Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  Then, rising up from the flatlands was Mount Yōtei, the Northern Fuji. The peak disappeared into the overcast sky.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, and Takayuki smiled. “The Northern Fuji,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  There are countless such “Fujis” across Japan, and I have seen easily half a dozen of them, so many in fact that I once referred, in jest, to Minamata City’s small hill, Nakaoyama, as “the Minamata Fuji.” I was taken aback when my friends took me seriously. “Yes,” said one. “The Minamata Fuji. I suppose it is.” Very little irony in Japan.

  Of the various Fujis I have seen, the only one which lived up to its name was the verdant, perfect cone of Mount Kaimon in southern Kagoshima. The peak of Mount Kaimon rises up, green against the sea, lush and perfectly symmetrical—and quite unlike the real Mount Fuji, which is in essence a large scrap pile of volcanic scree. The real Fuji, with the traffic clattering by and the disgrace of factories cluttered around her hem, is dreary. Mount Fuji looks better the farther away you go. From a train, say, or, even better, on a postcard. From an airplane, it is positively stunning. (Mind you, I may be biased. I slogged my way up Mount Fuji in a fog bank, and the view from the top was about the same as you’d get if you stuffed your head in a sack of flour.)

  We stopped for some of Mount Yōtei’s health-restoring waters, available in conveniently priced bottles marked “health-restoring water,” and Takayuki filled his tank with gasoline.

  I made a feeble I’ll-pay type of gesture (hands patting pockets as though searching for a wallet), but my offer was generously declined. And a good thing, too. In Japan, you might as well be filling your tank with cognac or fine perfume for the amount of money you are paying.

  We came down onto the central plains, and the city of Sapporo glowed gold in the distance.

  9

  SAPPORO IS TOKYO NORTH, a vast, glittering love affair in the heart of Hokkaido. Sapporo is where all roads lead. I arrived at dusk and checked into the Washington Hotel, into a room without a window, and then hit the streets. I was elated. A new night, a different city. It reminded me of an axiom that Jim Drawbell, a friend of the family, used to live by: If you are in an interesting area, in a place you have never been before, and you have twenty bucks in your pocket—you own the world.

  Night is good to Sapporo. The glass buildings shimmer, the crowds flutter past, and neon spills out in pools of light. The city has 1.7 million people in it, yet it doesn’t feel crowded in the least. The streets are wide and straight; the addresses are logical—a rarity in Japan—and the main boulevard evokes images of Buenos Aires, Dallas, Houston, Calgary. Anywhere but here.

  There is a reason for this. The city was laid out by an American architect. Sapporo is as American as Hakodate is Russian; there are touches everywhere, from the spacious layout to the height of the buildings, from the gaudy Pachinko USA to the splashy Hollywood Shop (“USA Movie Character Goods”), from the glass and steel to the kids with Stars ’n’ Stripes tote bags.

  Which makes it odd, yet inevitable, that Sapporo’s most highly touted symbol would be a small clocktower, tucked in behind modern structures. It is the city’s only surviving example of Russian architecture. I walked out to see this landmark, was suitably underwhelmed, and then retraced my steps back to the city’s nefarious Susukino District.

  Susukino is one of Japan’s largest, liveliest nightlife zones. A mix of family entertainment, teenage game centres, rowdy pubs, overpriced discos, and sanitized brothels, it is all things to all people. I couldn’t afford another night on the town—either financially or physically—but I could wander at will and marvel once again at the vitality of the Japanese urban night. And with my senses still humming, I returned to the windowless rooms of my hotel.

  That night, I dreamt of Buddha.

  He was standing beside the highway and he was holding up a sign. It read: Hello, everybody. I am the Buddha. Please don’t kill me. Then, just when I reached him, he drove off in a small Toyota car.

  There is a Zen saying: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” This is why I gave up on Zen. It was simply too provocative a statement, one that seemed painfully contrived, like replying to the question “What is the Buddha?” with the answer “Dried dung.” (An actual exchange between Zen monks.)

  If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Reams of commentary have been written about this statement, much of it of the esoteric angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin variety. Endless interpretations are possible. Semantics are dissected. Debates are waged. It is argued that the Buddha is not a real person but a state of mind, a catalyst to Enlightenment. If you think you have met the Buddha, you haven’t. The Buddha you can see is not the real Buddha; it is an illusion. Destroy it. Other interpretations have been less esoteric: It is the Buddha you meet on the road, and he must be killed. Why? Because you have to move beyond the realm of opposites, beyond Thou and I, beyond subject and object. Beyond even the Buddha.

  One thing that has always puzzled me about Zen, and indeed most Eastern paths to enlightenment, is that it always ends up back where it started. The boy searches for his ox. He finds it. The world disappears … and then he returns to the market, to the everyday. If Zen Buddhism is about the everyday, why depart in the first place? Why not simply enjoy the flow of characters who enter and depart, the moments that come and go?

  If life is an illusion, maybe the illusion is not all that bad. Maybe the illusion is life. Maybe the solution is not breaking through, but pulling back, learning to embrace the illusion, learning to accept the transient world around us, learning to live among mirages.

  If you meet the Buddha on the road, do not kill him. Hold out your thumb. Who knows, he might just offer you a ride.

  10

  SAPPORO CONSIDERS ITSELF one of the “Three Great Brewery Cities in the World,” the other two being Milwaukee and Munich. You know it’s true because the Hokkaido Tourist Board said so, and why would they lie?

  Central Japan may be the land of saké, and southern Japan the birthplace of shōchō, but in the heart of Hokkaido it is beer that reigns supreme. The Sapporo Brewery, established in 1876, is the oldest in Japan. They produce a light blond lager that sparkles in the mouth and reconfirms my belief in God. Even better, the brewery gives free samples when you take a tour. Free tour. Free beer. Which is to say, I decided in the interest of cultural appreciation to visit the site.

  I didn’t understand a damn thing. There were no English explanations and I tagged along with a handful of visiting Tokyoites who had the annoying habit of saying “Is that so?” every time the guide opened her mouth. “Good afternoon, my name is Ariko.” “Is that so?”

  I didn’t know, or want to know, the Japanese words for yeast, barley, malt, or fermentation. All I wanted was the free samples, and sure enough, once we had toured the historic red-brick building, we were seated in a hall and given a selection of beer to taste. “Excellent!” said I. “Enlightening!”

  So good was the beer—and Japan makes some of the best lagers—I decided to take another tour. And another, by which time it was becoming very familiar. Same swollen copper vats, same long hallways, same tour guide, same nods, same So desu ka?’s And more beer. It was wonderful. So wonderful, I decided to go through a fourth time. But there was no one else in line, and when the guide saw me staggering up, she gave me a wry half-smile and said, “You again?”

  “Is very interesting,” I replied, trying not to wobble too much.

  She cast a scolding look at me, the type women reserve for men who think they are being awfully clever but aren’t. She was dressed in a trim red blazer and a stewardess-type hat, but she wasn’t giggly or girlie at all. Her smile was ruthlessly intelligent. “Do you really want to take the tour again?” she said. “Is that really why you keep coming back?”

  “Well,” I said, “we could skip the tour.”

  She looked down at her wristwatch. “Let’s just walk through it,” she said. “We can talk.”

&
nbsp; I ended up spending most of the afternoon with her. She thought I kept going through the tour because I had a crush on her, and I was careful not to inform her otherwise. “I get off in twenty minutes,” she said. “Meet me at the main gate.”

  Now, I would like to say Ariko and I drove through Sapporo in a sports car with the wild wind in our hair, spilling champagne and laughing with carefree abandon, before retiring to my hotel room (which had somehow sprouted both a view and a canopy bed) to make mad, passionate love for hours. But we didn’t. What we did do was go for coffee. And we talked late into the night, sharing small confidences and comparing the separate tangents of our lives. She had been to Australia, had seen every Audrey Hepburn movie ever made—twice—and she enjoyed being a tour guide. She didn’t love it, but it was all right. “You do get tired of beer after a while,” she said, a statement beyond my frame of reference, akin to getting tired of air.

  Ariko had a single dimple, which only appeared when she frowned or when she sat back to consider something. She was, of course, beautiful. But one gets so used to seeing beautiful women in Japan that it hardly seems notable after a while. A female friend of mine made a similar observation about California, of all places, where she got so used to seeing tanned, trim, tousle-haired men that after a while they hardly registered. Ariko looked me over and said she liked my eyes, about the only good feature I have. “Blue,” she said, “like ice.”

  I always find it odd when other people find me exotic. It is a strange world indeed. I went back to my room in a very cheerful mood, singing my new theme song, “A Hitchhiker on the Road to Love” (Bobby Curtola, circa 1959).

  My burgeoning idyll with Ariko seemed destined to turn into something more—until reality in all its pustule-pocked, wart-infested, joy-destroying majesty came bursting back on the scene. Ariko and I promised to meet again the next day (she invited me to her apartment to hear recordings of Ainu music, and needless to say I suddenly became very interested in Ainu music), but my time was running out as quickly as sand through a glass. Back in the real world, the non-travel world, I was caught up in this odd arrangement whereby I agreed to spend all day doing things that were unbearably dull and monotonous for which I was compensated financially, much in the manner of a sea lion being rewarded with a halibut. Perhaps you’ve heard of this concept; it’s called a “job.” I have never really grasped the logic behind the system, but I did know that losing one’s “job” could have dire consequences in the food and shelter departments. I had already used up my paid holidays at this point, and most of my sick days, and I had even cancelled two weeks of company classes. When I called my supervisor from Sapporo, hoping to extend my furlough just a few more days—in the interests of a brewing romance, so to speak—the reception was chilled, to say the least. I practically got frostbite of the ear from the receiver. “One week,” I was told. “One week, and if you are not back at your desk we will have to”—and here is where it got scary—“reconsider our options.” When a Japanese company says they are going to reconsider their options, the only thing you can do is fall to your knees and beg for mercy and forgiveness.

  One week. That’s all I had. One week to get up to Cape Sōya and then back to Sapporo in time to catch a flight to Kyushu, but not before—please God please—I had a chance to consummate my relationship with Ariko. With any luck, by the time I got back to Sapporo, the cherry blossoms would be in bloom. (My mind was already feverishly churning up images of Ariko and me entwined on a bed of sakura.)

  In my cell-like hotel, where all the rooms looked inward, I laid out several maps across the bed and counted off the mileage. My heart sank in a cesspool of despair. It couldn’t be done. Even someone as cartographically challenged as I could see that. I’d be lucky to make Cape Sōya at all. In fact, I had to leave Sapporo right now! Swallowing the pain, I called Ariko and cancelled our date (talk about frostbite of the ear). The irony was worthy of an Alanis Morissette riff: It’s like a chance for a fling, when you’re already late. Isn’t it ironic. Just when everything was going my way, I had to leave, proving once again that God can be a real bastard when He wants to be.

  I left Sapporo in an understandably foul mood, taking a subway to the end of the line at Azabu Station and then walking out to Highway 231. It was already late in the day, and I wanted to clear the city and reach open country by nightfall.

  Ariko didn’t stay angry. She even tried to keep in touch, and for a while I received postcards and letters in carefully printed English, with the a’s written like those on a typewriter, with the curly bit on top. Ariko’s English was pieced together like the words in a ransom note, the phrases and expressions pasted up in long, interminable strings that only occasionally made sense. “Please, many times thinking this season? Take care the hot weather.”

  I dabbled in fantasies: flying back to Sapporo, showing up at her door in a black cape and a Zorro mask, with a bottle of wine and two tickets to ANYWHERE clutched in my hand. But Ariko didn’t need rescuing. That may have been part of the problem. She was a funny, confident, level-headed person. She liked her life and she wasn’t looking for an escape hatch. I was looking for: Someone to rescue. Someone to sweep up and carry away. Someone to save.

  I never answered Ariko’s letters.

  11

  THE ISHIKARI RIVER reaches the sea in a lacklustre fashion. Slow and silted, it threads its way aimlessly through sand dunes before fanning out into a lonely, windswept delta. A red-and-white-striped lighthouse peered above the dunes and grassy hills. The waves rolled in. And low across the horizon, the sun was setting fire to the sky.

  “I like it here,” said Mr. Tawaraya. “It calms your mind.”

  Mr. Tawaraya, a quiet, elderly man, had stopped for me on the highway and taken me here—to the Ishikari delta. It was his favourite spot.

  Forget Zen, I thought. Forget the mindless, repetitive rituals, the monasteries, the nonsense koans; all one needs is a windy cape, solitude, and a mind that needs calming.

  So taken was I with this spot that I decided to spend the night under the protective windbreak of a grassy dune. When I pulled my pack from the back of his truck, Mr. Tawaraya became adamant. No, this wouldn’t do, camping out on a beach miles from the nearest town. We wrangled over this awhile and I relented only when he began citing imaginary weather forecasts. “The rains are coming,” he said in his best Old Testament voice. “Heavy rains.” He hinted darkly at flash floods, fierce winds, ants, snakes, and—

  “Snakes? Did you say snakes?”

  We drove up the coast, looking for an inn. Mr. Tawaraya took a detour through the sand-swept streets of Ishikari Town, but the place was deserted, as though the entire population had headed out on caravan, leaving signs creaking in the wind and televisions flickering behind curtained windows. This wasn’t a town, this was the Mary Celeste. For some reason, we were speaking in whispers.

  A jogger suddenly appeared and sprinted past, down the blue-dusk streets of Ishikari, knees chopping the air, arms keeping time like a metronome. On the back of his jacket, in sharp, stylized letters, was the message JAPAN OLYMPIC SKI TEAM.

  To my horror, Mr. Tawaraya drove up beside him, rolled down the window, and—as we crept slowly alongside—tried to speak to the man. “Excuse me, but my friend is looking for a room and I was wondering—”

  The jogger was immediately pissed off. “Don’t know,” he said as he tried desperately not to lose his rhythm.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Tawaraya. “But you see, we were—”

  “I don’t know,” said the exasperated young man—who did indeed look very Olympian, I must say.

  “Well,” said Mr. Tawaraya, as we continued to drive slowly alongside him. “We thought maybe you lived in the area and—”

  “Sapporo,” said the man, breathing harder, jogging faster. “Came from Sapporo.”

  “You don’t say? You ran all the way from Sapporo, imagine that. Well, sorry to bother you. Please do your best.” We accelerated away from him, but it was t
oo late, the runner faltered and lost his stride. I looked back and saw him walking in a circle, hands on his hips, cursing.

  The incident reminded me, oddly enough, of my grandmother, a wonderful old dear who passed away during my first year in Japan. One of my strongest memories of her involves hitchhiking. I was fourteen years old and Grandma was taking me down to see a chiropractor in the town of Peace River. (I had buggered up my neck by catching an unannounced football with the back of my head.) You have to understand that this stretch of northern Canadian highway is nothing but trees, mosquitoes, muskeg, and moose. It is as wild as the Alaskan Highway, but with less traffic. As we drove down a steep hill, there beside the road was a hitchhiker, a long-haired, head-banded young man with a guitar slung over his back. This in itself was not remarkable. The North is scattered with the remains of romantic cretins who think they can hitch north and live off the land. It is a one-sided romance, alas, because the North doesn’t exactly love them back with the same simple-minded sincerity. Those hippies who managed to survive usually left bitter and disappointed; there is nothing Rousseauian or utopian about the North.

  This young man waved his thumb and, to my utter and profound amazement, Grandma pulled over. Grandma never stopped for hitchhikers. Yet here she was signalling right and turning onto the side of the road—slowly. Grandma needed at least a quarter-mile any time she wanted to come to a complete stop; she tended to eschew brakes and simply let air resistance and dwindling momentum do the trick. If there was the slightest downhill curve, you could be coasting for hours, if not days. For a teenager like myself, this was a painful thing to experience. One of my long-standing dreams was to attach a parachute-brake, like the kind they put on dragsters, to the back of Grandma’s ’72 Ford Falcon. “Need to stop, Grandma? No problem.” Whoommp!