Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  The husband in turn tried to give me one of his wife’s flower-arranging vases. It was her turn to smile tightly, but I managed to decline his gift. The wife then offered me a ride out of Nango with her husband, and he graciously offered to have his wife make a box lunch for me. I half expected her to up the ante by offering me one of her husband’s gold teeth, but it didn’t come to that. They were a good couple, not exactly ah and unn, but close enough.

  13

  “GOODBYE, GAIJIN-SAN,” said the lady of the house, bowing from the driveway as her husband and I drove away. “Goodbye and thank you.”

  There was a time I would have rankled over someone calling me gaijin-san. The word gaijin means “outsider,” and is derived from the term gai-koku-jin, “outside-country-person.” When the suffix -san is added to gaijin, it means Mr. Outsider. This was how the lady in Nango referred to me. Most Japanese insist that the word gaijin is strictly an abbreviated form with no undertone of racism intended, but they are wrong. Like gringo, the word gaijin has an edge to it. And when I ask my Japanese friends how they would feel if I were to refer to them in a similarly abbreviated form—Jap—their jaws harden and they insist that it is not the same thing.

  Like most visible minorities living in Japan, I went through a hypersensitive phase. It happens after the initial euphoria has worn off and you realize, “Hey! Everyone is talking about me! And they’re looking at me. What do they think I am, some kind of foreigner or something!”

  We become Gaijin Detectors. It’s like a silent dog whistle. It got so I could detect a whispered, “Look, a gaijin!” across a crowded street, and spin and glare simultaneously at everyone within a fifty-mile radius.

  Even when I could understand the language, I ran into problems. The word for the inner altar of a Shinto shrine sounds exactly like gaijin. I remember visiting a shrine in Kyoto and having a tour group come up behind me. The tour guide pointed in my direction and said, “In front of us, you can see the inner altar. This inner altar is very rare, please be quiet and show respect. No photographs. Flashbulbs can damage the inner altar.” Except, of course, I didn’t hear inner altar, I heard foreigner. It was a very surreal moment.

  Looking back, the biggest culture shock about Japan was not the chopsticks or the raw octopus, it was the shock of discovering that no matter where you go you instantly become the topic of conversation. At first it’s an ego boost. You feel like a celebrity. “Sorry, no autographs today, I’m in a hurry.” But you soon realize that in Japan foreigners are not so much celebrities as they are objects of curiosity and entertainment. It is a stressful situation, and it has broken better men than me.

  And yet it seems so petty when you put it down on paper: They look at you, they laugh when you pass by, they say “Hello!” They say “Foreigner!” They even say “Hello, Foreigner!” But it’s like the Chinese water torture. It slowly wears you down, and this relentless interest has driven many a foreigner from Japan.

  It is still fairly mild. I tried to imagine what would happen if the tables were turned. I think of my own hillbilly hometown in northern Canada, and I wonder what kind of greeting the beetle-browed, evolutionarily challenged layabouts at the local tavern would give a lone Japanese backpacker who wandered into their midst.

  I still hate the word gaijin and I still hate it when people gawk at me or kids follow, shouting, “Look, a gaijin! A gaijin!” But I have also learned an important distinction, and one that has made a huge difference to my sanity. It was explained to me by Mr. Araki, a high-school teacher I once worked with. “Gaijin means outsider. But gaijin-san,” he insisted, “is a term of affection.” Sure enough, once I started paying closer attention to who was saying gaijin and who was saying gaijin-san, I discovered that Mr. Araki was right. Gaijin is a label. Gaijin-san is a role.

  In Japan, people are often referred to not by their name but by the role they play. Mr. Policeman. Mr. Post Office. Mr. Shop Owner. As a foreigner, you in turn play your role as the Resident Gaijin, like the Town Drunk or the Village Idiot. You learn to accept your position, and even take it as an affirmation that you do fit in—albeit in a very unsettled way—and you begin to enjoy Japan much more.

  14

  MS. MAYUMI TAMURA and Ms. Akemi Fujisaki were on their way into the city to see a concert by a Japanese rock band called Blue Hearts. Mayumi and Akemi were young, high-spirited women, and together we managed to wedge my pack and my oversize self into the backseat of their Incredible Shrinking Car (it seemed to grow smaller and smaller as we drove). My knees were resting under my jaw. Akemi turned around to talk with me as Mayumi pulled out onto the highway and pointed us toward Miyazaki City.

  Initially they wanted to talk about Japanese pop music, but my knowledge was limited to a handful of names. I asked them if Blue Hearts was a popular band. No, not really. Did they like Blue Hearts? No, not really. Then, laughing at my puzzled look, they explained that there was so little to do down here in this southern corner of Japan, so few distractions, that they take what they can get.

  I asked them if they were good friends, and their eyes met, almost slyly, and a smile passed between them. “Best friends.” Akemi reached over, lightly, and touched Mayumi’s hand.

  Great. I’d caught a ride with Thelma and Louise. Which was fine, as long as they didn’t go driving off a cliff.

  Mayumi, the driver, could speak English. She studied it with a determined passion, fitting her studies in during afternoons and work breaks and free evenings. She was a maid at an inn near Cape Toi. She was single, female, and gainfully employed—which in Japan translates as “world traveller.” One of the acute ironies of the Japanese corporate-male philosophy is that the men of Japan do not have much time to enjoy themselves on extended holidays. Young women, on the other hand, may be underpaid and underappreciated, but in many ways they have more freedom. Their work is rarely their life, and it is they who are Japan’s new breed of traveller. The men of Japan are lousy travellers and even worse expatriates. The women, in contrast, are more aware of the world: less xenophobic, more adventurous.

  This newfound worldliness of Japanese women has also been partly responsible for a phenomenon known as “the Narita divorce.” It begins during the honeymoon, when the young husband discovers—to his eternal chagrin—that his new wife is more sophisticated, more self-assured, and more at ease in a foreign country than he is. He also discovers that his samurai prerogatives are meaningless once he leaves the maternal bosom of Japan. The young wife, in turn, notices how unworldly, how bumbling, how inept her husband is, and by the time they get back to Narita International Airport in Tokyo, they can’t stand the sight of each other. Fortunately, in Japan the marriage certificate is not usually signed until long after the ceremony, often not until the honeymoon is over. This acts like an escape clause. A couple returning from their disastrous first trip abroad can part ways at Narita, never to see each other again, and the marriage is effectively annulled.

  Mayumi had travelled through Canada and Europe, and she was now planning a trip to London—and this time she was taking Akemi. The relationship between Mayumi and Akemi was, to a certain extent, one of senpai to kōhai, senior to junior, teacher to student. In Japan, absolute equality between two people is very rare. One person is always older or better-trained or more knowledgeable. This is true everywhere in the world, but nowhere is it quite so entrenched as in Japan, where the senpai/kōhai system is the basis of virtually every relationship. It is not always apparent, but the more attuned you become to the nuances of relationships in Japan, the more often you see it. The senpai/kōhai system is not meant to be an antagonistic master/serf relationship, though it does degenerate into this at times. More properly, it is the sense of a chain of knowledge being transmitted from one to another. In the case of martial arts or company training, the position is explicit, but even among friends there is usually an unstated understanding of who is to be the senpai and who is to be the kōhai. (And every kōhai naturally aspires to becoming a senpai one day.)
Everyone in Japan is entangled—or nurtured, depending on your bias—in an interconnecting web of uneven relationships, here the senpai, here the kōhai.

  In Mayumi and Akemi’s case, their friendship easily divided into senpai (Mayumi) and kōhai (Akemi). Mayumi was the same age as Akemi, but she had travelled more, done more, seen more. It wasn’t a matter of Mayumi dominating Akemi, it was simply a rapport that they—like most Japanese—felt comfortable slipping into. Just as Americans feel most at ease with unpretentious jocularity.

  Mayumi and Akemi were a society of two. They had a secret map that would take them away. They told me far more about themselves than they really ought to (and more than I feel comfortable divulging). When you are a hitchhiker, people spill their lives into your lap. Things they would never tell their family they gladly surrender to a hitchhiker precisely because the hitchhiker is a stranger, a fleeting guest, a temporary confidant. But there is also something about the physical position; there is little eye contact. Drivers watch the road and you talk with parallel vision, without the extended face-to-face of normal conversations. It is almost like talking to someone at night in bed, when the voices are disembodied and anything seems possible.

  A sea change is under way, and Japanese women are the ninja saboteurs. In Japan it is not a revolution, but sedition. It is not about confrontation, but subterfuge. Together, Mayumi and Akemi were charting a course. A trip to Britain and then a journey through Europe, a change of jobs, whispers of work abroad. Secret passages. Hidden dens. Escape.

  Mayumi was unfolding the world for Akemi, like a glass gift in layers of silk. I imagine that courtesans once opened the world for their younger novices in much the same way. It is a sensual discovery to find yourself stepping from an isolated island into a global bazaar of experiences and possibilities. Akemi had that impatient panic of people on the verge of something new. It is like a first kiss, this journey abroad, and she twisted in her seat, almost breathless, and asked me about the world.

  She wanted my advice about British society. Not being British, I gave it. (It is one of those wonderful perks about being a foreigner in Japan that you are accepted as an expert on everything from Australian koalas to American gun laws.)

  “Is Britain really so foggy?”

  “Yes, very foggy,” said I, suddenly an expert on fog and all things mist-related.

  “But how can people breathe if it is so foggy?”

  “Well, they’re British, you see. Used to it.”

  “Is Britain safe?”

  Mayumi answered this one, speaking in near exasperation. “Of course it’s safe, I told you that many times. The world is not as dangerous as Japanese think.”

  But Akemi wanted to hear it from me. “Is it really safe?”

  “Well,” said I, “it is safe. Not as safe as Canada, of course, but still fairly safe, in a foggy British sort of way.” And on I went, building up steam, flinging out cultural traits and pontificating about national tics, with Akemi all but taking notes as I went. When we exhausted Britain we moved on to France and then Switzerland—a country that I have not technically visited. Not that this stopped me.

  “The Swiss are a very tidy people,” I assured them.

  By one of those odd quirks of life, it turned out that Mayumi and I had a mutual acquaintance: Paul Berger. Paul is a wry, perpetually perplexed New York exile who wrote his own book on Japan, The Kumamoto Diary.

  “I met Paul in the Rock Balloon,” said Mayumi. “Do you know the Rock Balloon? It’s in Kumamoto City.”

  Do I know the Rock Balloon? The Rock Balloon is a “gaijin bar,” where debauched foreign reprobates drink cheap beer and dance themselves into hormonic frenzies as they pursue equally debauched Japanese. Of course I know the Rock Balloon.

  I tried to get some dirt on Paul—maybe he had tried to cruise Mayumi with a line about being Paul Simon’s shorter brother, or maybe she poured her drink on his head and slapped his face or something—but no, Paul had been a perfect gentleman.

  “He did talk a lot about spiders,” she said. “There were giant spiders in his apartment. He was very afraid.” (Paul has this irrational fear of spiders. It’s embarrassing. Fortunately for Paul, I would never take it upon myself to expose this phobia of his in public.)

  “So did he say anything about his bed-wetting problem?” I asked.

  “Does he have one?”

  “No. But I just thought I’d check.”

  15

  MIYAZAKI IS A CITY of sighs. It carries a sense of faded grandeur. It was once the Budget-Minded Honeymoon Capital of Japan, a poor man’s Guam. Guam in turn is a poor man’s Hawaii, making Miyazaki a city twice removed from greatness. It is a city of also-rans, a favourite haunt of cardsharks and small-time mountebanks, a place for people starting over. Palm trees line the main streets. There are sad, romantic storefronts and bridal suite ads. (The hotels are still flogging the Honeymoon Horse, long after the beast has died.)

  Miyazaki has the highest per capita number of gambling casinos in Japan. The game of choice is pachinko, a form of self-hypnosis, wherein people sit in loud, smoky, painfully lit parlours and feed silvery ball bearings into a spring-loaded trigger. The trigger sends the balls up, into the board—a kind of vertical pinball machine, but without the interactive quality that redeems pinball. The players watch, slack-jawed, cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips, as the ball bearings cascade down the board. The name is derived from the pa-ching! noise the balls make, a racket that echoes constantly through the parlours. It is the passion of prostitutes. There is exaggerated excitement, loud bells, and lights, and in the end a faintly dissatisfied feeling. You can almost hear the pachinko boards cooing, “Oh, yes, do it to me, baby. Gimme more.”

  Pachinko parlours are the scourge of the modern Japanese landscape. They are also the mirages of the city nightlife. You see their eye-catching Las Vegas signs a mile away, and they draw you in. They look exciting from afar, but as you approach you realize, Damn! It’s just another pachinko parlour. The doors open, the place is deafening. The “Imperial Navy March” rouses the air, and the sound of balls bouncing down the boards has a stock-market frenzy about it—until you see the people, numb, transfixed. It’s like walking into a bad zombie movie.

  Miyazaki City is Pachinko Central. Akemi shrugs. What else is there to do in Miyazaki? I assume it is a rhetorical question. There is nothing else to do in Miyazaki, save the occasional Blue Hearts concert or overpriced disco.

  Still, you have to love this city. It is like your favourite aunt, the one with the raspy voice and vodka breath, the one who has been divorced four times, the one who dates younger men. Jaded, slouch-shouldered, rough around the edges, but still able to turn heads. I liked Miyazaki in the same way some people like taverns and smoky pool halls.

  The palm trees and wide boulevards, the scent of distant sea, and the faint taste of salt water and whiskey sours: Miyazaki reminds me of Miami, but without the handguns or shiploads of narcotics or Cuban exiles or ethnic tensions or—on second thought, Miyazaki is nothing like Miami. But both cities do share that same sun-bleached feel, where the colours fade into pastel shades of neglect and where the people are grateful for a breeze.

  It was a muggy day in downtown Miyazaki, which is to say, things were normal. Once again, I was doing my impression of the Amazing Melting Man, the sweat as slick as oil on my skin. Mayumi and Akemi dabbed at their foreheads with handkerchiefs. They agreed that it was very hot out today. The cherry trees in Miyazaki seemed wilted, the flowers hung down like beads of perspiration, and when Mayumi and Akemi offered to take me to the park for cherry blossom viewing, I opted for draft beer and air conditioning instead.

  Mayumi found a shop specializing in Chicken Nanban, Miyazaki’s local dish. Chicken Nanban was, the shop owner told us with a certain amount of misplaced pride, invented right here in Miyazaki, though how much work went into thinking up fried chicken with mayonnaise is debatable. Every area of Japan boasts its local specialty. In northern Shimok
ita, it is wild boar meat. In Morioka, it is small mouthfuls of noodles, tossed back in what becomes more of a contest than a meal. In my own home prefecture of Kumamoto, the main dish is basashi, which is—this is true—raw horsemeat. As Paul Berger noted, the only problem Westerners have with eating raw horsemeat is that (a) it is horsemeat, and (b) it is raw. The first time I had basashi was at my welcome party, when I had just arrived in Kumamoto. I asked one of the teachers what it was I was eating and he struggled for a moment, and then said, in careful English, “This is a horse.” I gently corrected him. “No, Mr. Suzuki, in English it is called cow.” He frowned and said, “No, horse.” And then he whinnied and imitated the sound of a galloping horse by slapping his hands against his lap. “Horse,” he said again. But of course by that time I was already in the toilet with a finger down my throat attempting to redeem my meal ticket, so to speak.

  Where the other regions of Japan specialize in gourmet dishes such as horsemeat or rolled seaweed, only Miyazaki has claimed Chicken Nanban, the Big Mac of Japanese food. Poor Miyazaki. Even its cuisine is second-rate.

  Not that Chicken Nanban isn’t tasty. It is. It is a popular dish across Japan, and every take-out shop and box-lunch emporium has Chicken Nanban on the menu. It is almost a staple of family restaurant chains such as Sunny-Land and Joy-Full. The name nanban is from the characters for “south” and “barbarian,” and it refers to the Jesuit missionaries who landed in southern Japan in the sixteenth century. Apparently these Portuguese missionaries, and the traders who followed them in, were fond of fried chicken. Later, Dutch merchants introduced the concept of mayonnaise. Together, this gives us Chicken Nanban—or more properly, “Barbarian-style Chicken.” That’s right, barbarian.

  You may want to pause a moment and wonder what sort of reaction you might get in the West if you opened a restaurant offering “Jap Noodles” or “Yellow Menace Sushi.” The fact that restaurant chains in Japan don’t think twice about labelling a dish “Barbarian-style” says a lot about Japanese sensitivity to outsiders—or their lack thereof. Mind you, I suppose it could have been worse. They might have named it Big-Nosed, Round-Eye, Butter-Smelling, Couldn’t-Make-a-Car-to-Save-Their-Life Chicken.