by Alan Booth
I ordered a draft beer but had barely sipped it when a voice at my elbow said "Hello, please, please, hello," and a bald, beaming gentle-man was standing beside me, pouring me a glass of Very Rare Old Suntory.
"That's kind of you," I just had time to say, "but I don't drink whiskey. I prefer beer or sake."
"Hello, please. You, hello."
Without any ceremony at all, the beaming man took a thousand-yen note from his wallet and dropped it on the counter, instructing the mama-san as he did so to fetch more beer and a saucer of peanuts. This sort of thing happens occasionally and there is little point protesting. I did not protest.
The beaming man produced his business card, explaining at the same time, since foreigners are not expected to be able to read Japanese business cards, that his name was Ogawa and that he was the town's Director of Public Works. He insisted that we drink together and steered me away from the counter to where his colleagues were seated at a corner table—four young men in white shirts and ties and one older man in Wellington boots and a boiler suit covered with smudges of mud who rose to hug me but fell across the table and upset two whiskeys and an ice bucket. He sat down again, missing the edge of his chair, and when he had scrambled out from under the table, was helped to his feet, dusted down, and conducted to the door, smiling and bowing and knocking over a dish of dried squid on the counter. At the door he turned to wave, dislodging the Playboy calendar, and was finally escorted, giggling, out into the night.
We raised our glasses in a toast. The red-bearded American wrestler was hauling Strong Kobayashi round the ring by his hair, Paul Anka was singing "Diana." Apart from that, a lull had settled over the bar. The man in the boiler suit was the Town Clerk.
"Thank you for coming to Horonobe. Thank you for going to see our bambi."
"It's a quiet town."
"It's a peaceful town," carefully amended Mr. Ogawa. "I go to Tokyo three times a year and I come back with my ears ringing. Horonobe is peaceful. It has twenty-two bars and a bambi, what's more, and the people of the world must try to be friends. If I may ask, where were you born?"
"In London."
"Ah, yes. What part of London?"
"Leytonstone.
"A splendid town! England and Japan have much in common. You have a queen and we have an emperor. We are islands. We have long histories. The Americans don't really understand us at all, but the people of the world should try to be friends. Do you think that Leytonstone might like to have Horonobe for a sister town? We have a bambi and so on."
"I could ask."
"It is essential, you see, that the people of the world be friends." The red-bearded American had Strong Kobayashi entangled in the ropes and was bouncing the Japanese referee off a corner post. Mr. Ogawa slapped me gently on the back.
"It's not often we see a foreigner in Horonobe," he said. "It's a clean town, a peaceful town. We do our best. We give our residents the best we can. A bambi for the children
"And twenty-two bars."
"Let us drink"—Mr. Ogawa raised his glass—"to the friendship of all the people in the world."
We drank. Altogether about eight large mugs of beer and two full bottles of Suntory whiskey. And thus passed my fourth evening in Hokkaido. Truly, I thought, the people of the world are friends, for I was not permitted to pay for so much as the saucer of peanuts. It was still quite early when we left, but some of our party, Mr. Ogawa explained, had been out drinking till five or six that morning (the twenty-two bars of Horonobe are not subject to licensing laws) and it was felt that if the town hall's principal business of the next day—a baseball match against a team from Rishiri—was to be conducted with proper enthusiasm, the evening had better come to a fairly early end. We left arm-in-arm. The red-bearded American had long since been carried out of the cheering arena with blood all over his face.
The heat wave ended. The sky turned the color of bean curd and the rain came. Out on the lonely coast road where I stamped through the rain for the next six days, there was at least a sprinkling of bus shelters to rest in—shaky corrugated iron structures with nettles growing up out of the dirt floors and signs tacked to the rusty walls that said, in English and Japanese, "May Peace Prevail on Earth." Through holes in the corrugated iron I could watch the sea oozing gray and sullen up these far northern beaches, and in one of the lulls I took off my clothes and swam out till I could look back at the hulk of Mount Rishiri, its slivers of snow like cracks in a gutter.
The noodle shop I stopped in for lunch on the fifth day was run by one frail old lady who both cooked and served, and every time she came out to wait on a table she had to take off the clean slippers she wore in her kitchen and put on the grubby plastic sandals she used for walking on the concrete floor of her shop. She would set down her tray of bowls on the counter, lean back against the doorpost, and shuffle her feet in and out of the sandals without needing to use her hands. But this slowed her down, and at lunchtime in a crowded noodle shop slowing down is rarely tolerated.
"Oi! Where's my noodles?"
"What's up, then, grandma?"
"Why can't you get this table cleared?"
"Don't you give your customers glasses of water?"
"Does it take half an hour to open a beer?"
"You swam?" gasped the old woman incredulously when, on the stroke of one, the shop had emptied and she had flopped down to eat her own lunch of rice and pickles. The weather forecast had announced that morning that the sea off the southern tip of Kyushu, fourteen latitudes further south, was still too chilly to swim in.
"It wasn't any colder than an English sea," I explained.
"How courageous!" the old lady marveled.
I was finishing off my noodles when the Meiji Ice Cream man arrived to fill up the fridge. "All Englishmen," he told me, "even fish-mongers, wear ties."
"Are you really from England?" the old lady sighed. "Is England further away than America? How long would it take to get there? How much would it cost?"
The ice-cream man had finished stocking the fridge and was lounging across the lollipops with a cosmopolitan air, shedding light on various foreign countries.
"What foreign countries are over there?" the old woman wondered, pointing out of the window at the sea.
"Russia," said the ice-cream man, "Korea, China... ," and then after a pause for thought, "Bulgaria."
Before I left he told me how the fishermen of Hokkaido exemplified the Japanese character. "Foreign fishermen," he explained, "will take only the fish they know they can sell and throw the rest back. But Japanese fishermen will keep fishing till their boats are full, even though it means they'll have to sell their catch at half price. We Japanese are waakaahorikku (workaholics). We do everything with a vengeance." And the old woman and the ice-cream man both solemnly nodded.
Perhaps the vengeance of the Japanese fishermen is one reason why Hokkaido's famous herring shoals have almost totally disappeared and why the herring boats have had to turn in recent years to the much less romantic business of netting shrimps and crabs. No one writes ballads about shrimps and crabs, but the former glory of the herring fishers is the subject of Hokkaido's most popular folk song:
Ask the gull if the herring has come.
The gull replies: I am a bird inflight—
ask the waves.
Through the curtain of the rain that still fell on the sixth day I began to make out a range of high mountains ahead of me, the summit of the highest still dismally capped with a gray-white blank of snow. My map, published seven years earlier, showed a road that skirted these mountains along the coast, though the key to the map, helpfully translated into English, warned that it was "difficult in traffic of motor car." This turned out to be a bit of an understatement for, as I was told, the road had yet to be constructed. I decided to give the mountains a wide berth, anyway, and turn inland when I reached the city of Rumoi, but Rumoi was still a good three days away and the rain showed no sign of letting up. I walked with the hood of my anorak zipped tig
ht round my head, but the rain spattered into everything—boots, clothes, the cracks in the asphalt—dripping through the roofs of the bus shelters, imparting to the sea a texture like pocked lead.
Sometimes I would stop to rest at a small shop or to ask how many kilometers it was to the next village. And sometimes, especially when the shopkeeper was getting on in years, she would tell me she had no idea how many kilometers it was, but that it was perhaps a ri or a ri and a half The ri, the old Japanese measure of distance, has disappeared entirely from road signs and maps, and within ten years it will have vanished from the language. One ri, say the conversion tables, equaled 3.927 kilometers, but that is nearly irrelevant. One ri—as I came to know in practice—was the distance that a man with a burden would aim to cover in an hour on mountain roads. The kilometer was in-vented for the convenience of machinery. The ri was an entirely human measure, which is why it had no chance of surviving. We tell the time in digits and bleeps, and distance is not distance if you can't divide it by ten.
On the long empty road I would walk for hours and meet no one I could stop and talk to. Occasionally a car bounced past, ploughing up the loose pebbles and skidding round the ruts and pits. More occasion-ally I passed a gang of workmen high up on the protective netting of a cliff face who stared down at me and muttered to each other, too far away for me to hear what they were saying. On these first lonely days the little isolated shops were not only sources of information, but shelters, rest centers, snack bars, and, together with minshukus and ryokans, the only real indicators I had of how life is lived on the north Hokkaido coast....
I unsling my pack and walk into a shop. The middle-aged woman who runs it is watching the midday quiz show on an eighteen-inch color television set. She can change the program by remote control, and in the lower right-hand comer of the screen there is a second screen, a tiny black-and-white one, so that she can monitor what is happening on other channels. Her wares consist of chewing gum, ice cream, soft drinks, cookies, and cellophane-wrapped bread rolls with bean jam in the middle.
"No beer?" I groan.
She does not sell beer but takes instant pity and raids her own massive three-door refrigerator.
"What a life!" she sighs. "It's ten past twelve and you're the only customer I've had all day. There's no point in having a shop here. All the fishermen and farmers have got cars so they drive into Wakkanai or Rumoi to do their shopping. It's a hard life for the poor like us." And she sighs again as the quiz show is interrupted by a commercial for digital watches.
In the back of one little shop I stopped in there was a woman with a smile so astonishingly lovely that it shot off her face like a beam of light. I glimpsed her while I was buying an apple. She was very tiny and had a grotesquely hunched back, and she sat in front of a huge electric knitting machine that someone had bought her as a present;
a brand-new electric computerized knitting machine—slip in a card and out comes a cushion cover. I don't think I have ever seen anyone look prouder than that little hunchbacked woman sitting there smiling at me, wanting me to notice her knitting machine.
There was a lull in the rain on the seventh day and I walked along the still empty coast road and saw an eagle ripping the guts out of a crow. On the main street of one village, an old woman in a dark kimono with a scarf round her head and no teeth in her mouth came up to me and, to my amazement, put her arms round my neck and, when I had bent down to her, put her cheek against my cheek and asked me where I lived.
"In Tokyo,I said, and she hugged me as tight as her shaky little body would let her.
"I have three grandsons in Tokyo," she said. "Three grandsons. Thank you. Take care. Good luck to you." And she patted me on the back, twice, smiling and then sighing, and the rain came down again and I walked on toward the snowy mountains.
It was dark by the time I reached the outskirts of the little town of Tomamae, and the rain was still pelting down, smacking the black gravel of the empty road and bouncing back in millions of crisp white explosions. I sloshed quickly past the rows of thin red-and-white striped poles that had been set up along the road for a festival, and under the strings of pink paper lanterns that bobbed and swung between them. The rain shook and spun the lanterns so that clouds of water cascaded off them. I passed a shrine where stalls had been erected and where one or two stallkeepers sat under their dripping canvas awnings, scowling at the shattered reflections of the lanterns in the puddles that swamped the gravel. I hurried on as fast as I could and met not a single reveler on the drenched streets.
In the ryokan three little children were screaming that they wanted to go out and buy candyfloss. We hung my dripping clothes over a stovepipe and I went down to the bathroom and wallowed for half an hour in water as hot as I could stand it. The hot smooth water nuzzled my thighs and shoulders and stomach, and first stung, then softened, the blisters on my heels and toes. I closed my eyes and the distant sound of a festival drum—a deep sodden thump of a sound practically drowned in the shush of the rain—came floating through the bathroom window. It went on for five minutes. Then it stopped, and there was only the rain thudding on the glass and in the yard and on the tiles.
Occasionally the bus shelters I sat to rest in had posters on the corrugated iron walls. In one, a lively advertisement for gravestones was stuck up next to a recruitment poster for the "Self-Defense Forces (the label coined in 1954 to get round the awkward problem of Japan's maintaining an army, navy, and air force while its postwar constitution specifically forbids them). The poster showed two men stripped to their vests arm-wrestling across a mess-hall table before an admiring audience of four uniformed women all of whom had gunmetal fillings in their teeth.
The mist lay so thick on the hills that it hid them, and the rain continued to flatten the sea. Fronds of dull green and orange seaweed were splattered, rotting on the stony beaches, and between the fronds of seaweed lay the usual beach ornaments: pink plastic detergent containers, a broken umbrella, white polythene bags, tires, beer cans, orange peel, and a rusty bicycle half buried at the line of the tide. I drank coffee at a drive-in that called itself a "pit-in," and the rain stopped, leaving the sea a silver calm.
The ryokan in which I spent my eighth night was an elaborate affair with an entrance like a Western-style hotel and a carpeted foyer stacked with pinball machines. The bath water had all the signs of coming from a natural hot spring—it was dull with thick black bits floating in it—and the guests ate their dinner in a small communal dining room, the first guests facing the color television set, the latecomers swiveling to watch it over their shoulders.
The program that evening was worth watching. An interviewer was talking to foreign students at a hostel in Tokyo. Most of the students had only just arrived and could speak little or no Japanese, so the interviewer was having a fine old time cracking jokes about their language and the color of their hair, and getting them to play Japanese children's games to the delight of the adult studio audience, who had not played such games since they were toddlers. But one young man from Greece spoke good Japanese and had obviously spent a lot of time studying the country and its culture. When the interviewer asked him about his hobbies, he replied that his main hobby was learning to sing enka—popular Japanese ballads.
"Enka! Enka!" shouted the interviewer. The studio audience giggled in anticipation.
"And what singers of enka do you particularly like?"
"I quite like Mori Shinichi," said the young Greek.
"Mori Shinichi! Mori Shinichi!" The giggles turned to snorts and nudges.
"Sing us a Mori Shinichi song, then." And so the brave young Greek took the microphone and, in front of all the cameras, sang:
Is a flower not a woman,
a man a butterfly...
The rest of his song was lost in the howls of laughter from the studio audience and the noise made by the half a dozen diners in the ryokan who had put down their chopsticks and were chortling at the screen.
"Look at that! Ha ha ha! A fo
reigner trying to sing enka!"
After dinner, in the ryokan's little bar, while the juke box played "Unchain My Heart" and one of the diners crooned "Danny Boy," I had an interesting conversation with a myna bird who did a perfect imitation of a slightly hysterical Japanese woman laughing at a myna bird. To anything I said in a polite tone of voice, the bird would re-ply "Ah, so desu ka? (Oh, is that so?)" But if it thought I was being rude, it would screech, birdlike, and on one occasion drew a tasty spurt of blood from my finger.
"Sayonara" it said politely as I went upstairs to get a bandaid.
The menu on the wall of the bar was headed "Fizz" and included one concoction called Blue Hawaii and another called Tennessee Waltz. There was a bust of Beethoven on the counter, with welts and cracks across its head that I suspect had been inflicted during the myna bird's rages.
"Why don t you teach Kyu-chan (the myna bird) English?" suggested the woman behind the bar. "He's as gentle as anything if he thinks you're sincere. And he's a very quick learner." The woman had stuffed two large dishes down the front of her dress for breasts and was dancing a rumba to amuse the three customers. I didn't want to guess which "Fizz" she was drinking, and anyway I was so dead tired—and the dishes seemed only to flatten her further—that I quickly decided to call it a night.
"That's all right," said the woman when I asked for the bill. "You can pay in the morning before you leave. That will be much more convenient, won't it?"