Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  The best illustration of what jōzu desu ne! means is the way my next-door neighbour taught her five-year-old son to ride a bicycle. Eschewing training wheels, she simply put him on a bike and pushed him off, down the driveway, where he inevitably flipped over or hit a tree or skidded to a stop on his face. After a few of these lessons, the kid was a wreck: his knees scraped, his elbows bruised. But he kept getting back on and trying again and again, sniffling back the tears as he went. It was all very entertaining, and it provided me with hours of amusement as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping my coffee and charting little Taro’s progress. I applauded his more acrobatic flips. Without fail, every time he set out on another foray, his mother would shout—in the brief moment he was in control—“Jōzu desu ne!” After which he would crash. Again. And again.

  Whenever someone in Japan compliments my second-language skills with the exclamation “Jōzu desu ne!” I think of little Taro on his bicycle, barely in control and heading for disaster. Keeps me humble.

  Anyhow, I had committed myself to discovering the True Heart of Japan. “William is going to follow the sakura all the way to Hokkaido,” my supervisor would tell people at random, and I would grimace in a manner that might easily be mistaken for a smile. I stalled for three years.

  When I finally did set out to follow the Cherry Blossom Front north, I went armed only with the essentials of Japanese travel: a map, several thick wads of cash, and a decidedly limited arsenal of Japanese, most of which seemed to revolve around drinking or the weather. (“It is very hot today. Let’s have a beer.”)

  Japan is not a small country, no matter what the Japanese themselves may think. The main island of Honshu alone is larger than Great Britain. Were Japan in Europe, it would dominate the continent. Japan is larger than Italy, larger than Norway, larger than Germany. A journey from Cape Sata in the south to Cape Sōya at the north covers three thousand kilometres. In North America this would be a journey from Miami to Montreal—and at roughly the same latitudes.

  So why this persistent image that Japan is a tiny little place? One reason is due to a cartographical optical illusion. On a map, Japan looks small because it is surrounded by the largest nations on earth: China, Russia, Canada, the United States, and Australia. But there is more involved than this. Japan is small because Japan prefers it that way. It supports the image Japan has of itself: the beleaguered underdog, small but mighty, the little engine that could. If you tell the average Japanese person that their country has a larger population base and a far bigger land mass than that of Great Britain, they will either resent it or refuse to believe you.

  Oddly enough, despite their conviction that they live in a small country, my Japanese friends also thought of northern Japan as being hopelessly remote. For them, the island of Hokkaido was a world away, and when we discussed my travel plans they were not terribly optimistic about my odds. “It is very far,” they warned. “Very far.”

  To make matters worse, I decided to go by thumb. Striking a heroic stance, I declared my intention to become the first person ever to hitchhike the length of Japan, end-to-end, cape-to-cape, sea-to-sea. This did not impress my Japanese friends as much as I had hoped.

  “Why would you want to do that?” they asked, genuinely puzzled. “There is no reason to hitchhike. That’s why we built the Bullet Train.”

  Others worried about my safety. “But,” I would argue, “Japan is a very safe country, is it not?”

  “Oh, yes. Very safe. Safest in the world.”

  “So why shouldn’t I hitchhike?”

  “Because Japan is dangerous.”

  And so on.

  Now, I will admit that mooching rides across Japan is not a major achievement—I mean, it’s not like I paddled up the Amazon or discovered insulin or anything—but I am the first person ever to do this, so allow me my hubris.

  When I left my home in Minamata City aboard a southbound train, I felt suitably bold with my backpack and muscular thumb.

  “I’m going to hitchhike the length of Japan,” I told the man beside me.

  He smiled and nodded.

  “I’m going to follow the cherry blossoms.”

  He nodded.

  “All the way to Russia,” I said.

  He smiled again, and soon after changed seats.

  * enkai: office party

  † ichi-man en: ten thousand yen; approximately $115.

  3

  KAGOSHIMA CITY is the Naples of Japan. All the guidebooks say this. Having never been to Naples, I really couldn’t tell you. The two do have a sister-city relationship, which is more of a suicide pact than anything, because both Naples and Kagoshima are known primarily for the imminent annihilation facing their people. Both cities, you see, are under the shadow of volcanic mountains.

  Across from Kagoshima City, rising up from the bay and dominating the entire view, is the gothic presence of Sakurajima, an active volcano with a potential wallop far greater than that of Vesuvius. Over one million people live within a six-mile radius of Sakurajima, well within the Blast Zone. The volcano itself is extremely ugly. It seems to float on top of the water like a charred, smoldering mass of candle wax. Although originally an island, in 1914 one of its more violent eruptions spewed out enough lava to weld it onto the far side of the bay.

  Incredibly, people continue to live on Sakurajima, even though an entire village on its east side was once buried under ash and stone. All that remains of the village is the top of a shrine gate, protruding out of the ground. The torii gate was over two stories high; only the top two and a half feet stick out. Undaunted, the people who fled returned as soon as the volcano calmed down. They rebuilt the town around the unnerving landmark of the buried gate. And life goes on. From the ash-rich soil of Sakurajima, the villagers harvest giant radishes that grow to the size of watermelons, and they hold their breath and they pray at their shrines and they wait for the next big eruption.

  Kagoshima City is just across the bay. It will be destroyed by tidal waves and flaming rock-falls when Sakurajima goes. Not if—when. As you can imagine, this adds an element of fatalism to the city. The grit and ash of the volcano lie like a funeral cloth over everything. Cars look old. Gardeners routinely dust their flowers.

  I was on the beach of Kagoshima Bay one summer when across the water the entire mountain just, well, shuddered. If you’re like me, you’ve probably never seen a mountain shudder. It got worse. Ominous dark clouds rolled up like bucket-throws of dirty water, and a muffled roar echoed across the bay and back again. “Run for your lives!” I said calmly. The others just shrugged. “Why bother? You can’t outrun a volcano.” (This, of course, did not stop me from trying.)

  The Japanese word for volcano is kazan, “fire-mountain,” yet the people of Kagoshima chose to name their volcano not for fire or thunder, but for the fleeting flowers of spring: Sakurajima, “Cherry Blossom Island.” A rumbling volcano named in honour of a delicate blossom that symbolizes the transience of life. I used to think that this was all very poetic, but as I stood on the beach watching Sakurajima that day, I realized that the transience of life being alluded to was my own. The mountain shuddered again, like a grumpy old man shifting in his sleep, and then slowly returned to silence. The echoes were a long time dying. Only then did I exhale.

  Southern Kyushu is divided into two peninsulas, and the quickest way to get to Cape Sata is to take a ferry from the western peninsula to the eastern and then travel south. Which is what I did. The ferry left with a sonorous, seagull-scattering blast of its horn, and I stood out in the wind on the upper deck and watched Sakurajima intently as it slipped by. (I was working on the “watched pot never boils” theory.)

  An old man approached me. He was tiny and tidy and as wrinkled as my thumb after a bath. He seemed to be shrinking back into himself even as we spoke.

  “American,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No.”

  “Where in America? Boston?”

  I sighed. “I’m not American.” />
  “New York? Chicago? San Francisco? Detroit?” He was evidently going to list every city in the United States, so I grabbed the next one that went by and adopted it as my new home.

  “So,” he said, “is it cold in Baltimore?”

  “Very cold.”

  “In Japan,” he said, “we have four seasons.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Can you eat Japanese food?”

  This was Conversation by Non Sequitur, and I was thoroughly familiar with it by now. The trick was to answer with equally arbitrary statements, until you sound like a couple of spies conversing in code.

  “Yes, I can eat Japanese food. Baltimore is very big.”

  “How long will you stay in Japan?”

  “Until tomorrow, forever. It is very cold in Baltimore.”

  He shook my hand. We smiled warmly at each other, clearly this was an International Moment. He then motioned to the mountain. “You are watching Sakurajima very closely,” he said. “It is beautiful, isn’t it? How do you feel about Sakurajima?”

  It’s a volcano. It’s named for cherry blossoms. It is mountain and sea and fire. “It is like Japan,” I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “You understand the true heart of my country.” Then—and I don’t mean to brag here—he assured me that when it came to speaking Japanese, I was pretty darned Jōzu.

  I had planned to take a bus down the peninsula to Cape Sata and begin hitchhiking from there, but there was no bus. At least, I don’t think there was. I examined the bus schedule posted by the highway, but no matter how hard I squinted, it remained completely inscrutable.

  The Japanese language is written in three separate alphabets, and I only know two and a half. The phonetic symbols (the kana) are easy enough, but the Chinese hieroglyphics (the kanji) are about as accessible to me as, well, Chinese hieroglyphics. If God had wanted me to learn kanji, He would have given me a bigger brain. So instead of catching a bus, I started hitchhiking earlier than planned, on a nondescript stretch of road cluttered with gas stations and appliance stores. Cars were flicking past in a steady tempo, the sun was out, and I felt good. It was under way.

  Humming my own private theme music (“Mission Impossible”), I thrust out a thumb and smiled like an angel. I was trying to look innocent and non-violent. Westerners are perceived as being aggressive and vaguely threatening, and I was working hard to counter this impression. I had shaved my beard off before I left and got my hair cut in that hip Mormon style that is all the rage in Japan. I was even wearing a necktie. In Japan, the Mormon Look is definitely in, and the young male missionaries who are sent to Japan—clean-cut and polite and oh so Aryan—are considered sexy and suave by the Japanese. This is true. Now, I’m not claiming I looked as sexy as a Mormon, but I did look mighty clean-cut, if I do say so myself. (I was going more for a Jehovah’s Witness effect.)

  Within minutes a car pulled over.

  When I say “within minutes” I mean, of course, “fourteen minutes,” and when I say “car,” I mean, of course, “white Honda Civic.” I got it into my head that I would keep track of the time I waited and the make of each car that stopped; I even carried a little notebook and a nerdy clip-pen so that I could record this information, which I assumed would make excellent small talk at future cocktail parties. “Say, did I ever mention that the average wait time for a hitchhiker in Japan is seventeen-point-two minutes?” Fortunately, I had a flash of common sense and I threw the notebook away. I had made only the one entry.

  The passenger door swung open and a young woman with black satin hair leaned over and smiled at me. “American,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  4

  KAORI YAMAGUCHI was an English teacher at Ono Junior High, a small school up in the mountains. With only fourteen students, she was the English department. In the West, we are so captivated with images of crowded Tokyo subways and faceless salarymen that we forget how much of Japan is still rural and traditional. Granted, not much of it is out-and-out wild—there are precious few frontiers left—but farmlands and villages are still a big part of Japanese society. And the dominant colour of Japan, the colour that permeates the landscape and provides the backdrop of countless vistas, the colour that is Japan is green—a deep, wet, tropical green. You will find very little greenery in most Japanese cities, true. But you will also find very little of Japan in most Japanese cities. The urban cores are exciting, crowded, jaded, but they are also the most Westernized, standardized stretches of the nation. Another Japan exists a half-step away, along the back roads, in the provincial capitals, on the outer edges.

  The highway Kaori and I were driving on ran low along the coast between Kagoshima Bay and the rolling green mountains of the interior. There wasn’t a subway or a salaryman in sight.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Cape Sata.”

  “I used to live near Sata,” she said. “There is nothing there and it is very hard to reach. It is maybe three hours away.” You could see the burden of duty descend upon her. “I am sorry, but I cannot take you all the way to Sata. I am very busy. I’m sorry.”

  I have a cruel streak, and for a minute I was tempted to force her to drive me to Sata simply by asking. That’s all it would have taken. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the necktie and maybe it was the crew cut; I felt strangely charitable. “You don’t have to drive me to Sata. Really. Just down the road is fine.”

  She was almost sick with worry at this point. “But no one will stop for you. Japanese people don’t pick up hitchhikers.”

  “But you’re Japanese, and you did.”

  She ignored my powerful Western logic. “There are buses,” she said. “You should take a bus instead. And after Sata, where will you go?”

  “Hokkaido.”

  When I said this she laughed, covering her mouth with one hand in that highly annoying, yet oddly endearing way Japanese women have. Then her expression changed as she realized I wasn’t kidding. Instead of shuttling me farther down the coast, she turned and drove inland. We came up onto a plateau and Kanoya City engulfed us.

  “Is this the, ah, way to Sata?” I asked.

  She smiled and said, “Can you eat Japanese food?”

  Kaori drove me smack into the middle of town and, with a friendly wave and tally-ho, she abandoned me. Now I was lost. Trying to hitchhike out of a city centre is like trying to find an exit after being spun around three times with your eyes shut. My cleverly improvised strategy involved wandering about hopelessly in all directions with my thumb extended before me like a divining rod. It worked. I was rescued “within minutes.”

  His name was Mr. Migita and he was driving a big boat of a car, shiny-black and filled with kids. In the front seat was his daughter, a junior-high-school student simply agog at the sight of me, and in the back were his two sons, around seven and five years old.

  Mr. Migita asked me where I was going and when I said Cape Sata, he told me I was heading in the wrong direction. He offered to take me back out to the coast, so I crawled in and faced the gaping stares of the two boys. You could tell what they were thinking: Dad’s gone mad. It was as though their father had let a large bear into the backseat.

  Mr. Migita looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Can you speak Japanese?”

  “Sort of,” I said. (Unless noted, the conversations in this book were originally in Japanese. Or at least something that resembles Japanese.)

  The younger boy, Hidenori, was becoming suspicious. “Are you American?” No. “Then you’re Japanese.” No. “Well, if you aren’t American and you aren’t Japanese, what are you?”

  Put like that, I wasn’t quite sure. “I’m a tanuki,” I said, and they burst into peals of laughter.

  “You’re not a tanuki!”

  “Sure I am.” Tanuki are creatures of folklore in Japan: raccoon-dogs with huge bellies and gigantic testicles who roam the forests drinking saké and tryin
g to seduce young maidens by passing themselves off as noblemen.

  The boys laughed and laughed, the daughter giggled behind her hand, and Mr. Migita eyed me warily from the rearview mirror. Hidenori then asked me with grave sincerity, “Are you really a tanuki?” His older brother biffed him one on the head. “You idiot, of course he’s not a tanuki! He’s an American.” And everyone laughed some more, as the little guy rubbed his head and grinned sheepishly.

  “Do you know how tanuki make music?” I asked them.

  “Sure!” they yelled. “They use their stomachs like a drum!” Hidenori then proceeded to show me how by punching himself repeatedly in the stomach. “Very good,” I said, but he kept on going.

  “Ah, that’s fine,” I said. “You can stop any time.” He continued pummeling himself in the stomach even as his eyes watered. “Come on,” I said, and then, slipping into English, “I get the picture, kid.”

  His eyes widened with an audible boing. “English! You speak English! Say something, say something in English.”

  “Wayne Newton is the Antichrist.”

  “Wow! What does that mean?”

  “It’s a poem. Kind of a haiku.”

  When we reached the coastal highway, Mr. Migita pulled over and told me to wait in the car. (You could tell he was a real Papa; he talked to me the same way he addressed his five-year-old.) He made a call from a pay phone and when he returned he said, “I told my wife we’d be late. We’re going to Sata.”

  The kids cheered and the three of us in the back did the Wave. Mr. Migita then told his daughter to change seats and he moved me up front. I had been promoted.

  The highway twisted from one hairpin to another and there I was, sitting right up front like a big person. I swung my feet and watched the palm trees and villages spin by. There are no roads in Sata, just corners joined together. The corners kept coming and coming, and I began to get queasy. I could feel my stomach percolating—never a pleasant sensation—and soon I was threatening to erupt, volcanolike, across Mr. Migita’s dashboard. Even in my stupor I realized that throwing up on your host was a bad way to start a relationship, and I fought hard to keep my lunch (pork and rice with a raw egg) from making an unexpected encore. We came to the parking lot just in time, and I bolted from the car and bent over, gulping down fresh air and trying not to faint. The littlest boy came up and punched me in the stomach. “You’re not a tanuki!” he said.