The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  Cover

  Author's note

  Chapter 1: Outposts

  Chapter 2: The Savage Island

  Chapter 3: Death in the North

  Chapter 4: Summer Lights, Summer Shadows

  Chapter 5: The Back of Japan

  Chapter 6: Buddha and the Floating Bridge of Heaven

  Chapter 7: The Thunder God's Eye

  Chapter 8: A Thousand Cranes, A Thousand Suns

  Chapter 9: Landscapes of the Moon

  Back cover

  P E N G U I N T R A V E L L I B R A R Y

  The Roads to Sata

  Alan Booth was born in 1946 in Leytonstone, London. He studied drama at Birmingham University. In 1970 he went to Japan to study Noh theatre and has remained there ever since. He has written extensively about Japan, including a book on Japanese folk festivals, Devils, Gods and Cameramen, and is also film critic for a Japanese newspaper. He lives in Tokyo with his wife and baby daughter.

  A 2000-Mile Walk through Japan

  Alan Booth

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  I am lucky in having among my friends a discerning publisher and a perspicacious editor. Though neither was professionally involved with this book, they both read or listened to all of it and were disturbingly frank in their criticism and equally purposeful in their encouragement. So my thanks to Ong Sok-Chzeng, for her incredulity and laughter, and to Timothy Harris, who knows a cricket from a grasshopper and was especially energetic in the removal of an anapaest.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R IB4

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in Japan by John Weatherhill, Inc. 1985

  First published in Great Britain by Viking 1986

  Published in Penguin Books 1987

  Copyright © Alan Booth, 1985

  All rights reserved

  Reproduced, printed and bound in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Limited, Member of the BPCC Group, Aylesbury, Bucks

  Typeset in Bembo

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ...the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

  Jaques

  in As You Like It

  Author's Note Few people (warns the publisher, grumbling) are likely to know where Sata is, so I had better locate it in this note. Sata is the name of the southernmost cape of the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. I walked there from Soya, the northernmost cape of the northernmost island, and the roads between, and the things I saw and heard and did along them, are the subjects of this book.

  Japan is a long country. If I had walked the same distance across the same latitudes in North America, the trek would have taken me from Ottawa to Mobile, Alabama; and if I had started in Europe, I would have marched from Belgrade through the Middle East to the Gulf of Aquaba. The distances I walked are given here in kilometers, not miles, because it is in kilometers that most Japanese think, and that I thought every morning, noon, and evening of my journey.

  If I could, I would individually thank the men, women, and children who populate these pages, but I never knew the names of most of them, and I have thought it in their interests to alter those names I did know. Where names are used, they are used in the Japanese manner: family name first, given name last.

  I have tried to avoid generalizations, particularly "the Japanese." "The Japanese" are 120,000,000 people, ranging in age from 0 to 119, in geographical location across 21 degrees of latitude and 23 of longitude, and in profession from emperor to urban guerrilla. This book is about my encounters with some twelve hundred businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, fishermen, housewives, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, soldiers, policemen, monks, priests, tourists, journalists, professors, laborers, maids, waiters, carpenters, teachers, innkeepers, potters, dancers, cyclists, students, truck drivers, Koreans, Americans, bar hostesses, professional wrestlers, government officials, hermits, drunks, and tramps.

  1

  Outposts

  One of the noodle shops at Cape Soya had a pair of loudspeakers perched high up above its door and out of these came, every five minutes, a song:

  The ice floes melt, the spring wind blows,

  the sweet brier blooms, the sea gull cries,

  far out to sea the smoke of foreign ships

  delights the eye at Soya Cape.

  Snow storms abate, the chill is past,

  the shellfish stir along the shore,

  while men throw wide the doors of their hearts,

  and the sea roars on at Soya Cape.

  It was late in June so most of Japan was dripping and gray—the rainy season was at its height. But Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands, was cracking under a heat wave. The sea did not roar or even mutter; it was intense and blinding, like in advertisements for citrus fruit. Only with great reluctance did the people of Cape Soya venture out into the scorching sunshine. Most of them slouched in the shade of their doorways watching the trickle of honeymoon couples vainly trying with the aid of the coin telescopes to pierce the forty-three kilometers of heat-haze that separated their noodle shops from the Soviet Union. Four young motorcyclists in gleaming black leather sat sweating and drumming on a table outside one of the restaurants, picking flies off the rims of their cola bottles,

  All night the wind blew into my room in the minshuku at Cape Soya and I couldn't sleep. The wind sang as it blew through the stovepipes till I thought there was a nest of birds singing: crafty birds, Japanese birds, transforming the pipes into their own loudspeaker. In the morning the owner of the minshuku gave me a small cotton handkerchief with a map of Hokkaido on it. It would come in handy if I took a wrong turn, he explained. Carefully, he unfolded the handkerchief and stamped the address and telephone number of his minshuku in the top right-hand corner.

  "What's the date?" he called out to his wife in the kitchen.

  "The twenty-eighth," she called back.

  With great concentration he inked a second rubber stamp and neatly stamped "June 28" under his address, stepping back to admire the effect. But it still didn't satisfy him, so below the date he wrote in small red characters "7:00 start."

  As though on cue the next-door speakers squealed into life and for the third or fourth time I retied my bootlaces.

  "It's the twenty-ninth," I remembered.

  listening to the taped voice shriek about shellfish, and gazing across at the four brand new Hondas they had parked within a yard of the end of Japan—latitude 45° 3′ N, the latitude of Milan, the Crimea, and Portland, Oregon—the furthest north you can get in Japanese eyes and still count yourself civilized.

  When the sun set the flies retired to the hills, the taped voice snapped off in a burst of static, and the northern evening grew a fraction cooler. Through the open door of the minshuku—the lodging house—where I was staying, I could see the prawn boats on the flat pink sea, so far away and so still that they looked like matchwood.

  "What time do you want to get up in the morning?" asked the owner of the minshuku. He was a tall man, brusque, unshaven, fiddling with his Dunhill lighter.

  "I don't know. Seven, I
suppose. I'd better get an early start."

  "Are you catching a bus?"

  "No, I'm going to walk."

  "Are you walking far?"

  "The length of japan."

  "It's the twenty-ninth!" the minshuku owner howled, scratching through the last figure of the date with his ball pen and scrawling the new figure in on top of it so that the result was a barely legible mess.

  “My wife is a donkey," he whispered.

  One of the Japanese friends who celebrated my last night in Tokyo with me had been propped against the sake shop wall by nine o'clock with bits of grilled liver stuck to his chin. But lie contributed to the conversation. "Count the steps," he had advised. "Count all the steps from north to south and you'll know how many there are."

  "What on earth would I want to know that for?"

  Then you could write a book about it. You can't write a book about a walk like that without knowing how many steps you've taken."

  "But I'll have maps and a compass and the road signs should tell me...

  "Take my tip and count the steps. No one I've ever met in all my life could tell you how many steps there are from Cape Soya to Cape Sata. I bet no one's ever counted them before. I bet you'd be the absolute first."

  He had gone to sleep after that with the liver still on his chin and two or three other friends had carried him out to a taxi, but the taxi driver had taken one look at him and sped off on a sudden urgent errand.

  I never did count the number of steps, but I counted the kilometers as best I could, and on that first extraordinary morning, for fifteen kilometers, I walked beside the bright sea.

  The walls and roofs of the sparse coastal villages were painted in what had once been primary colors, bleached to pale pinks and greens by the salt in the Siberian wind. The walls were made of plywood or cheap tin sheets printed to look like planks, and the roofs were patched with corrugated iron. Ahead of me to the southwest, beyond the invisible city of Wakkanai, loomed the awesome shape of Mount Rishiri, an island mountain far out to sea, its summit still covered with slivers of snow. The red doors of a fishermen's warehouse were open and on the floor sprawled a pile of large dead octopuses. I wished an old man in a kimono and a trilby hat good morning. "Gokurosan," he replied—"Thank you for taking the trouble."

  Turning inland at midday, I stamped for another eighteen kilometers through fields of dazzling green. The blistering sun struck the bright blue silos and their Dutch bran roofs, the hayricks set out like the squares on a chessboard, the tractor constructing them, the white hood of the woman driving the tractor, the fork of the man's rake as he piled up the hay and waved to me, a cigarette stuck between his teeth.

  By midafternoon my mouth felt like sandpaper and the empty beer cans by the side of the road were beginning to plague me like mirages. It was so hot and still that the stinking draft from the one truck that ground by was like a dip in the ocean. Hokkaido is the second largest of the Japanese islands, but it is by far the most thinly populated. A bare five percent of the population lives here—about one person to every four acres of land—and in the north of the island you can slog on for hours and. meet only crows. Late in the afternoon a tractor stopped and, without a word, the young driver handed me a bottle of orange juice. I stood and gulped it in the middle of the road while the tractor purred and the driver grinned down at me.

  "Where do you come from?"

  "England."

  "Ah, wonderful!"

  "How far's Numakawa?"

  "Just over the next rise."

  And, satisfied that the last drop of orange juice was gone, he took back the bottle and purred off up the road, turning into a field where the evening wind had just begun to ripple the grass. Numakawa was over five rises and round eight bends, and in the entrance hall of the ryokan—the Japanese-style inn—I sat on the step and drank two bottles of beer before finding the energy to unlace my boots, while the owners wife clapped her hands, wide-eyed with glee, and the maid stood choking on her giggles.

  Communities in Japan have effective ways of warning you that you've slept too long. There are sirens that blast you out of your futon— your bedding—just as dawn has broken, foghorns in the coastal villages, and complete loudspeaker systems that broadcast favorite melodies like "Sakura, Sakura" and "Colonel Bogey." In Numakawa there is a set of electric chimes that exactly duplicates the bongs of Big Ben and, if you sleep through the bongs, there is "Anchors Aweigh" for the children to troop into class to. The owner of the ryokan, Mr. Obata, was a teacher at the local primary school and had persuaded me to drop in on my way out of Numakawa the following morning to "show my face" to his pupils. By the time I reached the little single-story wooden school, the strains of "Anchors Aweigh" had long faded, for the school lay deep among the farms and the detour had taken me an hour out of my way. But the petrified squeaks and the breathless hush were definitely worth the extra boot rubber. The four children in Mr. Obata's class—three six-year-old boys and a seven-year-old girl—sat goggle-eyed on the edge of their benches while their teacher introduced them to the Thing from Outer Space.

  "Now, children, here's an Englishman who comes from England. Do you know where England is, Kazuko-chan?"

  "Zutto muko (far away)."

  "And do you think you can find it on our map?"

  A battered metal globe had been dragged out to the front of the class and the four children clustered round it, wriggling.

  "No, Kazuko-chan, that's Saudi Arabia. This is England," said Mr. Obata, tapping Iceland. Mr. Obata rocked back on his heels as he addressed his four pupils, gesturing at them with large sweeps of his arms.

  "Now, yesterday this foreigner walked thirty-three kilometers, all the way from Cape Soya. Where's Cape Soya, Kazuko-chan?"

  "Zutto muko (far away)."

  "Yes, and today this American is going to walk to Toyotomi. Where's that, Ryoichi-kun?"

  "Zutto muko."

  "And after that he's going to walk all through Japan.""

  "Oooooooo!"

  "How long do you think that'll take him?"

  "A week."

  "Two weeks."

  "Six months."

  "Five years."

  And by this time my feet were beginning to tingle, so after the children had each tried to lift my rucksack (the little girl was the only one who succeeded), I drank a cup of thin green tea in the teachers' room, while the headmaster guffawed quietly at his desk, and then set off in earnest for Toyotomi,

  The sun glared down on the unsurfaced road, on the white-cowled women constructing a drain, on the large brown snake that slithered miserably out of the way of a snorting tractor, and on me, my head wrapped in a sky-blue towel and my hands swollen to almost twice their normal size with sunburn, the skin slowly turning from scarlet to purple. I called at a farmhouse for a glass of water and received a tray of green tea and crackers and a recommendation that I see a doctor about my hands. In the wooded country above the fields flies clung to my face, and within seconds of taking off my boots and socks to bathe my feet in the exhilarating streams, my legs were mottled with spots of my blood the stream insects had sucked,

  By the time—late in the afternoon—that I reached the hot spring resort of Toyotomi, with its one dusty street and its dozen old ryokans, I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I had covered more than sixty kilometers in two days, through a heat wave everyone swore was unique and through country where often the only shade was in the clefts carved out of a quarry face. I managed to hobble from the ryokan to the public bathhouse—a feat in itself since the ryokan had provided me with a pair of the square wooden clogs called geta, which are not designed to soothe aching feet and which, anyway, were an inch and a half too short. But the sight amused the bathhouse attendants:

  "Here, look at this foreigner hobbling along. I told you they can't walk in geta."

  The bathhouse, mercifully, was almost deserted. Like a wall down the center of the huge tiled bathtub a cluster of gray volcanic rocks separated th
e men's portion from the women's, and out of these rocks trickled the natural hot spring water, a silky, morbid green. The bathhouse attendants had thoughtfully provided a net for skimming off the mosquitoes and flies that had died on the surface of the water, but I was too tired to bother and too badly blistered from the sun to do more than sit slumped on the tiled edge soaking my feet. I spent the best part of an hour in the bathhouse, limping back and forth between the bath and the cold-water tap where I emptied plastic bowl after plastic bowl of icy water over the burns on my face and neck.

  The food in the ryokan was meager, the maid surly, the room undecorated, and the black-and-white television would only work if you kept stuffing hundred-yen coins into it. In the morning, as I left, forty or fifty pensioners on crutches were climbing painfully into two large buses, while a loudspeaker in the neighboring ryokan broadcast "Auld Lang Syne," and a small delivery truck roared past with "Happy's Coming" in bright yellow English across the back of it.

  At ten to twelve the little restaurant opposite Horonobe station was empty. At twelve it was chock full. At one it was empty again. The third morning of my adventure had been a teeth-gritting twelve-kilo-meter limp along cinder paths, and I now sat in the restaurant drinking cold Sapporo beer and trying to reach a decision. My carefully plotted itinerary—plotted in Tokyo at a comfortable desk—and the neat little penciled numbers on my map all insisted I go on. My blisters, my sunburn, the joints of my toes, the arches of my feet, the balls of my feet, my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my gastrocnemii and the avail-ability of Sapporo beer were eloquently persuading me to spend the rest of the day in Horonobe. I reached the decision at a quarter past three and passed the next two hours in Horonobe's tiny park, sprawled out under a neatly labeled tree, watching young children poke potato crisps through the bars of a cage at a newborn bambi (the post-Disney Japanese word for a fawn).

  I had booked myself into a ryokan where the downstairs dining room was decorated with photographs of steam locomotives puffing through gorges and a large brownish reproduction of Millet's "Evening Knell." There were also some seashell pendants for sale inside each of which the teenage daughter had carefully glued a little cloth face, and there was a plastic mirror with "Tour Brings You Smile" printed across it in luminous letters. But, as I soon found out, the chief attraction of Horonobe (population 4,600) is its generous choice of bars (there are twenty-two). The third one I hobbled into that evening had a wonderful antique draft-beer cooling machine that the mama-san had to keep stoking with ice, a twenty-year-old Wurlitzer juke box, and a massive color television on which a red-bearded American wrestler was smashing a Japanese wrestler called Strong Kobayaslii over the head with a ringside chair.