Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  It was more difficult than I had expected getting out of Atsumi. The road that cut through the town banked from curve to curve with such a strong slingshot momentum that I had a hard time finding a place that was safe enough and visible enough to hitch along. Cars snapped around the bend at breakneck speeds and kamikaze angles, and with no sidewalk or guard rails to cower behind I had several brushes with death per minute.

  I wasn’t the only one braving traffic. A leather-faced old man walked slowly by, his hair matted in all directions and his skin creased by the sun. He was wearing blue track pants, a tattered polo shirt, and a jacket as frayed and dirty as life itself. It looked as though he had gotten dressed by crawling through a clothes hamper—which could only mean one thing: he was a widower. No woman in Japan would allow her hubby, especially an older, retired hubby, out of the house like that. I smiled at him sympathetically. He said nothing and disappeared down the road. A few minutes later, he returned carrying a bucket of fish, slopped up, tails poking above the rim, and an oily smell emanating. They were tai, the red-tinged sea bream that feature so prominently in Japanese celebrations. This is the fish that sumo wrestlers hold up grinningly after winning a tournament. This is also the fish that the god Ebisu keeps, tucked under his arm, as a symbol of his status as the God of Fishermen. These tai were much smaller than Ebisu’s. One was still gasping, its gills opening and closing, drowning in air.

  “Sushi?” I asked the old man as he passed. He stopped and looked at me—not in a mean way but in a rock-steady, could-chew-you-up-for-breakfast type of way—and then said, “Why are you here?”

  I hate these kinds of metaphysical questions. “I’m from Canada,” I said.

  “Canada, Canada.” He mulled this over as though it might be a place he was familiar with. “Ah,” he said suddenly. “America.”

  I nodded. “America.”

  “I have never been to America,” he said. “I just went to get some fish.”

  “For sushi?”

  His eyes had drifted out of focus during this, but now he locked his gaze back on me. “What?”

  “Sushi?” I asked.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m from Canada,” I said, and off we went again like a dog in pursuit of its own tail. What the old man was really saying, of course, was, Get out of my village.

  “It’s not good,” he said. “You shouldn’t stand here like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that—here, beside the road.”

  Not the warmest welcome I had ever had.

  Across the street, a car had stopped and the driver, another one of those leather-faced old men that Atsumi seemed to specialize in, was watching the proceedings.

  “Why,” persisted the first man, “are you here, beside our road?”

  “I was dropped off.”

  “Here?” He was incredulous. “Why?”

  “Look,” I said. “It’s really no concern of yours if I—”

  “I asked you a question. How did you get here?”

  Well, first the sperm travelled up through the uterus until it found the egg. “I’m trying to get to Hokkaido,” I said.

  “Hokkaido!” Now he was angry. “You are nowhere near Hokkaido. Don’t try to tell me you are going to Hokkaido when I ask you why you are here. I have lived here all my life.”

  It was in the middle of this increasingly belligerent conversation that the other old man—the one in the car—drove up and stopped in front of me. “Where you wanna go?” he asked without opening pleasantries or even greetings. Never had I been in a place that was in such a hurry to get rid of me.

  The man in the car agreed to take me north to the next town, thus delivering me from what may very well have turned into fisticuffs. “Why are you here?!” demanded the first man even as we pulled out, leaving him behind.

  “Pay him no heed,” said my rescuer. “He’s a fisherman,” as though that explained everything.

  Mr. Genzō Yamaguchi was not a fisherman. “I was a [something] worker. Retired now. Got an illness. They say it was [something]. But it was [something][something] else.” He was trying to speak in standard Japanese, but he had a thick regional dialect that kept creeping back in. As we drove north along the coast, he relaxed, and as he did, he slipped deeper and deeper into his dialect, until I could only understand every second word. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that he was a terse man and his sentences often only consisted of two words at a time, so our conversation was limited, to say the least.

  He had the same stubble-chinned, salt-water-creased, just-crawled-through-a-clothes-hamper feeling about him, though he was better kempt than my earlier interrogator. At one point he told me a long, involved story, all in short bursts, about monks who lived in the nearby mountains. I nodded when he nodded, smiled when he smiled, and frowned thoughtfully when he frowned thoughtfully, but I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The legend seemed to involve a carp, a sword, and—I think—an eggplant, but I’m not sure.

  The road and the coast eventually parted company, with the road arcing slowly away inland, where a small plain lay cupped in among the surrounding hills. Mr. Yamaguchi dropped me off at an intersection that offered six possible routes. When I asked him which one went north, he replied, “Yes.” When I repeated my question, stressing the word which, he replied, “Maybe.”

  —

  The city of Tsuruoka had once been a castle town, but now it was a factory colony of TDR, a company that made—well, who knows what. I never did figure it out, and after the third attempt at discovering what exactly TDR produced, I gave up. Maybe shoelaces, maybe buttons, or maybe it was heat-seeking laser-guided missiles. Whatever it was, it paled next to the heavy presence of Dewa Sanzan, the Holy Mountains of the North.

  I didn’t go into Tsuruoka but hitchhiked around it on a wide-flying bypass that swept me across the Akagawa River and into Sakata, a sister city to Tsuruoka. Both were a similar size and layout, mirror reflections of one another.

  I rode with a soft-faced, thick-lipped man named Hiroshi Endō, who introduced himself in English as a Christian seaman. I can’t say I was immediately pleased on hearing Hiroshi’s confession of faith. Self-professed Christians make me uneasy. They are always way too friendly and way too smiley. They are using you, of course, to propagate their faith. They don’t really want to be your friends, they want to be your converters. I have always found that talking with Christian propagators is a lot like talking to used-car salesmen. They may be chummy and sugar-sweet, but all they are seeing when they look at you is another sale. (In Kumamoto City I once witnessed a wonderful encounter between two intense young Americans, one a Mormon and the other a Hare Krishna. They were locked in a polite but obviously strained theological debate when I passed by. And when I returned, three hours later, they were still at it, head-to-head. They were now yelling at each other about peace and love. “Oh yeah?! But what about ultimate reality, man?” “Don’t tell me about ultimate reality, I know ultimate reality!” It was hilarious. It reminded me of two sand crabs locked in mortal combat, pincers shut, foam frothing up from their jaws. For all I know they are still there, spittle flying and eyes wild, in the name of God. Either that or they both succeeded and the Mormon went home a Hare Krishna and the Hare Krishna went home a Mormon. The main thing is this: they didn’t bother me. If proselytizers would all just pick on each other instead of the rest of us, this would be a happier world.)

  I felt none of the conversion fervour with Hiroshi. He was shy and soft-spoken, and his face was without angles or edges, as though his features had been slightly overinflated. He had a way of leaning in toward me and speaking out of the side of his mouth which made me feel as though we were doing something wrong. “There are two churches in Tsuruoka,” he whispered. “Two.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was complaining or boasting, so I made a sort of noncommittal “is that so?” noise, rather than congratulate him or commiserate. For all I knew, two churches were a triumph.


  “Which church do you belong to?” he asked.

  When faced with probing questions such as this (“So how much would you be willing to spend on a car today, Mr. Ferguson?”) I usually respond with something flippant like, the Church of Cheap Beer and Wild Women, but he was so shy, so painfully sincere, that I mumbled something about there being a distinct lack of Presbyterians in Japan.

  Mr. Endō had been a radio operator on a cargo ship and had seen the world: Australia, New Zealand, the east coast of North America, the islands and ports of Southeast Asia. He had retired just that year—not for reasons of age but for some unspecified illness—and now he was here in Japan’s far north, seeking solace in the words of a distant carpenter from Galilee. The world is a strange place indeed, and the ebb and flow of religions that move around the globe like ocean currents is stranger still. Religions rise and fall, fade and overlap, from Buddhist prophets to Christian sailors, all in pursuit of—of what? Insight? Deliverance? Discipline? Sakura?

  “I saw many things,” said Hiroshi. “In the Philippines, I saw a man singing to the sea. In Australia, I saw kangaroos in cages.” His voice was furtive, as though the vehicle were bugged, as though his life were under surveillance. “I sailed to many ports, but I wasted my youth and I married very old.” (At thirty-one, it turned out; hardly a senior citizen, but a bit late for Japan.) “My daughter is a teenager now, and she looks like her mother, but everyone says she has my eyes.”

  “Is your wife a Christian?” I asked.

  There was a slow, liquid pause. He said, quietly, almost to himself, “I go to church alone.” And then, changing tack, “How about you?”

  “I don’t go to church. Alone.”

  Hiroshi dropped me off on the eastern outskirts of Sakata. I was on an overpass, above a vast marshland and a flaccid, muddy river. A white heron skimmed across the surface, but any sound was lost to the traffic that rolled by with monotonous regularity. Here too the view was dominated by the pressing mass of Dewa Sanzan, the holy mountains of Japan. Clearly visible, even from here, were sacred ski runs running down the sacred mountainsides. They looked like frozen rivers.

  Cities create their own gravity wells. Hitching in is easy; you just relax and allow yourself to be pulled in. Hitching out, however, can be a nightmare. I wanted to skim the edge of Sakata, Sputniklike, using the city’s gravity to throw myself farther along, all the way to Akita.

  It was tough. I couldn’t ask—or expect—traffic to stop for me on the middle of an elevated bypass, but I thrust out my thumb anyway and hoped for the best.

  And that’s when I was captured by leprechauns.

  10

  THEY WERE little leprechaun people in a little leprechaun car and they spoke a leprechaun dialect I couldn’t understand. There were three of them, none over five foot four and all of them dressed in tidy, freshly pressed clothes. They were the Takahashis. There was Mr. Takahashi, friendly, hunched-shouldered, cigarette-smoldering, with an expressive face that had been battered by life but not defeated. Beside him was Mrs. Takahashi, his wife, an attractive lady, very prim, who sat with her hands folded carefully on her lap. In the backseat was Mr. Takahashi’s elderly mother, a tiny, thin lady.

  Mr. Takahashi was full of grins and handshakes and nervous, bobbing bows. His wife was less enthusiastic. She sat as rigid as an overstrung harpsichord, and her smile never wavered. Clearly, she had not been in favour of stopping. I had seen their little car drive by three times before it finally pulled over, a common enough event in Japan, where hitchhiking is not a custom and where the driver and passengers often have hurried, frantic discussions when they see someone with his thumb out.

  “It was Mother,” said Mr. Takahashi sheepishly. “She said it’s common courtesy. She said we had to stop, so we did.”

  Mr. Takahashi was an industrial mechanic with a large steel refinery. He worked swing shifts, and today being his day off, he had decided to take his mother and wife out for a drive.

  The mother was delighted to have company even though my bear-size body and awkward backpack—the pack alone was larger than she was—crowded her up against her side of the car. She shared with me plums from a plastic bag, and when I was done, she held my hand in hers and patted it gently, like you might pat a sleeping baby. This was a woman who was not afraid of bears. We had a wonderfully elaborate conversation, she and I, hindered only by the fact that neither of us understood a word the other was saying. She spoke with a murky Tohoku dialect, bluesy and rich and filled with late nights and long winters. (When I asked a Tokyo friend for advice on how to speak with the Tohoku accent, he said, “Fill your mouth with mud and chew on all your consonants.”) She pointed out Mount Chōkai, the “Dewa Fuji,” ice-blue at the top, and told me a long, involved tale that was apparently off-colour, because at one point her daughter-in-law turned around and said, “Mother! You know that isn’t true!”

  But the old dear just clasped my hand and chuckled softly. “Oh, but it is,” she said to me, in one of the few phrases I was able to catch. “It’s true all right. I was there.” And she laughed.

  What had happened up on Mount Chōkai, what scandal or gossip she had imparted, was lost on me, but it helped to break the tension, and soon Mr. Takahashi’s wife was laughing and gently scolding the mother, who continued to share her stories with me, as juicy as plums.

  Guidebooks are great for surface-skimming—and I’d be lost without them—but to really get in and get dirty, to muck about in the back country, to really worm your way into off-track Japan, you need to travel in the company of the people who live there. Train passengers, no matter how independently they are travelling, ultimately remain spectators. Hitchhikers are co-conspirators, fellow travellers.

  On the road north of Sakata, near the border of Yamagata and Akita prefectures, there lies an entire stone coast, a miniature mountainside, really, that has been carved into the shapes of Buddhist deities and saints. It is a striking landscape to stumble across, and one that was not listed in any of the guidebooks I was using: not in the Lonely Planet guide, nor in Gateway to Japan, nor in New Japan Solo.

  The site, known as the Jōroku Rakan, was carved over the course of several centuries by monks from a nearby temple, carved, it was said, to comfort the souls of dead fishermen who had perished off the coast. The sculptures were like a flowing, gentler Mount Rushmore. And the comparison to Rushmore is apt. The two contrast in several significant ways: the Japanese carvings are smaller and more fluid, shapes worked into the lay of the land; Mount Rushmore, with its granite-jawed faces blasted from the bedrock, is far more imposing.

  Mr. Takahashi pulled into the parking lot and we walked down to the open-air carvings. A few sightseers were scrambling about, taking pictures, laughing, pointing out oddities and details.

  A mountain of gods. I climbed up an outcrop of rock and looked out at the crash and roll of waves on the other side and then, with a start, realized that the rock I was clambering over was shaped into the form of a beggar god’s face. This one sculpture was as large as a car—a Japanese car—which is to say, it was somewhat small. The entire coastal expanse, the shapes hidden like faces in a cloud, was more of a dreamscape than a landscape. The gods were emerging from the rock as you watched.

  “The mountain is alive,” said the grandmother in a very pragmatic, unsentimental way.

  Further north, at the prefectural boundary itself, was a green park of sloping hills and grassy outlooks. We had a picnic on a small knoll overlooking the sea, and the grandmother made an effort to speak standard Japanese. She said to me, her voice as soft as a wisp of smoke, “I used to picnic over there—just over there, with my husband. I would make a bentō lunch and we would sit there.” She pointed a tiny finger to a hillside. A couple was lying there now; the boy had his head on his girlfriend’s lap. “Right there,” she said. “Right where those two are now.”

  “Would you like a drink?” said Mr. Takahashi, as he offered me some sickly sweet Chinese wine—once again s
trengthening my resolve to seek a complete world ban on Chinese wine production. This wine—this syrup—had a certain antifreeze piquancy about it, bold yet coy, horrible yet disgusting. I am a fervent believer in the notion that countries should stick to what they do best. Japan should produce video cameras, America should produce pop stars and computers, and the Chinese should stick to producing kung fu movies and short-tempered waiters. And they should be made to write a letter of apology to every Frenchman and Italian on earth for the crimes they have committed against wine. Thank you.

  When it came time to say goodbye, Mr. Takahashi had tears in his eyes. “It is good,” he said, “good that we can get along like this.” His wife dabbed at imaginary tears as well and then surprised every-one—herself included—by inviting me to their home whenever I came through. “We want to see you again.” Yes, yes, Grandmother nodded, “and please, whatever you do, take care not to …” and off she went into the depths of regional dialect to places I could not follow, leaving me with the vague feeling I had just missed a very important warning.

  In the end, they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t simply abandon me to my fate and instead Mr. Takahashi began scouring the parking lot and accosting strangers. As always when this happened, I felt very uncomfortable and vicariously embarrassed. “Excuse me, you wouldn’t be going north, would you, toward Akita City? It’s just that, well, we have this American who is in some trouble, you see, and, well—”

  Two bird-like ladies, twittering away at the proposition, came within a giggle of offering me a ride but at the last minute declined. A husband said yes only to be vetoed by his wife, who gave us all a disapproving, sour look. Eventually a young man in a khaki-brown company uniform shrugged and said, “Sure, I can take him into Akita City.”

  “You can?” “Sure.”