by Alan Booth
In some ways the Chugoku District is a microcosm of the whole island of Honshu. One coast—the one along which I was walking—is over-populated and depressingly "developed." Industrial debris has scarred the shores of the once-romantic Inland Sea, and the innumerable smokestacks that were the only monuments to Japanese civilization I saw on the ninety-eighth day of my journey were made no prettier by being painted with red and white stripes. The other coast—the one washed by the Sea of Japan—is as comparatively unspoiled this far west as it is in the more northerly parts of Honshu, and the mountainous area in the center, into which I would shortly begin trekking, is rugged and sparsely populated, with almost all the major towns and cities of the region crowding the shores.
The fearsome efficiency of the private sector of Japanese industry is to some extent offset by the startling financial losses regularly re-ported by parts of its public sector. The Japanese National Railways in particular has come under increasing fire for the inefficiency with which it is run (though this ''inefficiency" hardly ever affects the clockwork punctuality of trains). Overmanning struck me as a problem: for as I tramped along beside the main line out of Hiroshima I passed gang after gang of workmen replacing sleepers, each gang provided with two or three lookouts whose sole job was to warn them through megaphones (they were mostly standing within four yards of each other) whenever a train approached. There was a very efficient stink in the main street of the city of Otake which seemed to emanate from the Bank of Shikoku. It didn't bother the local people, though—the young car salesman with dyed auburn hair, the old grocer carefully washing and polishing a bit of ornamental driftwood, and the dozen or so long-distance drivers eating curry at a roadside cafe, all of whom had left their engines running, so that the bank stink and the truck stink combined to usher me smartly out of Otake wondering which sector of the medical industry—public or private—sold the residents spare sets of lungs.
Within minutes I crossed out of Hiroshima into Yamaguchi, and so entered the last prefecture in Honshu. I had dawdled in Hiroshima, and October was almost a week old now, which—together with the stinks and smokestacks—lent my feet a fleetness that surprised me. I passed a shed in which a woman was molding the headless torsos of pink shop dummies, and by five o'clock I had struggled through the growling suburbs of Iwakuni city and found a room in a dingy little ryokan where the woman confessed within seconds of meeting me that her sister had married an American marine, and then made up for this appalling revelation by explaining that she herself had been in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, had been told that she could therefore have no children, had adopted two on the doctor's advice and promptly given birth to four more. Later that evening, to demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of her family, she brought me a knife and fork with which to eat a bowl of noodles.
When I went out for a walk after dinner the woman's husband strolled to the corner with me and warned me against three-quarters of the bars in the city. He didn't warn me against the fast-food outlet that advertised "Mexican Bugers" or against the publication called Nasty Gals which was available from a nearby vending machine. A cabaret on the same street had a selection of photographs outside in which the grinning hostesses all displayed mouthfuls of jet-black teeth, the work of some dissatisfied client with a felt-tipped pen who had obviously not had the benefit of the husband's warnings. I played safe and strolled into an ordinary working man's akachochin, and thereby set in motion one of the oddest adventures of my journey.
It began with my being asked to leave because the akachochin was off-limits to the American marines who are stationed at the nearby naval base. I explained that I was not a marine, and not even an American, whereupon the stony silence in which a one-yen coin could have been heard drop gave way to the normal hollers and belches, and I was bought a beer by the two men sitting next to me at the counter, one of whom (an R.S.M. in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force) drew from his pocket a fistful of American money and flung it dramatically onto the concrete floor.
"That's the only money we're allowed to spend on base," he growled. "Look at it! And this is Japan!"
The dimes and cents continued to lie where he had flung them till he stooped and picked them up again a bit shamefacedly, and put them back in his pocket.
"Why is this place off-limits?" I asked. The other man (whom I shall call H, because he was also in the forces and anything like his real name had better stay unrecorded) told me sheepishly that it wasn't really off-limits, but that a number of Japanese servicemen came here to get away from the base atmosphere and the master obliged them by discouraging any Americans who happened to wander in.
"I'm really sorry," H said seriously, and the R.S.M. bought me a second bottle, at which point I had a beer-inspired brain wave and asked whether it might be possible for me to visit the base.
The R.S.M. was silent. H thought about it for a moment or two and then told me that it would be perfectly possible and that he would conduct me on a personal tour of inspection.
"When do you want to come?"
"Tomorrow morning, if it's all right."
"Yes, that will be fine. Come to the main gate. There you'll find two checkpoints, one after the other. The first will be manned by an American marine. Pay him no attention whatever; just walk straight past him and go to the Japanese guard who'll be in a sentry box further inside the gate. Ask for me and he'll phone my extension."
In the lubricated mutter of the cheerfully lanterned bar, with a third bottle of beer to banish all misgivings, nothing in the world had ever seemed more straightforward. Walk past the American marine at his checkpoint: but of course, who would think of doing anything else? Get the Japanese guard to phone H's extension: nothing simpler surely—have another beer....
And next morning, to my own surprise, this mood persisted long enough for me to march the four kilometers to the main gate of Iwakuni Base under a cloudy, busily windy sky, stroll past a spotty baton-wielding American M.P. in my jeans and patched denim shirt with a dusty rucksack on my back, greet the startled Japanese guard in Aomori dialect (which I tend to lapse into when suppressed tensions are cooking up the manic phase) and ask to be connected to H.
And here came the first thump of sobriety.
"H?"
"Yes."
"What's his rank?"
"Haven't a clue."
"What's his first name?"
"Couldn't tell you."
The Japanese guard groaned and tapped the telephone with his fingernails. And the American M.P., now partly recovered from the shock of a British hiker declaring independence in this incredibly UN-military manner, marched up to the door of the Japanese sentry box and demanded to see my I.D.
"I haven't got any I.D., I'm afraid," I said. "I've come to pay a call on Mr. H." (The "Mr." brought a louder groan from the Japanese guard.)
The M.P. made me stand against the wall outside the sentry box while the Japanese guard dialed the number I had given him and asked, with a small, marvelously timed cough, for "Mumble... mumble... H, who knew a foreigner."
H arrived within minutes, driving a huge black limousine and wearing a dress uniform with (an unrecordable amount of) gold braid on the sleeves. My eyes almost popped out of my head, but the two guards must have had near heart failures. They sprang to attention and saluted us both while H pumped my hand, slapped my back, signed me in, and stuffed my pack into the boot of his limousine. Then we drove off on a tour of the base, leaving the guards to curse all comers.
Iwakuni houses twelve hundred Japanese servicemen who operate seventeen PS1 seaplanes (classified information; guard this book with your life). They spend their time, I learned, playing two games of baseball a day, and the R.S.M. who joined us said he couldn't make out why the Americans on the base didn't do the same.
During the Vietnam War some protesters, including Jane Fonda and her husband, demanded that the Japanese government search Iwakuni for nuclear weapons. The government politely declined to do this, repeating its faith in
the "three-point principle," cheerily agreed upon with the United States, that no nuclear weapons will ever be manufactured, maintained, or brought into Japanese territory. This last prohibition includes the frequent visits to Japanese ports by U.S. vessels with nuclear capability, so presumably the armament is offloaded onto small rubber dinghies that are left floating on the high seas for the duration of the call. I taxed H with this joyful fiction and he brightly refused to discuss it. Instead, he told me that a big American transport had docked during the night, and we went to see it unloaded, clambering onto the deck of a moored tender where H and the R.S.M., chortling loudly, took it in turns to pose with me for souvenir photographs. (I begged them to send me prints but they never did.)
We drove slowly round the perimeter of the base, passing vastly over-weight Americans jogging, and H told me that he hated using a car but that you couldn't survive on an American-designed base without one. He hated going to the officers' club, where the Americans outranked and ignored him; he hated the fuss the M.P.'s made, such as not issuing passes to enough taxi drivers; in fact he hated the whole setup and longed to be transferred.
When we said goodbye back at the gate the two guards sprang to attention again and saluted me smartly as I passed. H waved me out of sight with a broad, satisfied grin on his face, and I stopped to look in the windows of the tailor's shops which, together with the pawnshops and bars with names like Linus and Popeye, were the only native enclaves in the district. You never see tailor's shops like these except near the gates of American bases. They all display gaudy Chinese dressing gowns which the proprietors impishly call kimonos, and specialize in embroidering the backs of colorful silk jackets with texts to please their unique clientele. Examples from the tailor's shops at Iwakuni:
And the Good Lord said "Let there be Marines," and the Gates of Death sprang open.
When I die I'll go into Limbo because Heaven doesn't want me and Hell is afraid I'll take over.
Both these jackets bore a picture of a huge U.S. marine in combat gear grasping the hair of a small Oriental man with large protruding teeth. The marine was sneering, surrounded by a ring of flames; the Oriental was dangling from his fist, crying tears of blood.
But the most extraordinary jacket, given the nature of the customers, was surely the one with this on it:
Beneath the spreading mushroom tree, the world revolves in apathy, as overhead a row of specks roars on, ground out by discotheques; and if the secret button is pressed because one man has been outguessed, who will answer?
The M.P.'s had displayed a text of their own, brisk and to the point: "The roads outside this gate are among the most dangerous in the world, warned their sign—"Drive Defensively!"
All day I walked in the Yamaguchi mountains, among startled people and snakes made lazy by the autumn heat. My map called it Highway 376, but in the reality of the hills, thirty kilometers on from the M.P.'s warning, the road was no more than an empty dust track, forking with-out signs in the middle of woods, surfaced briefly at the one or two villages where I smelled chestnuts roasting or heard the screams of a pig being slaughtered. When I asked directions I caused nothing but confusion. A truck driver pointed me down one fork, a cyclist pointed me down another; and the old lady who owned the shop we were all standing in blinked at them both and kept quiet till they had gone.
"I didn't like to contradict them, she said, "but if you'd done what they suggested you'd be sleeping with the foxes."
I was still eight kilometers from the nearest town when I tramped into the tiny village of Nakasu. Work had ended for the day. Wives were hurrying home to cook the evening meal, husbands were standing about in the street or sitting drinking sake outside the grocer's shop, comparing the fish they had spent the afternoon hooking out of the reservoir. And dusk was settling rapidly, but it was more than I could do to pass the shop without stopping in for something to fortify me against the two-hour trudge that still lay ahead.
As I took my pack off outside the grocer's a small middle-aged man in a grubby white vest stood up from his stool and exclaimed, again and again, his eyes sparkling with excitement:
"England! England! England! England!"
I nodded and went into the shop and the grubby-vested man fol-lowed me, jigging about from foot to foot.
"Where are you going?" he bubbled as I poured myself a beer.
"I'm trying to reach the next town."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight."
"What ever for?"
"I need to find a ryokan."
I had only half emptied my beer glass, but the man grabbed the bottle and refilled it for me, pouring beer till the froth spilled out of the glass onto the concrete floor.
"You don't need a ryokan," he bubbled. "You can stay with me."
Behind the counter the grocer sneezed.
"That's very kind of you," I said, "but I'd hate to put you to any trouble."
"No trouble at all," the man beamed, turning to the grocer who was wiping his nose. "It would be a pleasure, wouldn't it?"
The grocer examined the contents of his handkerchief
"It would be... er... interesting," he conceded.
"Come on," beamed the man, "no trouble at all." And he even paid for my beer.
I shouldered my pack, and we climbed the slope behind the shop, past two slavering dogs who mistook me for their dinner, and through the tangled undergrowth of the man's back garden to the front of his old wooden house. There, as he slid open the door, still jigging from foot to foot, we were met by a mess such as anyone who has ever seen those elegant photographs of japanese interiors, but has never actually set foot in one, would find very hard to credit. On the living-room floor lay pile upon pile of boxes, tins, books, papers, plates, kettles, dishes, picture frames, bottles, fruit, ashtrays, washing up, and a dozen large squares of orange foam rubber. On the wall above the color television the Mona Lisa smiled down at the mess and at the glorious centerpiece of it all—a huge black treadle sewing machine around which, in a circle, sat six oblivious cats.
Mr. Takahashi—the jigging man—swept mounds of papers off the low wooden table and moved enough of the boxes so that we could sit down on two of the foam-rubber squares.
"England, he mused, thumbing through one of the large books which turned out to be an atlas of the world. "Here we are—they've got it the wrong way round again. This island"—he pointed at Ireland —is Scotland, but they always call it Ireland; whereas this pink country"—he pointed at Scotland—"is Ireland, but they never get it right."
"Have you been to Britain?" I asked, thinking it a silly question.
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Takahashi. "Yes, I've been there. The River Thames. Australia, too. They sent me from one to the other. Actually..."
There was a long moment during which a cat licked its paw and I realized what was coming.
"...I was a prisoner of war. They caught me in Burma."
"Really?" I said, and counted the next ten seconds by the ticking of the wooden clock. Mr. Takahashi closed his atlas.
"Oh, yes," he said. "I like the English."
Out came his beer and in came his wife. She was a plump woman with lively eyes and not a trace of a wrinkle on her face. She was loaded down with shopping bags and explained that on her way home from the school where she cooked lunches she had passed the grocer's shop, and the grocer had rushed out to warn her about the "interesting" evening she was in for. So she had bought a great pile of meat and fruit and vegetables and sake and ordered a whole crate of beer. For the next half hour she took charge of me, finding me one of her absent son's kimonos, making sure I had put it on properly, and introducing me to her cats by name. Three of their names were Danshaku ("Baron"), Jerry (of "Tom and Jerry"), and Julien Sorel (out of Stendhal). I can't remember the other three, but I expect they were something like Wyatt Earp, Olive Oyle, and Chrétien de Troyes. The television had been switched on, and as the Mona Lisa continued to titter down at Telly Savalas advertising Master Blend coffee, Mr.Tak
ahashi steered me over to the alcove where a carved wooden chest contained a rare hand-printed edition of the eleventh-century classic Genji Monogatari.
"I can read this," said Mr. Takahashi proudly while his wife sighed and raised her eyebrows, "but these days there's not one in a thousand who can. I bet there's not one in ten thousand."
While his wife cooked dinner—a huge beef stew—Mr. Takahashi and I took a bath together. We had already drunk a fair amount of beer and exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, and we sat in the bathroom soaping each other's backs and singing odds and ends of folk songs. The couple lived alone in the old house, among drawers and cupboards full of their son's possessions, and I caught in their busy desire to please me a snatch of the loneliness in their lives—the loneliness of an entire rural generation whose sons and daughters have swapped the hills for the cities.
In the bath I happened to mention that today—the hundredth day of my walk—was also, my wedding anniversary. Mr. Takahashi climbed out of the tub, dried himself hurriedly and left the bathroom. I spent ten minutes in the tub by myself humming songs and warming to Yamaguchi Prefecture, and when I had put on my kimono again and come back into the living room, I found to my astonishment that the couple had phoned my wife, whom I had not seen for more than three months, and who was waiting eight hundred kilometers away in Tokyo to wish me a happy anniversary.
At dinner Mr. Takahashi drank a vigorous amount of sake and began to ask me odd questions such as whether I had my passport with me.
"You never know," he said, squinting at the window. "You can never be too careful with people here. A lot of schoolchildren saw us together. If they go home and tell their parents and their parents happen to phone the police..."
"Don't be so daft!" scoffed his wife.
"... then the police might come up here with truncheons..."
"Take no notice of him, the silly fool!"