Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  Instead, he ordered a plateful of deep-fried battered squid, which looked just like onion rings but tasted just like deep-fried battered squid. I hate accepting food at restaurants in Japan, because the people doing the proffering inevitably pick the least appetizing item on the menu. No one ever sends me pizza or french fries, it’s always squid this and squid that. Later, for a change of pace, the Master ordered a dish of raw octopus and then, perhaps to make amends, he presented me with a plate of artfully arranged strawberries—which don’t really go with fried squid and octopi, but I appreciated the gesture. Heck, it was on the house, and how many times can you say you have been handed a raw octopus as a gift and not as a practical joke?

  Having taken care of my immediate material needs—baseball caps and multilegged sea creatures—the Master slapped his hand on his chest and said, “My name is Taiyano. And you?”

  “William.”

  “Wi-ri-mu!” he cried. “His name is Wi-ri-mu!” He repeated this again for the benefit of the cooks, who passed my name down the line like a state secret. The disclosure of my father’s name was a further cause for celebration, as was my age, my occupation, and my prowess with a set of chopsticks.

  “You sure are talented with those chopsticks! More beer!”

  I think Taiyano took a liking to me because he saw me as a fellow nomad. He was born on the Gotō Islands, even more distant and more wreathed in history than Amakusa. He grew up in Nagasaki City. Later his family moved to Sasebo, near an American army base, where he failed to learn any English beyond “Goddamn it all to hell!” which he peppered his speech with while talking to me. “More beer, goddamn it all to hell!” he would yell, which impressed his cooks to no end. “The boss speaks English! Did you hear that? He’s talking to a foreigner.”

  After Sasebo, Taiyano had drifted east. He worked his way across Kyushu and southern Honshu, and eventually he found a wife and a livelihood here in Uwajima. We talked about baseball for a while, the scandal being that the Uwajima High School team had lost to Osaka Central because of a suspicious call made by one of the umpires, who just happened to be from Osaka and was clearly favouring the hometown team. The final score was 14 to 2. As this tale of treachery was retold, the cooks paused for a moment of silence. They shook their heads sadly at the injustice of it all. Then Taiyano told them to get back to work.

  He asked me why I had come to Uwajima. “Foreigners never come to Uwajima. Never.”

  “But I’m a foreigner, and I did.”

  Once again my powerful Western logic was ignored. I told him about my own ongoing journey and suddenly I was a celebrity again, elevated to a level beyond that of any mere soccer player. “On his way to Hokkaido!” he roared. “More beer!” The cooks crowded around their side of the counter and fired questions at me about my journey: how long did I have to wait, what kind of cars stopped for me, could I eat Japanese food, that kind of thing. “Fourteen minutes and a white Honda Civic,” I replied. “And yes, I can eat Japanese food.” Taiyano shooed them away like alley cats.

  Then, in a cryptic aside, he said, “Be careful. There are good people in Japan, but there are also bad people. Very bad.”

  For one skin-crawling moment I thought he was going to tell me about some lone Japanese psycho who was picking up hitchhikers and eating their livers, but fortunately that was not the kind of thing he was alluding to. “Most Japanese are kind,” he said, “but some are very bad.” And before I could stop him, he was spilling out his woes of how, in his first shop, yakuza thugs had threatened him and demanded money and how the police had brushed his complaints aside. How in one town the yakuza were practically a parallel government, and how he had settled in Uwajima mainly because it was small enough to be relatively free of extortionists, the bane of Japanese small businessmen.

  Japan is a safe country. There is no word for “mugging” in the Japanese language, nor are there separate words for lock and key. Murders, drug trafficking, and burglaries are exceptionally rare; muggings are almost nonexistent, except in Osaka and Tokyo, where they are sensationalized by the press and cravenly ascribed to “foreign elements.” A mugging in Japan is considered a major news story. That should tell you a lot.

  Crime does exist, but it exists on another strata. Instead of robbing passersby on the street corner, the Japanese prefer extortion, bribery, embezzlement, cabals, monopolies, and price-fixing. It’s not as messy and has a higher profit margin. What this means is that in Japan the politicians are all on the take, but you can walk down almost any street in any city at any hour of the night and be completely safe. After all, how many times has somebody jumped out of an alleyway and attempted to embezzle from you?

  The Japanese, unfortunately, have derived the following flawed syllogism from all of this: Japan has a very low crime rate. Therefore, Japan is very safe. Therefore, the rest of the world is incredibly dangerous.

  I remember the mother of one of my students fretting endlessly over the safety of her daughter who was going on an exchange to the United States.

  “It is so dangerous,” she said. “I am worried for her safety.” And where was her daughter going? Which seething pit of savagery and disorder? “Iowa.” The lady pronounced it with the same revulsion one might use when saying “Sodom.”

  Taiyano had seen enough of the outside world at Sasebo, though how accurately American GIs represent Western civilization is debatable. For him, Hokkaido was exotic enough. “Make sure you see the horses,” he said. “They have horses in Hokkaido.”

  By this point we had renewed our celebrations—it having been discovered that my blood type was O positive—and a rumpled old man with a perfectly bald head slumped down beside me and insisted on shaking my hand. “Ah, Gaijin-san,” he said. “Mamgrm kyogrf shrgoi deshne!”

  Which, translated, was: “Ah, Mr. Foreigner. Mamgrm kyogrf shrgoi deshne!”

  It was worse than trying to read Japanese highway signs. I felt depressed; so many years in this country and there were still times like this when I understood less than ten percent.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “Mugrmff gfrrmmg,” he explained.

  It got worse. The Japanese language has audible punctuation. To make a question in Japanese you just add ka to the end of the sentence. An exclamation point is made by adding yo. The bald man, gripping my arm like it was a lifeboat on the Titanic, mumbled something unintelligible that ended in ka. I knew I had been asked a question, but I didn’t know what. “Doshda gffmm ka?” he repeated. When I didn’t answer he became insistent.

  “Doshda gffmm ka?”

  “Sorry, I don’t—”

  He smote the table with his fist. “Doshda gffmm ka?!” he demanded. The kas were now coming fast and furious and the man was purple with rage. The veins began to throb in his temples. “DOSH-DA-GFF-MM KA?”

  In desperation, I hazarded what I hoped would be a noncommittal reply. “Yes,” I said. “Absolutely. But then again, maybe not. Who knows?”

  With this, his expression softened, he patted me on the back, and tears welled up in his eyes. “Grhhmm deshne,” he said sincerely.

  “I must apologize,” said Taiyano. “He’s my father. He can get emotional at times. He was in Nagasaki City when, well, you know.”

  Oh lord. I felt sick to my stomach. My throat tightened. Nagasaki. “What was he asking me? Was it—was it something to do with, you know?”

  “No, no. He was talking about baseball. He’s still pretty upset that we lost the championship.”

  “Grmmffda yo,” grumbled the old man as he stared down at his beer.

  8

  THE RAIN FELL throughout the night and when I awoke the skies had cleared and the air was crisp. I folded my futon and packed my bags. In one night I had managed to disperse my belongings around the entire room, a feat that never ceases to amaze me. I walked down the hall to the lobby where Television Man was still rooted in place, staring intently at a morning weather report. I banged on a bell apparently provided for my amusement, beca
use it brought no immediate response.

  After several minutes of this the man yelled, “Customer!” Now I understood. He was Off Duty, though the difference was hard to see. A woman I assumed was his wife came out to serve me. As she wiped her hands on her apron, she looked me over. “You’re a foreigner.”

  I conceded her point; I was indeed a foreigner. She seemed proud to have spotted it.

  “He’s a foreigner,” she said to her husband, who, with a single one-syllable grunt, managed to say, “Piss off, I really don’t care, can’t you see I’m too engrossed in this morning weather report to concern myself with such irrelevancies, and fix me a sandwich while you’re up.”

  She remained chirpy and undiscouraged by this. She said a word I didn’t recognize, and when I looked at her blankly she simplified it for me. “Sumo,” she said. “I suppose you are here for the sumo.”

  Sumo? At first I thought she was making a veiled reference to my weight and I was about to lunge across the desk at her when she elaborated.

  “The bulls,” she said. “You’d better hurry, the tickets will be sold out soon.”

  And that was how I found myself attending the Uwajima bullfights, a competition held only seven times a year. Today was one of those seven days. My timing had never been better. I booked an extra night at the inn and, following a hastily drawn map provided by the innkeeper’s wife, I went in search of Bull Sumo.

  When I arrived, the banners of individual bulls were aflutter outside the arena and crowds had already formed. We filled the seats in a crush of bodies, and the air was thick with the dust and pungent smells of rodeos half remembered from my youth. The same raw energy, the same blue-jean crowds, the same earthen pit.

  I had heard of bullfights when I was in Okinawa, but I didn’t know they were held on the main islands of Japan as well. The sport itself is part pageantry, part parody. The bulls are ranked just as in real sumo, from Grand Champion (yokozuna) down in numbered levels. The bulls being larger than life, a new rank has been added specifically for them, one higher than even yokozuna and rendered, inexplicably, in English: Super Champion. These bulls were definitely on steroids. They were pumped up, swaggering, slicked-down, and barrel-chested.

  “They feed them beer, you know,” said the man beside me. “And eggs. Raw eggs.”

  “No kidding,” I said. They certainly were impressive animals.

  “And snakes.”

  “Snakes?”

  “Habu. From Okinawa. Very poisonous.”

  “They feed them snakes?”

  He nodded gravely. “Makes them fight.”

  The man behind me had been eavesdropping and could take no more. “Oi!” he said to the first man. “Not snakes, you idiot. Snake-shōchō. It’s alcohol, they soak habu snakes in the bottle, you know, like worms in Mexican tequila. They don’t feed them actual snakes. Where did you hear such a thing?”

  The first man refused to acknowledge this and continued to address only me. “They eat snakes,” he repeated.

  The second man tapped me on the shoulder. “No, they don’t.”

  “Snakes make them strong,” said the first man.

  Another tap on my shoulder. “It’s not true. Don’t listen to him.”

  And on it went, a running argument-by-proxy with me in the middle. I remained neutral.

  “Welcome,” said a loudspeaker, “to the second annual All-Japan Championship, pitting local Uwajima bulls against the best from Okinawa, Tokyo, and Kagoshima.”

  “Who owns these bulls?” I asked the man beside me, but the man behind me answered instead, as though my question had boomeranged.

  “Farmers, truck drivers, anybody.” He was speaking down the back of my neck. “It’s a hobby sport. It began with the Dutch more than a hundred years ago. A Japanese fisherman saved a Dutch ship from sinking during a storm and they presented him with two bulls to show their thanks. The fisherman didn’t know what to do with them, so he started staging fights.”

  “He didn’t think to eat them?”

  “Oh, no. Japan was completely vegetarian back then. Buddhist, you know. Over the years more bulls were brought in, and it really began to boom. Lots of gambling, drinking. People would bet their tax money in rice and lose everything. Some lost even their houses, so around Taishō ten—”

  “I’m not good with the Imperial dating system. When is that?”

  He thought a moment. “Around 1925. Anyway, the government banned it and everyone was very sad. The town just couldn’t get any energy, you understand? Very sad. The city alderman who supported the ban lost his seat in the next election, and soon we had bull sumo again and everyone was happy. But after the war, it was banned again. General MacArthur. He said it wasn’t good for public morality.”

  I twisted around halfway in my seat. “How do you know all this?”

  “I’m just reading from the program. Look.” He passed it up to me and pointed out a section in it. I pretended I could read it.

  “See,” he said, louder than was necessary. “Right there. They feed them snake-liquor, not snakes.”

  There was a pause. The man beside me leaned over and said, in an equally loud voice, “My father once saw a bull eat a habu, fangs and all. They eat snakes, these bulls. Makes them strong.”

  A clicking of wood and the long, wailing voice of a ring announcer marked the start of the tournament. Everything mimicked real sumo: the list of fighting “techniques,” the ceremonial tossing of salt to purify the ring, the embroidered aprons thrown over the bulls like saddles, the white rope belts of the champions. The bulls had stage names as well—Iroha the Second, Shadowman—and they even had their own entrance ceremony filled with strut and pride.

  Here’s how it goes. Two bulls are led in on tethers. They circle. Their owners manoeuvre them toward centre ring. The bulls make eye contact and, because they are basically walking testosterone banks, they immediately want to fight. You can see much the same ritual in any country-and-western bar. The bulls snort, strain, and paw the dirt, and then, in a clash of egos, they lock horns and fight. They bellow and push, twist and struggle, but they do not gore each other. (Though one did get nicked.) It is a contest of strength and willpower, and it lacks the violence of a Spanish bullfight or a Texas rodeo.

  The matches are gruelling to watch: the bulls eyeball-to-eyeball, steam rolling off their flanks, their backs knotted in muscled exertion. Then, almost mysteriously, it ends. One bull suddenly loses his courage and breaks away, and the crowds—depending on which way they wagered—either cheer loudly or smile. (The ones smiling have just lost a fortune; this is how you show calamity in Japan.)

  Some bouts were embarrassingly short. One young bull stopped, took a look at his opponent, and ran away. Bull psychology is intriguing. Initially both bulls are aggressive, but wary. When one bull shows weakness and flees, the other immediately pursues. When it stops running, the other stops. When one squares off, the other does as well. And when two bulls are equally matched, the bouts can last over an hour. On one occasion, however, neither bull wanted to fight, and for all the shoulder slaps and cries of “Yo-shi! Yo-shi!” from their owners, the two bulls just stood there in centre ring and gently nuzzled each other. It was rather tender to see.

  The final match of the day was an epic. One of the owners was a woman from Okinawa, and news cameras were there to cover the event. She was the first woman to compete professionally—though let’s be fair, the bulls do most of the work—and she was also the first woman ever to be in a position to take the championship. The final battle lasted four hours. By the end of it the two grand champions were barely standing, their tongues lolling so low they were licking dirt, the sweat and steam coming off them like saunas. The scene ached with fatigue and something deeper than fatigue. It was will, pure and primal. Strength broken by strength and still strong.

  Then, dream-like, one of the bulls swung his head away and loped off to the edge of the ring. The victor didn’t have the energy to make even a perfunctory pursuit. Th
e crowd roared, for it was the woman’s bull that had won, it was now “Super Champion,” and the woman was ecstatic. She leapt and shouted and performed an Okinawa jig at centre ring. People swarmed over the barrier cheering wildly. It was pandemonium. Through the crowd, the champion belt was passed along and then draped across the bull’s weary shoulders. The woman climbed up on top of her bull, and she rode him around the ring. A spontaneous procession followed her. Newsmen waved their microphones like wands, trying to catch a comment for their listeners. I followed the crowds over the barriers and pushed my way through the tumult of bodies, across the soft loam of the ring. The bull was in his regalia, surrounded by admirers. I reached through and laid a hand on his side; it was hot to the touch and it reeked of pride, power, and victory.

  The next morning Uwajima was sane again. The ghosts had dissipated and the city was pale in the sunlight. I still do not know if the Uwajima of the previous day ever existed; travel tends to heighten one’s awareness to the point of delusion. Was it the same castle that had glowed like a lantern the night before? The deer, had they fled as well, leaving the woods to the tanuki, those half-mythic creatures of folklore and taxidermy shops? And what of the hunters? Had they grown up? Had they abandoned the hunt?

  On the way out of town, I passed the Grand Shrine of Warei where one of the gods honoured is Ushi-oni, the Demon Bull, the central figure in the Uwajima Cult of the Bull. I stopped to pay my respects. As I returned to the street, I saw, across from me, another backpacker. It was the first Westerner I had seen since I left Minamata. He was heading in the opposite direction, and he looked just like me. Same haircut, same posture, same backpack. He smiled at me. I nodded. We passed.

  On another stretch of road, in another state of mind, it would be a singularly unremarkable occurrence: two travellers pass each other on a road, surely as common an event as one could hope for. But it wasn’t another road. It was Uwajima, it was here, and it was unnerving. I often think about him, the other me, and I wonder, did he get where he was going? Did I unnerve him as he had me? Did he see himself reflected back as well, the two of us caught in a momentary infinite regress?