by Alan Booth
By three-thirty I was standing on the rim of the greatest crater on earth, having walked there from Hokkaido, staring down into the flat round hollow, big enough to contain three widely spaced towns, at the smoke from the towns and the shadows it made drifting lazily in the afternoon light, at the walls of the crater, like landscapes of the moon, and at Mount Aso itself huge in the center, and the purple volcanoes beyond it to the east. I walked down into the hollow, wanting to cry.
October was more than half over, and the little hot spring spa of Aso was quiet and mostly deserted. Many of the ryokan windows were shuttered and piles of old newspapers lay damp and yellow in the entrance halls. The only sound that came from the ryokans was the muted babble of huge color television sets that had been on since break-fast with no one watching them. The sun had gone down behind the rim of the crater, and a long shadow was creeping up the main street of the little spa. With it came the evening wind.
"What's the English for geemu?" asked Manabu, the eleven-year-old son of the couple who owned the ryokan. We were sitting in the roomy old hot-spring bath together, and Manabu had asked me to teach him some English. He had a small notebook and a pencil with him, and he was managing to write in the notebook without getting it wet. That was very clever, I thought. He was a very clever boy.
"What's the English for geemu?"
"Game," I told him. He wrote it down.
"What's the English for juusu?"
"Juice."
"What's the English for robotto?"
"Robot."
"What's the English for kamera?"
"Camera."
"What's the English for pitchaa?"
"Pitcher."
He wrote them all down.
"They're the same!" he told me happily.
The evening had turned chilly, and I wandered through the streets of the little spa in a thick autumn kimono and a pair of geta with split heels. The geta made a sharp noise that echoed through the empty streets, and amplified their silence. Manabu's mother had a small bar about a kilometer from the ryokan that consisted of one tiny counter and a cramped back room that could seat four at a crunch. There had been no customers all evening and at ten o'clock, bored half out of her mind, she had walked back to the ryokan to ask me if I would get up out of bed and go and sit in her bar with her.
We sat for an hour on the burned tatami in the back room, drinking sake and eating raw fish. It was colder in the bar than it was on the streets, and still no customers came. Manabu's mother sat smoking one cigarette after another, lighting the next cigarette from the butt of the last, and I supposed this was her way of keeping warm. She was an odd, scowling, shabby figure with the red dye fading from her gray frizzy hair, in her baggy trousers and patched jumper, coughing over her cigarettes, staring at her bottles of whiskey that no one was drinking, waiting for the New Year to come and go and for spring to come back to the crater.
At eleven the mama-san from the next-door bar came in. She wore a blue-and-gold embroidered kimono and her long hair was piled up in exquisite rings. I wondered how long it had taken her to dress and to pile up her hair like that, and what had occupied her mind for the last five hours, sitting with no one in her bar, listening to the radio. She saw me, bowed quickly, and turned to leave.
"It's all right," said Manabu's mother. "He's not a customer."
The mama-san had come to ask if she could use the ryokan bath, so we closed both bars, padlocked the mama-san's bicycle, and walked back through the empty streets. The mama-san had changed into a pair of blue jeans, but her hair was still coiled into the elaborate rings, and I had a vision of how we must look the three of us—two Japanese women, one in jeans, one with red hair and a cigarette stuck in her teeth, and walking between them, a tired Englishman in a kimono too short and geta too small.
I folded my arms, feeling the cold. It was the coldest evening of my journey. The stars were very bright in the sky and a light wind blew the smell of the volcano through the shuttered streets. In two days I would be in Kumamoto city. In less than two weeks I would be at the tapering rocks of Cape Sata. I looked for the moon, but I couldn't see it—only the empty space in the sky where the stars were hidden by the shape of Mount Aso.
In the post office at Aso Spa, where I went the next morning to with-draw some money, the computer deducted 80,000 yen from my 300,000 and left me with a balance of more than 9,000,000. I pointed this out to the post office clerk, who frowned, grinned, wagged his finger at the computer, and corrected the error with a stroke of his pen, thus confirming my belief that the leaky biro is mightier than the silicon chip. Though bright, it was the chilliest morning of my walk and the first on which I wore a sweater. In a little optician's I had a new screw put into the arm of my sunglasses, but forty minutes later a nose tab fell off, so I suppose they are self-destructing.
I searched for a coffee shop and found several in the quiet little villages of the crater, but all were closed; and the woman who was scrubbing down the windows of one of them scoffed openly at the idea that any self-respecting hot-spring coffee shop would be operating at ten-thirty in the morning. I slogged on, the sky still bright, smoke drifting lazily out of the silent volcano (signboards at intervals along the road welcomed tourists to "the Fire Country"), and followed a wooded path round the rim of the crater until I reached the point where Highway 57 broke through the towering caldera wall and rushed off down its western slope toward the city of Kumamoto, some forty kilometers further on. All afternoon tourist-filled buses passed me on the highway with their uniformed guides chirping mechanically into microphones, and between the buses, taxis ferried gray-faced company presidents into the crater, grimly bent on enjoying them-selves in the spas that the autumn had wasted. A beautiful white dog came limping along with blood trickling out of its hind legs, yelping whenever a taxi passed and cringing at each bus.
There seemed little point in making an all-out effort to reach Kumamoto city that day—particularly since my ribs, hips, and thighs were still celebrating my defeat at sumo wrestling—and so I took it fairly easy and, at about four o'clock that afternoon, I strolled past a wooden shack called Ari (Ant) which stood on the edge of a paddy field and advertised itself as a nightclub, and then into the little one-road town of Ozu, which seemed half asleep. A hot dog stand called Guudo Doggu occupied one end of the almost empty road, and midway along it I found a little ryokan where the young woman who came to the en-trance hall said to me in exquisitely polite Japanese, "Would you be kind enough to wait an honorable moment while I ascertain the avail-ability of a room?" and then skipped back into the kitchen and shrieked, "It's a gaijin!"
"It can't be!" gasped another voice, which turned out to be her sister's. She sat me in front of their television set to watch the kiddies' cartoons for half an hour while the first young woman fled upstairs to prepare the room with an honorable hoover.
The special language that attaches to ryokans is worth a moment's study. Sitting in front of the television, watching robots demolish galaxies in about the time it took me to peel my tangerine, I learned, for instance, that the hotels in the Fire Country get a lot of abekku in autumn. Abekku is the French word avec, but transmogrified into Japanese it means a (usually unmarried) couple. So the sister was informing me—why, I'm still not sure—that a lot of illicit humping goes on in the neighboring inns as the leaves fall. Then, too, a guest who says to a ryokan person—as I did shortly after dinner—"I'm just going out for a short stroll" is always understood to mean "Expect me back in-capable of speech at about midnight, and is automatically told what time the door is locked and shown the back way in.
I did go out for a short stroll, but Ozu being the kind of town I suspected it was, I was back at the ryokan before the sisters had ever dreamed of locking the door. I had one encounter in the town: two second-year high school boys shouted at me from the other side of the road:
"Hey, are spik English? Are spik Jap'neze? Hey, you, Amerika people!"
These boys had been studyi
ng English for four and a half years, so I expect in another six years' time they'll be able to say hello.
Back at the ryokan the elder sister told me about her trip to Europe two years before (five countries in ten days), and all her stories were about the horrific difficulties she had had with language. In Rome she had wanted to say Gucci but had kept saying Bucci, Kucci, Ducci....
I slept with a tingling cramp in my feet and next day followed the unraveled cassette tapes that wound along beside Highway 57 into the hazy prefectural capital. Trams clanged past the Hotel Mink and on the horned castle the roosting pigeons looked like ornamental tiles.
That evening I learned that raw horsemeat was a specialty of the area, so instead of eating dinner at my ryokan, I went to a little restaurant near Kumamoto station with my mind made up to try some. It was disappointingly stringy and, having come straight out of the refrigerator, was hard with bits of ice. I sat for a long time sipping beer, waiting for the horsemeat to thaw, while the only other customer in the restaurant had a private conversation with the owner.
"Foreigners are a weird lot, aren't they? I had my fill of them when I was in the States. So impolite and opinionated. Always on the look-out for a confrontation. I kept telling myself how lucky I was to have been born a Japanese."
I asked for another beer, and the owner brought it over and put it down on my table without a word.
"I tried to buy a raincoat in New York, but I couldn't find one to fit. It wasn't just that they were all too big. Foreigners are a funny shape. Japanese bodies are so much better proportioned."
My second beer bottle was still full and I'd hardly touched the horse-meat, but I got up and went over to the cash register to pay my bill. The conversation had been going on for twenty minutes and I no longer found it amusing.
"I don't speak English," the owner said to me and winked at his customer.
"Wah yah frum?" the customer grinned.
I paid the bill and left the shop. The night in Kumamoto city was cool, and I was still hungry and wanted a drink, so I strolled twenty yards up the road by the station and sauntered into another, similar shop. But no sooner had I slid the door closed behind me than I knew how impossible the night would be. One of the three customers sitting at the counter turned to his friends and announced in a voice loud enough to fill the place:
"Look! A hen na gaijin (funny foreigner) has arrived!"
I sat down and took the warm towel the master offered me and rubbed my hands and face with it.
"I'm not a funny foreigner," I said. "I'm an ordinary foreigner." There was a short silence, and the master coughed.
"Er... what... er... would you like to drink?"
"He heard me!" laughed the customer.
"Yes," I said, "you have quite a loud voice."
The traditional pantomime followed, in which the customer went through the motions of an elaborate and completely insincere apology, ending with an offer to buy me some beer.
"No thanks," I said. "I've ordered some of my own."
After that, for ten minutes, the man's two friends kept glancing at their watches and saying, "Well, shall we make a move, then?" and "How about another down the street?" Finally, when I had passed up one more offer of beer and not touched the peanuts that had been thrust along the counter at me, the men got up and paid their bill, leaving three whiskeys-and-water undrunk.
"Goodnight," the man said as he passed my stool. And, behind the counter, the master sighed and allowed himself a little smile.
"Where you from?"
"The moon."
"Oh?"
"The North Pole. Mars."
The master bowed twice and topped up my glass.
"I'm very sorry."
"It's not your fault."
"Really, I'm sorry."
"I fancied a quiet drink."
"It must be..."
"You know..."
"It must be difficult being so... well... so..."
"What?"
"Being so difficult."
I left and went back to my ryokan to sleep with a mouth smelling of ginger.
If you compare a medieval European castle with a Japanese castle you are at first struck by the similarities. Each consists of a series of fortifications arranged in roughly concentric circles. Each has a keep—or donjon—at the center of these circles, and each contains numerous turrets and angles from which the defenders, in relative safety, can inflict damage on the attackers. Kumamoto Castle, completed in 1607, is one of the three largest castles in Japan (the outermost of its concentric circles is nearly thirteen kilometers in circumference) and was the last to suffer a medieval-style siege (during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877). Strolling round the castle on the warm 116th day of my walk, I was struck not so much by its similarities to European models as by one significant difference.
The strongest point of a European castle is almost always the central keep. (The walls of the White Tower of London are twelve feet thick.) But the donjon of a Japanese castle such as Kumamoto is almost invariably its weakest point. Often, this part of the castle is constructed, not of stone, but of wood and plaster (the present donjon at Kumamoto was rebuilt in ferroconcrete in 1960), and its elaborate tiled roofs and templelike facades give it the appearance of a fragile bird poised for flight, or of a decorative plume on a suit of stone armor. The European castle is based on the strategy of a last-ditch stand in which the keep at the center must be held for as long as possible. This strategy has governed military practice in the West from Masada to the Alamo and from Hastings to the Battle of Britain. But the Japanese donjon by itself is indefensible. The strongest point is invariably the outermost of the concentric walls, and the builders of such castles must have known that once the last of these walls was breached the donjon would very quickly fall—most likely to an attack by fire.
It is interesting to apply this observation to the campaigns of the last war. In Europe, Churchill was telling the world that Britons would defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets...." The Japanese, meanwhile, were busy erecting a set of far-flung concentric defenses (on the island chains of the Pacific Ocean) in the belief that no last-ditch battle for the homeland would ever become a necessity. The Allied forces then attacked the rings of Japanese-held islands in precisely the same way as a medieval army would have laid siege to a Japanese castle, and once they had breached Okinawa, the last of the concentric walls, the homeland— the indefensible, fragile bird—lay spread-eagled and helpless before them.
The area around Kumamoto Castle has nowadays been turned into a park, and the authorities have erected signboards in English which introduce visitors to the botanical side of the city's history: "Kumamoto has several kinds of its own traditional plants handed down from the old times. These flowers stand for the traditional character of the people in Kumamoto who esteemed 'purity.'..." In a gravelly car park not far away some old-age pensioners were playing a rather in-tense game of croquet (popular among old-age pensioners in Japan, who organize leagues and tournaments and call it "gateball"). Each player had a large number taped across his back and chest as though he were an Olympic contender, and as I passed them, an old lady was berating an old gentleman for holding his mallet like a radish.
The evening was tamer than the last. I had a dinner of raw yellowtail and was back at my ryokan by eight o'clock. The hotels next-door were full of excursioning high school pupils—boys on my side of the road, girls on the other—and they spent an hour or so after their meal shocking the local esteemers of purity by propositioning each other out of third-story windows. From my own higher window I could see across the rooftops to the donjon of Kumamoto Castle, dwarfed by the neighboring TV transmitter and floodlit in the darkness. More than ever, in the floodlight, above those flat concrete roofs, the donjon looked like a white-breasted bird that had perched there today and tomorrow would be gone.
For a fortni
ght now there had been no rain, and though the autumn nights were getting colder, the days were still bright and the cirrus clouds drifted high, without menace. My pace had picked up in Kyu-shu, and with Kumamoto city behind me, I could watch the hills rising pale ahead, sloping up eventually toward Mount Kirishima, the last major obstacle between me and the sea at the end of Japan. A truck driver treated me to a lunch of boiled vegetables and told the woman in the restaurant that her tea was too bitter, but we drank three pots of it as he listened in puzzled silence to my tales of the roads he had known all his working life.
In the fields on the furthest outskirts of the city the yellow rice stalks, still uncut, had been hacked at and flattened by the wind from the sea, and no combine harvester would ever cope with them. Construction workers in yellow steel helmets lay on scaffolding planks in the after-noon sun with their transistors tuned to the year's last baseball series, and outside a dusty railway station a lunatic dog flung itself in the path of every truck that passed.
In the entrance hall of a little ryokan three elderly people greeted me with bows and smiles. They paid not the least attention to my foreignness, but brought me an evening paper and a bowl of tea and told me that the pass at Kirishima was the hardest in all Japan to cross on foot. The trains to Kagoshima banged and thundered by within ten yards of my window and the sound was oddly consoling. I watched Alain Delon play Zorro on a black-and-white television that nearly died with every passing train, and slept early, nursing the cramped feet I had begun to think would be mine for life.
The next morning—as on most mornings now—I searched for a coffee shop to sit in while I got used to the idea of lurching off on an-other thirty-kilometer day. Partly it was sheer procrastination and partly a real need for something to banish the taste of breakfast pickles. This 118th morning of my trek there were other reasons for prolonging my departure. There was the girl behind the coffee shop counter, for a start, who wore an apron that said "Prick Up" in big black letters and who fluttered her eyelashes at me while I outlined to her the state of trade unionism in Britain. There was, too, the nature of the shop itself, one of those shops—perhaps unique to Japan, but at least typical of the infinite pains for detail that Japanese proprietors can take—where a request for coffee is as meaningless as asking merely for beer in a British pub. There were at least ten different kinds of coffee, a map on the wall to indicate where each was grown, a chart displaying the taste, strength, and aroma of each, and a choice of sugar granules in two colors and four grades. On the counter stood a dispenser for breath fresheners called Mouth Clean—a good example of the no-nonsense use of borrowed English that I found more attractive than the euphemistic French of the crater hotels. It reminded me of the loan office called Money Shop, and of the yacht named Pipe Cut because it is owned by an advocate of male sterilization.
