Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  “Well, then,” I said as I turned and walked along the observatory platform in a jaunty way, humming lively tunes. “What a nice view!” But it was no use. In the shadows, in the corners, furtive in the half-light, I could see young, hormonally inflamed couples entwined in knots of limbs. At night, Japanese youth transform themselves into Parisians.

  The Hakodate Night-viewing Observatory looked like a telescope pad used for stargazing, except, instead of stars, the gaze was directed downward, toward the city, adding to the voyeuristic atmosphere. I was standing there in the cold air, watching the night deepen and the lights become brighter, when a young woman slid up beside me.

  She was staring out intently at the city lights. I sent ESP waves of charm toward her, but she evidently had her radar deflectors up. So, on the count of three, I turned and said, in a friendly-yet-exotic, American sort of way, “Hi there!”

  She returned my greeting like a limp volleyball and walked away, leaving me to set, leap, and spike to an empty court. Hakodate women, I decided, were very cold.

  6

  MR. SAITO hailed my return with a hearty “Hello!” His face was red and he clutched a bottle of Japanese vodka in one hand and a glass in the other. “I’ve been drinking,” he said, superfluously. “Come!” he cried. “Have some sea crabs. I caught them today when I went fishing.” A steaming tray was set before him. “I wasn’t even looking for crab; they just crawled into my pail. Can you imagine such luck? Good luck for me. Bad luck for the crabs.” He laughed and laughed and handed me a plate.

  I loathe crab. But I couldn’t think of any way to decline his offer, which was generous to a fault, so I sidled up to the table and Mr. Saito, with a scholarly air, proceeded to teach me the correct way to eat them, which, if done properly, is horrible and messy and more than a little barbaric. First, he wrenched off the legs—the hairy legs (did you know crabs have hairy legs?)—and demonstrated how to suck the meat out. He then cracked open the backs and showed me the proper way to scoop out the (thankfully) small brains, which you lick from your fingers like pâté. “But we don’t eat the lungs,” he said as he removed the tiny flaps and discarded them. Why not? Well, that would be gross.

  I have never felt fully comfortable eating anything that looks like a giant mutated cockroach, but with enough vodka to wash it down, I was able to eat most of my crab. Then, like a bad joke, Mr. Saito produced another. And another. The brain-scooping and lung-discarding began anew.

  “Drink! Drink!” he urged. He then topped up my glass with shōchō, a form of alcohol so pure it shows up on some Periodic Tables.

  “Someday,” he threatened, “I will introduce shōchō to your country.”

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to eat the rest of the crab because another guest arrived, a tall, gregarious American named Donner. Donner had missed a flight to Sapporo and when he tried to check into a nearby hotel, the owners had frantically fobbed him off on Mr. Saito, whose English ability was well known in the neighbourhood.

  Donner was an entrepreneur. He had a smile as clean and wide as the Great Outdoors, and he had been doing business with the Japanese for almost four years. “I don’t speak Japanese,” he said, reciting a pet quip, “but I do speak Loud English.”

  Over crab and shōchō, Donner regaled us with his various misadventures in the import/export business. He had that brash confidence Americans seem to exude. “Have my card,” he said, and like a blackjack dealer in a Nevada bar he pulled out a stack and dealt me one. “I have connections. Lots of connections. Japan,” he said. “Tough country. Lotsa red tape. But well worth the effort. Well worth it. Profits. Huge profits. Profits the size of—of—” He couldn’t come up with a metaphor big enough. “As big as—well, you know. A lot of money. Big money. You should get involved. Teaching English? Chump change. The real profit is in imports.”

  On and on it went, like a personal self-help video. And when he announced suddenly that he was tired (it was as though he had decided when he would get sleepy) a vacuum of silence followed his departure. In my heart of hearts—and oh, how I hate to admit it—I sort of, almost, like Americans.

  “Tell me,” said Mr. Saito after Donner’s departure. “What did you think of Hakodate? Did you go up the mountain? Did you see the night view?”

  I had indeed. He was pleased to hear this.

  “There is a theory,” said Mr. Saito, “a common theory, that we can understand a person by the way they look at the lights of Hakodate.” It was a bit like a Rorschach test. “Some people see an hourglass: they are thinking about life and how short it is, how time passes. Other people see a fan opening up: they are very high-culture people. Others see a wineglass. Some see a river. Tell me, Mr. Will, what did you see?”

  “What did I see?”

  “Yes, when you looked at the lights of Hakodate. What did you see?”

  “Ah, what you said, a river. A wineglass. That sort of thing.”

  He saluted my good tastes. But when he tried to foist off more crab legs on me, I pleaded extenuating circumstances. “I’m still full from King of Kings.”

  King of Kings? He knew the place quite well. He was friends with the owner. When I told him about the vast amount of meat I had packed away, Mr. Saito shouted with laughter. “You didn’t tell him you were staying here, did you? Did you?”

  “I might have.”

  “Oh, no!” said Mr. Saito. “I’ll have to buy him a new cow just to reimburse him!” He laughed so long at this that his face became even redder, almost purple. He laughed so long he forgot what he was laughing about.

  The shōchō and beer continued, and the more we drank, the more disjointed and incoherent the conversation became. Somehow we ended up talking about the war. Why does this always happen? Again, is it just me, or does every heart-to-heart talk in Japan always end up focusing on the Second World War? I wasn’t even a corny pickup line in my father’s repertoire when that war started. What do I know about the Second World War?

  Japanese knowledge is even worse. In Japan, the bombing of Hiroshima is treated as though it were a baffling, unprovoked attack. As though the innocent Japanese were sitting around, minding their own business, when wham! out of the blue, the Americans decided to obliterate them. In China, meanwhile, the Rape of Nanking (dismissed as a “myth” by Japanese apologists) left more people dead than Hiroshima; and the Japanese army did it the hard way. They butchered, tortured, and raped the citizens of Nanking one victim at a time.

  “I’ll tell you why the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Mr. Saito. “It’s because they didn’t consider Asians to be human. That’s why they never would have done it to a white country.”

  “But they couldn’t have. Germany had already surrendered by the time the bomb was ready.”

  “There is no excuse for what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no excuse!” His voice had a sudden snap to it, and a cold fury cut through the alcoholic haze. He looked at me with a rage that was directed outward at every angle, to all points of the compass. One shouldn’t talk about the war in Japan. This is one of the first rules of conversation. Every family has a litany of sorrows and a closet filled with skeletons. As often as not, Southeast Asian skeletons.

  I knew this, and yet I continued anyway. Mr. Saito and I argued well into the night, arguing for the sake of arguing, like a pair of Talmudic scholars debating some fine, esoteric, and utterly irrelevant point. And nothing we said that night changed history in the least.

  7

  I WOKE to the familiar sound of bongo drums being played across my cranium. Death by Hangover once again loomed large as the probable outcome of my irresolute lifestyle. My journey was coming to an end, but I wasn’t so much cruising to a finale as I was limping toward the finish line. I figured: Cape Sōya and then three weeks in a hospital getting a blood transfusion.

  It had been decided the night before that Mr. Saito, against my better judgment and constant urging, would drive me out to the Hakodate ferry port for the arrival of the A
omori ferry. “Most of the passengers will be driving all the way to Sapporo,” he reasoned. “If you hitchhike right in front of the off-ramp, you will surely get a ride.”

  “But what if I don’t get a ride? I’ll be stranded way out of town.”

  “That’s true. What you need is a sign,” he said, and he cut up a cardboard box. “This will do nicely.” He reached for a felt-tip marker.

  “But I’ve made it this far without a sign. Signs can actually hurt your chances in Japan. People think they should stop only if they are going to the exact destination you are holding up. One time, a Japanese friend of mine—”

  “Now then,” he said with the air of a man who knows his way around the world. “You must, how do you say it, reassure the drivers. So, let’s first write your name, so they know who you are—” and in wide, thick Japanese letters he wrote HELLO EVERYBODY! I AM WILLY FROM AMERICA.

  “Now then.” He sat back to consider this. He had been drinking, so the letters looked a little crooked and poorly spaced, something like a schoolchild would write. When I commented on this, he was unfazed. “It will help you, see? Because they will think you wrote it yourself. Very cute.”

  He thought a moment and said, “Now we must reassure them that you can speak Japanese a little.” So he wrote I CAN SPEAK JAPANESE A LITTLE. “And we must let them know where you are going.” So he added, PLEASE TAKE ME TO SAPPORO.

  He frowned at this, and then added, I AM AN ENGLISH TEACHER. And then, I CAME ALL THE WAY FROM KYUSHU. A pause. REALLY, I DID.

  He ended with THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I AM SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, and then held it up for me to admire.

  By this point the cardboard was completely filled with characters, which got progressively smaller and more cramped as they neared the bottom of the page, much like the listings posted before a sumo tournament. In tiny English letters he scrawled across the bottom, let’s be international friends!

  HELLO EVERYBODY!

  I AM WILLY FROM AMERICA.

  I CAN SPEAK JAPANESE A LITTLE.

  PLEASE TAKE ME TO SAPPORO.

  I AM AN ENGLISH TEACHER.

  I CAME ALL THE WAY FROM KYUSHU.

  REALLY, I DID.

  THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

  I AM SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

  let’s be international friends!

  This wasn’t a sign, this was a short story. It looked bad enough when I was tipsy, but the next morning, when I found it tucked in with my bags, it looked even more illegible and more bizarre. I discarded it as soon as Mr. Saito was out of sight.

  He was right about the ferry traffic. They were all heading north toward Sapporo. But not with me. I watched with that sinking yet oddly familiar sense of dismay that overcomes travellers with bright schemes as car after car filed off like cattle down a chute, thumping across the ramp, across the terminal parking lot, and then out to the highway. No one stopped or even seemed to notice me. Perhaps I should have held up Mr. Saito’s sign after all. Perhaps I should have juggled and danced. Perhaps I should have set my hair on fire and sung “Ave Maria.” But I doubt any of that would have helped. I was stranded in an industrial park, miles from the train tracks, on the opposite side of the peninsula from where I wanted to be.

  I walked for hours. I walked across long endless anonymous tracks of pavement, past equally anonymous houses, through a series of identical intersections, none of which were the least bit Japanese or exotic or memorable. The landscape was shaggy. The fields were shaggy. Everything was shaggy.

  On a map, the highway I wanted to reach looked very near, but the reality of the matter was just so much drudgery. It was only after I examined my maps for the third time that I realized the road I was walking on, Highway 227, did not intersect with the road I wanted, Highway 5, but actually ran parallel to it. I had been walking alongside Highway 5 for hours.

  Spouting such witticisms as “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I took a short walk across some shaggy-looking, unkempt fields and soon found myself on Highway 5. I was on the outskirts of Nanae Town, which was—and here’s an interesting coincidence—exactly the town I had planned on taking a train to before Mr. Saito talked me into going to the ferry port instead. In fact, just as I arrived, the very train I would have caught went rolling by at a zippy speed.

  There is nothing like wasting an entire morning to put you in the proper frame of mind. I came to Onokayama Station just as a torrent of black-suited junior-high-school students came pouring out in a barrage of “Harro’s!” and “Zis is a ben’s.”

  “Piss off,” I said with a growl.

  The streets leading into Nanae Town were wide and flanked with tall, leafy trees. Shaggy trees. A bicycle-and-pedestrian path ran down either side of the road, making it a perfect spot for hitching rides. And so it proved. The tenth car pulled over.

  Inside was a man not much older than I, dressed in a corduroy jacket and wearing a relaxed smile. His hair was slightly shaggy.

  I was bracing myself for something like, “I’m only going to the end of this block, can I let you off at the next tree?” when he said, “Sapporo?”

  One ride. All the way from Hakodate to Sapporo. One ride. It almost made up for my mindless trek across the barrenlands. I congratulated myself on being such an astute world traveller and climbed in.

  8

  IT WAS A DEAD-STRAIGHT, cruise-control highway of the type I hadn’t seen since Canada. We blew down it like a rocket in a wind tunnel. “You know,” said Takayuki, rather proudly, “Hokkaido has the highest number of traffic fatalities in Japan.”

  “Really? But the roads are so wide and straight,” I said.

  “Exactly. It is easy to fall asleep at the wheel or lose control on corners. It’s too fast. Too few obstacles. Drivers become relaxed. A lot of people die.”

  This is not the sort of thing you want to hear when you are hitching rides.

  Takayuki worked for a drugstore north of Sapporo, and within moments of introducing himself he had invited me back to his home to meet his family. A few weeks ago I would have accepted, but my funds were dangerously low, the clock was ticking, and my final destination was too near to allow—or enjoy—a leisurely detour.

  Takayuki Ideta, I realized, was a perfectly normal Japanese man. He had a wife, two kids, a house, a car. He wore a necktie and he liked baseball. “You are normal,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Average.”

  “Yes?”

  “You are the first normal, average person who has picked me up.”

  This bothered him. “Well, I suppose I am normal—but I’m not so average.” And for the rest of the trip he wore a slightly furrowed brow.

  Highway 5 is a magnificent road to travel along. It skirts the edge of Uchiura Bay, and we could see right across its cold, clear waters.

  Bamboo grass, thick and leafy—shaggy, really—had choked out other plants. It was everywhere. It overran abandoned farms and spilled over the edge of the road. It grew in trellises up telephone wires and it hung in vines around the poles. In southern Hokkaido, land is not so much cleared as it is wrestled free from bamboo grass. It was like a plague of crabgrass. It was Day of the Triffids in slow motion.

  I couldn’t get used to the sense of size. Everything seemed wide and open and thin on the ground. There was breathing space, elbow room, a landscape to look through. Nothing cramped the view, and the sky was grand and theatrical. The air seemed cleaner, too—alpine, chilled. If Hokkaido were a bottle, it would have cold condensation running down the sides.

  Communities were spaced out along the bay like a supply line, small towns hugging the shore. On an island without typhoons, the homes of Hokkaido were built up against the sea. In Kyushu, they would have been washed away.

  An American flag snapped in the wind as we passed through Yukumo, and I had trouble remembering where we were; my frame of reference kept slipping. The notes I took read like a drive through the foothills of my youth: birch trees, red barns, round silos, rolling pastures, ranch-houses, chicken coops. M
en in baggy jeans. Farmers driving tractors down the road, holding up traffic. I felt right at home.

  At Lake Tōya, behind a rim of mountains, there was a stark reminder that I was still in Japan, that I was still on an archipelago formed like molten pewter along a soldering joint, islands on the borders of tectonic plates: here at Lake Tōya were two very dramatic, very active volcanoes. They rose up in hammerheads, they grumbled and complained, and occasionally they coughed—deep, wet chest coughs. In 1977, Usuzan, the larger of the two, erupted, destroying a cable car and showering the lake, the valley, and the town with pyroclastic loam. The water went sludgy for weeks and volcanic mud washed up along the shore.

  The smaller of the two volcanoes, Shōwa-shinzan, first sputtered out of a farmer’s field back in 1943. The steaming, bubbling hole grew and grew, burning off the fields and forcing the people in the area to retreat. Today it stands at 402 metres. The lake itself is in a crater formed by a prehistoric volcanic eruption. Tōya was shrouded in mist the day I came through.

  “It is a cold country,” said Takayuki. “But the people are warm. I have two children, Masahiro and Satoshi, and I am glad that they will grow up in Hokkaido. It is freer. Cleaner.”

  We went west into the highlands, where the fields lay fallow, spread out like squares of textiles: rough canvas, unironed cotton, thick felt. Farmhouses were set high on hillocks and in among groves of trees. Takayuki was in no particular hurry to get to Sapporo, and he drove me from farm to farm, carefully pointing out which were the horses and which were the cows. “Cow,” he would say. “Cow. Cow. Horse.”