I stood for a long while looking at the phone, my hand still on the receiver. I tried to think of someone else I could call, but there wasn’t anyone. I went outside and looked at the night sky.
The moon was phosphorous white, as stark as a searchlight, and a pale sweep of cirrus cloud arced above the island in a single brushstroke, like the kanji character for “one.” Uchinomi Bay curved in an arc toward the clustered lights of downtown. It was the most beautiful night of my trip—perhaps of my entire life—and like most great moments of beauty it was singularly unspectacular. Ships lay tethered on the water, feigning sleep amid the lap and roll of waves. The moon was so bright, and the sea so clear, that the sand beneath the water was lit up. It glowed. I had never seen an effect like that before and I have never seen it since. A moon so bright the seafloor glowed. Another of many incomplete haiku.
I went back inside, calmed, and no longer needing someone to call. My bedroom was filled with moonlight and the sound of strangers sleeping.
18
THE MOTORCYCLE ENTHUSIASTS left at six in the morning, in a muffled flurry of rustles and stage whispers. Why is it that hushed voices are so much more annoying than regular speech? It’s like someone in a movie theatre trying to be inconspicuous by unwrapping a candy bar slowly. The bikers crept out, closing the door behind them on squeeeeeeeeaaky hinges, and I faded back into slumber—only to be awoken two minutes later when they came creeping back in with hushed steps and furtive voices to pick up forgotten gear. A few minutes and they tiptoed back in for something else. At which point, I leapt from my bed and attacked them. Okay, not quite. What I actually did was lie there like a coiled spring, gnashing my teeth and making disdainful snorting sighs through my nose.
A while later, still groggy, I arranged a rent-a-bike at the hostel and set out to circumnavigate Shōdo Island. The bicycle had a choice of one gear (slow) and two seat positions (low and very low). It was like one of those clown bicycles, but not as dignified. With my knees repeatedly blocking my view, I wobbled toward Uchinomi Town. Along the way, the bikers from the hostel came roaring back in tight formation, bobbing and weaving as they zoomed past at Mach II.
By the time I reached the town, I wasn’t pedalling at all, but kind of scooting myself along with my feet and coasting. I had already managed to get lost in the streets of Uchinomi when a white pickup truck, not much larger than a Dinky Toy, came lurching around the corner. A silver-haired man rolled down his window.
“So there you are,” he said in carefully enunciated English. “I was told of your presence by a certain shopkeeper. May I ask where you are going?”
“Um, I was going to bike around the island.” I looked up at the ominous green backdrop of mountains behind the town. “But now I think I’ll just go back to the youth hostel.”
“If I may presume, are you a Mormon? That is, are you of the Mormon faith?”
I was flattered. My disguise was working. “No, I’m not a Mormon. I’m a hitchhiker.”
“Ah, yes.” He nodded as though it confirmed a pet theory of his. “As a Japanese, I am naturally a follower of Buddhism. In this case, Shingon. Are you informed about a certain Kōbō Daishi?”
When I showed enthusiasm for the Daishi, he decided to take me under his wing. “As a retired person, my time is flexible,” he said. “If you place your bicycle in the back of my small truck, I shall take you to see the various attractions of this island, which is my home.”
And so it was, I slung my circus prop in the back and climbed into the passenger seat. This was getting easier and easier. I was now catching rides without holding out my thumb while on a bicycle. Surely a record of some sort.
Akihira Kawahara was a gentleman through and through. A recently retired schoolteacher, he spent his free time reading English dictionaries. “I read ten pages a day. So far, I have completed three lexicons of vocabulary. It keeps my mind busy and increases my abilities.” It also explained his extensive, if somewhat eccentric, vocabulary.
Akihira was an excellent guide, but not terribly discerning in his choices. “On your left is Saisho-an Temple, which has as its principal deity a carved image which is nine hundred years old. And here, how shall I say, is our new urine processing facility, where human waste from a wide area is gathered. The specialty on Shōdo, I should add, is tenobe sōmen, a type of handmade noodle that is quite delicious.”
He was very thorough. He even identified smells. When we came down an especially pungent stretch of road, he said, “What you are noticing is the smell from many seaweed and soy sauce factories, for which Shōdo is also famous.”
The island was far bigger than I imagined. There was no way I would have been able to ride a bicycle around it, even with gears. Shōdo was also far more mountainous than I expected, with a cloak of forest covering the peaks like a blanket draped over sharp rocks. These mountains, mossy green, provided the backdrop to every view, just as the sea provided the foreground. It felt Mediterranean, which was more than mere imagination. As Akihira explained, Shōdo was the only place in Japan where olives were commercially grown. The climate was so similar to that of Greece, with just the right mix of sea and sun and long parched summer days, that, while olives failed elsewhere, they flourished here. Olive branches, as Akihira pointed out, were a symbol of peace, and Shōdo was known as the Olive Island, a pocket of peace in an otherwise hectic world.
“It is often remarked upon that Shōdo Island is Japan in miniature,” said Akihira proudly, as it was a great honour to be the miniature anything in Japan. “In Shōdo we will find the same percent of mountains to plains, agriculture to industry, and town to country which we find in Japan as a whole.”
When Akihira noticed that I was taking notes, he concluded, “If I may so presume, your occupation is that of journalist.”
“Ah, no. Not really.”
Akihira suddenly veered to one side—his driving rivalled that of the Blind Swordsman himself—and took me down a steep side lane that plunged toward the water. We swerved into a driveway at the last possible moment and came to a skidding stop in front of a barnlike building tucked into a cove. It looked like some sort of clandestine shipyard.
We were met by Mr. Mukai, a tanned older man dressed in white coveralls. He had a golden smile—literally. His bridgework was extensive.
“Mr. Mukai owns a Honda dealership,” said Akihira. “But that is not why we are here, as you shall see.”
Akihira turned to Mr. Mukai and explained that I was an important journalist from America here to do a feature story on Shōdo, and Mr. Mukai slid open the doors of the building and there in the dusty dark, as inexplicable as coming across the Ark of the Covenant, was a high-winged seaplane.
Mr. Mukai was one of the few private pilots in Japan and practically the only one south of Hokkaido. (In a land as long and narrow as Japan, and with air lanes as crowded as they are, very few private air licences are handed out. It is almost the equivalent of getting your own space rocket permit.)
Akihira smiled with the pride that comes from having a friend such as Mr. Mukai. “This is Mr. Mukai’s third seaplane, which he built by hand and of his own design. It is the only hand-built seaplane in all of Japan. Surely it is a remarkable work. The motor is that of a Volkswagen car. There is space for a passenger. Every Sunday, Mr. Mukai takes his plane out and flies high above Shōdo Island.” There was a meaningful pause. “Today is Sunday.”
Hot damn! An airplane ride! Hitchhiking a ride through the air was even more impressive than on a bicycle. If I could pull this one off, I would go down in the Freeloaders’ Hall of Fame. But it wasn’t to be. Mr. Mukai was working on the motor and the plane was grounded. I asked him if he might be able to patch it up for just one flight, you know, for the sake of international journalism, but he declined.
Not coincidentally, perhaps, on a hill behind a temple not far from Mr. Mukai’s airplane hangar was a monument to the kamikaze pilots who had trained on Shōdo during the war. Maybe it was better that I missed the
thrill of riding in a homemade seaplane with a VW bug for a motor, but I doubt it.
Everything after a lost airplane ride is bound to be anticlimactic, but Akihira did his best. He drove back up the road, popping in and out of gear like someone with double-jointed knuckles, lurching and bouncing until we reached a small, secluded village named Tanoura.
Tanoura was the site of one of Japan’s most touching novels, Nijōshi no Hitomi, “Twenty-Four Eyes.” Written in the 1920s by Ms. Sakae Tsuboi, “Twenty-Four Eyes” is the semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of a young woman who comes to distant Tanoura to teach at a small rural school.
“Twenty-Four Eyes” was turned into a film using the original Tanoura schoolyard as a set, and it was here that Akihira now took me. We marched in, waving aside the 350-yen entrance fee—“He is a journalist from America, here to do a story on Tanoura.” Although the day was humid, the interior of the three-room schoolhouse was shaded and the old wood beams and weathered floors exuded a quiet coolness. Akihira stood before the school shrine and recited the Opening Proclamation of Fealty to the Emperor, which he had learned as a boy.
“During the war, mines were dropped in the harbour,” said Akihira. “After the war, the minesweepers came through, exploding the mines one by one. I was just twelve or thirteen and I remember, very vivid, the windows shaking. Boom. Boom. Boom. One man died, I believe.”
In Tanoura School an old textbook showed students precisely how far to bow to their superiors (forty-five degrees) and the proper way for women and girls to kneel.
“One of the first phrases a child learned to write,” said Akihira, “was sakura ga saita, ‘the cherry blossoms have bloomed.’”
Tanoura was a melancholy place. For all its sudden and enduring fame, the village was slowly dissolving. A modern highway now joined this tiny community to the rest of Shōdo. It spared the villagers the long mountain walk to the next town, but it also siphoned off the young people.
“Twenty-Four Eyes” has become little more than nostalgia. There is no longer a school in Tanoura. The teachers and their dwindling number of pupils were moved from the village in the 1970s, and now all that remains are museums and movie sets. Sakura ga chitta.
19
SHōDO ISLAND has a pilgrimage route of its own. According to legend, Kōbō Daishi visited Shōdo Island and founded several temples which would later become the backbone of a second, smaller Eighty-Eight Temple Pilgrimage. The route was laid out by Shingon priests either in 1686 or after 1764, depending on which source you consult. Where the Shikoku pilgrimage takes months to complete, the Shōdo route takes only days—and even less if you take a packaged bus tour.
Akihira drove me back to his house. It was a well-arranged Western building turned at an angle to fit in among competing plots of land. Inside, he showed me photographs of some of the temples on Shōdo’s pilgrimage; none were singularly spectacular, yet all shared the cachet of the circle.
“Hundreds of people still come to Shōdo every year,” he said. “But many are not real pilgrims but merely tourists. As a pilgrim, one must abstain from alcohol, one must practise asceticism and vegetarianism, one must not wander at night in search of entertainments, and, most vital of all, one must call upon Kōbō Daishi with true feeling. Without sincerity, the pilgrimage is—if this is the correct word—a sham. Or is it shambles?”
“In this case, either will do.”
“A pilgrimage is meant to be difficult. It is meant to test you. Many of the pilgrims came for specific reasons; they were sick, or poor, or old. My family has a long involvement with the Shōdo pilgrimage. My great-grandmother used to take care of unfortunate pilgrims, tending to them free of any charge. It almost bankrupted the family, but the karma she collected has now returned, and my family has been blessed with security and longevity.”
“Your family? Are you married?”
“I am alone now. My wife was—Did you want coffee, or perhaps a cold refreshment?”
He showed me some landscape prints by a visiting artist who had painted scenes from Shōdo. We sat in the clean silence of his house awhile before he said, almost as an afterthought, “She died … Not so long ago. A year. Less, less than a year.”
He smiled. It was a smile of sadness, an expression that is deeply Japanese. I used to be baffled by smiles of sadness, but now I think I understand. These smiles reveal emotions even as they seek to conceal them. They say, I am sad and so I will smile in the understanding that you will realize that it is only a façade that hides a hurt too deep for tears. Entire essays have been written about the Japanese smile. It is a sigh deferred, and it is far more profound than weeping sobs or streaming tears. Akihira was the second widower I had met since Sata. In Japan, where the women live longer than any other group on earth, where the men—especially the men of an older generation—rely so heavily on women and are so lost without them, in Japan a widower is one of the saddest figures imaginable.
“I believe in Kōbō Daishi,” Akihira said. “I believe that his benevolence encompasses everything. It makes sadness and loss more bearable, don’t you think? Let me tell you of a certain incident many years ago. To be speaking more precisely, it occurred on April fifteenth, 1980. I was sitting at my desk, here, when a young and saintly man appeared hence like a ghost. It was Kōbō Daishi, of that I am certain, and he spoke to me, telling me to write a book in English to explain Shōdo’s pilgrimage to outsiders. This I have done.” Akihira handed a copy of his book to me. “Please have this, as a gift.”
From Akihira’s house, we drove up the wilder east coast of Shōdo, past corrugated tin shacks of uncertain structural integrity that looked more like metal tents than permanent dwellings. Akihira wanted to show me something called zannen ishi (“that’s too-bad stones”), and we found them in a forested grove near the village of Iwagatani. They were rough-hewn blocks of granite that lay tumbled throughout the woods like massive dice. Some had sunk partway into the soil and were half covered with moss and matted grass. Some bore faded kanji characters, still faintly visible, that were the family crests of once great overlords. In the 1500s the rock quarries of Shōdo had supplied the stonewall defenses of Osaka Castle (the walls still stand in Osaka, though the castle itself is a reconstruction). These jumbled stones left behind on Shōdo had been deemed imperfect or poorly cut and were rejected. They remain to this day, zannen ishi, lined up near the shore, or half forgotten in quiet forests.
We continued up the northeast coast with the expanse of the Inland Sea below and beyond, and Akihira pointed out the smaller uninhabited islands, one of which was evocatively named Kaze no Ko, “Child of the Wind.”
Shōdo Island is again being eaten. The quarries that supplied Osaka Castle were now supplying the raw rock for further construction at Osaka’s newest glory—an international airport built on an artificial island. Osaka has always considered Shōdo to be a colony, in the baldest sense of the word: a place to be exploited, not developed. As we drove north toward the Shōdo quarries, trucks rumbled by loaded down with crushed granite. The convoys roll day and night, and Shōdo has once again been inflicted with economic leprosy: a chunk here, a chunk there, to please new Osaka lords.
Great dry, bloodless bites have been taken from Shōdo, and the dust drifts up in a fireless smoke. Amid the chalk-like powder, moving like harnessed elephants, are massive trucks, their din and roar as loud as any minesweeper. Blasting caps and sudden monochrome firework explosions puncture the air. Quarries are such primal places: man and rock and machine. I was fascinated by it, as I always am when I see large equipment digging up chunks of earth. I am one of those weird construction-site groupies you see peering through fences in rapt attention.
We stopped for a light lunch at the Fukuda ferry port, with Akihira somehow managing, in a vast, near-empty parking lot, to box in one of the only other cars there. From the restaurant’s window, the view was once again sea-saturated. Even the farmers tilled their land within sight and scent of the sea. It was such a c
ompact, manageable landscape.
From the restaurant we drove—south? north? I wasn’t paying attention any more. I had slipped so comfortably into the role of pampered guest that I no longer took note.
Along the coast, we came upon a small community that was gripping the hillside. Above it was a rocky promontory named kabuto iwa, after the helmets worn by samurai warriors. The road twisted and turned to get through the village, dropping low and skimming the water to get around a large, drab cement-block apartment building that had, apparently, dropped from the sky.
“I’m sorry,” said Akihira. “It isn’t very clean.”
“Pardon?”
He grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
And I knew then what we had just passed through. I knew it very well, because I had taught in schools in towns just like this one. It was a burakumin town. Those were burakumin shops and burakumin apartments, and those were burakumin children playing in the streets.
Japan has a caste system. Japan has a caste system and burakumin are at the bottom. Their ancestors were butchers and leather-workers, shunned by a Buddhist society that had learned to eat meat but not to accept those who processed it. This stigma, incredibly, has been handed down for generations and is firmly entrenched. Circles include and exclude, they create outsiders and insiders, and outcasts.
But it goes beyond the burakumin. Not long ago, I read a newspaper report about a Chinese businessman who was named to the head of a local PTA in Japan. The media trumpeted this as a breakthrough in “internationalization.” An official in the Japanese Ministry of Education agreed, saying, “This demonstrates that any qualified person can serve as president of a PTA union, no matter what nationality he or she may be.” On it went, rounds of self-congratulation over the first “non-Japanese” person ever to head a PTA. The man was quoted as saying, “I hope to include many people in our program, including foreigners such as myself.” A wonderful and warm story. Except for one small detail. This particular non-Japanese person was born in Japan, educated in Japan, had lived in the prefecture for thirty years, and had a son—also born in Japan—who was now attending the school. But his grandparents were from China, and thus he would always be a foreigner, a “Chinese resident of Japan,” and would never be a citizen. Nor will his son.
Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Page 17