Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

  We drove through haphazard villages, thrown together like boxes in an attic. He stopped to drop off some textbooks, to visit a student’s family, to pick up a package. And the day bled slowly away.

  “Tell me something,” I said as we drove north into a deep indigo blue. “The Japanese. In their heart of hearts, are they arrogant or insecure?”

  “Arrogant or insecure? Or?” He looked at me as if to say, Well, there’s your problem. Perhaps the problem is in the question itself. “We Japanese,” he said confidently, “are not arrogant or insecure, we are both. You know, it is possible to be insecure in a very arrogant way—and vice versa. Look at America. I have always thought that you Americans manage to be dumb in a very smart way. Very smart.”

  “And the French are clever in a very stupid way,” I said, catching on.

  “Exactly. You have to stop thinking in opposites. You have to start uniting opposites.”

  “The British?” I asked.

  We mulled this over for quite a while and finally came up with “well-mannered in a rude way.” It was great fun. I love labels. Especially paradoxical ones.

  The sun was setting when he dropped me off. He was turning back toward Rumoi and I was continuing north. He gave me his number and told me to call him if I got stranded. It was only after he drove away that I realized I was nowhere near a town, let alone a pay phone.

  I was alone on an empty highway in a cold land. Night fell like an executioner’s hood. The moon, half chewed, lit up the landscape just enough to create ominous shadows and shapes. I swallowed hard and told myself to be a man. Or, failing that, a very brave child. The wind was picking up. It carried all kinds of creaks and groans and various assorted sound effects sent down from the gods above for the sole purpose of tormenting me. I tried whistling, but then I thought, what if ghosts are attracted by whistles. You never know, so I compromised by whistling but in a very low voice.

  I’m not sure why I was scared. I had camped out on beaches and in temples and in forests, but this was somehow different. This was a highway, and there is something innately unsettling about an empty highway at night.

  I kept whistling, and when a pair of car headlights finally approached, sweeping the road ahead like search beams, I took no chances. I stepped out and waved him down. He was a plant manager named—and here it gets really creepy and symbolic—Sakuraba, or Mr. Cherry Blossom Garden.

  “I’ve been chasing cherry blossoms since April,” I said, a little too cheerfully. “At last! I’ve found you.”

  This did not make him feel comfortable.

  “It’s a joke,” I said.

  “I see.”

  Mr. Sakuraba worked at a fish-processing plant in Sarafutsu, a small village on the northeast shore of Hokkaido, an area even more remote than that which I was travelling through. “Iceberg alley,” I said, and he nodded. His village was the gateway to the Okhotsk Sea, the Japanese equivalent of the Northwest Passage. Mr. Sakuraba was on his way home from a late-night delivery and his route would take me right through the hot-spring town of Toyotomi, my last stop before reaching Cape Sōya.

  “We have Russians working at our plant in Sarafutsu,” he said. “Twenty Russian women and one Russian man.” (Bicycle thieves and salmon gutters; things were looking up.)

  “It’s been a long day,” he said. “But I have to get home tonight. Tomorrow morning, I promised to put up carp banners for Children’s Festival. I have two sons,” he said, and in the glow of the dashboard lights I saw his expression soften.

  At Teshio, the highway turned inland.

  16

  THE HOT SPRINGS of Toyotomi are the northernmost in Japan. A six-kilometre detour east of the main town, the area itself is little more than a clutch of inns and red lanterns huddled around a central public bath. At night the streets were awash in wisps of steam and visitors walking through on unsteady wooden clogs. Guests were wrapped in cotton yukata robes and laughing in whispers. Every inn had its own thermal baths and its own distinct style of yukata. You could identify which hotel you belonged to by the pattern you were wearing.

  I finally found a room in a dark-wood-and-white-plaster inn, a building with narrow, winding corridors and angles that didn’t quite add up. In my room, I unfolded my maps and drew a thick line up the distance of Japan using a red marker, following the route I had taken.

  Tomorrow I would be at Cape Sōya. Then it was a train ride back to Sapporo, an afternoon of cherry blossoms (there were now rumours of flowers to the south), and then it was back to Minamata. This seemed to call for a celebration of some sort, so I went for a walk.

  It was a cold, clear night and the stars were suspended like ice crystals in dark wine. I found the Big Dipper, turned upside down in the sky, and Venus, the North Star.

  Maybe life isn’t one big pachinko game; endless variations in a set pattern where the house always wins. Maybe there is no pattern. Maybe there is no pattern except those we project onto our lives, like constellations on a field of stars. Ah, yes, Vega the Hunter. That’s Orion. That’s the Traveller. I remembered stargazing as a child and having the constellations pointed out. They made no sense then, and no sense now.

  Toyotomi Onsen is not a large place. Walk long enough and sooner or later you will come upon the town’s public bath. Inside, the sudden drop in temperature had turned the air cumulus. I soaped myself down with lather as thick as shaving cream, rinsed, and then lowered my body into the water. The shapes of people emerged from and dissolved into the mist, and my vision blurred as I tried to look at—through—into—the fog. It was like trying to focus on flux itself. Nearby was a font for drinking the sulphuric water, and I took a token, medicinal sip. It had the taste of blood and rust.

  That the bath is a return to the womb, I do not doubt: a chance to float again in the oceanic state as layers of dirt and fatigue and worry wash away. You emerge, flushed and well scrubbed, with skin so clean it hurts, and your head reels and you almost fall and float away. I sat in the water as long as I could, and when I rose, steam rolled from my body and the smell of sulphur clung to me like a lover’s scent.

  That night, I lay awake looking at the ceiling, thinking about people and places. I remembered friends I hadn’t thought of in years. I tried to make sense of my trip, my past. But it was all jumbled together like a box of slides that has fallen over and then been thrown back together, out of order. The images flashed upon the screen without rhyme or reason. Landscapes. Faces. Sunsets. Airplane wings. Tourist snapshots mixed in with still-life portraits of flowers.

  I came to Japan looking for some kind of realignment. A new start. A game plan. But somehow, along the way, I had become a collector of trivia and souvenirs, writing postcards addressed to a future self who would—somehow—make sense of it all.

  Deferring judgment to a later date resolves nothing, and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knickknacks and odds and ends. Here a face. There a sunset.

  17

  I WOKE to a cold grey sky. The hot-spring town was deathly still as I walked through it, and a few paltry snowflakes drifted down. What I didn’t know—what I couldn’t know—was that this was the advance guard of a cold front that would eventually lash out against Hokkaido and shipwreck me on an island, far from the mainland.

  I caught a ride with a schoolteacher into the town of Toyotomi itself. Toyotomi had the impermanent feel of a movie set. It was the type of place where stores sell goods from the 1950s, and fashion is something you get from a mail-order catalogue. It was Rumoi without the Russian flare. Or the harbour.

  Outside a small shop, a solemn-eyed six-year-old shared small confidences with me: favourite teachers, best friends, meanest bullies, that kind of thing. “Is it far?” he asked. “Where you come from, is it far?”

  “No, it’s not far at all.”

  And he walked me to the end of the street and saw me off. “Be careful,” he said. “Be careful and goodbye.” And that was how I left Toyotomi, walking out of town
on a slow slope uphill to the gradually fading farewells of a six-year-old. “Goodbye, Gaijin-san. Goodbye.”

  As I set out for Cape Sōya, I felt no sense of foreboding, no premonitions—only that familiar mix of disappointment and triumph that accompanies the coming end of any journey. In light of what happened next, foreboding might well have been more appropriate.

  Tomio Honda stopped for me just north of Toyotomi. He had a rough-cut, sun-creased, Jake-the-Farmhand look about him. He was a friendly man.

  “Welcome to Hokkaido!” he said when he opened the door.

  He was on his way to a country club to play a round of golf. Nothing unusual there. He took a shortcut, along the back roads, through sheep pastures and herds of cows. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight.

  “And what do you do?” I asked.

  He tried to explain, but I didn’t recognize the word. “I’m a teacher myself,” I said.

  Tomio grinned at this and suddenly switched to English. “Cows!” he said, pointing to one as we passed.

  “Cows,” I agreed.

  He pointed to several more. “Cows!”

  “Yes,” I said. “That is correct. Cows.”

  “Sex!”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Cows,” he said. “Cows. Sex. Cow sex!” He was now pointing vigorously at a herd and grinning.

  The admittedly small section of my brain devoted to rational thought had seized up like a rusty gear. I was utterly, positively, irretrievably baffled.

  “Cow sex?” I said.

  “Yes, yes. Me. I do cow sex.” His grin was now taking on a slightly demonic hint. I slowly reached for the door handle. We were coming up to a rural stop sign and the few survival skills I possessed were now kicking in like recessive genes. Run away, they whispered. Run away. I slid my hand onto the door handle and prepared to leap from the car. (I was frantically going through the fundamentals of the shoulder roll, as gleaned from high-school gym class, and berating myself for not having paid more attention.) I made my move.

  The door was locked.

  “Cow sex,” said Tomio, his eyes shining with glee.

  Well, you’ll be happy to hear that the story doesn’t end with me being forced to scamper about in the clover wearing a cow bell and going “moo” while the theme song from Deliverance plays in the background. I had just managed to discreetly unlock the door and had girded myself to leap from a moving vehicle when—like a tumbler turning in a lock—it suddenly clicked. I looked over at him.

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked. “An animal doctor?”

  “Oh, no.” He brushed this aside with a show of modesty.

  “But you help animals have babies.”

  “Yes, yes! Cows. Sex. Babies.”

  He was an artificial inseminator. “My cows,” he said, pointing to one herd and then another.

  I almost wept for joy. “Do you have any children of your own?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. I have three.”

  “And you, ah, had them—naturally?”

  He laughed uproariously over this. “Of course, of course.”

  With the tension gone and my anus slowly unclenching, I became giddily, hysterically happy. Tomio and I got along famously, laughing at everything and slapping each other on the shoulder (in a strictly he-man way, you understand). By the time we reached the golf course, he had invited me along.

  As I had never played the game before, it was decided we would stick to the driving range. He pulled into the parking lot and retrieved his clubs from the trunk.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “It’s the northernmost golf course in Japan,” he said. But let’s face it, we were only about ten or twelve kilometres from Cape Sōya, so everything up here was the northernmost something or other.

  “Form is very important,” said Tomio as he teed up a ball. “Shift your left leg forward, rotate your hips, keep your chin up, your chest out, and your shoulders straight. Tilt your right knee at a forty-two-degree angle, while raising your left elbow two inches and shifting your lower pelvis over your centre of gravity. Decrease the upward velocity, slowly raise your right pinky, put your left leg in, put your left leg out, and do the hokey-pokey as you turn yourself about. And that,” he said, “is what it’s all about.”

  What a stupid sport. I took a couple of swipes at the ball, but all I succeeded in doing was sending up a spray of dirt. Rugged Canadian that I am, my technique was more slapshot than golf swing. I was digging up great clods of earth at this point, and every time I slammed down with the club, Tomio winced. His smile trembled in the way I imagine a patriot’s does when faced with a firing squad. Stiff upper lip and all that.

  I was sweating so hard I had to take off my jacket. I spit into my hands (a gesture Tomio had apparently never seen before) and went at it with renewed vigour. Having perfected a take-no-prisoners sort of slapshot, I began working on my wrist shot, my hip shot, and my finely tuned, scythe-like, Genghis Khan shot. I was lobbing balls in all directions, right, left, and into the next lane. The other golfers were standing back, well back, and watching with that same queasy fascination one usually gives an impending car crash.

  After about half an hour of this, Tomio congratulated me on my prowess and took back his club. It was scuffed up quite a bit. On the back, in a metal sticker, was the price tag. (High-status items in Japan will occasionally have price tags that are semi-permanent and not meant to be removed.) It read: 70,000 yen. No wonder he was wincing. “Jeez,” I said. “A hockey stick would only put you back ten, twenty bucks tops.”

  He smiled at me, but his eyes were full of tears.

  “Shall we play a round?” I asked. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.”

  “That, ah, won’t be necessary,” he said.

  18

  TOMIO DROVE ME far out of his way, beyond the golf course, to where the road met the sea at a T-intersection. From here it was a short, four-kilometre hop to Cape Sōya. I could see the cape, a low slow curve of land in the distance. “I came all the way from Cape Sata,” I said. “Just one last bit to go.”

  “I hope you make it.”

  I dropped several hints (“So, I guess whoever I meet next will be the very last person I hitch a ride with.”) but Tomio didn’t offer.

  We said our farewells. “Next time,” I said, “I’ll teach you about hockey.”

  I could have walked to Cape Sōya in less than an hour, but as a matter of pride I decided to hitch.

  “You came from Cape Sata?” said the young woman in the front seat, almost swooning with disbelief. “Today?”

  I laughed. “Not today. Today I came from Toyotomi.” But even that elicited gasps of wonder.

  “But Japanese people never pick up hitchhikers,” she said.

  The car was crammed full with bags and skiing gear. Inside were three college kids, clean-cut, cheerful, and brimming with an enthusiasm I never remember possessing, even in college. The driver’s family name was Kitajima, which meant “Northern Island,” and the young man in the back was named Takeyuki, which could mean “Snowy Bamboo” if you screwed up the translation a bit. Up front was Yoko Tanaka, a very cute, very boisterous young lady with a big smile and dimples. I was in love with Yoko.

  We went to Cape Sōya, took silly pictures, ate at a lunch counter, bought postcards, and basically goofed around. The cape itself was secondary. It was a low point, with rocks piled along it so you could go down and dip your hand into the cold north sea and say, “Here I am, at the end of Japan.” At Cape Sōya you look back, toward Cape Sata in the south, across an archipelago that curves like vertebrae toward Okinawa.

  In Roads to Sata Alan Booth suggests that the landscape around Sōya is similar to that of Sata, the idea being that nothing really changes no matter where you go. (Alan was a bit of a pessimist that way.) But this isn’t true. You can drive right up to Cape Sōya and stroll down to the water. There were no cliffs or jagged rocks. These two capes—Sata to the south and Sōya at the north—ar
e just about as different as any two points could be.

  There were a few shops at Sōya, and even an inn, but little else. Other than the fact that you were at the northernmost point in Japan, there wasn’t much reason to stop. Japan ends not on an exclamation point but on an ellipsis: Sata! to Sōya …

  Yoko came bounding over, dimples ablaze. She shook my hand, squeezed it, and said with vicarious joy, “You did it! You really did it!”

  19

  MY TRIO of college students took me back to Wakkanai City (“the northernmost city in Japan!”), where a reporter with the Yomiuri, Japan’s national newspaper, was waiting.

  The Yomiuri has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world, so you’d think I would have been treated to dinner and drinks, but no, we held the interview in a hotel lobby.

  “You travelled end to end solely on the kindness of strangers, is that correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No one has ever done that before?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “And you were following the Cherry Blossom Front.”

  “Well, I got ahead of it in Sapporo, but it should catch up to me any day.”

  This was a new experience for me, being interviewed. I felt like a celebrity. I felt like Alan Booth. I felt like I had done Something Significant. I was droll, witty, deep. I even joked about getting a sunburned thumb in Shikoku. The reporter took all kinds of low-angle, heroic photos of me, thumb extended, and asked me all sorts of weighty questions. We spoke for over an hour.

  Why had I wanted to make such a trip in the first place? Because I wanted to see Japan, I said. Not as a spectator, but as a participant. I wanted to experience the Japanese as individuals and not as a nameless, faceless block.

  My own progress was similar to that of many expatriates. Before I came to Japan, I had tremendous respect for the Japanese, but I didn’t really like them very much. Now, after five years in this aggravating, eccentric nation; having travelled it end to end; having worked and lived and played with the Japanese; having seen beyond the stereotypes; having come up against their obsessions and their fears, their insecurities and their arrogance, their kindness and their foibles; having experienced first-hand all the many contradictions that are Japan, I found I did not respect the Japanese as much as I used to, but I liked them a whole lot more.