The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  "Welcome. Didn't see anything on the road, I suppose?"

  "Like what?"

  "Animals, or anything like that?"

  "Foxes?"

  "I was thinking more of wild boars. The first bus in the morning often drives a crowd of them off the road. A hundred and fifty kilo-grams some of them are, with acceleration like a guided missile. You were all right in a car of course. Pretty scary on foot. Where did Uehara drop you?"

  I never told him. But late that night, lying in my futon, I watched the shadows the moon cast on the pale paper windows of my room—moving shadows that crept from wall to wall, large as sheep, silent as the moon itself. It was dawn before I fell asleep.

  The stream that people came to fish in bubbled away from the min-shuck door, and the empty road followed it steeply into the hills. A red helicopter hammered low over the paddies, driving the kites and the crows away, its shadow flicking across the golden rice like a grass-hopper out of some absurdly inelegant haiku. Ever more steeply the road wound and twisted, through villages whose houses were strung out along it like beads. Firewood stood stacked outside the wooden bathrooms, sometimes reaching up to the tin roofs, and in the hills high above the villages the rice crop was squashed into cramped, narrow terraces that looked more like a giant's footholds on the mountainside than arable fields.

  These three days in the mountains of Hyogo—during which I covered 113 kilometers—took me up and down some of the steepest slopes of the journey. A balding young man in one of the villages I walked through told me that an NHK camera team had been there some months before to film the inuwashi—the rare golden eagle that is a specially protected creature in Japan. They had come loaded with cam-eras and tripods and had been completely unable to haul them up the vertiginous footpaths into the hills. Eventually, they had given up trying and had hired men from the local villages to lug their equipment about for them like Sherpas on a Himalayan expedition.

  From the highest passes I had breathtaking views of the green deeply wooded valleys, with their sharp twists and cliffs that made it look as though a pickaxe had hacked them out of the landscape. The only eagle I came across was emblazoned on the side of a bright new loggers' truck. (Emblazoning trucks is a minor but vigorous art form in some parts of Japan.) The eagle was perched, rather precariously, on a fanciful American flag, while a bewigged geisha with a pipe in her mouth —the work of some inglorious Utamaro—adorned the other side of the truck, and two gold carp, protected by their beauty as the eagle is by the atrophied calf muscles of NHK cameramen, disported them-selves on the tailboard.

  Toward noon, I passed a shaved bit of mountainside that signboards told me was a ski slope, and emerged from the steepest of the hills onto Highway 29, where I found a drive-in and had a lunch of noodles while the proprietor and his family hooked fish out of a filthy dirty tank and tossed them with unsettling, secretive smiles into a tin bucket to die.

  At about four o'clock I came to a part of the river that had been turned into a lake by the construction of a dam. In a dark, tiny sweet shop near the dam an old woman advised me to spend the night at the Saikuringu Taaminaru ("Cycling Terminal"), a hot-spring lodging house which I presume was so called because it catered to the hundreds of students who came through these hills in the summer on bikes. I recognized the turnoff to the lodging house, which I reached about an hour later, by a brightly lit electric sign glowing an effusive welcome. The place itself was about a kilometer and a half along a track that ran up into the hills, and when I arrived a large barking dog greeted me equally effusively. The doors of the lodging house were curtained and locked and it took five minutes of rattling them to rouse the white-shirted custodian, who bustled out finally to tell me that they were closed.

  "But you've got a sign all lit up down on the highway."

  "Yes. We always keep it lit."

  "What for, for goodness' sake?"

  "To make people feel welcome."

  "But you're closed!"

  "That's right."

  Which was, perhaps, the most quintessentially Oriental conversation of the entire trip.

  I stamped back down to the highway in the dusk in an unrelentingly British frame of mind. The sign, as I passed it, still glowed its vacuous welcome and if I had been a bother boy I would have put a boot through it. Being a man of letters, though, I contented myself with a few letters, stamping on under a risen moon and a rapidly darkening, star-flecked sky until I reached the little town of Ueno and trudged about in search of a ryokan.

  At the first one I came to I opened the door and called out in a hearty voice. Beyond the open screen, in the darkened living room, I could see an elderly man in a white vest sitting opposite a Buddhist altar for the dead. I called out to him five or six times, but he simply sat staring across the small room at the photograph of a woman on the altar, flanked by flowers and misted by incense smoke that drifted like a fog through the whole building.

  I crept out of the door as quietly as I could and turned away down the pitch-black street, using the pocket torch I carried for tunnels. There seemed to be no lights in the town at all, nor any shops open, and the windows of the second ryokan I found were as black and empty as their surroundings. It was very eerie, as though the whole silent township were awaiting the passing of some grim angel. Yet the man in the second ryokan welcomed me, and we sat together in his fly-spattered living room while he watched me eat a cold steak smothered with sauce out of which I picked a dead mosquito so deftly with my chopsticks that the man didn't know whether to apologize or applaud.

  Halfway through the meal we were visited by a member of the Communist Party selling copies of their newspaper, Akahata (Red Flag). I could hear the conversation in the entrance hall as I picked a second mosquito out of my miso soup.

  "I don't think much of the emperor, but we need him to preserve the traditions of our country. I don't think much of your lot either, but I'll buy a paper for the sake of democracy. I've got an English bloke eating steak in my living room. Why don't you come in and have an argument with him?"

  But the party member tactfully retreated, and Red Flag served to mop up the spilled sauce and miso soup.

  As I walked out of the town next morning I saw some very decorative election posters. One was of an elderly politician with a portable cassette recorder, thrusting a large microphone urgently forward, perhaps to elicit opinions from his constituents or perhaps to encourage them to sing. There was an even better one further on—a plump middle-aged candidate for the House of Councillors in a red-and-black striped rugby jersey running forward with a beautifully polished rugby ball under his arm and not a pomaded hair out of place. Perhaps the helicopter had something to do with elections too, for it was thudding about the sky again this morning, swooping over the streets of Ueno that were as lifeless by daylight as they had been by night.

  In the next little town I trudged through it was Road Safety Day, and the town hall had mounted an exhibition of photographs of mangled cars and bicycles. Along the main street came a jeep with two town hall officials in it and a loudspeaker broadcasting a woman's voice saying, "Ladies, aren't you worried about your husbands?" I suppose this had something to do with road safety, but in a place where foxes bewitch police constables and signs welcome you effusively to places that are closed, who knows what husbands get up to?

  By midafternoon I was nearing the highest point of another mountain pass. The sweat on my back was biting cold whenever I stopped, but despite the discomfort, I sat for a few minutes' rest, watching a gang of road repairers, the men lounging in the seats of their bulldozers while elderly women stooped to hand-mix cement. Then I walked on through the pass and so crossed out of Hyogo Prefecture and into Okayama. The Kinki Region had taken me a bare seven days, but they had been very hard ones. Now, on the last leg of my walk through Honshu, I was entering the Chugoku ("Middle Country") District—not to be confused with Chubu (the "Middle District," from Niigata to Fukui) nor with the Japanese word for China, which is also Chugo
ku (that land having been known throughout most of its history as the Middle Kingdom). "Middle" at first seems an odd thing to call this extreme western tip of the main island, until you remember that the first Japanese settlements were almost certainly in the northern half of Kyushu while the first real center of political power grew up in the Nara basin. It is midway between these two pivotal points that the Middle Country lies.

  The afternoon was overcast, with a thin mist of rain on the distant peaks, and the road turned steeply down into the teeth of a strong mountain wind. The hours spent trudging up mountains like this strain the muscles of your calves and thighs, while the hours spent trudging down the other sides can send strange pains shooting through your feet. Sometimes it's hard to say which is worse, and the relief you feel on reaching a summit is always short-lived. In the first village I came to in the valley, I passed a group of children on their way home from school. As often, it was impossible not to notice the difference in attitude between the sexes. First I passed two little boys who giggled their heads off and screamed back at the four girls following them, "Gaijin da! Gaijin da!" and ran off shouting "I rub yoo!" When the little girls passed me they simply nodded and said "Kaerimashita," which in this part of japan is the greeting that schoolchildren are taught to use when they encounter their elders. For most of the trip this had been the pat-tern—jeered at by boys, greeted sensibly by girls—and I found myself regretting again and again that not a single one of the election posters I had been passing bore a woman's face.

  At the Japan Synthetic Rubber Company a group of cheery women hung out of the second-story windows to get a look at me, and at a grocer's shop another cheery woman rang a ryokan to book me a room.

  "Shall I just tell them it's a man?" she asked a bit timidly.

  "No, I said, "you'd better tell them I'm foreign."

  But when she did, the woman on the other end of the line grew so flustered that I had to take the receiver and spend two minutes persuading her that I wouldn't bite her head off, and then another two minutes assuring her that this was not all some kind of elaborate joke, since she couldn't believe that anyone who spoke Japanese could possibly be something else.

  "I thought you were having me on," she confessed when I finally reached her ryokan after disappointing two schoolgirls on motor scooters who had asked me to write my name in their notebooks and were visibly upset when I spoke to them in their own language.

  "Make him speak English! Make him speak English!" shouted four grubby little boys who had tailed me for more than a kilometer and were now crowding into the entrance hall of the ryokan gaping; but the woman shooed them all away.

  "People round here have got a passion for languages," she explained, unwrapping the beef she had rushed out to buy because no foreigner, whether Japanese-speaking or not, could possibly digest fish. She charged me an extra thousand yen for the beef, and the yukata she gave me to wear after my bath had "Japanese National Railways" printed all over it. She was, I saw, cost-conscious.

  The Idemitsu Petroleum Company used to run a series of TV commercials which showed customers—or sometimes just people asking directions or caught in the rain—being welcomed to one of their petrol stations with tea and cakes and a display of friendliness not normally met with except in fairy godmothers. I used to scoff. I no longer do. As I was tramping past an Idemitsu stand next morning, a man in a peaked cap with a scar on his chin came running out to invite me in for coffee, and in order to make sure that we communicated properly, he thrust his face as close to mine as he could get it without giving me a godmotherly kiss.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Hayashino."

  "I'll take you there in the car if you like."

  "No, thanks very much. I'd like to walk."

  "Ha ha ha! Well, where were you born? New York?"

  "No, London."

  "What part of London? Scotland or Wales?"

  We sat inside the office on smart vinyl chairs while the godmotherly woman who tended the cash register bustled about making cups of instant coffee (adding powdered milk called Creap) and a petrol pump attendant in striped overalls peered shyly in at the doorway.

  Is it true that English people have only one bath a week because there's a shortage of water?"

  "No, it's because they're congenitally dirty."

  "You're not dirty, though. How come you're walking? Have you run out of money or what is it?"

  "Are you sure you're English?" wondered the bustling godmother. "You don't look much like James Bond."

  I stayed nearly an hour at the petrol station, drinking coffee and Creap and eating cakes, and before I left, the shy attendant plucked up his courage and asked me for my autograph.

  "What ever do you want my autograph for?"

  "For the memory," he whispered, blushing to the roots of his hair. Far to the southwest a ribbon of traffic growled along the Chugoku Expressway. A little girl on my older, narrower road skipped happily home from school with her yellow satchel on her back and was immersed in the choking black fumes of a diesel truck that she did not even appear to notice. A small gray van stopped in front of me and one of the two women in it got out and flapped round onto the pavement.

  "Hello! Hello! Can you speak Japanese? You can? Phew! That's a relief! We thought we'd better stop and ask. You'd have been in trouble if you couldn't."

  What kind of trouble she never said, and I didn't think it proper to ask, but she gave me a nashi (a hard, juicy fruit, something between an apple and a pear) to make sure that starvation would not add to my woes, and told me that it came from the seacoast to the north and that nashi grow best on slopes near the sea.

  "You ought to go up to the coast too, you know. You'd get into less trouble up there."

  Evening came on, and in the town of Hayashino, after asking at several rice and sake shops (shops selling rice and its byproducts are ideal places to make inquiries since they are often the oldest established shops in the district), I found a beautiful seventy-year-old ryokan, full of odd, dark, stepped corridors and smoky bamboo screens, where I passed the eighty-sixth night of my journey. The only other guest was a traveling salesman who ate dinner with me and who confessed himself astonished when I made the weekly telephone call to my wife.

  "Your wife? What ever for?"

  "So she won't worry."

  "That's funny. In my case it's exactly the opposite. I'm usually away from home about ten days a month, and if I phoned my wife she'd think there was something wrong with me."

  The food was good and there was lots of it, and when we had stuffed ourselves with more nashi, we settled down to lie on our elbows, listening to the night sounds of Hayashino—the cry of a child, the squeak of some late shopper's bicycle, the sharp sound of the wooden clappers that in the dry season warn against fire—and in this satisfied, half-somnolent state, we ruminated on the problems of the world.

  "What do you think of all these Indochinese refugees coming to Japan?" the salesman wondered.

  "I thought there were hardly any coming. The government won't let them in."

  "At the port of Fukuyama where I come from they've had to keep turning them away. It's a pity, and of course foreigners can't under-stand it. They're forever criticizing us for one thing or another. If it's not cars or dolphins or whales, it's refugees. But what can we do? We're such a tiny country, so mountainous, so overcrowded...."

  I reached for another of the hard, juicy nashi and thought about the empty tracts of land I had walked through in Hokkaido, where living has become so inconvenient, and of the deserted highlands of northern Akita, where farm workers have left paddies lying fallow and crammed their families into two-room city apartments, and of the southernmost of all the Japanese islands—islands such as Iriomote, so underpopulated that the government will build a house free for any Japanese family willing to settle there.

  "... no, foreigners simply can't understand, coming from countries where there's so much space for everyone. Sometimes 1 feel they don't want
to understand—that they misinterpret us out of spite. I know, anyway, that I don't' want to go abroad again. I've been to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Korea. I've never been to a white man's country and I don't think I could bear to go. They treat all Asians as inferiors, just as if we were blacks or Jews. We're not cold-hearted. We've just got no room to spare for anyone else, that's all."

  We ruminated on the problems of the world for an hour more, but their solutions seemed as out of reach as though we had manacled each other's hands.

  The day of the autumn equinox—September twenty-third—was hot and muggy. The old ryokan in Hayashino flew a Japanese flag to mark the national holiday, as did many of the houses and shops on the road that straggled beside the railway track into the city of Tsuyama. I reached the city by midafternoon after a fairly easy but sticky day, and was strolling through the covered shopping arcades looking for a quiet coffee shop when I suddenly found myself on television.

  "Would you mind being interviewed?" bubbled the interviewer— unnecessarily, I thought, since the camera was already panning up and down my tatty figure. The interviewer was a nice-looking girl in a bright pink trouser suit, and the microphone she thrust at me, unlike the politician's in the poster, had a little yellow ribbon tied round it.

  "What about?"

  "Fashion," she said quite seriously, and for a moment it crossed my mind that I had stumbled onto some kind of candid comedy pro-gram. I was wearing—and the camera was busy scrutinizing—a pair of torn, patched jeans, filthy dirty mountain boots, a denim shirt in urgent need of a wash, a muddy blue towel wrapped round my neck, a leather belt with a blunt hunting knife attached to it, and a fourteen-kilogram backpack.

  "Fashion?"