The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The highway rejoined the coast at Obama, and after a couple of hours of heavy tramping I clambered down a grassy bank and had a glorious swim in a beautifully empty lagoonlike bay. The sea was so warm that I wished it cooler, and as I floated on my stomach gazing down through the foggy green water, a jellyfish drifted lazily by my head and made a brief, tingling foray across my face.

  Sitting toweling myself in a little restaurant above the bay, I chatted to the old man who ran it. He was busy trying to puzzle out how his new electric cash register worked, and in between mouthfuls of fried rice I told him about the jellyfish.

  "That's quite out of the question," he said with authority.

  "But I saw it. I can still feel the tingling on my face."

  The old man pointed across at a calendar.

  "You see," he said as though to a child, "the jellyfish season ended yesterday."

  Further along the coast the inlets were all walled with concrete, and in the largest of them a dredging operation was in full swing: engine growling, crane creaking, slamming and banging that put an end to any thoughts of another swim. At Takahama I slipped off the highway and wandered down toward the lighthouse, where I found a government lodging house and decided to stay the night. The plump old woman whose job it was to serve me dinner told me an American had stayed there a month ago. He had wanted toast and coffee for break-fast and had been most upset that they only had rice.

  "Can you eat rice?" she asked suspiciously—not Do you want it or Do you like it, but Can you eat it, as though it were a skill.

  In the bath I watched a happy father bathe his two little laughing daughters and then turn his soapy towel over to them while they took it in turns to scrub his back. It rained during the night, and a wild wind slammed the sea against the dark rocks by the lighthouse. In the morning the beach was deserted except for three men who had driven their car down onto the pebbly sand and were peeling on black rubber skin-diving suits, eyeing the loud spray as a turkey might an axe. In the tiny park outside the lodging house fallen leaves flapped noisily along the ground and beer cans bounced and rolled about the paths. I trudged back toward the highway and passed three women washing underpants and vests in a swollen stream by the side of the road. The stream looked none too clean to me, and in a land where five-cycle washing machines are commonplace, it appeared, that blustery first morning of autumn, that a time warp had trapped this sliver of the coast.

  September fifteenth is Respect for the Aged Day, one of Japan's twelve national holidays. By midmorning the wind had blown most of the straggling storm clouds away, and in the subdued breeze flocks of white cumulus drifted lazily over the hills casting round blimplike shadows. Most of the drive-ins I passed were closed for the holiday. Near one—the Oasis—a ragged little procession of dark-suited men picked its way up a hillside behind a brown-robed priest. One man carried a white wooden sotoba stick of the kind that are planted in clusters behind a grave; another carried a bunch of wilting yellow flowers.

  At midday I emerged from the low hills that separate Fukui from rural Kyoto. My march through the Chubu District of Japan was finished—a march of just over seven hundred kilometers that had begun twenty-eight days before when I crossed the prefectural boundary from Yamagata to Niigata. I was now starting a brisk seven-day stroll through the northwestern reaches of the Kinki ("Near the Capital") District, so called because, from the earliest times to the 1860s, the imperial hub of the nation lay not far south of here—in the Yamato area around Nara, in Asuka, in Nara itself and finally, for almost eleven centuries, in Kyoto, whose name means simply "capital city."

  The first villages I came to on the Kyoto coast contained some of the finest thatched shops I had seen on my journey. If it had not been for the vending machines outside them selling instant "Cup Noodle" they might have seemed finer. As I approached the large port city of Maizuru the shops turned glass and concrete again, noodle dispensers gave way to denim jackets lavishly embroidered with English texts— "Let's Go Dance, Kitty or Jimmy" (always wise to hedge your bets)— and as I tramped into the city I was surprised to see a large brown snake swimming nonchalantly along in a ditch.

  Since 1901 Maizuru has been a major Japanese naval base. It is situated on a perfectly sheltered bay, approached from the sea by a long narrow channel that forks into two anchorages some seven kilometers apart. In the eastern anchorage, on this bright Respect for the Aged Day, lay three destroyers, two minesweepers, and four gleaming torpedo boats, all flying the Japanese naval ensign, as well as a rusty Panamanian freighter and two Liberian tankers in dry dock. Four little boys stood in a line by a bus stop pissing at all these ships through the wire netting, while their kimonoed grandmother, weighed down with carrier bags, looked on in satisfaction.

  On a school sports field fringed with refreshment tents a fancy dress carnival was in progress. Five fat middle-aged men dressed as bumble-bees were performing a desultory conga, their yellow-and-black bellies wobbling like blancmanges and their paper wings catching each other in the eye. In another part of the field eight younger men were prancing up and down with large cardboard penises tied between their legs— perhaps a sign of Respect for the Aged. I stopped to drink some lemonade but quickly attracted more frothing children than the bumblebees and penises combined, so I emptied the paper cup in two gulps and plodded off down the highway.

  Because its twin anchorages are so far apart, the city is divided into two sectors, East Maizuru and West Maizuru, and these are separated on the landward side by eight kilometers of road and a curved, unlit tunnel. Emerging from this tunnel at about four o'clock in the after-noon, I was forced to leap onto the grass verge by a car that came screeching up the slope toward the tunnel entrance at about twice the speed limit. As the car approached, the driver gave me four loud blasts on his two-tone horn, stuck his head out of the open window, and yelled ''Gaijin! Gaijin! Gaijin!" at the top of his voice. I barely had time to glimpse his laughing face before the car had swept past me into the tunnel, slammed on its brakes as the driver saw the curve, spun with a sickening squeal of rubber across the road, and smacked into the tunnel wall.

  I stood on the grass verge open-mouthed. Another car was racing up the slope after the first and I did the only thing I could think of to stop it, which was to wave my arms at it like a demented windmill. The driver stared, grinned, muttered something to his giggling passenger, and shot by me into the tunnel. A split second later there was another nerve-grating screech of brakes and the sound, amplified by the tunnel echoes, of two Liberian tankers colliding.

  I struggled out of my pack and had begun running back into the tunnel when a motorcyclist came up the slope at a sensible speed and I managed to stop him and explain what had happened. He suggested that I find a phone and call the police while he—being Japanese and so more obviously sane—stand there and flag down oncoming drivers. I shouldered my pack and sped off down the road in top gear till I came to a yard where an old man was loading crates of beer onto a little delivery truck.

  "Can I use your phone ?" I panted.

  "Why, what's up?"

  "It's an emergency!"

  The old man picked his teeth.

  "What sort of an emergency?"

  I explained the accident.

  "Who d'you want to phone?"

  "The police, of course."

  The old man spat out his toothpick and puffed out his chest in what struck me as a well-rehearsed impersonation of Kojak.

  "I'll do it," he growled. "I can do it in Japanese."

  And he rolled off airily across the yard while I turned away toward West Maizuru mouthing Swahili, a language I do not speak.

  Five minutes later two police cars and a wailing ambulance roared by me heading for the tunnel. It took me three quarters of an hour to reach the center of West Maizuru and during this tramp it occurred to me that, since I was the only witness to the accident, I ought to make a proper report of it. So I marched full of public spirit into the first Swahili-speaking police box
I came to.

  "You know that accident...," I began.

  The younger of the two policemen in the box stood picking bits of lint off his cuffs and the older one sat gazing at the ceiling, tapping a pencil on his gray metal desk.

  "What accident is that, then?"

  "In the tunnel about fifty minutes ago. Two cars, I was the only witness."

  The younger policeman took control.

  "I expect they'll be dealing with that at the main station."

  "I thought I'd better make a report."

  "Thank you."

  "So here I am."

  "Yes, well, they'll know more about it at the main station."

  "Do you think I should go there?"

  "You can if you like."

  The older policeman stopped tapping his pencil and started to twirl it like a little baton.

  "Whereabouts is the main station?"

  The directions involved half the buses in Maizuru.

  "Can't I walk?"

  "It's much too far."

  "Well, wouldn't it be possible to phone from here?"

  "No," interrupted the older policeman, "I don't think that will be necessary. Why don't you just forget about it? I'm sure they'll have all the details they need."

  A bit peeved that my sense of public spirit had been so bluntly nipped in the bud, I asked about a place to spend the night and with this the policemen seemed on firmer ground. But over dinner I was nagged by a nasty thought. Suppose the driver of the first car had been charged with dangerous driving—as he certainly ought to be. He might have made me a part of his defense: "There was this gaijin, you see... a real one... and he was dancing through the tunnel wearing a card-board penis...." So I obtained from the ryokan's telephone directory the address of the main West Maizuru police station and went there as soon as I had finished eating.

  The policemen on duty had just finished eating too—there was a pile of unwashed noodle bowls on one of the desks—and as I strolled in through the glass doors a TV commentator was announcing that the count on Oh Sadaharu was one strike and one ball.

  "I've come about that accident."

  One strike, two balls.

  The two policemen at the desk glanced briefly away from the TV set and one nudged the other.

  "That accident in the tunnel..."

  The nudged policeman stood up, straightened his tunic, and ambled over to the counter where I was standing.

  "I think I was the only person who saw it, you see, so I thought I'd better come and tell you what happened."

  "Tunnel?"

  "Between East and West Maizuru. About four o'clock."

  "Oh, yes. That tunnel."

  "There was an accident there."

  "How do you know?"

  "I saw it. I'm the only witness."

  The policeman drummed his fingers on the counter.

  "You'd better talk to the officer in charge. Oi! Ono!" he called. "Come out here a minute, will you?"

  And the youngest policeman I had so far had to deal with poked his head round a door on the other side of the room with a single yellow noodle still dangling from the comer of his mouth.

  "Here's a foreigner who saw that accident in the tunnel."

  One strike, three balls.

  Officer Ono swallowed his noodle and came briskly over to the counter, buttoning his tunic. The other policeman ambled back to the TV set where the catcher and pitcher were conferring. I explained to Officer Ono what had happened at the tunnel, and he wrote down everything I said very carefully on a sheet of ruled paper. I estimated the car's speed and drew a diagram of its erratic swerve into the tunnel wall. Then I told him what I thought had caused the accident.

  "The driver was looking at me, you see, and yelling 'Gaijin! Gaijin! Gaijin!' at the top of his voice."

  Officer Ono put down the pencil he had been making his notes with and looked across at the other two policemen, who were distracted from the TV screen long enough to glance from me to him and chuckle. I finished with the part about the motorcyclist and the phone call.

  "Yes," said Officer Ono, who had not written any of the last part down, "that confirms what the other witnesses told us."

  The pitching coach had strolled across to the mound, and one of the seated policemen took this opportunity to bark a quick order at Officer Ono, who blinked, thanked me, and made straight for his door.

  "Don't you need my name and address or anything?"

  "No, I don't think that will be necessary."

  "I see. That's all, then, is it?"

  "Yes, indeed. Goodnight and thank you very much."

  I never found out whether Oh reached first base or behind which tree the other witnesses had been lurking, but the incident has a post-script. When I returned to Tokyo at the end of my journey, I wrote to the police in West Maizuru to ask whether anyone had been seriously injured in the accident, and I received a postcard from Officer Ninomiya of the Traffic Division, which said in part:

  "Thank you very much for your recent polite inquiry. We checked our records at once and discovered that no injury was reported. The driver of the car was eighteen." His name and full address followed. "Two of his friends were with him in the car but, being young and strong in body, they came to no harm. All of the officers here at the station would like to express their profound thanks for the utmost cooperation you rendered on that occasion. Please do not fail to drop in and see us when you are next in our vicinity."

  Respect for the Aged Day ended with me dropping in elsewhere for a sizable beer and the Hiroshima Carp beating the Yomiuri Giants 4-3.

  I left Maizuru, striding through the suburbs where elderly women sold vegetables off the pavements and Russian sailors tried on cheap woolen jackets in the cramped, dark shops on the highway. Then I turned north along the bank of a deep, full-flowing river, and just before coming out on the seacoast again I passed under a railway bridge that, a moment before, an orange-painted train had crossed. I stood and watched the train cross the bridge and felt a strong compulsion to stride into the next little station I came to, buy a ticket, and rejoin human life. It wasn't that I felt more than usually tired, though I had had a week of insomniac nights, lying awake from two to five each morning watching the dawn creep into some unfamiliar sky. Simply, there was a homeliness about the rattling train; an everyday taken-for-granted matter-of-factness that contrasted brazenly with the ridiculous aches in muscles that I was still only just discovering I had.

  Beyond the railway arch I could see the sea crashing in heavy white breakers on a beach, and above the last of the bare estuary fields kites wheeled, uttering their strange high-pitched mew as they searched for small creatures made homeless by the harvest.

  I had become obsessed with distance, and I noted every day's total in neat script in my diary, adding it to the week's and the month's and the journey's. This was my eightieth day on the road and the previous night I had logged 1,997 kilometers. When I reached Sapporo I thought I had done something respectable, and at Hakodate I thought I had done something uncommon. At Niigata I thought I had done some-thing admirable, and at Kanazawa something remarkable. At Maizuru I thought I had done something astonishing, and I expected to reach Shimonoseki feeling that I had done something incredible. But watching this little train rattle across its bridge while the kites wheeled and the breakers crashed, I wondered whether I would reach Cape Sata knowing I had done something mad.

  Amanohashidate—the Floating Bridge of Heaven—is a narrow sand-bar about three and a half kilometers long which stretches across the Bay of Miyazu, enclosing half o£ it like a lagoon. Just as Kenrokuen in Kanazawa is one of the Three Most Beautiful Landscape Gardens in Japan, so Amanohashidate is considered one of the Three Most Beautiful Scenic Places. The habit of counting and classifying things is deeply ingrained among the guardians of Japan's natural assets, as the explanatory English signboard at the southern end of Amanohashidate makes particularly clear. The main section of the sandbar, it records, is 2,425 meters long and ha
s an area of 130,484 square meters. At its greatest width it is 149 meters across and at its slimmest 19. The investigation" of 1934 revealed that there were 3,990 pine trees on it, while a second "investigation" in May 1950 showed that this number had risen to 4,522. Such investigations, then, not only content minor government officials but, on the evidence of these statistics, excite the pine trees too. The signboard also advises that the "distance necessary time on foot" from the small revolving bridge at the southern tip of the bar to Kasamatsu Park at the northern end is exactly sixty minutes, and so I set out jauntily along the sandy track that on this sunny September day was splattered with the shadows of the busily pro-creating pines.

  Few people, it seems, walk the length of the sandbar. At Chionji temple, near the southern end, a group of tourists had just broken off their prayers at the urgent beck of several bullhorns and had rushed down the old temple steps and boarded a boat for a sightseeing cruise. That is certainly a better way of appreciating the sandbar as a whole than to walk along it, where only the details are viewable; but it was the details that I liked most.

  Whether they are procreating or not, pine trees are nicely eccentric plants, and it is not an accident that the Japanese accord ancient ones the same veneration due hermits and saints. Nor is it only ancient pines that possess a touch of human idiosyncrasy. At the narrowest, least protected point of the sandbar, where the full force of the wind cuts across it from the open sea, the trees are fiercely, tortuously bent, as though a life spent resisting the siege of gales had driven them to permanent distraction. Walking, I had the leisure to see them as individual creatures rather than as globs of green lost in a larger land-scape, and perhaps because of this I left the sandbar feeling not that it was heavenly at all, but that, as with Eiheiji, its proper element was the earth. Others have clearly felt the same: