Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  “Japanese women love Americans,” said Mac. “They think you’re exotic. We’ll take you with us, as bait.”

  Big ol’ Tom agreed, and when we finally reached Fukui City, we pulled up to the local Mr. Donut. “Girls who like Americans come to Mr. Donut,” said Mac knowingly. The three of us sauntered in and flopped down in a booth, cool as all get out. Mac started talking to me in English in a really big voice. This was to (a) establish our presence, (b) demonstrate that we were cosmopolitan, international English-speaking dudes, and (c) scare away any competition. Having defined our domain, we scoped the room. At the counter were a pair of college girls sipping milk coffee. Mac stared at them until they noticed our throbbing presence. He then jerked his head in my direction and said with a cocky grin, “American.” Tom smiled in a shy yet vulnerable manner. I tried to look cool, dark, and American (as opposed to clumsy, pale, and Canadian).

  The two girls, as if on cue, dropped their smiles and gave us looks that were utterly devoid of any expression. It was beyond disdain, it was a look of absolute indifference. Slowly, they turned back to their coffee and continued their conversation. My face was burning. Children laughed. Strangers stopped to point. Crowds were bussed in from neighbouring cities. Satellites shifted their orbits to capture the moment on film.

  My charm as a woman magnet having failed, the ride came to an end. Mac told me to call him when I got to Hokkaido, but there was a lack of conviction in his voice that I found disheartening.

  “We could try again,” I said. “I just needed to warm up. Look, some more girls are going in! Hey! Are you a horny tomato? Do you wanna love me?!”

  But Mac and Tom exchanged significant glances and my pleas were ignored. “Here’s how to get out of Fukui,” said Mac. “Walk down to the first set of lights. Turn right and then left. You can start hitchhiking after that. It won’t take long. Very easy.”

  The weather was good; the traffic, steady. What could go wrong? I thanked them for the ride, we shook hands, and off they drove. I took a deep breath, briefly reconsidered making another sally into Mr. Donut, and set off down the road.

  And so began the longest day of my life …

  * I did. They weren’t.

  9

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I wanted to be Alexander the Great, not because he had such a nifty nickname. (How many people do you know called “the Great”? Hey, guys, Bob the Great called. He wants to know if he should bring cheese dip?) No, I wanted to be Alexander the Great because he had his own conquering army. I always thought a conquering army could come in handy. For example, if Alexander didn’t like a particular place—say the service was bad or he couldn’t find a parking spot—he would simply turn his army loose and they would raze the buildings, salt the fields, and enslave the general population. It sounded like a lot of fun.

  The point being, had I my own conquering army, Fukui City would no longer be standing.

  What a hole. The citizens are actually proud of their reputation as Japan’s rudest people. “We are very rude in Fukui,” they will say. “May I spit in your coffee?”

  The day started out just fine. I was on the perfect stretch of road: wide, uncluttered, just beyond the city limits, and several hours ahead of the evening rush. Surely one of these stalwart citizens would stop. They didn’t. They did swerve, however, in my direction. Ostensibly, this was to get a better gape at the strange foreigner, but had they managed to clip me as they passed I suspect they would have pumped the air with their fists and shouted, “Awwright! Ten points!”

  The sky darkened, the wind picked up, and these bloated, bottom-heavy clouds rolled in, looking like large wads of wool that had been soaked in a mud puddle. A raindrop splattered to the ground in front of me. A moment later another splatted on my right, then another on my left, like a sniper trying to find the range. Finally one hit me on the head and you could hear the distant gods of Fukui yell, “Awwright! Ten points!”

  At first I was overjoyed. Rain! Surely I would now look so pitiable that people would stop out of sympathy. I changed my expression from non-violent Mormon to puppy-eyed orphan and looked wistfully at each car that passed.

  Which leads to Ferguson’s First Law of Hitchhiking vis-à-vis the Japanese: A foreigner standing by the side of the road in the rain with his thumb thrust out does not look sad or forlorn; he looks deranged. Cars sped up when they saw me and drivers’ eyes watched me recede in their rearview mirrors just to make sure I hadn’t leapt onto the bumper. Then the clouds opened up, and the rains came down as in the days of Noah.

  Having given up on an early rescue, I struggled to get out my handy fold-a-pac plastic rain poncho—which was clearly intended as a novelty item, because it stopped approximately zero percent of the rain, while still managing to cling to my body like a wet sarong. The rain was coming down so hard and fast that it bounced up off the pavement in ricochets. The road was awash. I thrust my thumb at cars in a wild frenzy. No one stopped. I began cursing as they passed, alternating between my thumb and middle finger. Not a good hitchhiking strategy. “Gee, honey, let’s stop for that rain-soaked wildman who is giving us the finger. Why look, he’s wearing a novelty item over his head.” I was out there in the rain for three hours. Let’s pause a moment and reflect on this. Three hours. In the rain. And not a single Fukui person stopped. Get out the salt, boys! Burn the fields! Unleash the hounds! You remember Carthage? The sack of Fukui City would have made Carthage look like a romp in the park. Fukui delenda est! Though I doubt whether even Alexander’s troops could have ignited anything in this downpour. Still, it was nice to imagine and it helped take my mind off the bone-chill of advancing hypothermia.

  Like so many things in life, it got worse. Rush hour began: bumper-to-bumper cars hydroplaning by, dousing me with great sheets of water as they sailed past. Trucks went by like snowplows, pushing the rain before them, and one driver laughed at me as he passed. His licence plate: Fukui prefecture, naturally. The sun went down. Or rather, the rainstorm darkened. Headlights came on. Now I was a wildman ranting at traffic, illuminated by passing vehicles—like Frankenstein in a lightning flash. Nobody was going to stop for me and it was ten kilometres back into town.

  I dragged my backpack up onto my shoulders. It was soaked heavy with water, its space-age zephlon NASA waterproofing having proven ineffectual in the face of a Japanese rainstorm. I turned and was about to begin the long walk back into fun-loving Fukui City when a low-slung sports car pulled over. The vehicle was practically afloat. It was so low, it resembled a red life raft.

  “Are you okay?” asked the driver. I squeezed in, dripping rain over everything. I was wedged into the passenger seat, my backpack across my lap.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you people?” I yelled. “Three hours I waited, three goddamn hours!” I put my glasses on and they immediately fogged over.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Well, I was going to Kanazawa, BUT THAT WAS THREE HOURS AGO! Now I’ll be lucky to get to the next town.” I pulled a soggy map from my jacket pocket and peeled back the pages until I got to Fukui. “Just get me out of this goddamn prefecture. What’s the first town after the border? Let me see. Kaga City.”

  “I can take you to Kanazawa,” he said.

  “Good. Then take me.” I mopped my face with an already wet handkerchief and wiped the fog from my glasses. For the first time, I saw my driver. He was young, well dressed, and very dry. “Are you from Fukui City?” I asked.

  “Yes?” he said, hoping that was the right answer. It wasn’t.

  “Well, what is it with you people? Doesn’t anybody care about anybody else any more?” (You ever notice how personal affronts inevitably signal the downfall of civilization as we know it?) “Fukui City people,” I said, “are not kind.” This is a really mean thing to say in Japanese, trust me.

  We drove into the night. The car was deathly quiet, just the sound of the rain drumming across the car roof, like fingertips on Tupperware, and me hyperventilating. Slowly I ca
lmed down enough to realize that perhaps it was not a good idea to verbally abuse the person who has rescued you. It might even be considered rude. To tell the truth, as soon as the adrenaline subsided, I was overcome with guilt.

  “Say,” I said, suddenly cheery, “it sure is rainy tonight.”

  The poor man eyed me fearfully, as one might well eye a mood-swinging lunatic. I introduced myself, he did the same.

  “Shoichi Nakamura,” I repeated. “Swell name, that. It means ‘middle village,’ right? My name means ‘son of Fergus,’ but who Fergus was I couldn’t tell you. Somebody’s father, I suppose, ha ha, just a little joke there. It sure is rainy, isn’t it?”

  Shoichi nodded and smiled as though speared in the stomach. A few minutes later he turned on the radio.

  The familiar having failed me, I switched to ultra-polite Japanese. “And may I ask what you do for a living?”

  “I work for Nexus,” he said. “We make computers.”

  “You work for Nexus? No kidding? Me too!” But he clearly did not believe me, and the conversation drowned in its own bad beginnings. We arrived in Kanazawa City, hours later, after enduring the sluggish ordeal of a traffic jam and a harrowing glimpse of a four-car wreck. It was almost midnight. By now my guilt had reached pathological levels and I was trying anything, even money, to convince him I wasn’t really such a bad person.

  “Let me give you something for gas,” I said, offering him roughly a hundred zillion dollars’ worth of yen.

  “No, no,” he said. “You are my guest. It is my”—and here his voice caught in his throat—“pleasure.”

  In a way, I envy Catholics. I’m not sure I understand the details, but from what I gather, if you’re Catholic you just go into a closet and mumble your sins to a priest, he gives you some punitive tongue twisters, and all is forgiven. Then you go out and find some more sins to commit. It seems very circular and holistic. Protestants, however, are stuck with their guilt forever, and if you happen to be Presbyterian, well, forget it, you might as well just go shoot yourself.

  “Fukui is very beautiful,” I said, flip-flopping like a politician on a campaign trail. “Lovely prefecture.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but the people are not kind.” Ouch. Talk about twisting the blade.

  “Oh, that, I was just kidding. Listen, why don’t we go out for supper? I’ll treat.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I have to get back to Fukui City, my friends are waiting for me.”

  “Your friends are waiting for you?”

  “Yes, I was on my way to a goodbye party for one of my co-workers. He was transferred today.”

  “You mean, you weren’t on your way to Kanazawa?”

  “No, I was just going around the corner.”

  I began frantically rummaging in my wallet for more money. “Please. Here, for your troubles,” I said, pressing fistfuls of cash at him, but it was no use. He wouldn’t accept any of it, and I just wanted to crawl under a petri dish and die like the piece of primordial slime I was. This wasn’t hitchhiking. This was bullying. I had browbeaten my way to Kanazawa and all my talk of Zen and the Art of Hitchhiking, and travelling with the Japanese and not among them, came back at me with unusual clarity.

  “You are very kind,” I said. “Very kind. You are a kind man.” I repeated this like a mantra every few seconds until we arrived at Kanazawa Station.

  “Enjoy your stay in Kanazawa,” he said.

  Fat chance. “Listen,” I said, “give me your address and I’ll send you something, a present, some money, just to thank you.”

  “No,” he said. “That isn’t necessary.”

  You son of a bitch. “Well, thanks again for the ride. I really appreciate it.”

  And off he drove, leaving me with several large burdens, only one of which was my backpack.

  Kanazawa Station was ringed with bright neon signs and massive, contemporary slabs of hotel. You know the kind; they have names like The Hyatt Royal Regent Davenport Imperial Overpriced Inn, and are lit up at night as though they were the Parthenon itself and not simply a large filing cabinet for humans. I wandered into one such hotel. It was decorated according to standard middle-class notions of upper-class décor: glass chandeliers, leather couches, paisley carpets, superfluous lamps, and lots of brass and mirrors.

  Like every hotel in Japan, it was ridiculously overstaffed. Entire fleets of doormen circled the lobby, searching desperately for something to do. They were trying to look busy so that the manager wouldn’t notice he had fourteen people to open two doors and empty three ashtrays. Then again, this hotel probably had fourteen managers as well. Heck, it even had escalator girls. That’s right, escalator girls. They stand beside the hotel escalators all day long and bow to every honourable guest who passes by.

  I went up to the front desk where a man in a blazer had the comical idea that I would be willing to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for a single room. “I don’t want the President’s Suite. A single room will suffice.” But the man at the desk persisted in his humour and I left. On the way out, I counted the number of bows I triggered: seven. Seven different people bowed and thanked me, and I hadn’t spent one dime in the place. Had I actually rented a room, would they have prostrated themselves before me and offered to shine my shoes with their neckties? Japanese service can be so overbearing.

  I wandered away from the bright lights and big-city atmosphere of downtown Kanazawa—a city the Japanese routinely refer to as “quaint” and “traditional”—and found a room a few blocks back in a charming concrete-and-concrete arrangement. It was called a business hotel, but the sign out front didn’t say what kind of business. My guess would be cockroach exterminators. A steal at sixty dollars a night. And boy, didn’t I get my money’s worth. Every room in the hotel was provided with the following: a bed.

  When I asked for a wake-up call the man handed me one of those big wind-up alarm clocks that no one has used since the forties. When I asked him for a towel, he charged me extra. I was going to ask for the time, but I wasn’t sure I could afford it.

  Once I got up to my room on the fourteenth floor—and I wasn’t at all worried about being caught in a firetrap, no sir—I realized that I didn’t really need the alarm clock. I had asked for it out of habit. My plan was to spend a couple of days in Kanazawa; for the first time in almost a week, I wouldn’t be hitting the road at dawn. I could sleep in. In fact, I could go out all night and not have to worry. So off I went, having wrung out my jeans and dried my hair and splashed myself generously with aftershave, to prowl the mean streets of Kanazawa. Many hours later, I crawled back into bed, reeking of cigarette smoke and stale beer, just before sunrise—only to be woken from my pre-REM slumber not half an hour later by someone pounding on my door. It was the night clerk; he had noticed that I hadn’t come down and was worried I had overslept. I couldn’t even tell him to piss off and get lost. I had to get up and thank this man for disturbing me. He was just being concerned. “Thank you,” I croaked.

  At least I was in Japan, so I didn’t have to tip him. All I had to do was leave large satchels full of cash with the hotel management when I checked out. This is to save us the embarrassment of evaluating service with anything as crass as money. Instead of something as vulgar and unbecoming as a tip, Japanese businesses prefer to slip in an automatic service charge of, oh, about seven hundred percent I would imagine, which is a small price to pay for such a face-saving device.

  10

  KANAZAWA IS an old castle town renowned for its old streets, old buildings, old pleasure quarters, an old villa, an old garden, and an old theatre. It is a very old city, except for the parts that aren’t. All that was missing was the actual castle. Only the rear gate remained, imposing even in its quixotic lack of mission. The fortress it once guarded had long been lost to time and city planning.

  I was disappointed with Kanazawa. I’m not sure why. It was a prosperous city, and I didn’t begrudge the town its success, yet Kanazawa is quaint only if you are appro
aching it from Tokyo or Osaka. After the side roads of Shikoku and the fishing villages of Kyushu, Kanazawa felt too big, too congested, and—more importantly—too expensive. It was also the halfway mark of my journey and I had expected to enter the city triumphantly, amid cheering crowds and confetti. Instead, I had staggered in, exhausted and whimpering, and racked with a persistent cough and a lingering guilt. I hadn’t been this tired or numb since my visit to the Uwajima sex shrine.

  Beyond the generic Japanese-city look of its downtown (also known as “Really Big White Boxes Arranged in Confusing Patterns”) much of Kanazawa is surprisingly well preserved, with neighbourhoods that date back to the days of the Tokugawa shōguns. And after Fukui City, the people of Kanazawa were downright hospitable. The whole time I was in Kanazawa not a single person attempted to spit in my coffee.

  But where were the cherry blossoms? I saw a few scraggly flowers here and there, nothing to pen a haiku over. I went to Kenroku Gardens, across from the solitary castle gate, and searched for sakura but found none. The Cherry Blossom Front had not yet arrived. A sombre-looking newsman pointed to a satellite map of Japan and explained that in Kanazawa the sakura were only at eight percent blossom, a full thirty-four percent less than last year. Or maybe it was the other way round. Anyway, he was very concerned about this and, to prove it, the television station showed an assortment of maps covered with contour lines and whorls and complicated grids, as if to say, “We paid a lot for these maps, so you’re damn well going to see every one of them.”

  I tried very hard to like Kanazawa, but I was impatient. I kicked about for a couple of days. I ate at some wonderfully snooty restaurants where thin fish was arranged in papery designs and the waitresses moved about in a delicate kimono shuffle. These restaurants were the very antithesis of the red-lantern dives I usually frequent. In Kanazawa, the restaurants exuded a certain high-class ambience. They also cost an arm and a leg, but were worth every limb if you ask me. Anyway, I was getting a little tired of scuzzy joints and I enjoyed the chance to try some of Japan’s more unusual offerings. I even considered eating fugu, the poison puffer fish that can kill you if not prepared properly. Still, you never know when you’ll run into a Japanese fugu chef whose home was destroyed during the war, so I gave it a pass.