The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The fourteenth day was brilliant hot—the sort of day when indolence was an even greater hazard than dogs. I turned off the road and tramped down a scorching path through fields to a small, sheltered hot spring where I lounged for an hour, trying to read the mineral analysis in the changing room, sipping what tasted like liquid sulfur from a dented metal cup on a chain.

  I made an easy day of it, and after twenty-three slow, flat kilometers I strolled into the little town of Tobetsu. At the ryokan, there was a choice of slippers and the owner's wife greeted me with a kneeling bow and with a cup of green tea that I sipped as I perched on the upstairs window ledge, listening to the chirruping of the river. The owner's wife cut flowers in the garden and brought them up to me—two large white lilies and a blood-red camellia—arranged in such a casual way that no effort seemed involved at all. But I had watched her in the garden from my seat at the window, measuring the stalks, trimming them with her eye. There are ryokans and ryokans, but I found few like this one, where everything in sight had been chosen with care—from the handmade paper fan on my table to the scroll in the alcove with its two wild persimmons.

  The owner had a soft round face and a quiet voice, and after dinner we sat in his living room together sipping beer that I knew his wife had gone out specially to buy. You could hear the river from the living room too, cooling the night with its plashing.

  My grandfather was a samurai in the province of Awa—nowadays the eastern part of the island of Shikoku. He kept a martial arts academy where he trained the sons of farmers. Awa was such rich country then. You could scatter seeds on the bare hills and watch them grow. Our family had lived there for centuries...."

  His wife brought us a dish of cherries.

  "When the old feudal government fell and the restoration of the emperor took place—what year would that be... ? Meiji gannen— 1868 by Western reckoning—all the lords of Awa were dispossessed. One by one they lost their lands. My grandfather ended up a ronin..."

  There was a flicker of embarrassment in the owner's smile.

  A ronin, you know—a samurai without a master. He was left with no lord, no responsibilities, no duties, no reason to stay in the place where he was born. So he packed his bags and came north to Hokkaido—two thousand kilometers, would it be? It must have been an extraordinary journey in those days. My grandfather was one of the pioneer settlers. He built a house here in Tobetsu. Married here, died here...."

  That night I lit a mosquito coil for the first time. Swarms of mosquitoes came up off the river and the old Japanese house with its gaps and cracks afforded no protection against them. It is often said that Japanese houses are built for summer, not for winter; and in this hard, far northern place, where the cool July drafts in the rooms seemed evidence of that, I thought about the lives of the old pioneers and of the snow that covered their thin wooden lintels.

  The smoke from the mosquito coil drifted through the little room, scenting the air with summer. Across the river, still faintly purling, children were letting off fireworks late into the night. But I was asleep five minutes after my head touched the pillow. I have only fond memories of Tobetsu and my dreams there were gentle ones.

  There was a fierce wind on the bridge across the Ishikari River, and it took me nearly twenty minutes to battle it. Ahead of me, against the haze of the mountains, I began to make out the distant high-rises of the city of Sapporo, site of the 1972 Winter Olympics and the administrative capital of the island. The car cemeteries grew more and more frequent—acres of brightly colored metal, wheelless, impotent, still oddly condescending. It had taken me fifteen days to reach Sapporo— 370 kilometers from the start of my journey. It would have taken a motor car perhaps nine hours.

  On the road into the city I was twice greeted in English. At a drive-in a young truck driver jumped out of his cab and said, "You foot, yes, and good for walk, but sun day—rain day, oh, Jesus Christ!"

  Further on, a businessman stopped his car to offer me a lift and, clearly puzzled by my refusal, said, "Then what mode of transportation are you embarking?"

  Japanese slipped out: "Aruki desu."

  "Aruki?"

  "Aruki."

  A digestive pause.

  "Do you mean to intend that you have pedestricized?"

  I nodded. He drove away, shaking his head.

  That evening, with my rucksack unpacked in a hotel room and twenty-four hours of lounging ahead of me, I strolled across the railway tracks to celebrate the completion of the first leg of my journey at the largest beer garden in Japan. The Biiru-en, or Beer Park, is actually the old disused Sapporo brewery, built in 1887, a dark, massive, red-brick complex like Victorian engine sheds sprouting ivy. The black brewery chimney bears the sign "Sapporo Beer," and the labels on the bottles celebrate the holy trinity: "München-Sapporo-Milwaukee." Students and office workers crammed the trestle tables, slamming their tankards down on the wooden tops, shouting, singing, rolling from side to side, ordering beer (spelled "bier") by what looked like the gallon, and occasionally stumbling off in the direction indicated by two signs that said "Herren" and "Damen."

  The tables out on the lawn were quieter than those inside, and I ambled towards them past a line of parked taxis where the taxi drivers slouched, chain-smoking, over their bonnets.

  "Japan! Japan!" said one of the drivers, scowling and jabbing his finger at me.

  "Pardon?"

  "Japan!Japan!Japan!Japan!"

  "Amerika," giggled the office girls at whose table I sat, and as the waiter swabbed down the table in front of me, they gathered up their handbags, still giggling, and left.

  I ordered the largest mug of draft beer on the menu and a dish of mutton-and-cabbage which the Japanese find so outlandish that they have dubbed it jingisu kan (Ghenghis Khan) after the grandfather of the greatest barbarian they ever jabbed at. The beer, as always, was about one-third froth, but a single portion of Ghenghis was so huge that it took an hour to eat—compensation for the loss of fluid ounces if not for the loss of office girls.

  At eight the air took on a northern chill and the tables on the lawn began to empty. One by one the customers hailed taxis or threaded their way back into the jam-packed halls. I watched a young foreigner —I guessed an American—leading two Japanese girls toward the exit—one by the hand, gazing dreamily ahead of her, the other a yard behind, flirting with his back.

  And all the people of the world are friends, I thought. Lovely sentiment, lovely girls. I watched them till they were out of sight, then I groaned and bent to my mutton.

  2

  The Savage Island

  The young women who operate the lifts at Sapporo Tower are well trained. As soon as the lifts are full they turn their backs on the passengers and politely address the instrument panels.

  "Many thanks for your generosity in visiting us and a profound welcome to Sapporo Tower. We are now on our way to the observation platform. We are passing the offices on the second floor and the shops on the third floor. There is a souvenir stall on the observation platform and a tourist information bureau near the first-floor entrance. Please make free use of all our facilities." (An inclination of the head to the emergency call button.) "The television antenna that tops Sapporo Tower is 147.2 meters above the ground. The observation plat-form is 90.8 meters above the ground. The digital clock on the outside of the tower is 69.98 meters above the ground."

  The lift floats to a halt, the doors swish open, the instrument panel is thanked for its patronage, and the passengers drift across to the plate-glass windows and grin down at the city spread below them.

  Sapporo was laid out in 1869 and has a street plan like New York's. Its straight roads cross at right angles, its blocks are numbered according to the cardinal points of the compass. The result is a checkerboard that was considered at the time of the city's founding to be "modern" and "Western." Ironically, the Japanese city that Sapporo most resembles in this respect is Kyoto, laid out on an exactly similar pattern in the year 794 in imitation of
China's three-thousand-year-old capital of Ch'ang-an. "Modernity" is an oddly blinkered concept. The little stream that flows through Sapporo has been made to flow in a dead

  straight line. The broader avenues are lined with trees, and the trees have been planted exact distances apart. The city viewed from Sapporo Tower is a clear contradiction of the distaste for symmetry that Japanese aesthetics are held to embody. It is a model of cleanliness and order and, as such, seems only to underscore the "foreignness" of Hokkaido.

  One point of interest not visible from the tower is a narrow avenue of shops that stretches across eight of the city's central blocks. The high-rise buildings have hidden it from sight and, in any case, it has been roofed over and converted into an aakeedo—an arcade. It is called Tanuki Koji—Badger Alley—and I spent an hour strolling up and down it.

  The badger is a magical animal in Japan, able to take on human form. So is the fox, but the fox is malevolent whereas the badger is simply mischievous. He is best known for his phenomenal sake consumption, for the equally phenomenal size of his scrotum, for the nighttime drumming he performs on his belly, and for his skill in tricking innocents out of their cash. In the early 1870s a parcel of land was sold to a man called Matsumoto Daikichi who built a theater on it. Japanese theaters have been notorious since the seventeenth century as magnets for seekers of illicit pleasure. That is one reason why, in 1629, the government banned public performances by women, and why male actors still traditionally perform the female roles in Kabuki (thus encouraging a still more illicit pleasure). But government edicts did not prevent the theaters from continuing to attract fans of "the floating world," and the area round Mr. Matsumoto's theater was soon dotted with tea shops, bars, and places that specialized in less public entertainments. Sapporo was a boom town then, and many of its residents were frontiersmen who had come to Hokkaido in search of their fortunes. These hard-working, hard-drinking trappers and miners found them-selves irresistibly drawn to the new pleasure quarter. There, beguiling creatures of the night, their powdered necks magical in the glow of the lanterns, proved able to spirit away their cash quite as competently as any badger. They first called the area Shirokubi Koji—White-Neck Alley—in honor of its principal attractions. But perhaps at the instigation of the city fathers the name was changed to Tanuki Koji, and it was known after that, as the badger is, for its nocturnal liveliness, its enchantment, and its trickery.

  Today, nothing much is left to indicate Tanuki Koji's virile past. It has become an avenue of fashionable clothing shops and early-closing pizza restaurants.

  It was well after midday on the fifteenth of July—the seventeenth day of my journey—when I walked out of Sapporo. In the broad park avenue that stretches from the tower—with its gum machines and its ashtrays that say "Smokin' Clean" on them—workmen were putting up pink paper lanterns for the summer Festival of the Dead. It was a bright hot afternoon. The mountains stood clear and violet on the horizon. Beyond them lay the southern lakes. I walked quickly past the sprawling pink concrete housing estates with their thousands and thousands of tiny apartments that the Japanese, straight-faced, call "mansions," past the vast Ground Self-Defense Force barracks with its rows of tanks that Japanese politicians, straight-faced, call "Special Protected Vehicles," past the salarymen practicing their golf swings with invisible clubs at the pedestrian crossings, past a girl wearing a jacket that said on the back of it "Let's Summer and Punk," past the intriguingly named Bar Madonna, by which time I was out of the suburbs, it was five o'clock in the evening, and the road stretched bare ahead of me with neither ryokan nor minshuku in sight.

  I tried a motel. The owner explained that, since he was a member of the Japan Motel Owners' Association, I had no need to worry— his rates were all fixed and aboveboard. Between eleven o'clock at night and ten o'clock the next morning I could stay there for 4,800 yen (about fourteen pounds). For each hour before eleven o'clock I must pay another 500 yen. It now being five o'clock, I would be most welcome to stay at a total cost of 7,500 yen (about twenty-two pounds). This, of course, did not include meals. In fact he did not serve meals. But I could easily drive the five or six kilometers to a restaurant he would be glad to recommend. It was at this point, I think, that he realized—from my boots and rucksack and general demeanor, and from the fact that I was standing and not sitting behind a steering wheel— that I didn't have a car. He looked up and down the drive for a moment, cocked his head thoughtfully to one side, and suggested that I go and amuse myself for six hours and come back shortly before midnight.

  "Thank you," I said. "Do you get many customers?"

  "Oh, lots," he assured me.

  The restaurant that I finally found was closed, but the tail end of the day's business was dragging on at the grocer's shop next door.

  "I wonder if you can tell me where the nearest ryokan is?" I said, smiling encouragingly over the rim of my beer glass. I knew perfectly well where the nearest ryokan was. It was thirty kilometers away on the shore of Lake Shikotsu.

  So I ended up helping with the evening deliveries, lugging beer crates two at a time up the fire escape to a tiny bar that smelled as though the lavatory had been clogged for a fortnight. My muscles groaned and all I wanted to do was sleep, but I was enticed back to the same bar after dinner, where the grocer, nudging me under the count-er, announced that I was his long-lost son and that he'd fathered me at a grocers' conference in Edinburgh.

  "Is he really your son?" whispered the awe-struck mama-san.

  "What do you think? He speaks Japanese, doesn't he?"

  "Oh, yes—he's obviously not a foreigner."

  "Well, then..."

  "Well, then, he must be."

  I had the living-room floor to myself In the morning when I went out to look at the garden pond, the kind grocer turned the waterfall on specially for me. Wildlife abounded. A huge Saint Bernard in the next-door yard couldn't make up its mind whether to mother me or kill me, and in the kitchen the grocer's wife was replacing long fly-papers that were black two layers deep with flies.

  The eighteenth was a bright day and the road ran high through wooded country. Often I stopped to bathe my feet and drink the water of the mountain streams. The water was colder than any I had ever drunk, and I could not keep my feet in it for more than a minute or two without them turning numb. Clouds rolled over to rake Mount Eniwa, and a young cyclist stopped to take our photos with an automatic camera.

  "How many kilometers do you walk a day?"

  "About thirty as a rule."

  "You should walk at least forty."

  "But I'm not in a race."

  "At least forty, I should say, with legs as long as yours."

  I buried my face in the Izari River and lay for a while on its gravel bank looking up at the gray clouds scudding.

  At three I glimpsed Lake Shikotsu for the first time far below me, absolutely flat, the color of breeze-blocks. As I clumped down to it along the winding asphalt the clouds parted to let through white slanting rays of sunlight that mottled its surface. By the time I reached the picnic spot on the shore of the lake and was kicking my way through the beer cans and lunch boxes, the sun had reappeared entirely and the lake had brightened to a glittering blue.

  It was a Saturday. The lodge at Marukoma Hot Spring was crowded with two large groups of young women holding class reunions and with a much less appealing group of some fifty businessmen who already, at four in the afternoon, were merrily drunk and clapping their hands to the one Hokkaido folk song everyone knows:

  Yaren soran soran soran soran soran hai hai!

  The staff of the lodge were rushed off their feet, and so as not to in-convenience them I agreed to have dinner at whatever time they chose to serve it. They chose to serve it immediately—at a quarter past four— with the result that I left about half of it on the tray. But it wasn't wasted. It was finished off in front of me by twenty-six nonchalant flies.

  After dinner I took a towel and explored the long corridors of the lodge till I e
merged on a rock platform at the edge of the lake. There, to one side of the natural ledge, in a cove sheltered by the overhanging cliffs, thermal water came bubbling out from under the rocks at a temperature delightful to lie wallowing and singing in. I used it like a sauna, sitting for five minutes on a submerged rock in the hot slimy pool, then wading out and sitting for five minutes in the lake.

  "Are you going to do that?" scoffed a nude businessman to his companion.

  "What do you think I am...," his nude companion grumbled, "a foreigner?"

  They grumbled together, though not for very long. The pool was too hot and too slimy and too dirty and too small and too crowded for them (I was the only other bather there), so I soon had it to myself again.

  The sun set behind me and a soft gray light settled over the hills on the distant shore. Along the wharf outside the lodge the guests who had spent the afternoon scouring for prawns were packing up their nets and strolling back to the baths inside. I sat for a long time in the hot spring, watching the light fade till I could no longer see the smoke drifting out of the crater of Mount Tarumae and, then, till Mount Tarumae itself was hidden in the dusk.

  There were no rooms vacant at the lodge so I made do with a bunk bed in a small wooden outhouse. The bed was hard and there was no service of any kind―no shower, no television, no maid, no futon— but it was quiet and I had my own sleeping bag to crawl into. I was a little surprised in the morning when the matronly old lady who ran the place presented me with a bill for full board and lodging that amounted to more than twenty pounds, and even she must have experienced a twinge of guilt about it for, as I stamped grumpily out of the door, she gave me—quite free—a packet of picture postcards.