Under the Osakan Sun

by Hamish Beaton

  ‘Probably only another hour I reckon,’ Justin replied pensively. ‘We should grab a bite to eat along the way. Once we hit Expressway 127, there may be nowhere to stop until we cross the mountain.’

  I nodded. ‘There’s a family restaurant over there,’ I suggested, pointing down the road. ‘Do you want to grab an early lunch now?’

  Justin agreed readily. ‘Hey, they’ve got a buffet special. And it’s only 800 yen. Good spotting, mate. See, I told you we’d have a great weekend.’

  We cheerfully locked our cycles outside the restaurant and settled in for a three-course meal of soup, salad and sushi.

  We emerged from our gluttonous feast an hour later, keen to make up for lost time. ‘We need to head north-east,’ Justin announced, looking up from his map. ‘If we head down that road over there and keep cycling in that general direction we’ll be fine.’

  He chuckled happily. ‘We’re doing great. I can’t believe how far we’ve come already. We’ll be there and back before we know it.’

  This optimism soon proved sadly unfounded. It started to feel as if we were getting further away from the mountains, rather than closer. After some anxious studying of the map it became apparent that Justin had misread our position, and we had been cycling in the wrong direction. We now needed to make an hour-long detour to catch up with Expressway 127.

  Tempers flared and we cycled in silence. The sun was still shining and the skies were still blue but we no longer cared. Justin stopped singing and humming, and his broad grin was replaced with a confused frown.

  ‘Hey! Mate, I think we’ve found it,’ he suddenly shouted. ‘This must be Expressway 127 up ahead.’ He pointed wildly.

  I caught up with him. ‘Yep, there’s a signpost,’ he said with a huge sigh of relief. ‘1 … 2 … 7. We’ve made it. We’re back on track. Gimme five.’ I clapped Justin’s hand, and took a photo of him standing in front of the signpost.

  Our joy and relief at having finally stumbled across Expressway 127 was short-lived. We now realised we were two hours behind schedule. There was not a moment to lose. We hopped back on our ‘old lady’ bicycles and pedalled furiously.

  As we progressed north across the Kansai Plain the scenery changed once again. Rice paddies dotted the countryside, the long stalks basking in the last few weeks of sunshine before the autumn harvest. The Shiga mountains studded the horizon, and we could make out Mount Ise to the north.

  We were unable to enjoy these picturesque surroundings for long. Expressway 127 had, up until now, been accompanied by a peaceful pedestrian footpath, which had allowed us to sit back in our seats and gaze around, while sailing alongside the busy road. Now this luxurious trail had disappeared and we were forced out into the middle of the road, where we needed all our wits to battle through noisy, fume-ridden traffic.

  We braked and looked at each other hesitantly. ‘It might get a bit scary from here on,’ Justin said nervously. ‘Look, we’ll just take our time, and pull over for a rest if the traffic starts getting too fast or overwhelming.’ I nodded uneasily.

  We pushed off and almost immediately had a brush with disaster.

  Expressway 127 now led us through a passage of small rolling hills. As well as being deceptively steep in parts, these hills were spring-loaded with lethal blind corners. As we sailed slowly downhill enjoying the respite from pedalling, we leant to our left and cruised around a long sloping bend.

  HONNNNKKKKK!!! A concrete mixer roared around the corner, missing us by a whisker and nearly throwing us under its wheels with its slipstream.

  Justin braked, and I narrowly avoided crashing into him. We were both white-faced. ‘Do you think we should walk down the rest of this hill?’ I suggested, pointing to the secluded safety of a muddy ditch that ran alongside the road. Justin agreed without uttering a single word.

  We finally managed to reach the turn-off to Mount Ise just as the sun was setting. However, since we had no lights, no helmets, no reflective clothing, and had been narrowly missed by several more oversized trucks and construction vehicles, neither of us were particularly keen on crossing Mount Ise in the dark.

  We eventually decided it would be safer to cycle around the base of the mountain to Kyoto and spend the night there. We had failed in our attempt to cross both the Kansai Plain and Mount Ise in a single day, but we were not overly disappointed. The distance could easily be recovered if we started cycling again early the following morning, and perhaps scrapped our sightseeing plans for Shiga Castle.

  Buoyed with the relief of not needing to cross the mountain in the dark, we made good speed and were again in high spirits as we raced down Expressway 24 into Kyoto City. I spied a group of well-dressed young women strolling ahead. ‘Watch this, mate,’ I nodded to Justin. Speeding up, I whizzed past the women, intending to perform some sort of unrehearsed acrobatic feat.

  I squinted my eyes to get a good look at their faces and make sure they weren’t high-school students. Bang! The front wheel of my bicycle slammed into the side of the gutter. I bounced out of my seat, soared over the handlebars, and slid along the pavement for several metres on my stomach.

  The young women were unimpressed and passed me by, and I was left to pick stones out of my bloody palms and dust off my favourite pair of shorts, which now sported several large holes. Fortunately, though, the bicycle’s ancient design had saved me from serious injury. My backpack, which had been stowed in the front basket, had fallen out and landed between me and the concrete pavement, acting as an impromptu airbag.

  I patted myself down, checking for broken bones and missing limbs. Nothing. I checked again. Apart from a bit of lost skin and a large dent in my pride, I was unscathed.

  Justin was at my side in seconds. ‘Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?’ He was seemingly more traumatised than I was. ‘Where’d you hurt yourself? Are you bleeding?’ I assured him I was fine, showed him my grazed palms and holey shorts and explained how my backpack had saved me. To be on the safe side, he raced across the road to a convenience store, and returned minutes later with a packet of Hello Kitty Band-Aids.

  ‘You’re bloody lucky,’ he said sternly. ‘That was your crappiest attempt at a chat-up ever!’

  It was dark by the time we finally arrived in downtown Kyoto. We sorely needed somewhere to rest our exhausted, sweaty bodies, but the sudden change in our itinerary meant that we had arrived in an unplanned destination with no hotel reservations. All hotels were fully booked: it was both a national holiday and the start of a three-day weekend.

  We slumped down in a hotel car park to discuss our options. I was grumpy and my palms were stinging. I had realised that my favourite pair of shorts were now ruined, and the fact that we had failed to cross Mount Ise was suddenly very depressing.

  Justin seemed equally gloomy. ‘We could always go home for the night,’ he suggested in a tired voice.

  ‘What!’ I thundered. ‘Go home!’

  ‘We could leave our bicycles locked in Kyoto Station, catch the train back to my place and sleep there for the night. It’s only two hours by train. We could be back here first thing in the morning on an early express. Think about it, we’d get a good night’s sleep for free.’

  ‘No way,’ I said angrily. ‘I’d rather sleep on a train-station bench. There’s no way I’m catching a train back to Osaka. It would make today’s efforts completely meaningless.’

  Justin sighed. ‘Shall we have one last look around the block then? We may find some place we hadn’t noticed before.’ I nodded weakly, and we plodded off down the road.

  A dim neon bulb flickered faintly above the entrance to an old wooden guest-house. No doubt ‘No vacancy’ would be posted above the door. We blinked. Nothing. It would appear there was a free room for the night. The Bible tells of how Mary and Joseph, struggling to find accommodation, stumbled across a tiny inn in Bethlehem. What it doesn’t mention is the sheer relief they must have felt when they were finally able to relax and put their feet up.

  Justin and
I were ecstatic: we had found our own biblical inn. We quickly checked into the last remaining room, took a long leisurely soak in the inn’s piping-hot bath, and strolled down the road for a late dinner. Later, back in our room, I fell asleep the moment my head hit the rice-filled pillow.

  We awoke with agonisingly stiff legs. I struggled to make my way downstairs to breakfast, and my bottom felt bruised and chafed when I mounted my bicycle.

  Justin had managed to acquire a detailed Kyoto street map from our kindly innkeeper, and was poring over it. ‘We’re in luck,’ he announced. ‘Our detour to Kyoto may have been the best thing that could have happened.’ I looked at him quizzically.

  ‘It’s actually going to be easier and flatter to cross the mountains from Kyoto than if we’d gone over Mount Ise last night.’

  He pointed eagerly at the map. ‘Look, we’re here at the moment. We can just go across this bit here, and bang, we’ve reached Lake Biwa. I’ve already spoken to the innkeeper; he reckons it won’t be very steep at all. He reckons it’ll only take a couple of hours.’

  Justin’s smile was broader than ever. ‘In fact, he’s the only Japanese person I’ve met so far who’s said that it’s possible to cross the mountain range on a bike. He reckons it won’t be that hard.’

  I eyed the innkeeper suspiciously. He was possibly insane and had been filling my naïve friend’s head with nonsense. We paid our bill, thanked him for his words of encouragement and set off.

  The morning’s cycling went smoothly. The road out of Kyoto was lined with footpaths, and these continued to shelter us from the traffic as we started our ascent of the mountains. Our innkeeper’s advice was proving to be valid, and after an only mildly difficult hour and a half of cycling, the road started to plateau off and Lake Biwa came into view.

  As we paused to take in the grandeur of the next leg of our journey, it was dawning on Justin just how much further we had to go. ‘Phew! That’s one massive lake,’ he said pensively.

  We coasted down the other side of the mountain and arrived at the lakefront shortly before lunch-time. Justin sat quietly as we munched on our filet-o-fish combos. ‘That’s one massive lake’ he repeated to himself. I could hear doubt creeping into his voice. ‘Do you reckon we can bike around it in a single day?’

  I looked out at the lake. It was already noon. We were going to struggle to get even halfway around it before the sun set. ‘I think we’ve arrived a bit late in the day,’ I replied. ‘We’re going to have a massive ride back to Osaka tomorrow if we only get halfway around the lake today. We’d still have to cycle the length of the lake just to get back here, and then go over the mountain, through Kyoto and back home.’

  Justin sighed. ‘Shall we call it quits?’ He looked at me dejectedly.

  ‘How about we go for a cycle ride out into the countryside near here,’ I suggested. ‘There are some interesting-looking temples we could visit. Plus there’s a hot spring where we could relax and unwind later. We could even go to the movies.’

  Justin was smiling again. ‘That sounds like good fun,’ he said happily. ‘I read about that famous temple. We should go check it out. Plus, it’ll be a fairly decent bike ride there and back.’

  He paused. ‘You know, I still reckon we’ll be able to prove our coworkers wrong. They all thought it would be impossible for us to get this far. Well, they’re wrong. And we could have cycled round the lake in a single day – we just didn’t start early enough. We only needed a few more hours, not weeks like those namby-pamby workaholics said.

  ‘Plus, since we’re adventurous New Zealanders we can cope with a change in our itinerary and not get hung up about sticking to schedules. Well done, mate, we should be proud of ourselves.’

  I agreed enthusiastically. Justin was right: we’d done incredibly well for a pair of podgy white guys, whose combined physical preparation had been cycling home drunk from pubs, dancing at nightclubs, and climbing a small hill to look at rabid monkeys.

  Justin and I spent an enjoyable Saturday afternoon cycling around Otsu City, visiting temples, playing video games and relaxing on the lake front.

  Sunday dawned. It was time for the return journey, the longest and most dreaded part of the trip. Justin had chosen the most direct route, Expressway 171, from which, he assured me, we would be unable to stray and get lost.

  We set out in high spirits early in the morning, but our tired, creaky bodies barely managed to propel us back over the Kyoto mountain pass. Expressway 171, when we reached it, cut straight through the heart of Kyoto City. It was a smoggy highway complete with freshly laid asphalt, construction work and stinking, teeming traffic.

  We cycled in gloomy silence alongside a tall grey concrete wall that blocked residents from Expressway 171’s constant noise, but prevented motorists (and frazzled cyclists) from enjoying even the slightest view of the surrounding countryside. After the first couple of hours, I was in a very bad mood. Motorists veered alarmingly close to our footpath, and several times I was nearly clipped by side mirrors. My skinned palms rubbed painfully against my handlebars: the Hello Kitty stickers had grown slick with sweat and fallen off long ago. My bruised knees throbbed and my legs cried out for rest.

  I spent the final hours of the great Lake Biwa bicycle expedition yelling at cars, telling ignorant motorists where to go and what to do once they got there. When I arrived home at eleven o’clock that night, I fell into the comforting embrace of my pink futon. Justin and I had cycled for twelve hours, most of them alongside Expressway 171’s monotonous grey wall. I had reached the wise and well-informed decision that I would never again cycle on a Japanese highway.

  18

  The enforcer

  I turned on the staffroom computer. It flickered slowly into life, and I sipped delicately at my cup of coffee. It was a Mr Higo-made brew, bitter and burning.

  I connected to the internet and opened my email account.

  An email from my mother.

  An email from my friend Steve in the US.

  An email from a family friend, Bev Dewar.

  I opened Bev’s email. ‘How are things going in Japan?’ she asked. ‘Heard from Mr Doi recently?’

  I started my reply. ‘Nope, no news from Mr Doi. Absolutely no idea where he is these days.’

  There was a tap on my shoulder. I put down my cup of coffee, turned around slowly and blinked. Mr Doi was standing right in front of me. He was sporting a green velvet smoking jacket and a goatee, and drinking casually from a white coffee cup that appeared to be empty.

  He shook my hand firmly and gave me a knowing wink. I was unable to wink back, or say anything in reply.

  Mr Doi smiled toothily and stroked his new goatee. ‘So, have you got your licence yet?’ he asked in a low whisper.

  I racked my brains, trying to figure out what licence he was referring to.

  ‘Yes, everything is at hand,’ I replied confidently.

  Mr Doi was delighted. He slapped me on the back, shook my hand once again, and informed me that everything was going well. He then leaned forward ever so slightly and in a stern voice said, ‘December 15 will be a very important day. I have made good progress. I think the relationship with South Korea is a very good one.’ A quick tap on the nose, a wink, and the message was conveyed.

  In a breach of security, I started laughing, but luckily recovered my composure before anything could be leaked to the enemy. Mr Doi wished me well and strode off to continue his mission.

  Ms Yurika Yurano had barely been at school for the past month. Things had finally come to a bit of a head in early November, when the teachers had decided to crack down on her bright yellow hair and miniscule miniskirts. In protest, she had loudly declared that she would not come to school ever again.

  I figured this would be the last I ever saw of her. Four nights later, however, at the supermarket I spotted ahead of me in the aisle a tall blond Japanese female, Ms Yurano – and her mother. Mrs Yurano had hair the colour of the mandarins in my shopping basket, and was wearing
camouflage trousers and a hip-hop hooded sweatshirt.

  I caught up and said hello to Yurika. She smiled meekly and looked at the floor. Obviously a little shy in front of her mother, I thought to myself. Mum, meanwhile, flashed me a big smile, a quick wink and, unless I imagined it, a lingering look.

  Three days later I was sitting at my desk reading The Daily Yomiuri when I heard someone shouting. I swivelled around in my chair and came face to face with an enraged Mrs Yurano. She had clearly turned up to give the teachers a hard time for picking on her daughter, and I was the nearest to hand. Luckily, though, she immediately recognised me as the warm-hearted foreigner from the supermarket, and diverted her rage to everyone else.

  ‘Where are my daughter’s belongings? Why is my daughter being picked on? Where is that dickhead Mr Hisada? Why does he refuse to start a class until my daughter has been packed off to sick bay? Why is my daughter being denied her right to an education?’

  One of the male teachers timidly stood up and asked Mrs Yurano to calm down. She screamed in fury and started banging the wall with her fists.

  As I picked up my newspaper and studiously informed myself on the state of the Greek economy, the teacher escorted Mrs Yurano into the hallway. This just served to increase the volume.

  Only the school’s scariest staff member would be able to deal with Mrs Yurano. Sure enough, Mr Kobayashi appeared at the staffroom entrance in a flash. He was in attack mode, and looking extremely menacing.

  Mr Kobayashi’s job within the school was officially listed as ‘counsellor’. In reality, though, he was the discipline enforcer, responsible for taking naughty students into the ‘conversation room’ and bouncing them off the walls until they learnt the error of their ways. He was the one Japanese man of whom I was mortally afraid. I had witnessed his bouts of corporal punishment on several occasions, and was astounded that such acts were permitted. It seemed the school and the community turned a blind eye, and everyone agreed that Mr Kobayashi’s mere presence was often enough to keep the students in line.