Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  A persistent myth holds that most were destroyed by the United States during the firebombing of Japanese cities. This is not entirely true. There were a few glaring examples: Nagoya Castle with its golden tiger-fish, and of course Hiroshima Castle. Both have since been rebuilt to original scale. (In Hiroshima City I once overheard a tourist ask his Japanese guide, “Hiroshima Castle, is that an original or a reconstruction?” I winced so hard I got a facial spasm.)

  Most of Japan’s castles were destroyed long before World War II, first during the feudal wars and then later during unification, when the Tokugawa shōguns systematically dismantled and destroyed hundreds of castles under an edict limiting each clan lord to a single fortress. (In typical bureaucratic fashion, lords without castles were required to build one.) The goal was to confine the clan lords and solidify Tokugawa rule. It worked, and two and a half centuries of relative stability followed—but at what a cost.

  Only 183 castles survived the Tokugawa shōguns. Then came the modernizing forces of the Meiji reformers, and the real destruction began. Beginning in 1873, 144 castles across Japan were dismantled, sold, or razed as Japan sought to “Westernize” itself through a kind of cultural shock therapy, the effects of which are still being felt. By the end of the Meiji period only 39 castles were left standing. The American bombers of World War II destroyed two dozen more, and today only 12 are left.

  Japanese castles are not the dread granite bastions one associates with Europe. Japanese castles are delicate in appearance, like decorative wedding cakes poised above the treetops. They look down upon the townspeople huddled below as a lord might look down upon a vassal. Indeed, to call them castles is a bit of a misnomer. They were manors as much as anything, and their design was based more on ostentation and pride than on tactics—or even common sense. The usual plan was to build the tallest wooden structure possible on the highest hill you could find. And they wondered why lightning kept hitting them. That’s right, military strongholds built entirely of wood. They tended to catch fire, and any army close enough to pelt a castle with fireballs was close enough to burn the castle to the ground. In a hundred years of warring and fighting and dying, no one ever thought to build a single castle out of stone. The wonder is that any survived at all.

  The real strength was never the castle itself, but the labyrinth of walls and moats that surrounded it. The walls of the Japanese castle are majestic. They sweep up above you like a wave about to break, rough-hewn rock made supple in design. They confound you. They lead you into dead ends, they force you through bottlenecks, they make you backtrack and hesitate. (Much like the average Japanese neighbourhood, now that I think about it.)

  These walls within walls, ringed with corner watchtowers and sentry posts, helped keep the potential field of combat far away from the sequestered life of the courtiers and calligraphers inside. Once the walls were breached, however, the castle was practically defenseless. This is in stark contrast with the citadels of Europe, which are designed to be defended right to their very gates. Japan prefers to fight its wars at a distance, in outposts far beyond its walls, in Okinawa, Saipan, Midway. When the outer walls are taken, there is no Fortress Britain to fall back upon.

  Uwajima Castle was built by Lord Tōdō, who began construction in the year 1595, at about the same time that Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet. Tōdō’s castle was later handed over to the powerful Daté clan, who began extensive renovations in 1664. Over the centuries, the castle’s guard towers fell into disuse and were eventually torn down. But the central keep remains. It has stood for four centuries. It has survived wars, uprisings, political intrigue, Tokugawa edicts, and American bombers—solely because it lacks any strategic importance.

  The irony is sweet. Consider Osaka’s castle: It was once the sprawling power base of Japan’s second most powerful family. The most powerful family destroyed them and razed their castle, and today all that stands is a concrete reconstruction, while Uwajima’s castle, so tiny and so unimportant that no one ever bothered to siege or sack it, is now a protected cultural property. It stands just three stories high, with flying gables that are awkwardly large for its frame. Not so much a wedding-cake architecture as cupcake, it just may be the cutest little castle in Japan.

  High atop its tuft of forest, Uwajima Castle is above the flow of time and history. To reach it, you follow a winding footpath through an ancient forest. No tree has been cut on Castle Mountain for three hundred years; wild tanuki roam its underbrush, and the entire hillside is now a national wildlife preserve, an ark for animals that fell back in retreat at the city’s encroachment, seeking high ground in a deluge. The forest rings with birdcalls.

  Crowds of children in bright costumes hurried past me as I clambered through the woods. With them came women in summer kimonos and men in traditional happi coats, kanji characters splashed across the backs. The nearer I got to the summit the thicker the crowds, until finally it became a single flow of bodies rushing in a current toward the top. I ran with the crowd up the last few steps and came out in front of the castle.

  A festival was waiting to begin. Dancers milled about impatiently, taiko drummers shuffled their ranks, and a jerry-rigged PA system announced times and protocol in a steady, static-ridden chatter.

  They were here to herald the spring. At Uwajima Castle the cherry blossoms hung heavy like grapes upon a vine. To entertain the gods and to honour these flowers, carnival revellers were mustering their forces. The scratchy voice on the PA kept countermanding previous instructions and the crowds rearranged themselves accordingly, amid grumbled complaints and scattered laughter.

  I wended my way through and the crowds parted like the sea before Moses. Women eyed me with intent indifference. Schoolchildren openly gawked, jaws gaping. Men watched my every move as though I might pull out a handgun and start shooting at any moment. Old women bowed with perfect precision, not a degree too low, not a degree too high. You could use the bows of Japanese grandmothers to chart the entire Japanese social hierarchy, from outcast to outsider, from doctor to lawyer to Emperor.

  “A foreigner, look!” A flock of high-school girls burst past in a flurry of nervous laughter, and boys, brave after the fact, whispered “Harro!” to the back of my head. “Ah, we have an international guest from America here today,” said the disembodied voice of the PA system, the voice of a decidedly tinny god. “Maybe he will sing a song for us later.”

  That I, so very average and unexceptional, should cause a stir among these bright crowds of costumes gives a new perspective on the idea of exotic. I remember a trip to a Japanese zoo, and how the children turned their backs on the caged wildebeest and watched me instead. More interesting than a wildebeest, became my personal motto after that. It was oppressive at times. When your face doesn’t fit the national dimensions you find yourself in an observer-affected universe; your presence alters actions, and the very act of observing changes that which is observed. You cannot slip by unnoticed. You cannot forget the pigment you present to the world. If nothing else, Japan has taught me what it is like to be a visible minority.

  The crowd shifts. On some elusive cue, the drums begin, and the first group of dancers advances, a troupe of severe-looking women, their faces white as bone, lips lacquer red. They move from posture to posture with studied ease, their hands shaping the air in preordained patterns, effortless, unsmiling. They are followed immediately by a confusion of schoolchildren who make up in enthusiasm what they lack in coordination. After the children, an electronics company’s managers and sales clerks, misstepping and fumbling side by side—then another column of precision-bowing grandmothers, then one of junior-high-school boys, then one of insurance salesmen. The three central divisions of Japanese life are thus represented: age, gender, and the workplace.

  Near the end, a ragged band of farmers comes down the line in drunken disarray, swigging from flasks and improvising lyrics and dance steps as they go. They are crowd pleasers and you can see the lacquer-lipped women absorb this usurp
ation with stoic indifference.

  One by one, the processions continued, down to the castle and then a turn, falling in like army cadets in blocks of colour schemes: high-school blue, young-girl yellow, sakura pink.

  When the last group of dancers reeled to join the ranks, the music stopped. Then came the deer.

  From behind the wall of dancers and into the open field they came, young boys in gilded antlers, eyes painted wide, movements unsure. They were dressed like Asian princes, the avatars of the deer-child. Siddhartha afoot. They formed and dissolved patterns. They gathered in circles, they moved in half steps. The dance built slowly in a crescendo of motion, moving toward free-form, flirting with chaos.

  Then, the hunters. Young girls, sashed in silk and armed with arrows: girls dressed as boys dressed as men. They stalked in stylized movements, and the hunt became a dance. Flowers fall from the stem. Youth comes to an end. The arrival of spring also marks its imminent departure. In pairs, the hunters and the deer moved in circles. They cross-hatched their movements, braiding pathways in wider and wider curves until at last the circle broke and the hunt ended.

  I was never asked to sing my song. When the dance of the deer and the hunter had finished, the attention of the gods turned elsewhere and the crowds reverted to profane preoccupations: group photographs, salutations, the long walk home. Young girls and boys, no longer deer or hunters, the spirits having passed from them, chased each other around the castle in a series of squabbles and taunts. I passed one such deer as he demanded of his mother, “Chocolate! Give me chocolate!” When he saw me, he cried out, “Harro! Harro!” and soon the entire herd had joined in and I was chased down the hill by the human shells of magic past.

  I never feel more like an outsider than when I attend a festival in Japan. Here is Japanese culture at full gallop, and all you can do is stand aside and watch it pass you by. As I left the castle grounds, the last of the drums were beating out a message, and the message was not for me.

  It wasn’t the lack of Western faces at the Uwajima Festival that made my chest feel so hollow. The truth be told, I prefer to be the only outsider; to have bumped into other Westerners would have reduced me in my pride to the level of tourist. I tell myself often that I am not a tourist. I exist somewhere else, in between voyeur and exile. Which is to say, my journey is almost complete. In Japan, the movement from Tourist to Exile to Insider is one that ends at Exile. There is no final step inside. We are kept at arm’s length by the arc of a bow, by the sound of a drum.

  The Japanese are not a cold-hearted people. Sometimes I wish they were, it would make leaving easier. The problem is not that you aren’t welcome. You are. You are welcome as an outsider. The problem is not exclusion, the problem is partial exclusion. The door is open but the chain is on. One hand beckons and the other blocks. Like a hostess in a snackbar, Japan flirts its way into our hearts, it pours our drinks, it strokes our ego, it smiles and sighs and listens to our stories, and then in a moment of silence it asks: “How did you ever get so fat?” Japan is not the Land of the Broken-Hearted, it is the Land of the Wounded Pride. It is not that I want inside and can’t that bothers me. I do not want to be Japanese. What rankles my Western heart is that it doesn’t matter what I do or do not want. I could not be Japanese, anyway, even if I wanted to be, and this is so hard on the pride. We want to reject, but we do not want to be rejected.

  For expatriates in Japan, the question is this: Do you really want to go all the way inside or are you just hurt that nobody asked you to?

  Strangely enough, the closest I ever came to feeling I belonged to Japan—one does not belong in Japan, one belongs to Japan—was during a festival, when I laboured with an army of men from my neighbourhood to carry a shoulder-aching movable shrine, the size of a small house, in the city’s summer festival. We were dressed in blazing red jackets and straw sandals. To gird ourselves for strength and stamina we wrapped mummy-cloths of white linen around our midriffs and twisted banzai headbands around our brows. The shrine was both our glory and our burden, like being born Japanese I suppose. A Shinto priest blessed it with a sweep of paper. We then hoisted it onto our shoulders and entered a traffic jam of other such shrines. We elbowed our way into the throng. We chanted challenges. We swerved and collided. We battled our way down main street and, as we went, people threw buckets of water at us and sprayed our heads with beer. We were running a gauntlet and at the end of it we collapsed, soaked in sweat and water and alcohol. We were triumphant. We ranted and raved. We congratulated ourselves hoarse and far beyond the level of actual achievement. Damn, it was fun. Then one of the men turned to me and said, “You foreigners are so much stronger than we Japanese,” and instantly I was outside the circle again, looking in. Waiting. In exile.

  7

  THE UWAJIMA FESTIVAL did not degenerate into water balloons and beer baths. It was restrained to the point of sadness, and the only water that touched me was a faint mist that came down near the end. It shrouded the castle in soft-focus and reduced the crowds to outlines. Then the footlights came on and the castle glowed as though lit from within, like a paper lantern in the night.

  Down below, in the town of tradesmen and alehouses, the neon was flickering on. The streets were slick with rain. Crowds of revellers spilled out, some still in costume, some already steeped in saké and song. A man yelled “Hey, foreigner!” and came over to present me with a can of beer. “For you, Mr. Foreigner. Japanese beer. Number one! Japan is an international country!” and he returned amid hoots and laughter to his circle of friends.

  I dropped the can, unopened, into the first garbage bin I came upon.

  There was an incident of aromas. I entered a side street lined with restaurants and noodle shops, and I was surrounded by smells. Ginger wrapped in soy wrapped in smoke. At the same time, under the shelter of a small roadside altar, incense sticks were burning, and even in the mist and haze you could smell it, the scent of spice and prayers. That, and the odour of urine from an alley and untreated sewage running under concrete slabs along the gutter. The smells met and mingled.

  They call it the Seidensticker Complex, after the American scholar and translator, and it describes the ambivalent feelings that torment long-term foreign residents in Japan, a pendulum of emotion, alternating between attraction and repulsion, affection and anger—back and forth. But the image is false. These feelings do not alternate. They are inseparable. As inseparable as the scent of urine and incense on the same wind. The same festival that beguiles you also excludes you. One does not love and then hate and then love Japan like a metronome. One lovehates it, one wants to draw nearfar to it, to gostay.

  For most Westerners, one urge or the other eventually wins, and instead of inseparable feelings you have only to go or to stay. But there are some who are caught in the middle, suspended by opposing desires. They are lost and not sure if they want to be found. They try to run in two directions at once and fail. Like a deer on a highway.

  Such were the morose thoughts that pursued me through the drizzle and oily refractions of Uwajima. Just be glad you weren’t keeping me company that night; I was as deep as I ever want to go. Everything was fraught with significance, every gesture portentous, every glance an omen.

  I sought refuge from myself in a crowded bar and grill, and from the moment I stepped inside, I was everybody’s best friend in the world. “Welcome! Welcome! Come in!” This was in the time-honoured tradition of Japanese blue-collar eateries: to be as noisy and as nonphilosophical as humanly possible. Everything is everyone else’s business and you never whisper when you can shout. “Ah, Mr. Foreigner! Welcome, Mr. Foreigner!”

  The Japanese call these places aka-chōchin, “red lanterns,” what we in the West might call greasy spoons. But in red lanterns it is not just the spoons that are greasy. The chopsticks, the menus, the table-tops, the plates, the walls, the cooks permanently and the customers eventually, everything gets covered in a thin film of grease, what might otherwise be called “atmosphere.”

/>   No tea-ceremony subtleties here. It was in-your-face hospitality, back-slapping, boisterous, and very loud. I had learned to be wary of such welcomes. Westerners are often treated as sources of amusement and ridicule in Japan, and it can be difficult to spot the difference between derision and friendly chiding. The line is fine, almost invisible, between someone mocking you and someone genuinely curious. Tonight, thankfully, there was no mockery in the air. I sat down at the counter across from a choreography of cooks performing circus feats with knives and whisks, their hands a blur, dicing cabbage, stirring woks, and tossing up plate after plate of Japanese shish kebab.

  One of the cooks, a haggard young man with a week’s worth of stubble, leaned over the counter and screamed, “What do you want!” I was two feet away. I gave him a preliminary list and he announced to the room, “He speaks Japanese! The foreigner speaks Japanese!” but no one was much impressed save the cook himself. The owner came over and chased him away.

  The shop was named Sasebo, after a city in the owner’s home prefecture of Nagasaki. The Amakusa Islands where I used to work had once been a part of Nagasaki, and even now there is a sentimental bond between the people of the islands and those of the peninsula. When I told the owner that I had lived in Amakusa it was as though I had declared myself to be his long-lost brother come home with a winning lottery ticket in my pocket. “Beer!” yelled the Master of Sasebo like a wounded soldier calling for a medic. “Beer!”

  The Master of Sasebo was a man of immense girth and good humour. The Uwajima City High School baseball team, which his shop helped sponsor, had gone to the national championships in Osaka and been thoroughly trounced. He gave me a souvenir baseball cap. His previous restaurant had burned to the ground last spring. He gave me a souvenir lantern from the place. I half expected him to present me with photographs of some distant dead relatives as well, but he didn’t.