Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  Mayumi, Akemi, and I finished our meal and said goodbye on the walking mall outside the restaurant. The concert was starting soon, though neither of them seemed thrilled about seeing any band named “Blue Hearts.”

  16

  HIGHWAY 10 north of Miyazaki City is one long extended aggravation of traffic lights and intersections. I walked forever. My tongue was thick with the taste of oil, diesel, and dust, and the traffic rattled by with bone-jarring persistence. At one point, above the haze of exhaust and cat’s cradles of telephone wires I saw the Statue of Liberty advertising a muffler shop or a pachinko parlour. Or maybe it was the Statue of Liberty. Maybe I was hallucinating. Carbon monoxide will do that to you. To make matters worse, I was using a backpack apparently designed by astronauts. It had hooks and pulleys and compartments, and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t sit straight. I began pulling straps at random, and it lurched on my back like a drunken sailor.

  Rush hour came and went like a slow swell of ocean, but eventually a polished red sports car, low along the road like a hovercraft, pulled over. This car purred. Inside was a worried-looking man in a chef’s jacket.

  “Are you lost?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Hokkaido.”

  I knew it was a long shot that he would be going all three thousand kilometres to Hokkaido. “I’ll take you to the next town,” he said. “That’s as far north as I’m going.”

  Fair enough. I got in. There were plastic covers on all the seats, and when I started squirming about, trying to work my backpack onto my lap, he quickly offered to store it in the trunk. I stuffed it in beside a set of golf clubs.

  “Do you play golf?” he said hopefully, and it just went downhill from there.

  The man behind the wheel was a chef named Kenichi Inada who had two great passions in life, neither of which had anything to do with cooking. His passions were (a) golf and (b) cars (more specifically his car). Now, I can hold my own in any Japanese conversation that concerns the weather, drinking, or chopsticks, but cars and golf are complete blanks to me. I can’t even discuss them in English, let alone Japanese. When Kenichi asked me what kind of automobile I liked, I said “Blue.” Pushed for more detail I said “Two-door.” Yup, I would have to say that when it comes to automobiles I am a blue, two-door kind of man. Kenichi looked at me with an are-you-sure-you-are-really-a-guy? type of look. Then he asked about golf, and all I could contribute was that famous quip about golf being a good stroll ruined. I do not believe this endeared me to Kenichi.

  His face had the creased good looks of a farmer, and he used polite Japanese, which was a nice change from all the “Hey you’s!” and “Gaijin!” that had hounded me during my stay in Miyazaki. Unfortunately, he and I had zilch in common except for my needing a ride and his offering one. He was a hard man to faze. When I told him I was going to the very end of Japan he didn’t blink, and when I told him I was following the Cherry Blossom Front he reacted as if it was the most common, sensible thing to do. It took the wind right out of my sails. So I started exaggerating.

  “I might even continue across Russia.” No reaction. “Maybe hitchhike through the Gobi desert. Hard, that, what with there being no cars or anything.” No reaction. “Probably have to hitch rides on camels.” Still no reaction.

  He was more interested in explaining why his car was the best self-propelled piece of internal combustion on the road today. This involved a lot of technical car words that may well have been borrowed from English but which I wouldn’t have recognized even if they were. It was a case of competing obsessions, dueling monologues: I would talk about cherry blossoms and he would nod and pretend to be interested, and then he would talk about dual-exhaust piston joints and I would nod and pretend to be interested.

  For all his love of cars, Kenichi was an unusually cautious driver. We crept along well under the speed limit, and he’d begin braking miles ahead of any intersection. All that automotive power and he was afraid to use it. I tried to get him to open ’er up and see how fast she’d fly, but he said no. Then I asked him if I could drive. No. Are you sure? Yes. But I promise I’ll be good. (I didn’t actually have a driver’s licence, but I didn’t see the point in bothering him with such minor details.) There was a noticeable chill in the air after I made my third, summarily rejected request to take his car for “a little spin.”

  He dropped me off on an open stretch of highway west of Sadowara. We dutifully shook hands and exchanged addresses. He gave me his number and said, “If you have any trouble—if you become lost or if you want to play a round of golf or something—give me a call. Ask for Chef Inada.”

  “Thanks. And if you ever want to talk about haiku or cherry blossoms, that kind of thing, here’s my number.” I stepped back and looked down the highway that unrolled before me like tickertape. “Do you think I’ll make it? You know, to Hokkaido.”

  “No. Japanese people don’t stop for hitchhikers.”

  “Maybe I should golf my way across Japan instead.”

  And for the first time, his eyes brightened at the mention of my travels. “Wouldn’t that be something?” he said, and you could see that he was picturing it in his head. “A round of golf on every course in Japan. That would be something, wouldn’t it? You should do it and write a book about it.”

  He was still smiling as he drove—cautiously—away, the plastic seat covers shining in the sun.

  My next ride was with a wiry young man named Kiminori Maruyama, who was impossibly thin and so grinningly young that he reminded me of my high-school students, even though he was several years out of school. Kiminori was driving a battered old box of a truck. I wasn’t sure what the cargo was, but I thought what the hell, a gun runner or drug carrier might make a nice change of pace, so I climbed up and in.

  He creaked open the door of his truck and shoved aside the take-out coffee cups, work gloves, and dust-bedeviled newspapers without so much as an arched eyebrow.

  “Travelling, are you?” and he told me about his own long-distance hauls. Why, just last year he drove five thousand kilometres in one week, a solo trip from Tokyo to Nagasaki and back again.

  “For business?” I asked.

  “No, no,” he assured me. “Strictly for pleasure.”

  He was completely discouraging about my own travel plans. There will, he assured me, be absolutely no rides once I got past Nobeoka, the next town up the road. It is empty up there. Just forests and hills. Nope, he didn’t like my odds. Japanese simply do not pick up hitchhikers. Sure, he stopped, but that is just because he is a traveller himself and he understands my position. Why, just last year he drove from Osaka to Kitakyushu in nine hours flat. Not bad, eh? And another time he did a Tokyo–Aomori loop, solo. Straight through. Only stopped for gas and meals. No, no, it wasn’t for business. It was a holiday.

  Kiminori, it turned out, wasn’t a professional truck driver. He worked for a pachinko parlour. When I caught a ride with him he was transporting a bunch of defective pachinko games (people kept winning on them) to a service centre in Nobeoka City where they would be, ahem, “repaired.”

  “My family”—he used the affectionate term for company—“is Twenty-First Seiki Pachinko. Do you know it?”

  How could I not. They tore down a row of wonderfully dilapidated old shops in the middle of Minamata, the city where I lived, and they put up a sprawling Vegas-size monstrosity, with eye-socket-aching fluorescent lights and polished chrome. Brash. Big. Loud. Soulless. I know Twenty-First Seiki very well. I kept waiting for social activists and placard-waving protesters to picket the construction site, but no one ever did, and the heart of my sad tumbledown little city had another large bite taken from it. The word seiki means “century” in Japanese, and in some ways I suppose these towering, sleek, soulless buildings are the harbingers of the new millennium.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know Twenty-First Seiki. There is one where I live.” He was pleased to hear it. His family was very big, they wer
e everywhere.

  —

  Nobeoka City was to be my Waterloo. At least, that was how Kiminori saw it. He took me to the intersection nearest the Akadama Phoenix Pachinko. “You’ll never catch a ride,” he said with a cheery smile. I adjusted my backpack and tried not to snarl at him.

  The last ride of the day, and the one that would take me straight through to the ferry port at Saiki, was with an older gentleman named Hiro Koba. He sighed more often than is normal and when I asked him about his work he said, “What’s to tell?”

  He was returning from a long day on the road, and he seemed tired, bone weary. “It’s the job,” he said. “I’m having a bit of trouble adjusting to it. I don’t really belong down here. I’m from central Japan. Nagoya City. They have a castle there, with golden fish on top, do you know it? It’s a beautiful castle. A reconstruction, of course. The war—well, you understand.”

  The highway north of Nobeoka ran through steep forests of evergreen and cedar. The heat wave that had stalked me the previous few days had ended and the sky was a softer shade of blue. We passed a temple, a side road, and a fleeting glimpse of cherry blossoms, faint against the green.

  More than one hundred different strains of cherry tree grow in Japan. If you add the carefully crossbred substrains the number rises to three hundred. Some sakura are tufted like miniature chrysanthemums (yae-zakura), others grow on thin branches, in tight clusters (Edohigan-zakura). Some weep like willows (shidare-zakura). Some are tiny and delicate (chōji-zakura), others are garish and red (kanhi-zakura). Some sprout wildflowers from their trunks, others move on the wind like curtains. Some foam over like champagne, some grow in a web of tendrils. Some tumble early, some tumble late. Some tower high and lean, others are short and squat. Their trunks range from finger widths to gnarled girths more than eleven metres around. Some grow beyond their own strength and have to be propped up with wooden crutches to stop the branches from cracking. Hundreds have been designated gods and encircled with shimenawa ropes and honoured at shrines. Others have been designated Natural National Treasures. All are sakura.

  The standard sakura (somei-yoshino) is not a natural blossom, but was crossbred from different strains to produce an artificially high number of blossoms per tree. This is why most Japanese insist that cherry blossoms in Japan are more beautiful than anywhere else in the world; they were created to be more beautiful. And yet, although these trees have now taken over the Japanese imagination, they are a relatively new addition, dating from the Meiji Period (1867–1912). Today, it is the man-made somei-yoshino that most people think of when they speak of cherry blossoms—when the Cherry Blossom Front is tracked across Japan, it is primarily somei-yoshino that are being monitored—but this wasn’t always the case. The standard cherry blossoms were once those of the mountain, the yama-zakura with their smaller blossoms and leafier branches, the flowers sparser on the branch but deeper in colour.

  The mountain sakura of Japanese tradition have been largely displaced in central Japan, but they remain strong in the south, and here, in the backwoods of Kyushu, it is indeed the yama-zakura that are still seen highlighting the forests like dabs of paint.

  “There are cherry trees in Nagoya,” said Hiro, “that take your breath away. We went every year to the castle, to see the flowers falling. I miss that castle. It had golden fish on top. In Nagoya.” There were long pauses between everything he said, and his voice was so quiet it was almost like listening to his thoughts rather than his speech. “I used to visit the castle grounds with my wife. When she was young. I’m retired now. Semi-retired. I had to come south, for work.”

  Changing jobs is as traumatic in Japan as divorce is in the West. Hiro’s company had gone out of business in Nagoya and he ended up here, in Oita prefecture, working as a salesman for a construction firm. He gave me his card. The company motto was in English: Think of Space and Tomorrow. I chuckled over the slogan and for a long time I didn’t think much about it. But lately it seems to me that the motto might well be that of modern Japan. Not space in the sense of the stars, but in the sense of isolation and vacuums. This fixation with the future, with tomorrow instead of today, is strange in a nation with a two-thousand-year history. Stranger still in a country that gave us Zen Buddhism, haiku, and the tea ceremony. Japan seems hell-bent on modernity, and in the end I suppose it is for the best—or, at the very least, inevitable. Welcome to the 21st Seiki.

  Almost a hundred years ago, a man named Wilfrid Laurier declared that “the twentieth century belongs to Canada.” He was wrong, of course, and Canadians have spent a long time living down that remark. The twentieth century belonged to America. But the twenty-first century will belong to Japan. Not necessarily in the size of its GNP—not with the Japanese economy stalled like it is—but more in its outlook. Japan has no sweeping ideologies or founding philosophies. It is old-world nationalism and tribal alliances writ large against the future. Grounded in traditions, mesmerized by novelty, I can think of no nation better suited for the new postmodern world. Japan, almost by definition, is eclectic.

  Think of Space and Tomorrow. It is a fine battle cry, but there are casualties along the way. Mr. Hiro Koba doesn’t dream of the future, he dreams instead of Family and Yesterday. And Sunday afternoons in a park with a castle topped in gold.

  “Does your wife miss Nagoya as well?” I asked.

  “Oh, I suppose she does.” There was a pause, longer than usual, and then: “I’m a widower. My wife passed away.” And then: “Have you ever been to Nagoya? They have a castle there with beautiful golden fish. It’s a reconstruction, of course. But I miss it. Have you been to Nagoya?”

  It is the third time he has asked me this. Yes, I have been to Nagoya. What I didn’t tell him was that I didn’t especially like the place. It seemed to be just another large Japanese city, but then, I have never lived in Nagoya. I didn’t go to school there, I don’t have memories invested in it, I didn’t work in Nagoya for thirty years, and my wife’s ashes aren’t buried there.

  Hiro and I talked about the sakura and spring, but that only led back to the castle grounds of Nagoya, where the cherry blossoms are at their best. I could feel our conversation drowning in a series of sighs, so I changed tack.

  “Hobbies?” he said. “I don’t have any really.”

  Damn. But then, almost in passing, he said, “I like sumo, though.”

  Finally, I was back on steady ground. I am the equivalent of a Sumo Deadhead, following tournaments, keeping track of the stars, spending my money on sumo handprints and sumo playing cards and commemorative sumo banners. I love sumo the way some people love their country. It is, and I think I am being objective in my assessment, simply the greatest sport in the history of the universe. In Japan, rotund pale flabby guys are considered the epitome of masculinity. Don’t you just love that?

  The rikishi of sumo (“wrestler” doesn’t quite describe what a rikishi does) are objects of lust and adoration. Personally, I think it’s the hair. Sumo rikishi were the only group allowed to keep their traditional samurai topknots when Japan went through its drastic modernization in the late nineteenth century. The rikishi’s hair, oiled, pulled back, and combed into elegant fan-shaped rooster-combs, gives them a Samson quality. (When a rikishi retires, his topknot is ceremonially cut away with a pair of golden scissors, his strength drained.)

  The rikishi are massive, strong, obese, arrogant men. They are not especially bright. They drink heavy, play hard, and giggle like little kids. They are the last of the samurai. A scent of perfumed oil and sweat surrounds them like an aura of … well, perfumed oil and sweat. Women throw themselves at rikishi, and the rikishi get to eat as much as they want. I would give anything to be reborn as a rikishi.

  Hiro and I discussed the previous tournament, the upsets, the triumphs. We picked our favourite fighters. Hiro naturally favoured the ones from northern Japan, I favoured the ones from the south. For some reason, a disproportionate number of rikishi come from either Hokkaido in the far north or Kagosh
ima in the far south. Even their styles of fighting have been described as “hot” and “cold,” with the smaller southern rikishi known for their blistering arm-thrusting attacks, and the heavier northern rikishi tending more toward slow, walrus-like grapplings.

  Sumo is the national sport of Japan. Part religion, part ritual, its origins lie in the contests of strength once held to entertain the gods during festivals. Even today, the high-level, professional sumo of modern Japan takes place under the suspended roof of a Shinto shrine, and the ring is blessed by a priest prior to each tournament. Sumo is replete with pomp and ceremony. The referees resemble priests, the rikishi toss salt into the ring in a purification ritual before each fight, and the Grand Champions, the yokozuna, wear white ropes—styled on those of Shinto shrines—around their midriffs during their elaborate entrance ceremonies.

  Fights rarely last thirty seconds. It’s a hell of a show. Explosive and yet, restrained. There are no weight divisions in sumo, which means that little ninety-kilogram halfpints can go up against two-hundred-fifty-kilogram giants, and the giants don’t always win. Sumo requires a low centre of gravity—hence the force-fed diets and round, heavy bellies—but smaller, faster, smarter rikishi can get inside, grab the belt, and upset much larger men, who fall like toppled redwoods.

  There was one rikishi who retired shortly after I arrived in Japan, and it was because of him that I got hooked on sumo. His name was Chiyonofuji, but they called him the Wolf. He was one of the smallest rikishi fighting. He was also the best.