by Alan Booth
"Some of these fishermen just don't wanna know. We try and be friendly and all, and some are O.K., but I guess speaking the lingo'd make a helluva difference. D'you speak it?"
"Yes," I admitted, half apologetically.
The middle-aged officer and his wife had come up from the American air base at Misawa to comb the beach for glass fishing floats.
"I'm just crazy about this blue-and-white china," said his wife. She unwrapped a small round dish and held it out to show me. You could have bought it at any pot shop for a couple of hundred yen. "We've tried to make friends with a farmer's wife back down the highway. Last week we brought her some American cookies. I wanted to ask her if she has any of this blue-and-white china, but she just doesn't understand. Today I brought this dish to show her, and I held it up like this and kept pointing at her kitchen, you know. But she still didn't seem to get the message. I guess if I knew the word for 'dish.' What's the word for 'dish'?"
"Sara."
"Saru?''
"Sara. Saru is a monkey."
"Oh, gee. I guess we'd better not."
"We pick these floats up on the beach," said the officer, "ship 'em back to the States, make a helluva profit. There's a real demand for this kinda stuff"
"Doesn't it cost a lot to ship them back?"
"Not a cent." The officer winked. "Some of these fishermen, when you try to buy 'em, they ask, like, three thousand yen. That's twelve dollars! Out here on the beach it's a rare Sunday we don't find two or three. Over the four years we've been here I guess we've shipped back maybe a hundred."
"What do they sell for?"
"Thirty, forty dollars."
We went for a swim.
"What brings you up here?"
I told them.
"Oh, gee!"
We popped a bottle of fifty-cent Korean pink champagne. My hangover disappeared in a panic.
They stood on the beach waving to me like windmills, as I climbed back over the railway track onto the road. It was slick and empty in the midafternoon heat. An adder had been squashed flat to the middle of it and an eagle was trying to rip it free, but it was stuck down hard and slowly frying.
I asked for a beer in a little sake shop. An old woman hauled herself to her feet and fetched me a bottle from the refrigerator. I asked for a glass. She fetched me a glass. Then she fell down on her knees on the concrete floor of the shop with the beer bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. I helped her to her feet and took the bottle. She dropped the glass and the glass broke into slivers on the concrete. I put the bottle of beer down on the counter and began to pick up the slivers of broken glass. The old woman fell down on her knees in the middle of them.
"I'm sorry," she said.
An old man came out of the back room holding a dustpan and brush.
"Excuse me," he said.
He gave me another glass and began to sweep up the broken slivers. He never once touched the old woman, nor spoke to her.
"I'm very sorry," the old man said to me.
The old woman stood up and limped away into the back room with blood coming out of her hands.
It took a long noisy morning to get off Highway 4, and when I finally managed to, at the dusty little town of Shichinohe, no one seemed able to tell me which road I should take. I wanted to get to the town of Towadakomachi without having to go through Towada City.
"You can't," said a petrol pump attendant, flatly.
But after a half-hour conference with four of the staff at a second petrol station, each of whom drew plans on scraps of paper and none of whose plans resembled any of the others', I finally found the road I was looking for and set off through flat wet rice fields that the over-cast sky had turned a deep bottle green. Mount Hakkoda brushed the clouds to the west, and the hills that surrounded it were layered in tones of gray like cardboard cutouts.
"To Kyushu?" spat a workman in an orange helmet. "I wish I was going to Kyushu. There's thousands of Turkish baths in Kyushu. The cheapest Turkish baths in Japan."
He spat and grinned and squinted sideways at me.
"I don't need to tell you what goes on in Turkish baths."
"Well..."
"Nothing like that round here," he mourned. "I'd invite you out to one if there was. Don't miss the ones in Kyushu, though. I bet you'll end up staying a fortnight."
A grandmother in mompe—traditional loose-fitting "mountain trousers"—was out on the country road playing baseball with some young children. She was showing them her catcher's crouch.
"Where are you going?"
"Lake Towada."
"Look after yourself. Take care of yourself"
My judo friends tell me that, once upon a time, it was the dream of every schoolboy in Japan to be a judo champion. This remained their dream until the 1964 Tokyo Olympics—the first Olympics to include judo—when a foreigner, the Dutchman Geesink, beat the all-japan champion and took the gold medal. Since then, they tell me, all the schoolboys have wanted to be baseball players.
In the dusk a man stood bare-chested on a bridge that crossed a stream, staring down into the water as though he had drowned his child in it.
"Excuse me, could you tell me..."
He didn't move a muscle.
I tramped on and found a sweet shop. The woman in the shop phoned a ryokan for me, and the man at the ryokan offered to come and fetch me in his car. It was seven o'clock and dark. I had covered, twenty-eight kilometers that day and the ryokan was still an hour away.
"I'll walk," I said.
The man in the car came anyway.
"No, I'll walk," I insisted.
When I got to the ryokan they were waiting outside in the street for me.
"That was splendid," the man said, seriously.
"What?"
"After I'd come out to fetch you, and all. Have you walked very far?"
"Just from Noheji."
"Splendid," the man said. "Let me take your pack."
He carried the pack up the narrow stairs for me.
"What's it weigh?"
About fourteen kilograms, I think."
"And you've walked from Noheji. Splendid! Splendid!"
In an upstairs room four workmen were grilling liver. They saw me on my way to the bath. Three plates of liver and five cups of sake later I made it down to the bathroom.
"What do you think of Aomori?" asked one of the men. He was a young man with short cropped hair and a deep, livid scar that ran down his right cheek.
"I like Aomori very much."
"What about the stars?"
"Stars?"
"You can only see them in the north. You can only see stars like this north of Fukushima. What about the people?"
"I like them too."
"Aomori people are the best. People in Akita and Iwate are all right. South of that they're a lot of bastards." He rubbed his scar and nodded at me. "Fukushima people are bastards, but it's not their fault. They can't see the stars."
I ate dinner downstairs with the family. The youngest son kept running in and out announcing that there was an obake in the house. An obake is a ghoul, a monster, a freak. This went on for about five minutes and I glared at him every time I caught his eye.
"A real obake!"
His parents ignored him.
"A horrible, fearful, real obake!"
Slamming down my chopsticks and swinging round on my cushion to berate the little horror, I came face to face with a second son, about eight years old, whose head and neck were entirely sheathed in a large green rubber Frankenstein mask.
"Wwwaaa!" he said. The youngest son whooped. The parents slapped their thighs. I nibbled a pickled radish.
It rained all night and it was still raining when I set off the next morning for Lake Towada. My shirt was drenched in half an hour, and I caught myself sneezing. "Watch Out for Kids" said a road sign in English outside one village. I knew what that meant.
The sky cleared towards midmorning, and I sat on the bank of the Oirase River, my shirt dryin
g over a gate, and listened to the low trickle of the water through a concrete dam. Above the dam the river widened quickly to a still deep green, and there were trout pools and ice-cream stands and expensive-looking drive-ins. But once past the crossroads it narrowed again into the steady rapids that gurgle steeply out of the three-pronged lake. This is a stretch of the Oirase River made famous by tourist posters and by dabblers in the traditional forms of Japanese poetry. In autumn the road will be jammed with cars, bumper to bumper, and fathers will wish they had stayed at home, and children will wail for Coca-Cola, and mothers will lean out of car windows to snap the red and gold trees with Instamatic cameras. Nothing will daunt the poets, though, and they will see and hear only what thousands of others have wanted to see and hear before them:
Shrill in its rapids, sobbing in its deeps,
the Oirase water sings.
Stand for a moment in the shade of a tree
and listen, traveler.
But autumn was months away, and except for the coach parks with their crowds of snapping people and their mounds of empty cardboard lunchboxes, the little footpath that follows the river was quiet and the sounds of the waterfalls and the river bubbling over moss-covered rocks held their own against the motor horns.
At the lake an irate bus driver was persuaded to phone a minshuku for me, while the waitress I had first asked hopped from one foot to the other as though in urgent need of a lavatory.
"Look here," barked the bus driver, "there's a gaijin here..."
The minshuku sent their apologies for being full.
Lake Towada lay gray and still in the evening, swallowing the last halfhearted shafts of sunlight. I marched round its southern bank, recalling the words of another poem I had seen printed on a picture postcard:
For life, the Land of the Rising Sun.
For disporting oneself, Towada Lake.
It is a three-and-a-half-ri walk along
the Oirase River.
Some poems, I supposed, were written on commission.
Eventually I found a minshuku and spent the night there, trying to ignore the unearthly noise made by two frantic mongrels in heat. A mongrel accompanied me on my trudge next morning—the thirty-sixth morning of my journey—trotting on ahead of me for a while, then sitting and waiting at a bend in the steep road till I caught him up. When I caught him up, he would eye me indulgently and trot on ahead again, looking round at me often, but never once letting me touch him. In this way we reached the lakeside resort of Yasumiya together. He took one look at it and bolted into the trees. I, less free, trudged down to explore it.
Lake Towada is a caldera lake, formed two million years ago in the collapsing cone of an extinct volcano. It is surrounded by steep wooded hills and divided like a webbed foot along its southern shore by two promontories, one thin and flat, the other steep and mountainous. Famous for its crystal blue water, for its maple leaves in October, and for its proximity to the hot springs of Kuroishi, Hakkoda, and Hachimantai, the lake is the most popular tourist attraction in the north of Honshu, and since 1936 it has been the center of a national park. Yasumiya (literally, "Rest Shop") stands at the base of the thin south-western promontory. It is not picturesque, nor does it command a good view of the lake, most of which the promontory blocks from sight. But it offers everything that a Japanese holidaymaker could wish for: souvenir shops, sightseeing cruises, high-speed motorboats, restaurants that charge five hundred yen for a medium-sized bottle of beer, tiers of wooden benches on which groups of people can have their photographs taken against a background of other groups of people, a shrine, a crowded beach, and the comforting sense that you must have come to the right place because this is where everybody else is.
On a large square plinth near the end of the beach stands a bronze monument erected in 1953 called The Maidens of the Lakeside. It depicts a pair of young women with prohibition hair and breasts like ovens, standing stark naked playing pat-a-cake. This is one of the lake's most popular attractions. All the souvenir stalls stock plastic replicas of it and people stand in line to have their photos snapped in front of it. It has been celebrated, too, in a postcard poem:
Have they dropped from Heaven?
Are they clustered foam?
These maidens on this sad, strange shore—
face to face, of what do they speak?
And there the poet's imagination fails him.
A breeze began to blow in across the lake and turned slowly into a wind. I strolled down the beach past two black families sitting huddled round a monster radio tuned to the American Forces' transmitter at Misawa, nibbling kiritampo (baked mashed rice) and looking thoroughly miserable. The wind carried their music out over the beach and you could hear it as far back as The Maidens of the Lakeside.
"Soul," said a maiden, "I wanna go home."
"Oi, you you you!" barked a Japanese man in an Aloha shirt. "You you you, oi, camping, camping!"
I hitched up my pack and trudged out of Yasumiya, and at three-thirty I crossed the prefectural boundary from Aomori into Akita.
The lakes and ponds of ancient Japan were known to be the haunts of dragons, and the moods and changing colors of the lakes were attributed to the dragons' rages and calms. A sightseeing boat ploughed out of Yasumiya, with its amplified commentary audible for miles describing the lake in our own century's terms: "...forty-four kilo-meters in circumference, 334 meters deep at its center..."
For the first time since I found my packet of picture postcards, I felt moved to admire one of the contributing poets:
The sky too is deep,
the water immeasurably deep.
Of heaven and earth we know nothing.
The northern third of the island of Honshu is called Tohoku—"east-north." It used to be known as Michinoku—literally, "the end of the road." From the point of view of the court in Kyoto, or even of the Shogun's government in Edo (Tokyo), the name was both a literal description and a dismissal. The roads north were narrow, wild, and unpoliced, the inhabitants of the north little better than beggars. You might come to Michinoku out of despair or out of curiosity or to hide from hostile eyes, but not unless you were stark mad would you forsake the delights of the civilized south and bring your family to scratch a living here.
The six prefectures that make up Tohoku are today among the least developed in Japan. (In terms of per-capita income, Aomori is the second poorest of all the forty-seven prefectures, Yamagata is the ninth, Akita the sixteenth.) This is partly due to the long, harsh winters, the heavy snows of the Japan Sea coast, and the fogs that roll in from the north Pacific to blight the towns and sour the farmers. Most Japanese, for all their complaints about population density, have grown so used to big city comforts that they no more want to live in Tohoku than they want to live in Hokkaido. The climate is too bitter, the living too hard. And so in recent years as the old cottage industries of rice-straw weaving and charcoal burning have declined to the level of picturesque jokes, and as television has broadcast throughout the country its slick versions of the urban gospel, the population of Tohoku, despite the region's size and the richness of much of its soil, has dwindled to a bare eight percent of the nations total.
Yet go into any bar that has a karaoke and you will hear customers who have never been further north than Tokyo singing soulfully about "A Northern Inn" or "The Straits of Tsugaru in Winter." The north exerts a profound attraction on the armchair imaginations of many Japanese people, because it epitomizes what they call furusato— "the old home country" and its influence on their lives. The Tohoku of their imagination is a perfect furusato—a place that is content to be old-fashioned, that doesn't alter with each new twist of "progress," where nature, though harsh, is also generous, and where time is measured by the changes in the seasons:
A white birch, a blue sky, a wind blows from the south,
and in the deep north blooms the magnolia—
ah, the deep north spring!
In cities the seasons pass unnoticed.
save for a package from my mother;
ah, shall Ig o back to that old home country?
Shall I, shall I go back?
Offer the singer a one-way ticket to Akita in January and you'll soon have an answer.
The road down from the Hakka Pass was practically a wilderness. The migration of farmhands south to the cities had left fields lying fallow even now in early August. Next to a swathe of sturdy green rice would lie a square of dead brown stalks cropped off at the mud level in the previous autumn and not ploughed since. The buildings were few and miles between, but they presented the same stark contrasts. Most were the cheap aluminum-paneled shacks that I had seen along the coasts of Hokkaido. The outhouses were corrugated iron, the roofs were insane blue plastic. At intervals I would come across a wooden farmhouse falling apart at the eaves, and I would stop for a minute to admire the pale green moss that grew on the thatch, and the wide dark pillars and half-timbered walls that reminded me of my own furusato. The orange-and-yellow pyramid-shaped cabins of the Towada Car Lodge gave warning that civilization was again at hand, and at about four-thirty in the afternoon I walked into the little hot spring village of Oyu, passing under a white banner stretched across the road that advertised the triple delights of "Apples, Skiing and a Stone Circle."
My experience of Japanese youth hostels is not wide. One reason is that the people I meet in youth hostels have mostly come from Tokyo, so the amount I can learn from them about anything is minimal. Another reason is that, despite the legend, the cost of staying in a youth hostel, if you eat two meals and are loaned a sheet, is only marginally less than that of staying in an ordinary country minshuku. A third and a fourth reason are that, in the few Japanese youth hostels I have stayed at, the food has been uniformly dreadful and alcoholic beverages have not been allowed on the premises. Fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth reasons were made plain to me during the course of the night I spent at the youth hostel in Oyu.