The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  I did not risk eating there, but wandered up and down the one village road till I found a little akachochin (drinking shop with a red lantern outside) where I was able to persuade the mama-san to pop out to the fishmonger's for a couple of trout. I agreed to look after any customers that came in while she was away and she went off happily, leaving me to mind the business. An old man who wandered in for some sake seemed not in the least surprised to have me serve it to him, and even asked me if I knew where he could get hold of a decent eel-trap. The trout were good, and so was the old man, and it was with great reluctance that I left the shop to attend the hostel's evening meeting, but the warden had already chided me for not telephoning to reserve a bunk, and I thought that, if I missed the meeting, I might blacken the gaijin image for years to come.

  We sat round the walls of the meeting room on metal chairs, and the warden told us where we should go in the morning, what time we should leave, what buses we should catch, what we should do when we got there, and what souvenirs we should bring back with us. He then divided us into three teams and we stood up, sat down, clapped our hands, and hopped in circles whenever the name of our team was called. After this, the forty or so university students who were staying at the hostel, and who ranged in age from nineteen to twenty-four, began with noisy enthusiasm to play a game of musical chairs. I excused myself on the grounds of suddenly intolerable thirst and fled back to the akachochin where I drank three beers in quick succession and bought the old man another jug of sake.

  That night we slept twelve to a room, The sheet I had rented was absurdly small and there was no toilet paper in the lavatory—only a sign forbidding me to throw cans or bottles down the pan. At 6:30, piped birdsong that sounded like factory whistles wafted into our rooms, to be replaced at 6:35 by the Beach Boys and at 6:40 by the warden who came bursting in to scold us for not being up. In the meeting room at 6:55 the television was on full blast, two students were listening to transistor radios tuned to competing stations, the rain which had begun to fall in the night was thunderous outside the plate-glass windows, and to spice the cacophony the members of a cycling club had discovered a set of wooden skittles and were bowling them down with a determination approaching cruelty to inanimate objects. Each member of the club wore a T-shirt with the words "TIT CYCLIST" printed across the front of it. I took the most studious-looking member aside and quietly explained the implications. "No, no," he insisted, "it means Tokyo Institute of Technology." "With that, I drank a cup of black coffee beside a vending machine called "Nuts is Best," and despite the rain's still falling in torrents, I left the hostel at Oyu and ate a breakfast of tangerines in the doorway of a chemist's shop.

  The rain was falling even harder by the time I reached the Oyu Stone Circle, or rather the two stone circles, one on either side of the narrow prefectural road. I found the custodian in his tiny museum, borrowed his umbrella, and wandered about in the rain for half an hour, peering through the wire-mesh fences at the spoked-wheel and sundial patterns of the stones, and splashing through the ditches of a recent excavation.

  The stones—the tallest are no more than three feet high and most are laid, or have fallen, flat—were discovered in 1932, but a proper investigation had to wait until six years after the end of the war. It revealed two rough circles—one 44 yards in diameter, the other 50—formed of boulders taken from a dry riverbed and mostly shaped into crude oblongs. The circles are thought to be late Neolithic (about four thou-sand years old) and the usual theories have been advanced to account for them—that they are part of a burial complex, that they are part of a place of worship, that they have some vague astronomical significance. It never seems to occur to people that primitive man might have made tilings like this to amuse himself, as we amuse ourselves with musical chairs and statues of nude women on plinths by lakes. The signboard on the wire fence apologizes for the mystery: "Not even the professors," it moans, "are certain...."

  "Of heaven and earth we know nothing," I chuckled, splashing off through the rain towards Hanawa, down a road that was straight as a ley.

  The road began to curve, though the land was flat and the mountains of Hachimantai reared up like a stage set. In the brief intervals between the torrents of rain, the layers of cloud that hovered round the mountains would rise and fall as though on pulleys. First the clouds would hide the peaks so that the mountains looked flat-topped like tables, then they would sink to hide the slopes and the peaks would jut up above the clouds like a landscape in a charcoal painting. When the rain ceased, the light had the chilling quality of old silver, but when the rain came on again it smothered everything—the peaks, the clouds, the distant farms. I sheltered for an hour in someone's back shed and scooted on again to find a grocer's shop where I sat, sodden, eating apples while the thunder drove the grocer's children frantic.

  In a lull I reached the town of Hanawa. It was a little after midday. I ate lunch in a restaurant where the walls were covered with posters announcing a festival, and the restaurant owner stamped about, cursing the rain and worrying that the festival would be canceled.

  "You mean it's today?"

  "Today and tomorrow."

  "Here?"

  "Over towards the station." The owner squinted at me from behind the counter. "You mean to say that's not what you've come for?"

  "I'd no idea."

  The owner scoffed. "There's no other damn reason to come here. You might at least stay for that."

  I needed no persuading. The weather was foul to walk in and the prospect of a festival—however threatened—was the perfect excuse for a dry afternoon. I took a room in a ryokan near the station, hung my dripping clothes over an oil stove, and spent a couple of hours sprawled on tatami mats, sipping green tea and listening to the thunder ripple across the valley.

  By early evening the rain had stopped and I strolled out of the ryokan to find the road in front of the station transformed into an open-air bazaar. It was lined with dozens of pink-draped stalls, all hung with red-and-white paper lanterns, selling fireworks, goldfish, stag beetles, terrapins, candyfloss, robot masks, octopus, and ginger. There were rifle ranges and hoopla stands, and in a shelter between the pumps of a petrol station sat six or seven policemen with megaphones, sipping tea and trying not to look enthused. Beyond the stalls, on the main street of the town, was a collection of large wooden platforms on wheels, and on each of the platforms stood a huge taiko drum. Hordes of young children in bright summer yukatas were clambering over the platforms and beating the drums with curved wooden sticks. Out of the shops and houses flocked the fathers—firemen, bank clerks, post-men, farmers—dressed either in yukatas or in white shorts and the belted blue tunics called happi. There was mayhem as the fathers tried to wrest the drumsticks from their wriggling sons, and the noise of the drums and the screams and the laughter had reached a climax when the downpour began again.

  It fell without thunder but it fell as solidly as it had fallen for most of the day, and the cries of the children when their mothers scuttled forward to drag them off the streets mingled with the curses of their fathers as they swarmed onto the platforms and struggled to haul tarpaulins over the drums. The tarpaulins were sodden and heavy with a day's rain and the drums were twice the height of a man.

  I fled into the first dry space I could see—a canvas tent that turned out to be the festival organizers' headquarters. The organizers sat be-hind a row of trestle tables, scowling at the rain, complaining to their wives, and drinking large quantities of beer. We gaped at each other for a few seconds, till I was invited to sit down at one of the tables and submit to beer and questions.

  "What do you think of festivals ?"

  "I like them when it doesn't rain."

  For a long moment my presence was ignored.

  "That is to say, I like them anyway. Especially festivals in small towns."

  An organizer topped up my glass.

  "I like festivals where tourists are not important, festivals where they'd just as soon tourists didn'
t come. The festivals I've seen in large cities like Kyoto and Kanazawa seemed mainly for the benefit of the tourist trade, whereas a festival in a small town like this one is an event for working people and their families. That," I continued, growing radical,"is what a festival ought to be, not an annual bonus for some travel agent."

  This heady speech earned me a plate of salami and a bottle of beer I was allowed to pour myself

  "And what do you think of Akita bijin?"

  Akita is famous for its beautiful women (bijin), a fact that I had noted long ago and tended to dismiss as a partisan myth until, wandering about the streets of Hanawa in the rain, I found that my mouth kept dropping open and that I was devoting about a quarter of one eye to the taiko drums.

  "My daughter is a bijin," an elderly festival organizer chuckled. "She's twenty-four."

  "How very nice..."

  "It's a pity she's married. You could have married her."

  His wife, I supposed, was the woman choking in the corner. His daughter stayed wisely out of sight. And before I could ask about nieces and distant cousins, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the organizers packed me off to the station square where "the real festival," they said, was about to commence.

  In the station square stood eighteen of the wooden platforms in a semicircle facing the gathering crowd. Nine of the platforms supported taiko drums, and on the other nine stood rectangular paper lanterns, all taller by half than the massive taiko, and lit from inside by candles so that the red-and-gold hand-painted pictures on them glowed and flickered with life. Some were of heroes from the Kabuki theater with masses of black hair, white-and-blue faces, and bright scarlet eyes. Others were of feudal warriors, grimacing under fierce horned helmets. On some, the warriors were locked in combat, a tangle of long white-bladed swords and black, glinting halberds. On others, a single warrior rode in arrogant splendor, his horse's jaws a mass of foam, his armor bristling with arrows.

  The nine drums thundered in unison, pounded by the fathers now, not the sons. Each drum required two men to beat it, and they hammered out a single rhythm that had already reached a powerful crescendo and was still mounting as the noise and excitement of the crowd mounted with it. Sweat poured off the faces of the drummers and the trails of it glistened in the light of the candles. So violently did they hurl themselves at the drums, and so powerfully did each stroke take its toll on the whole body, that a man could not play for more than three or four minutes before stumbling away, as another took his place, and collapsing on a bench to tip cold sake down his throat and bury his face in a towel.

  The taiko is an instrument that demands more than technique. It is an obstinate instrument. It will resist and resist the drift of the music until the sheer energy of the man who plays it at last excites the god in the drum, and the rhythms then flow naturally from him till his arms grow weak with exhaustion. The wise player circumvents the drum's resistance by taking so much sake into his body that the god in the drum has no alternative but to assume command at the outset.

  I have to suppose that the god in the drum can also read minds, for as I moved in and out of the crowd, past the lanterns and the benches and the crates of bottles, a young man wearing a white plastic raincoat came up and thrust a paper cup of sake into my hand and asked me if I would like to play. I said that I would, but that I would require more sake. More sake came. The crowd around us began to bubble. Three drummers offered me the use of their sticks, and after I had drained a third paper cup I took my place by the side of a drum and waited for the right-hand drummer to tire. Then, when my turn came, I stepped up to the drum, saluted it with the sticks, and whacked it.

  The crowd went silly. "Look at this! Look at this! A gaijin! A gaijin playing the taiko!" Flash guns went off, crates were upended, parents pushed their children forward and craned their necks and stamped and clapped, and I felt the sake curl in my stomach and grinned at the drummer on the left of the drum, a middle-aged man. who said "Yah!" and grinned back, and the god in the drum was kind to us both.

  I have no idea how long I played. Twice the left-hand drummer changed and twice the drumsticks slipped out of my hands. When I came away I was drenched in sweat, and I sat on a bench with a towel round my head, guzzling sake and laughing like an idiot.

  They had seen me from the ryokan windows, and when I got back, they danced about the entrance hall while I beat the floor with a pair of slippers. Then they ushered me into the front parlor where a college professor in a suit and spectacles presented me with his namecard and commenced to give us all a lecture.

  "You see, the festival is a Tanabata festival and so it has its origins in eighth-century China where it commemorated the annual union of the two stars Altair and Vega. Up to the nineteenth century..."

  Someone had poured me a cup of sake.

  "Up to the nineteenth century the festival was celebrated on the seventh night of the seventh month, but when Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar Tanabata was incorporated into the general celebrations of August. The Nebuta lanterns of Aomori..."

  "Excuse me, professor...," I said, grinning inanely while the parlor audience held its breath, "... but have you ever played the sake after three cups of drum?"

  The professor expressed his puzzlement.

  "I mean to say," I said, attempting a northern dialect to hisses of delight, "have you ever played the taiko after drinking three cups of sake?"

  The professor admitted that he never had.

  "The professor knows an awful lot about festivals," said the mistress of the ryokan, beside herself with joy.

  In the streets the fathers were lighting fireworks for their sons. I felt happy for the firework sellers, who were the only stallkeepers that had

  not been doing a brisk trade. In the bath, when I let my ears sink under the water, the water throbbed to the rhythm of the drums, and when I got out of the bath and stood drying on the mat, my hands were still tapping out the rhythm on the windowsill. It was a long time before I could get to sleep, but I didn't mind. That night I knew an awful lot about festivals.

  The most significant summer festival in Japan is the Festival of the Dead, which is called O-Bon. To many people O-Bon is the most important time of the year, for at O-Bon they leave the cities where they work and go back for a few days to the towns and villages where they were born. There they meet their families again and visit the graves of dead family members. They place parcels of food and drink on the graves and invite the spirits of the dead to come back to their houses. In the villages and towns they dance to amuse the dead, and to amuse themselves. And so O-Bon is a happy time.

  O-Bon is coming

  and then we shall go.

  If Bon comes soon

  we shall soon go home.

  But O-Bon is a strangely sad time too, for thoughts of death are every-where—even in the lullabies sung to children...

  And if I die

  who will cry for me?

  The cicadas will cry

  in the mountain pines.

  No, not the cicadas;

  my sister will cry.

  Ah, sister, don't cry,

  for it grieves me so.

  "We were going to have a Bon dance this evening," said the waiter in the dining room at Tamagawa Hot Spring, where I spent my thirty-ninth night. "We'd already strung out the lanterns and there's a space down by the stream just right for a dance. All the guests were looking forward to it, and now they've gone and canceled it."

  Tamagawa is described in the official guidebook as a "primitive" resort, where most of the guests lodge in cheap wooden dormitories. The majority of guests are elderly or ill, and many come for weeks at a time, for the strong acid sulfur and radium springs are said to cure various forms of neuralgia, gastroenteritis, and diseases of the stomach. Those who stay in the wooden dormitories cook their own food, wash their own clothes, and emerge from their rooms four or five times a day to lie for an hour at a stretch in the steamy wooden bathhouse. Through the windows of th
e dining room, I watched a group of women gathering in sheets and airing straw pallets. The diners were dressed in yukatas and geta and the waiters wore black dinner jackets and bow ties.

  So I asked the waiter why they had canceled the dance. He struck me as genuinely simple-minded. I had been chatting to him about my journey, and he had written down everything I had said to him on small scraps of paper which he pulled out of his pockets and spread on the table. "How many kilometers from here to there? What will be the date when you get to Kanazawa?" The dining-room manager seemed not to mind that he was sitting with me instead of waiting on tables and, in fact, came up and joked about how well Shigeru could speak English. Shigeru smiled and pocketed his scraps of paper.

  "Or can it be Japanese you're speaking? I expect it is, isn't it, Shigeru? I can see this guest speaks Japanese. I can see it from the way he uses his chopsticks."

  "Why did they cancel the Bon dance?"

  Shigeru looked round to make sure the manager was out of earshot.

  "One of the guests died in his room this morning. He'd been here about three days with his wife and she found him lying dead on his mattress. It's a good thing he didn't die in the bath. They were an old couple. It happens sometimes."

  Shigeru went off to eat his dinner and I sat picking at a dish of raw tuna. Outside, in the hissing bed of the stream, metal pipes and a wood-en trough stained bright yellow by the sulfur carried the hot spring water to the baths. The water is a bare two degrees below boiling when it conies out of the earth, and so the stream is practically invisible, shrouded day and night in billows of white vapor. The smell of the springs is overpowering, and in the huge wooden bathhouse where you grope your way to the pool of your choice through a permanent curtain of cloying steam, the stench is so heavy it chokes your throat till, after a while, you learn to breathe very gently and regularly as in a sauna.

  But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Tamagawa is the fact that men and women bathe together. This was often so before "Westernization," and its survival here must be one of the reasons why the Japan Travel Bureau is so sniffy about "primitiveness.'' I found nothing primitive about it. I thought it a joy to lie and watch old women with breasts hanging down to their bellies giggling like schoolgirls while they scrubbed their husbands' backs and eyed the one or two muscled young men who skipped self-consciously from pool to pool dangling hand towels in front of their crotches. The beauty of the Akita bijin does not appear to suffer much with age; the grandmothers' faces were often as radiant as sixteen-year-olds'. The younger bijin stayed irritatingly out of sight—though, on reflection, that was probably just as well, since it enabled my enthusiasm for the primitive to continue at a cerebral level.