The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The path I had planned to follow along the lakeshore turned out to be a fiction of the mapmakers; at least, two of the three people I asked about it swore there had never been any such thing, and the third—the matron of Marukoma—remembered it vaguely from her childhood, but told me it had been impassable for the last thirty years. Since most of the lake is bounded by cliffs, and the chances of scrambling along them looked very remote, the only alternative seemed to be to skirt Mount Eniwa to the north, and so I set out, grudgingly, back along the same road I had tramped down the day before.

  It was a brilliant Sunday morning and the shimmering surface of the lake was dotted with boats. As I rose above it, the sound of young men's voices came floating up to me—"Sutaato! Sutaato! Sutaato! (Start! Start! Start!)"—all hugely amplified through bullhorns and clearly, unconcernedly, audible for miles. "Left! Left! Left! Sutoreeto! (Straight!) Sutoreeto! Sutoreeto!" I was glad when I rounded the hulk of Mount Eniwa and the voices no longer reached me.

  But relief was short-lived. The sky clouded over with malicious speed, and by the time I had reached the highest point of the road and the car park with its little observation platform, the sun had entirely vanished and the air had acquired an electricity that was tangible. For a while the storm merely threatened, though the one or two motorists who passed me seemed to sense it at their backs, for they steered their cars like mad things between the potholes, spewing up the stones and gravel of the worst road I had so far walked along.

  The first thunderclap broke with no warning at all. It bounced off the bald face of the mountain, off the flat sounding board of the lake four hundred yards below, and rolled for what seemed an incredible time through the hills and trees as though seeking an escape route. It brought with it a sudden rising of mist. The lake, when I glimpsed it, was indistinguishable from the sickly sky, and the borders of the visible world shrank until I could see little but the potholes in front of me. I hurried on as the first rain spat, counting the snakes squashed flat to the gravel. The raindrops were huge and smacked like hail, but there were few, and the real onslaught was concentrated in the thunder.

  My tally had reached six snakes, four of them babies, when quite without warning the mist rose and the storm was gone as suddenly as it had come. The lake was tranquil again through the pines. The evening had begun to gather.

  I tramped on past the debris that accrues to tourist sites—rubbish tips in the clefts of the hills, abandoned cars, their windows demolished, bonnets up, wheels gone. By the time I reached level ground again it was clear that there were no more hot springs, no outhouses, no ryokans, no grocers in search of long-lost sons. Through a stretch of the trees I glimpsed the lakeshore, flat between a break in the cliffs, and so I left the road and walked half a kilometer over soft fallen pine needles and emerged into a sandy clearing that turned out to be a campsite. Two fishermen sat smoking on the nearby beach, and an old caretaker had come out of his wooden hut and stood staring at me as I trudged towards him. I nodded.

  "Do you mind if I sleep down there on the beach?"

  "You can if you want."

  "I haven't got a tent."

  He was lighting a cigarette. "Haven't got a tent?"

  "Will I have to pay?"

  The old caretaker squinted at the pack on my back.

  "I've got a sleeping bag."

  He shrugged, said nothing, and went back into his hut.

  I chose a spot away from the fishermen and laid out my groundsheet on the damp sand of the beach, weighing it down with my boots and with stones. I unfolded my waterproof sleeping-bag cover and pulled it carefully on over the thin quilted bag. Then I crawled into it and lay for a while as the last light faded and the insects began to come in off the lake. The sound of the lake water was peaceful and the lights of the little fishing boats out on the surface of the lake seemed as distant as stars. There were no stars in the sky. I zipped the bag tight round my head and tried to go to sleep.

  The rain began at midnight. It was light at first and felt like a breeze, but it was rain. I heard it on the waterproof cover of the sleeping bag and swore at it (that, incidentally, being the first English word I had uttered in nineteen days—Japanese is a very adequate language for complimenting the autumn moon and things like that, but it is sadly deficient in words for expressing a less harmonious relationship with nature). I uttered more English about thirty minutes later when I dis-covered that my waterproof sleeping-bag cover was definitely not waterproof

  Still the rain was light and I decided to try and stick it out, which was a stupid decision. By two o'clock I was thoroughly soaked and the drizzle had turned into a downpour. I got up, spewing out English like lava, and began gathering together my saturated belongings. It took me three journeys to drag everything over to the dry concrete step under the eaves of the caretaker's hut. I had a small electric torch, but still managed to lose my way on the second journey and spent ten minutes fighting a forest of wet thornbushes. I ended up leaving my groundsheet on the beach, throwing down my sleeping bag on the narrow sheltered concrete, crawling oozily into it, and trying once again to go to sleep. I found it impossible to keep my eyes closed. The rain thump-thumped on the iron roof and under the damp sleeping bag the concrete was a torment.

  A light went on in the hut. Through the condensation on the window I could see the wood stove the old man had burning. I saw his shadow move across the dry wall and watched him peer out through the lighted window and stare at me lying on his step. Then I heard him move to the door. The door opened a little and, by turning an inch, I could see his face silhouetted in the doorway. He stood there for what seemed a very long time and I tried to think of something to say, but in the end, I was spared the necessity of saying anything. Quietly but firmly he closed the door of his hut and turned the key in the lock.

  It was light by five and the rain had stopped. I got up, shivering, retrieved my groundsheet from the beach, beat the sand off it with a sodden branch, and began to pack my rucksack. The caretaker sat staring at me through the window of his lodge. He looked as though he had been sitting there all night. His old face was tired but his eyes were remarkably sharp. I knew he was staring at me as I rolled up my sleeping bag and strapped it to the pack and as I folded the groundsheet and laced my boots.

  "Sayonara," I said as I got up to leave.

  I expect he was still staring when I reached the trees.

  The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one.

  Like most Hokkaido people, he knew the value of hot water. He had an oil stove going now, in mid-July, and he poured the water that he had pumped up out of the ground very carefully into his small metal teapot and set it on the stove to boil.

  Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals—far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.

  "There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."

  He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.

  "You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they're really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want."

  I nodded pleasantly, having no food.

  "If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's thirty meters away from you, you've no need to worry. The bear will run away. It'll be far more frightened than you are."

  "Well, well!" I said, and sipped my tea.

  "If you turn a corner and you see a bear,
say, twenty meters away, there's still a good chance it won't bother you. It'll roar a bit just to let you know it's there, but if you stand quite still it'll probably get bored and go back into the forest."

  "Mm," I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance.

  "And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's five or ten meters away from you..."

  "Then, presumably, I should start to worry," I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.

  "Not really," he said. "You've no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it's five meters away it'll certainly kill you. There's no point in worrying at all."

  From a distance Mount Shiraoidake must have looked like a Sung Dynasty painting. It looked a bit less like one at close range. Two motorcyclists came down the dirt road, their headlamps full on in the noon mist. One fell on the turn and hadn't the strength to lift his ma-chine. When I passed him he was in tears. The road over the mountain was wild and high, crags and outcrops of sharp black rock, a sheer drop on one side, a sheer cliff on the other. Incredibly, a bus came bouncing down, hooting every four or five seconds, lurching on the turn, forcing me flat against the wet rock. Visibility was less than fifty yards and a drizzle had been falling since midmorning. I met a middle-aged Japanese couple in full Alpine gear—knickerbockers, knobbly canes, and Tyrolean hats with feathers in them. They were quivering under a single bright yellow poncho—the bus had missed them by fractions of an inch.

  At three in the afternoon I emerged into green open country and the first cultivated fields I had seen since before Sapporo.

  "Look at it! Look at it!" gasped the three little boys who had fol-lowed me to the door of a noodle shop and now had their noses pressed flat against the window. "What's it eating? What's it speaking?"

  "Go away," said a woman, "and don't be rude to customers."

  It's all right," belched a fat man, "they're only kids."

  The evening breeze bore a whiff of sulfur that spiked the blander smell of the apple orchards. At the hot spring resort of Kita Yuzawa clouds of white steam came hissing off the river. The drizzle had stopped and one or two people in ryokan yukatas were dipping small string baskets of eggs into the scalding pools in the riverbed. I asked for a room at the kokuminshukusha—the government lodging house— but it was booked solid by an old age pensioners' glee club. The clerk phoned a ryokan.

  "Hello, ah, I'm sorry to trouble you only, the fact is, well, uh, could you... I mean to say... it would be very good for international relations..."

  There was a small refrigerator in the ryokan room containing bottles of Coca-Cola and beer. This is an increasingly common pro-vision. The guest helps himself to whatever he needs, and in the morning the maid counts the empty bottles. It is an efficient arrangement that saves time and energy and reduces the pleasure of human contact to an absolute minimum.

  The bath was fine. The men's and women's sections were separated this time by a jungle of plastic flowers and leaves so realistic I had to float up and touch them before I was sure they weren't real. From the bathroom I could see the steam rising off the river for more than a kilometer. There were benches on the opposite bank, and wooden bridges, and colored fairy lights in the trees. One guest succeeded in washing the whole of his body, face, and hair without taking the cigarette out of his mouth. I very nearly applauded.

  "Why do all foreigners have such beautiful faces?" asked the middle-aged maid as she laid out the futon. I couldn't think of a suit-able reply. "Men, women—they all look the same—such beautiful faces."

  In the morning she counted the bottles twice and opened the refrigerator door to make certain.

  The weather had improved. The gray clouds were sponged white, and Mount Shiraoidake stood the picture of innocence behind me. In midafternoon I caught a glimpse of Lake Toya, sparkling and clear, and the deep green knobs of the islands in its center. I trudged down past a row of souvenir shops selling carved wooden bears with salmon in their mouths.

  The Ainu used to revere bears as gods. They would capture a young cub and keep it for years in a wooden cage in their village, treating it with great kindness, letting their children pet it, till it was tame as a puppy. Then they would dress up a stake with evergreen leaves, noose the bear, and lead it out into the village compound where they would let it skip about on a long leash. Some of the men, dressed in their finest robes, would shoot harmless decorated sticks at it in imitation of a hunt. They would then tie the bear to the green stake, kill it with arrows, ceremonially strangle its corpse, decapitate it, skin it, scrape out its innards, drink its blood for the mystical strength in it, and display the head of their god on its mangled hide.

  Until 1879 this northernmost island was not called Hokkaido, but Ezo. The word Ezo is written with two Chinese characters. The first means "prawn," the second means "alien or "savage."

  For twelve hundred years of their history the Japanese left Ezo alone. It was too frigid, too wild, too much trouble to civilize, fit only for habitation by barbarians. The title Shogun, an abbreviation of Seiitai-shogun—literally, "Great Barbarian-Subduing General"—was earned in the genocidal campaigns that were waged against the Ainu in the eighth and ninth centuries, and which succeeded in pushing them out of their homelands in Honshu into these northernmost wilds. The Ainu were altogether a different race from the Japanese. They spoke a different language, practiced a different faith. Ainu men—reputedly the hairiest in the world—grew thick beards that covered their chests. Ainu women tattooed their faces. To the Japanese who glimpsed them, spearing their fishes, murdering their gods, they must have seemed utterly alien.

  Added to their savagery was the savagery of the Ezo volcanoes, a savagery that still threatens. In 1910 Mount Usu erupted with such violence that a new mountain was formed in the convulsions. In 1944 it erupted again and a second new mountain grew up beside the first. To the Japanese people who have finally settled here, the island must resemble a half-wild animal. They have tried to tame it, and now they love it. But they can never be sure that it will not turn against them.

  Lake Toya lies at the foot of Mount Usu and on the shore of the lake stands the hot spring resort of Toyako—a mess of ten-story Western-style hotels, Western-style coffee shops, and Western-style bars. The hotels have names like Villa and Palace, the bars have names like Julie. There is an amusement park called Samaa Rando (Summer Land), a club called Kurabu Nuudo (Club Nude), and a "Ladies' Corner" called Don Quixote.

  I took a sightseeing cruise in the early morning of my twenty-second day, when the mist had not yet cleared from the water. The hotels were quickly lost to sight and we chugged through a world in which nothing was visible but the lake, the sky, and the gray humps of the islands.

  "Good morning, everybody," said the guide through her micro-phone. There were three of us on the boat—two old ladies and myself "If you will kindly turn and look to your left, you will see Mount Yotei."

  We turned to our left. The mist was so thick that we couldn't even see the shore.

  "What a beautiful mountain—the Mount Fuji of Ezo! And to the right you can see Mount Usu and the new mountains called Meiji Shinzan and Showa Shinzan."

  We turned to the right and stared at a gray wall. No mountains, no buildings, no land of any kind.

  I recall the blue waters of Izu and Miura

  at the distant hot spring town of Toya.

  The mist had begun to clear by the time we reached the little island called Kannon-jima—the Island of the Goddess of Mercy. We moored next to the six swan-shaped tunnel-of-love paddle boats, and I left my rucksack on the jetty while I strolled up to look at the Goddess of Mercy's shrine. It was a single small building of unpainted timber standing on the top of a pleasantly wooded hill. In the trees that ringed it hung two loudspeakers out of which came a stream of advertisements for the hotels and bars in Toyako, followed by "Black is black I want my baby back," followed by more advertisements, followed by "Oh mammy oh mammy mammy blue oh mammy blue." It was,
in short, a typical sanctuary, so I refrained from pummeling the two old ladies who had followed me up the slope, and we returned intact to the jetty.

  On our way back the mist had cleared enough for the new mountains behind the resort to be visible: Showa Shinzan, its cone belching smoke, Meiji Shinzan like a burial mound.

  The sound of trapped fire―

  the breath of the mountain

  ascends toward Heaven...

  The Goddess of Mercy has a lot of problems to contend with, not the least of them having to do with gender. Kannon is actually one of the male attendants of Amida Buddha, but he is generally depicted with so tender an expression on his face that, in the Japanese imagination, he has undergone a sex change. The bewildering variety of his own incarnations must be another source of consternation. There is, for example, a Horse-Headed Kannon, ringed with fire, who defies evil spirits. There is an Eleven-Faced Kannon who, for some reason, always has twelve faces, and a Thousand-Handed Kannon who only ever has forty hands (the argument being that each hand has the power to save twenty-five souls). Kannon's most familiar form is that of a tranquil, feminine spirit seated benignly on a lotus leaf crowned with the crown of everlasting compassion, and glowing with the eternal tolerance of Buddha.

  But in this savage island the Goddess of Mercy can be equally savage.

  Eighteen days after I left Lake Toya, Mount Usu erupted for the third time this century. The eruption hurled ash and stones nearly three hundred kilometers to the south and east. Lava ran down the slopes to the shoreline. Smoke rose nine kilometers into the sky. A thick gray layer of what appeared to be moondust settled over the fields, and the vegetable, wheat, and rice crops were ruined. The five thousand inhabitants of Toyako Hot Spring were evacuated from their homes in army lorries and had to camp out in schools and temples till the eruption had ceased. Fish died in the lake, young trees died in the forests. Roads and railways were impassable. Fourteen cities and towns sustained damage. The hotels, coffee shops, and bars were closed and the boats no longer went out to the islands.