Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  Chiyonofuji was the son of a Hokkaido fisherman. Solid muscle. There was not an ounce of flab on the Wolf, and although technically a northern rikishi, in every other way he resembled the smaller Kagoshima fighters. While other fighters used sheer mass to win, Chiyonofuji used physics. His smaller body gave him a lower centre of gravity and he used this to fulcrum his opponents out of the ring. He was strong as a banshee as well. If he got hold of an opponent’s belt, inside and on the right, the fight was pretty much over. Chiyonofuji would lean in, biceps rigid, legs low, and he would flip these giant oversize men ass-over-teakettle right out of the ring. And there he would be—still standing—at centre ring. It was a religious experience to see Chiyonofuji at work.

  I met him once. True story. It was in Fukuoka City during the Spring Tournament. He was retired then; his topknot had been ceremonially cut off the season before (I cried when I watched it on television) and he was now a senior statesman of sumo. I was up the night before and was wandering around Fukuoka’s notorious red-light district when lo! I ran right into Chiyonofuji. He was coming out of an exclusive all-girl topless cabaret. I recognized him immediately, and the following, now immortal conversation took place. (I have given it in Japanese as well, so that you can best savour the moment in all its authenticity):

  ME: Hora! Chiyonofuji deshō?

  Hey! Aren’t you Chiyonofuji?

  CHIYONOFUJI (as he sweeps past):

  So da yo.

  Yup.

  ME (to the back of Chiyonofuji’s head as he continues down the street):

  Komban-wa!

  Good evening!

  THE BACK OF CHIYONOFUJI’S HEAD:

  No response.

  There you have it, the Dumbest Conversation of the Decade. When I told my Japanese colleagues about my encounter with the Wolf, they cringed. For one thing, his name is no longer Chiyonofuji; he has been given a name of higher respect befitting his position. And for another, one does not just go up and talk to a man as great as Chiyonofuji. (I was lucky he even responded at all.)

  Mere moments after humiliating myself with Chiyonofuji, I ran into several other rikishi. One stout fellow was getting into a cab and I hurried over on the assumption that he would probably be thrilled to shake my hand. It was Kotonishiki, always easy to recognize because he looks just like Essa Tikkanen, a hockey player whom you have never heard of either. I was a little more composed when I accosted Kotonishiki. I thrust my hand into his and said, “Do your best in tomorrow’s bout.” He nodded and said, “I will do my best.” And son-of-a-gun if he didn’t go out and win the very next day. I couldn’t help but feel partly responsible. And needless to say, I am now a big Kotonishiki fan.

  Mr. Hiro Koba agreed that Kotonishiki had been very polite to have stopped to chat. (It helped that I had a hold of his hand and wasn’t prepared to let go until he acknowledged me.) Kotonishiki, meanwhile, went on to get caught in a twisted love-triangle sex-scandal, with a pregnant mistress and a wife betrayed, which the newspapers covered with an incredible eye for journalistic detail. The life of a rikishi, you just can’t beat it.

  And so it was.

  Instead of plumbing the depths of our souls, Hiro and I talked sports like a couple of regular guys. I think there is a fear, somewhere in the mind of the traveller, an unease with emotions laid raw and bare. I prefer width to depth, variety of experience to intensity of experience, quantity to quality. And there is something about Japan—the surface reflections and refracted lights—that allows you to skim across without having to sink below. Japan does not swallow souls whole, as do some countries. Countries like India. China. America.

  Japan is a nation perfect for hitchhikers, and one of the great appeals of hitchhiking is that it is a transitory experience. You cut through lives in progress, the rides flip by like snapshots, and the people become a procession of vignettes. I was not searching for catharsis or murky depths, I was searching instead—for what? I suppose I was hoping, somehow, to find in this pixilation of people and places something larger, an understanding, if not of Japan, then at least of my place in it. It was not a quest—that is too grand a word for it. It was more of a need, an itch, quixotic at best, presumptuous at worst.

  So I left Hiro Koba to the privacy of his life, to his own singular joys and small defeats. He liked sumo, he missed Nagoya. That was enough.

  17

  THE CITY OF SAIKI was built largely upon reclaimed land. This gives it a low, flat feel. The area around the port was arranged in a grid: square blocks, wide avenues, and box-like buildings. With several hours until the evening ferry, I wandered aimlessly through this forlorn town. It was the kind of place you expect tumbleweeds to roll through. Signs creaked on rusted hinges, and the stale smell of fish and diesel fumes had seeped into every house and plank. The paint was peeling, like eczema. Strangely enough, Saiki’s straight-square gridwork of streets actually made it harder to get around. It was a confusing place. Every corner looked vaguely the same. I passed a red-lantern eatery, walked for a few blocks, and then, seeing nothing better, I circled back only to get hopelessly lost. Block after block and still I could not find it. It was getting dark, and I made a list of places in which I would not want to live: Saiki, Saiki Port, near Saiki Port, and Saiki. Harbour towns either hustle with excitement or reek with lassitude, old urine, and turpentine. Saiki is of the old-urine-and-turpentine variety.

  As I passed one doorway, I startled a little boy, maybe four years old. He was buttoned up from neck to ankle, the sure sign of an overprotective mother. She proved me right by coming out hurriedly and telling him in a hushed, frantic whisper, “Kiwo tsukete! Gaijin wa abunai yo!” a phrase which always stings me when I hear it: “Watch out! Foreigners are dangerous!” But the little boy was having none of it. He stood, mouth open, his eyes a cartoon of surprise.

  “Good evening,” I said, first to him and then to his mother. She gave me a hypocritical little smile and a small bobbing bow. Her son, having regained the power of speech, burst out with “A-B-C-D! A-B-C-D! A-B-C-D-F-G-E!”

  “Very good,” I said. “Did you learn that in kindergarten?”

  To which he replied: “A-B-C-D! A-B-C-D!”

  This was getting real annoying, real fast. “Can you say Hello in English?”

  “A-B-C-D! A-B-C-D!”

  I congratulated him on his prowess with language and said goodbye. His mother bowed again, more deeply this time, and said with grave sincerity, “Thank you very much,” though it wasn’t clear whether she was grateful to me for speaking with her son or for not robbing her and leaving her and her boy for dead. At moments like these I have to fight the overpowering urge to yell “Boo” and see how high they leap and how loud they shriek.

  Then, at the next corner, I came upon the red-lantern café I had passed earlier, and I went inside.

  There was a plump, aproned lady behind the counter, and when I came in she exchanged glances with the only other customer in the place, a thin man slouched over his noodles. He slurped them up noisily, keeping an eye on me the entire time.

  Above the bar were glossy photographs of Japanese battleships—not vintage Second World War destroyers, but modern, state-of-the-art vessels of prey. In one photograph a phallic grey submarine was emerging from the sea, the decks awash with foam and the Japanese flag emblazoned cross the aft or forecastle, or whatever the hell the correct seaman’s term is. As the lady of the place hurried herself with my curried rice, I pondered the significance of these photographs. I was wondering how a nation that claims to be the “Switzerland of Asia,” a nation whose constitution outlaws war and forbids it from ever having an army, I was wondering how such a nation managed to produce these lethal, sleek war machines. Except, of course, they aren’t war machines. They are part of Japan’s Self-Defense Force. Call it what you like, it is still a military buildup. I, for one, do not have a problem with this. Put yourself in Japan’s position. You’ve got North Korea aiming its warheads at you with a certified nutball at the helm, and you’ve
got your crazy cousin China babbling away beside you, armed to the ears with Communist-era nuclear bombs—which means that eighty percent of them won’t work properly when fired. Unfortunately, twenty percent of Apocalypse is still Apocalypse. When you have neighbours like these, maintaining primed-and-ready armed forces would seem to make a lot of sense. But why can’t they just come out and admit it? Why the big charade?

  “Oi! Gaijin!” It was the other customer. He had addressed me in the rudest possible way. “Gaijin! Chotto!”

  Shit. Just what I didn’t need, a dyed-in-the-wool, one-hundred-percent certified Grade-A Japanese asshole. I tried to ignore him, but he became belligerent, speaking in what I think was a slurred Osaka accent. “Oi! You like that ship? You a sailor?”

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.”

  “Ha ha!” He called out to the lady, who was now bringing me my curry. “Henna gaijin!” (“Weird foreigner!”) Then, his eyes narrowing, he said, “I am Japanese.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I am a Japanese sailor. That ship,” he gestured with his jaw to one of the photos and in English said, “Japanese, number one.” And he sneered, his lips like eels.

  There ought to be an archaeology of facial gestures. I am sure we could trace this particular expression—this eel-like sneer—all the way back to northern China. It is a mix of arrogance, utter contempt, and adolescent pride. In Japan it is usually more subtle than this caricature I was now up against. Sometimes it was so slight, you almost missed it. I once had a Korean customs officer sneer at me continuously for three hours straight as I was uselessly interrogated about nothing. When you get to China you see it more often. In Shanghai it is common even among young women. And by the time you reach Beijing, it is almost a permanent feature, more of an attitude than a facial expression. I do not doubt that somewhere out there, beyond the Great Wall in the outer steppes of Mongolia, there exists an old withered tribe, the wellspring of this sneer, the Ur-Sneerers, living in their huts, chewing skins, and spitting venom at one another. I was weary. I was weary of this tired old tune, this tinhorn anthem.

  “Oi!” he said every time I tried to ignore him. He was drunk, or at least pretending to be. He switched back to English, “Japan! Number One!” and to emphasize his point he held up his index finger. I responded with my middle finger. “I agree,” I said. “Number One!” But he didn’t catch, or didn’t understand, my insult.

  I was trying to make this lizard man disappear but he kept inching closer to me, talking about how great, omnipotent, excellent, fully erect, etc., etc., the Japanese navy is. So I decided to take him down.

  “Are you Korean?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you Korean?”

  He sputtered in disbelief. “Of course not! I am Japanese.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You mentioned that. It’s just that, well, you look kind of Korean. I think it’s your eyes. Or maybe your mouth. Very Korean.” And that was it. I had destroyed him.

  It is one of the eternal mysteries of Japan: Are the Japanese arrogant or insecure? Deep down, deep inside: insecure or arrogant? Arrogant or insecure?

  “Well, have a good night,” I said with a smile. And, having driven the poor man to the point of apoplexy, and hopefully given him a lifelong complex—Do I look Korean? Really? Do I?—I paid for my curry rice and got up to leave. Just as I was about to go, I did the cruelest thing you can possibly do if you are a foreigner in Japan. I laughed at him. Not loudly, you understand. More of a chuckle, really. His face was purple with bottled rage, but fortunately—this being rural Japan—he did not follow me out of the café and beat me senseless. Instead he sat, seething in his own bile, and I left.

  It was a hollow victory, of course. No doubt he now hates all foreigners on sight, and I have probably added to the already strained relationship between Japan and the West and created bad karma and misused my role as international ambassador of goodwill and poisoned the well of human kindness and killed the bluebird of happiness, but what the fuck, it was worth it.

  I walked toward the white-bright phosphorous lights of the harbour, down to where the ferry was tethered. A group of boys, killing time on a spring evening in Saiki, were on their bicycles by the dock waiting for the ferry to leave. When they saw me, a mini-pandemonium broke out. They yelled, “Hello!” “This is a pen!” and other such witticisms. (Or more accurately, Harro! Zis is a ben!)

  “Gaijin-san! Gaijin-san! Are you ging to Shikoku? You are? Did you hear that, he understands Japanese! Goodbye, Gaijin-san! Goodbye!”

  The ferry bellowed once, twice, and the motor began rumbling. Cars were filing on, their headlights on low beam. “Say something in English! Gaijin-san, Gaijin-san, say something in English!”

  “I have never eaten feces knowingly!”

  And on that note, I said farewell to Kyushu.

  TURNING CIRCLES

  Shikoku and the Inland Sea

  1

  THE FERRY crossed a black sea to Shikoku. I stood on the deck watching dark shapes slide by in the night: islands and ships, clusters of lights, fishing boats like fireflies. The wind was billowing my jacket, and the moon above was an arc in the sky, a great luminescent toenail of God.

  Just before the ferry was about to leave, a taxi had roared up to the dock and an elderly couple had scrambled out. The taxi driver hurried to get their bags out of his trunk. The ground crew, meanwhile, were already tossing the ropes free. The drawbridge was about to be raised. The couple could have made it—would have made it—but they stopped to bow to the taxi driver. He bowed back. They returned the bow … and at that moment they were lost. It was too late. The gate was closed, the dock workers waved them away, and they stood watching helplessly as the ship sailed without them. In the time it took to bow they had missed their ferry and were stranded on the wrong side of the strait, a husband and wife marooned by good manners.

  Sukumo City is built deep in a fjord that forms one of the largest natural harbours in the world. I had expected Sukumo to be a bustling town—or at least one with a heartbeat—but from the deck of the ferryboat, all I saw were warehouses and a few forlorn streetlamps. As we slid into harbour, I went into the quiet controlled panic of the traveller who has just arrived at his destination and realizes he has no place to sleep, the notion of calling ahead and making a reservation having once again eluded me.

  The ferry bellowed. Crew, on shore and on board, cast off ropes and hurried about, tying the ship down like Gulliver asleep in the land of Lilliput. I was one of only a handful of pedestrians. Everyone else had returned to their cars and, with headlights on, had begun filing off the boat. I ran to the head of the line and frantically held out a thumb, to no avail; the cars were gone, the few foot passengers had been whisked away by taxis and waiting relatives, and I was alone.

  Sukumo Port is an eerie place at night. The waves were rolling in on ghostly groans along the pier. A shape—probably a cat, possibly a dog, perhaps a large wharf rat—slipped out from the shadows and across the alleyway. Japan is such a dark nation once night falls. Beyond the neon excitement of city centres, there are few if any streetlamps and, as an added obstacle, just to make things interesting—there are almost no sidewalks, and the gutters are a metre deep. (These sudden, open gutters are the bane of drunks and strangers.)

  I groped my way toward a distant group of lights, but it turned out to be nothing more than a row of vending machines with a hover of moths and damselflies fluttering around the fluorescent glow. “Damn,” I said to no one in particular. Then, just when things seemed hopeless, I gave up. I turned around and started back toward the dock, resigning myself to spending a night on the pier, huddled under a crate and fighting off wharf rats.

  A voice from an alleyway called out in a stage whisper, “Oi! Gaijin-san! You’re going the wrong way.”

  I couldn’t see who was speaking, or even from which direction. “Pardon?” I said.

  “The inn—it’s farther down, on the other side of the s
treet.”

  I looked all around but could see no one. Apparently I was conversing with the night itself. So I asked the night if the inn was very far, but this time there was no response. The voice had dissolved back into shadows, and I was left with a clammy sensation on my skin. Deus ex machina. It must have been the voice of God or Buddha or Saint Christopher, I decided, and I headed down the street with the renewed confidence that comes when you realize you are under divine protection. God is not such a bad guy after all, I thought, and I regretted the crack I had made earlier about His toenail.

  2

  THE DOOR STUCK. Warped wood and old ball bearings, I suppose. After a moment’s effort, it relented and slid open. I stepped inside and checked the entranceway for footwear. Guests take off their shoes when they enter an inn and, by examining the type of shoes you see lined up in the entranceway, you can tell a lot about the place, its character, the kind of clients it attracts. If you see row upon row of polished businessmen’s shoes, you know that you are in for a loud, sleepless night. (In Japan, male bonding generally involves a lot of drunken laughter.) Ditto if you see carefully paired men’s and women’s shoes. The moans of short-lived ecstasy are less obtrusive than the drunken shouts of salarymen, but they are also more disturbing to listen to—especially if you happen to be travelling alone. The walls in Japanese inns are notoriously thin. You can hear people snoring in the other room. And if you press your ear to the baseboard and listen carefully, you can’t help but overhear couples making love. The worst entranceway sight, one that strikes terror into my heart whene’er I see it, is rows of children’s running shoes. This signifies a school outing and you might as well forget about getting any sleep, what with the shouts and screams and flirting squeals and the play-fights and the constant treks to the bathroom. And that’s just the teachers; the students are even worse.