getting exasperated. “I don’t know why I even try to enlighten you. Listen,” he’d say. “Ezra Pound helped translate Noh plays into English. Brecht was greatly influenced by Noh. W. B. Yeats felt that it reached new levels of suggestive art.”

  “Name drop all you want,” I said. “It makes no difference. Noh is still Noh. It’s like attending the opera or going to the dentist. You don’t enjoy it, you endure it.”

  I will concede one point. The masks of Noh are sublime. The female masks in particular. (Like Kabuki, Noh is still a primarily male domain.) Poised between expressions, they are capable of all expressions. During performances of Noh, I have seen—though I would never admit this to my Noh-loving friend—how the masks seem to change moods onstage, so effective are the postures and gestures of the performers.

  Perhaps my English friend was right. Perhaps Noh truly is the essence of Japanese society. Masks that have incredible depth, feelings that are restrained, emotions turned inward, silences that fester, sudden bursts, violent emotion, lifetimes of regret. Or maybe it is simply a very old and dated art form. Either way, I would not attend another evening of Noh at gunpoint.

  Instead, I spent my time on Sado Island admiring masks and seething in envy over the sensual, hedonistic lifestyles of ski instructors and sun-browned scuba divers.

  4

  SADO ISLAND, if not lost in time, was certainly adrift in it. The villages were like fallen stacks of wooden crates surrounded by seascapes and embraced by rolling hills.

  We stopped for coffee at a viewing spot along the way, and Say Ya, stretching and yawning, wandered into the tourist shop. Say Ya had to try everything, squeezing horns in the toy section, trying on hats, spinning tops, playing plastic flutes. Then, as soon as we were back into the car, he dropped into sleep as suddenly as someone under a hypnotist’s command. A torrent of energy, then a nap.

  “He is just like a kid,” said Hot Sushi approvingly.

  At Senkaku Bay we stopped to visit an aquarium, with listless fish and giant mutant crabs and stir-crazy sharks turning cramped circles. The bay itself was a deep turquoise inlet of sea amid jagged rock formations and overspills of green. We walked along a narrow footbridge onto an observation deck perched on an outcrop of rock.

  Say Ya looked around and said, philosophically, “Good place for a barbecue.”

  As we continued up the west coast, we passed a sign near a beach: CAUTION: WATCH OUT FOR BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.

  “Next week,” Abo assured me. “Next week and the beaches will be filled with beautiful women.”

  Story of my life.

  From the Senkaku Bay area, we turned inland toward a place called Kinzan, “the Gold Mountain.” This was no hyperbole. In 1601, the very year that Lord Tokugawa unified Japan under his rule, gold was discovered at Kinzan. It was a rich vein, near the surface and easily separated from the bedrock. This discovery on the fringes of Tokugawa’s realm proved fortuitous indeed, for the gold of Sado funded the coffers of the Tokugawa dynasty and kept them in power for the next two hundred and fifty years. The gold of Sado outlasted the shōguns themselves. It helped fund the Meiji Reformation and it supported Japan’s imperial adventures in China. Sado gold helped pay for the planes and ships that attacked Pearl Harbour, and it helped fund the winged bombs of the kamikaze pilots. Gold was still being mined at Sado right up until 1990.

  At the height of the gold rush, the main site was near the boom town of Aikawa, the Klondike of Japan, a brawling community of gold miners, samurai overlords, imported prostitutes, wealthy wine merchants, assorted mountebanks, and thousands upon thousands of slave labourers. It was a major, albeit makeshift, city. Today, little is left of Aikawa to remind you of its once reckless past.

  As we drove inland toward the old gold mines, the ragged green peaks called Doyu-no-Wareto rose above us. They were formed, it was said, by a gold miner enraged with greed who struck the mountain so hard with his hammer and spike that he split the peak in two. The mountain was split, but not by any mythical figure. It was the ceaseless mining activity of thousands that cracked the mountain.

  The mines have since been turned into a sort of Disneyland of the Oppressed, with walkways built deep into the wet, chilled depths. Mannequins dressed in ragged clothes are arranged in mini-dioramas, reminders that it was grunt work, performed by slave labourers, that made the gold mines viable. The mine shafts, now a
tourist attraction, were a kind of mass grave. Thousands of slaves died in these mines. Their average life expectancy, upon arrival at Aikawa, was less than four years. Meanwhile, on the mainland of Honshu north of Tokyo lie the baroque, extravagant mausoleums at Nikko, burial place of the shōguns. The contrast between Nikko and the mines of Aikawa, between two tombs, is so vast as to be obscene.

  There was an awkward moment outside the Mine Museum when Hot Sushi pulled me aside and said, in a hushed voice, “Hey, man. It costs six hundred yen to enter. If you can’t afford it—I mean, if you need some money, or—”

  “No, no—” I waved his offer away.

  Michelle eyed our exchange warily.

  From the gold mines, Hot Sushi decided to follow the O-Sado Skyline Highway along the spine of the isle and then down into the port city of Ryōtsu. When Hot Sushi began to yawn, lion-like, Michelle became concerned. “Are you sure you aren’t too tired to drive?”

  “Tired?” said Hot Sushi. “Who—me? I never get tired. Never.”

  Again Michelle tried to catch him in a contradiction, and again he managed to elude her. “But yesterday you told me that you always feel sleepy.”

  “Sleepy, yes. But tired? Never.”

  I liked Hot Sushi. I liked the fact that you could never pin him down on anything. He reminded me, in his slightly ironic outlook and breezy goodwill, of the French Acadians of my home country. And his understanding of English nuance was remarkable as well. There is a difference between being tired and being sleepy.

  The air was clean and alpine crisp. Sloping away on either side were heady vistas that were so absolutely spectacular we almost considered waking up Say Ya. Abo finally did, as we snaked our way down toward the eastern shore of the island.