The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The cliff road was opened in 1883, and the danger from the waves was overcome. But the road is fraught with its own dangers. It is far too narrow for the diesel trucks that now chuff up it yard by yard, far too tortuous for the speed at which the tourists screech round it in their luminous orange Cedrics. To the solitary walker, shunted off the road by all the trucks, honked at by every Cedric that passes, the beach below beckons like a haven.

  The village of Oyashirazu has been completely bypassed by a newer stretch of highway. The drivers roar by without even noticing it, and the ryokan and the little restaurant in the village are closed. I stopped for lunch at the Lesthouse Nihonkai and was treated to "Stupid Cupid," "Crazy Love," and "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" broadcast over the restaurant's loudspeaker system at a volume that would have prompted any stranded traveler who valued his eardrums to duck under the waves in order to preserve them. Eventually, lunch abandoned, Lesthouse abandoned, I rounded the last descending curves of the highway, passed the black-roofed houses of the last village in Niigata, and with the sun squinting hazily through the afternoon clouds, I crossed the prefectural boundary and emerged from a filthy, mile-long tunnel onto the flat coastal plain of Toyama. Straw-hatted women pedaled their bicycles, children marched trimly home from their schools, a grandfather with a fuzzy-haired baby strapped to his back stood by the side of the highway eating toast and jam, and in the green, close-packed, watery fields the rice slowly ripened.

  Perhaps the first thing you notice about Toyama is its gravestones. Those of Niigata were ragged and black. They perched in clumps on the edges of clifftops and seemed on the point of crumbling into the sea. The gravestones of Toyama are huge and elaborate, each one erect on its own stone plinth with its own flight of steps leading up to it like a cenotaph. They are flanked by lanterns and stone letterboxes into which mourners can respectfully post their business cards. There are trimmed flowers in the polished stone vases, incense smoking in the incense burners, and the Chinese characters on the graves have been chiseled by craftsmen. Graves like this clearly cost a small fortune, but few families in Toyama seem to begrudge the expense.

  On the quiet coastal road, away from the highway, the houses stood tidy and scrubbed. Their black slates shone, their little yards were neatly fenced, and their lawns were dotted with plaster storks. At Nyuzen the Nyuzen Lions' Club had equipped each bus shelter with a dust-pan and brush. The cars of the local driving school buzzed neatly about, all a uniform rose-pink, and the Western-style toilets in the coffee shops I stopped in had fluffy seat covers and silent flushes. Toyama is one of the smallest prefectures I passed through on my journey. It ranks thirty-third in the country in size (out of a total of forty-seven), yet its per capita income is the seventeenth highest—and, for a prefecture stuck here at the Back of japan, that is a remarkable achievement.

  "It's because we work," crowed a busy shopkeeper, and we've got no time for people who don't. We've got a nice little prefecture here, a nice little life. And by the way"—eyeing my rucksack—"what do you do for a living?"

  The highway curved further away to the south. Beyond it Mount Tateyama was hidden in haze. To the north, the sea was a brilliant cornflower blue, a thin ribbon above flat sparkling fields that, on this last day of August, mellowed towards harvest.

  But on the banks of the Kurobe River stood a cluster of thumping factories that made granite chips, and the outskirts of the city of Kurobe were dominated by a plant that turned out aluminum window frames and zippers. The largest buildings in the city itself were the plant's three massive housing complexes, with the company's initials— Y.K.K.—on their roofs in letters so high they could be read for miles. On the streets of the city the telegraph poles bore Y.K.K. advertisements, and Y.K.K. buses shuttled snoozing employees from company workshops to company restaurants to company gymnasiums to company beds.

  Was it haze that hid Mount Tateyama, I wondered, or was it a whiff of company smog? Or was it smoke from the company fire that seemed to be smoldering just outside the factory? Five red fire engines came hurtling down the narrow road with firemen in asbestos armor clinging to their ladders. I could see them only indistinctly as they converged on the bubble of smoke across the plain, but their sirens shattered the quiet for miles, and the haze round Tateyama, when I really looked, had a definite charred-brown tinge to it. The poet Basho once remarked that it is "fun" not to see holy mountains when you have been looking forward to seeing them, so I zipped Mount Tate-yams and its fires out of my mind and tramped at dusk into the small city of Uozu.

  "Look, it's a Frenchman!" said one little boy to his schoolfriends with an assurance that worried me for several days.

  The ryokan I found was full upstairs, but if I didn't mind sleeping downstairs in the room next to the carp pond, I was welcome to sample its hospitality. I didn't mind a bit. The carp were entertaining; their feeding time was the same as mine. As I watched them from the veranda outside my room, gobbling pink pellets like submarine pigs, the woman of the ryokan brought me a slab of korimochi—white, hard, hammered rice cake, studded with beans, hung up for a month, then roasted over glowing charcoal.

  "You've missed the Bon dance, but you'd hardly have noticed it. It's not worth watching any more. We used to have a very good Bon dance till ten years ago when they took away the town square for a bus terminal and built the elevated railway. There's nowhere we can dance now, but you can't complain. The railway's made life so much more convenient..."

  After dinner I went out for a walk along the dark streets of the city and watched people pissing and emptying their teapots into a little stream that flowed down to the harbor. When I got back to the ryokan the guests were in an uproar. Oh Sadaharu, the Yomiuri Giants' Taiwanese first baseman, had just equaled Hank Aaron's American major league record of 755 career home runs and was to be awarded the title of National Hero.

  "What a magnificent Japanese!" yelled the salesmen in the room next door.

  Quite a compliment for a Chinaman, I thought.

  By the side of the road an old man in a straw boater sat carving rough stone statues of Jizo, the Buddhist guardian, of travelers, children, and pregnant women. Along country lanes the figure of Jizo is often a commoner sight than road signs. You come across him, too, at the sites of traffic accidents, and on the anniversary of an accident he is preened and pampered like a summer grave. The sea was divided into neat squares by floats, and beyond the floats white fishing boats shimmered in the morning haze. In one small harbor a newish monument depicted the Goddess of Mercy balancing herself on the head of a floundered whale. The whale had flopped over onto its side, and it was impossible to say whether the goddess was blessing it or trampling it to death.

  At noon on this first day of September I swam near the estuary of the Joganji River. The beach was fine and relatively unlittered, but the water was cloudy and had an odd, sweet, unsalty taste that reminded me of rotting cabbage.

  "You shouldn't have swum," clucked the middle-aged woman in the ice-cream shop just past the bridge. "Not this late in the summer. In August everyone cleans their houses for O-Bon and they tip most of their rubbish into the river. It's an old custom, but nowadays, with more houses and more rubbish to tip, it's getting to be a real nuisance. When the wind blows in from the sea you can smell it. A sweet smell..."

  "Like rotting cabbage..."

  "Or squashed fruit or compost. You know what I mean."

  I said I did. She made me a strawberry ice.

  "The daughter of the family next door is in America. She's studying English there for a year. They've given her a million yen. Do you think that'll be enough?"

  I said it depended on her tastes.

  "Oh, but Toyama people are very thrifty. We know the value of money all right. Families from Toyama were among the first to emigrate to Hawaii and Brazil. Always trying to improve ourselves, we are; on the lookout for a better life. My eldest son's a barber in Tokyo—a proper barber, American-style. He earns three million yen a year. My second s
on works in a dairy. He earns two and a half million yen with bonuses. We've got three hundred and ninety square meters of land, and we're thinking of buying another hundred and sixty."

  I asked why Toyama people wanted to emigrate.

  "It's such a little prefecture, you see, and there's a long history of moving away. People who didn't emigrate would generally go to Osaka or Tokyo to find work. Today almost everyone goes to Tokyo, and when they come back you can tell it by their accents. But moving abroad must have been such a wrench. I can't imagine doing it myself There are so many Japanese things I'd miss. I'd miss the four seasons like anything. They don't have four seasons abroad, do they?"

  I paid my bill and shouldered my pack.

  "Anyway," said the woman, "you're too young to worry about work. You've got college to get through first, I expect."

  I turned inland feeling remarkably frisky. It must have been the strawberry ice.

  Halfway through the suburbs of Toyama I went into a coffee shop, and before I had time to sit down at a table, one of the customers said, "Ah, an American."

  No, I sighed to the hushed shop, I was not an American. There were other kinds of foreigners in the world, and some of them even found their way to Toyama.

  Instantly, conversation about me bubbled, but it was a conversation from which I was totally excluded.

  "He's wearing boots."

  "He's got a sleeping bag."

  "And he's looking at a map. What d'you reckon he's up to?"

  "It looks like he's walking into Toyama."

  "Doesn't he know there's a bus?"

  Once or twice I was asked a question.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Kyushu, eventually."

  "What, through Tottori?"

  "No, through Hiroshima."

  And the questioner would promptly turn his back on me while my answers were relayed round the shop.

  "He's going to Kyushu. He's not going through Tottori. He's going through Hiroshima."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  "Wouldn't it be quicker through Tottori?"

  "He might not know that, being an American."

  On my way out a man caught me by the elbow.

  "Where do you come from?"

  "England."

  "Do they speak English there?"

  "Some of them do."

  The man leaned back in his chair and studied me.

  "Well, I've heard that in English they use the word 'another.' They use it quite often. What does it mean?"

  I explained as best I could, with a couple of examples. The man turned and nodded to his companion.

  "There, what did I tell you? He speaks Japanese. I can't imagine where he learned it."

  The city of Toyama is nationally famous for the manufacture of patent medicines, usually sold door to door by elderly enthusiasts in small wooden chests (the medicines, not the enthusiasts), and these chests become part of the household furniture. The preparation and sale of the medicines, called kampoyaku (Chinese concoctions), bear all the signs of a small-scale cottage industry, but the entrepreneurial genius of the people of Toyama has parlayed this unlikely source of fortune into a business with an annual wholesale value of more than 190 billion yen. The city's oldest and best-known kampoyaku manufacturer is Kokando, and I arranged to pay them a visit.

  The Kokando factory—opened in 1876 and rebuilt shortly after the war—stands in the southern sector of Toyama near the old tram stop named after it. The girl who showed me round spoke slowly and precisely and with the solemnity of a preacher who has the undivided attention of a disarmed infidel.

  "Before the war our ninety-nine medicines—the widest range of kampoyaku in Japan—were manufactured and packed entirely by hand. Nowadays, of course, we use machines, but the traditions and processes remain the same, and the recipes continue to derive from those which were imparted to Lord Maeda in the seventeenth century.

  "The botanical ingredients include Korean ginseng (a very expensive kind of carrot) and the roots of the Indian ginkgo tree. But more highly prized are the items we obtain from the internal organs of animals. There is, for example, the dried glandular fluid of the male musk deer, drawn off during the rutting season and employed in the manufacture of a powerful stimulant. Originally, in order to obtain this fluid, it was unfortunately necessary to slaughter the deer, but nowadays, thanks to the development of new methods, it can be obtained humanely through plastic tubes. Then there is the bile of the Japanese bear, a pain killer and an agent in the reduction of fevers. The secretion from the poison gland of the Chinese toad is mainly used in the treatment of heart diseases, though it, too, kills pain with remarkable efficacy. And gallstones produced in the bladders of cows are a restorative and an antidote to several toxic substances.

  The girl bestowed on me a reverent smile, and we stopped to watch two young women in nurse's uniforms, whose faces were entirely hidden behind gauze masks, sorting through a trough full of tiny yellow capsules.

  "They are checking them for shape," the girl explained, "and their job is so terribly taxing on the eyes that they must change shifts every thirty minutes."

  "What's in the capsules?" I asked.

  "Oh, vitamins—and one or two other things," said the girl with studied nonchalance, and I followed her down the length of the ma-chine shop, where white-clad women were operating little conveyor belts in a hush that reminded me of Remembrance Sunday. The only sounds were the faint click and patter of the neat gray machines and the occasional sigh of an elderly employee poised in her mask over a tray of colored tablets—or perhaps, out of sight of the casual visitor, over a cauldron of steaming Chinese toads.

  The names of some of Kokando's products were as fascinating to me as the ingredients. What was in Six God Pills, I wondered, or Real Mother Powder or Woman Reliever? Those with "English" names were equally intriguing. What did "Mashin A" cure, and why would one want a dose of "World Hap"?

  Before leaving, I was given a small brown bottle of chilled liquid to drink. I learned from the label that it was made from asparagus, which, considering the range of possible free samples, was something of a letdown. However, it also contained royal jelly, and the label recommended it in glowing English for "sport, driving, mountain-climbing, working, and being beautiful."I swallowed it in a gulp, bowed solemnly to my guide, and went to get a haircut.

  The young woman in the hairdresser's wore the same nurse's smock and white gauze mask as the employees of Kokando. She washed my hair, cut it, dried it, gave me a fierce massage, pounded my skull, vibrated my spine and thighs with a mechanical vibrator, shaved my chin and cheeks, my forehead, the tops of my eyebrows and the space between my eyes, cleaned my ears with padded sticks, and trimmed the hair from the insides of my nostrils. A missionary who came in once or twice, she remarked, had exactly the same sort of nose that I had. Takai (high) was her word for it, and she smeared it lavishly with skin cream.

  Walking back through Toyama in the late afternoon, it was impossible not to detect the glint of affluence. The shop windows were crammed with Hanae Mori fashions, the main streets had names like Sunflower Boulevard, and when I went to draw some money from a large post office, no one thought to ask me for identification. Crossing from Niigata to Toyama had reminded me a little of crossing from Yugoslavia to Austria: from a land of calloused laborers to one where slightly obese people consume cream pastries and have safe-deposit boxes in air-conditioned banks. Opinion polls now regularly announce that something like ninety percent of Japanese people regard themselves as belonging to "the middle class," and I expect the percentage in Toyama is even higher. I paid a lot of money for a dinner of sweet prawns and went to bed early in my middle-class ryokan with its vase of plastic flowers and its coin TV. There were no mosquitoes or wind to wake me and I slept the sleep of the solvent.

  On the way out of Toyama the haze that had been hugging the city lifted, and in the lulling heat a range of blue-gray mountains stood faintly visible to the south
. I was quickly out of the center of the city, striding through the flat suburbs where small green rice fields lay sandwiched between single-story shops and cupboard-sized beauty parlors. The signs of affluence grew fewer—one of the last was the "New World Coffee and Dance"—and as I started to climb toward the thickly wooded western hills, a low ripple of thunder snaked sluggishly from end to end of the basin.

  Throughout the morning the clouds mounted and the light changed as though through a set of filters, till by midday the sky had turned a bright salmon pink. Ten minutes later the rain began, not in drops but in a sudden belting torrent. The thunder slammed from cloud bank to cloud bank, and small livid spears of lightning crackled down through the salmon pink sky.

  No wonder the Japanese think foreigners are odd. A car screeched to a halt twenty yards ahead of me, and the driver rolled the window down and beckoned to me frantically through the blinding rain.

  "Come on! Quick!"

  I sloshed up to the car as he flung the passenger door open, and grinned sheepishly in at him.

  "It's all right," I said. "I'd prefer to walk."

  He did reply, but it was inaudible above the rain, and his jaw had dropped so far that he had a bit of trouble articulating.

  No other cars stopped; they probably couldn't see me. No houses appeared, no shelters to rest in. A long way further on I found a little drive-in and sat there for two hours soaked to the skin, drinking beer and waiting for the storm to pass. The owner was a pleasant man, and when I had finished my second bottle, he opened a third without any prompting and brought it over to my table where we sat and drank it together. Outside, the storm raged in fits and starts. In the lulls the own-er would run out into the car park and spend a minute staring up at the sky. Then he would come back and sit down at the table and give me a confidential weather report.

  "Sky's clearing a bit to the south, but a lot more clouds blowing up from the northwest."

  A fresh sheet of rain clattered down to rattle the drive-in windows.