Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  A Transformer Priest. A San Francisco farewell. Sad rocks, a Greek shrine, and a Mediterranean landscape. None of it made any sense. Since we go astray, the three worlds are castles. Since we are enlightened, all the directions are non-existent.

  The ferry slid free of the island and into the night, past the peaks of drowned mountains, other islands. Somewhere to the east was the churning whirlpool of Naruto, where currents meet and collide just below the surface.

  There is one last story of Shōdo to tell, and it is appropriate to save it for now, for it was on a night like this, on a ferry departing Shōdo for the mainland, that an eighty-four-year-old man—a pilgrim—walked out onto the deck and, quietly, unobtrusively, slipped away. His name was Ichikawa Danzo VIII, a Kabuki actor of note, and in his death he gave his last and greatest performance, a performance that would assure him immortality.

  Ichikawa first appeared onstage as a child in arms. When he retired in April 1965, it was celebrated as eighty-two years onstage. After the fetes and final farewell performance, he travelled to Shikoku and set off, alone, to follow the Eighty-Eight Temple Route of Kōbō Daishi. It was a remarkable undertaking for a man in his late years, and there are suggestions that he never expected to finish the pilgrimage, that he expected to die on the road. But Ichikawa finished his trek at the end of May, after the sakura had fallen and the circle had closed. He was at a loss over what to do. He sailed for Shōdo, apparently to complete that island’s pilgrimage as well—but something changed his mind.

  Why he chose to leave the final circle unfinished remains a mystery. Perhaps he was simply tired. He spent the last days of his life alone in a small inn on Shōdo before boarding a midnight ferry for Osaka. Rain was washing across the deck as Ichikawa made his way to the stern and stepped over the guardrail into a dark sea. He was never seen again. It was as though his body had vanished. He had chosen the moment of his exit carefully; the ferry was crossing the strong eastern currents of the Inland Sea and he was swept away into the whirlpool of Naruto—and the endless circles it spins.

  Ichikawa’s death became legend, the ultimate act of autonomy, the pilgrim deciding for himself how the journey would end. In Japanese Pilgrimage, Oliver Statler writes, “His was not an act of desperation but of resolution. He walked out of life as he had walked off the stage, with composure.”

  Which is not quite how I intend to go when my own circle comes to a close. I plan on being dragged into that great abyss by my fingernails, screaming and kicking all the way. Ichikawa, you’re a better man than I am.

  As the darkness fell on the ship’s deck, I retreated inside, looking for voices and well-lit rooms.

  CROSSING OVER

  Central Honshu

  1

  ON THE FERRY to Honshu, I had the misfortune of making friends with a group of truck drivers. They were huddled in the empty cafeteria on the ferry’s upper deck drinking beer. The cafeteria itself was long closed but the vending machines were still running, and the truckers were sitting about eating dried fish and kicking back the beer. They soon spotted me, and I was hailed like a returning general. “Oi! Gaijin!”

  They were headed for the big bad city of Osaka, their trucks loaded down with shipments of crushed granite, their clothes dusty and grey. The leader was a neckless man, heavy-browed with close-cropped hair, who took an immediate, antagonistic liking to me. He spoke in rapid bursts, in a thick Osaka accent: “Gaijin! Don’t go! Stay and—drink this beer and—tell us where you’re going and—what you think of Japanese women and—can you eat Japanese food—talk to us, Gaijin!” I shook his hand, or rather, he clutched my hand and whipcracked it something fierce. He handed me a beer and dragged me down to the seat beside him. The rest of his crew wedged in. “Look! The gaijin likes our beer. He’s drinking it, so quick, get another can. We’ll get this gaijin drunk, if it’s the last thing we do.”

  Normally, my instincts are to avoid drunken, unruly truck drivers. Avoid drunken, unruly truck drivers: that’s my motto. But in this case I made an exception. Shōho, the priest on Shōdo Island, had warned me that the ferry port at Himeji was far from downtown, that there would be no buses this late, and that a taxi would be exorbitant. I had hoped to wheedle a ride into Himeji with one of the passengers on board, but most were sound asleep in their cars, and the only lively, approachable group were these Osaka truck drivers. So …

  “Ha ha! Gaijin wants a ride. Of course we will give him a ride! Are we not truck drivers? Are we not Osaka men? Quick—get him another beer so we—can toast our new gaijin friend! Kampai!”

  “Isn’t it illegal to drink and drive?” I asked with contrived innocence. I knew quite well the answer. It was very illegal. Japan had the strictest laws of any modern, industrial nation. Zero tolerance. If you drove after even one drink, you would lose your licence. If you worked in the public sector, you would also lose your job.

  “Tonight’s drivers are below, asleep. We drive in shifts and now—it is time to drink!” He emptied the can directly into his gullet, without swallowing, and then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth with a grandiose flourish. “We drink!”

  Great, of all the people I had to latch onto, I ended up with Zorba the fucking Greek. At any moment, I expected him to toss down his beer can and leap into a dance. I tried to squirm away but he had a death grip on my shoulder at this point and I was trapped. Even worse, he pounded my back in exaggerated mirth every time I did anything even remotely entertaining. This wouldn’t be so bad except that—as a foreigner—he found my very existence entertaining, so I was getting my back pounded an awful lot.

  At least I had a ride. Or so I was led to believe. At some point during the festivities, I realized that Zorba was arguing with his minions over which bar to take me to—in Osaka. “Excuse me,” I said. “Osaka?”

  “You will love Osaka!” It was not so much a promise as it was a threat.

  “But—but I’m going to Himeji.”

  “No, you’re not.” Then, loudly, “More beer!”

  “Now wait a sec. I have to get to Himeji. It’s very important. I have to see a doctor. Very serious. Life or death.”

  “Forget Himeji! Himeji is nothing. The women of Himeji—bah!—ugly, like this.” He screwed up his face. “But Osaka women! Ah, Osaka women!” He threw his hands heavenward and grinned, convinced he had won the debate.

  “Osaka women are horny,” said one of the other truckers. “Yes, yes,” they all agreed. “Horny, very horny. They wear red, bright red. They just don’t care.”

  Jeez, how do you argue with that? Again, I tried to escape. It was hopeless. They had me in their clutches. One man, slurred beyond comprehension, kept grabbing my arm and pulling me in to whisper some reeking gibberish in my face. Another kept up a steady round of toasts, raising his beer at the slightest provocation. But the most unnerving man was the one who kept bringing up the American soldiers who had assaulted a young Japanese girl in Okinawa. He looked pissed off. The more he drank, the more he stared at me. And the more he stared at me, the angrier and more persistent he became. My few instincts dedicated to self-preservation were screaming. Run. Jump. Hide.

  “Excuse me, I have to go to the washroom,” I said.

  “Me too! Ha ha! We can have a pissing contest!”

  To which another trucker immediately yelled, “Ten thousand yen on the gaijin!”

  “Yes, but first I have to go get my backpack. It’s on the lower level.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s right here.” They slid it over.

  “Yes, but I need to get my other backpack. I’ll be right back.”

  Somehow I slithered free and disappeared down the stairs, dragging my pack behind me. I frantically looked for a place to hide. I found a corner behind a closed magazine stand and I squeezed in. Through the ferry windows I could see the docks of the mainland approaching, and I soon heard various voices calling out, “Gaijin! Gaijin! We have to go. Gaijin, where are you?”

  The voices came and went from various d
istances, until one truck driver walked into the very room I was hiding in. I held my breath. There was only the throb and shudder of the ship’s engines. “Gaijin?” With a heart-skipping seizure, I realized that I was standing in front of a light and my shadow was cast far across the floor, beyond my hiding nook. Fortunately, the man was too drunk to notice. Seeing no one about, he continued the search on the next level. “Gaijin! Gaijin! Where are you?”

  They sounded genuinely worried, and I felt a small pang of guilt. Not enough to come out, you understand, but enough to make me feel sort of bad, especially after all the free beer.

  The ferry bumped up against the pier, and I watched from above as the convoy of granite trucks rolled off the dock. They drove slowly, backing up traffic, and I saw Zorba looking this way and that from the passenger window of the lead vehicle, still trying to spot me. The trucks rumbled clear of the ferry and turned toward Osaka. Only then did I make my exit.

  I was congratulating myself on my cunning escape when I realized, with a flood of all too familiar despair, that once again I was alone in the middle of the night, facing yet another dingy expanse of warehouses and empty dockside streets.

  A taxi was waiting in front of the ferry office, but the pickings were slim. As near as I could tell, I was the only pedestrian to disembark. I would have had to compromise my integrity as a freeloader if I took a taxi into town, but as luck and duplicity would have it, Zen Zen Chigau and Uso Bakkari reappeared in their red sports car and leather miniskirts, and drove me all the way into the city. Very fortuitous, that.

  2

  CAPSULE HOTELS are a Japanese invention, and who else but the Japanese could have invented them? Instead of renting an entire room, you rent a small, space-age pod and crawl inside like an astronaut preparing to be frozen in suspended animation. Each unit has a control panel, a radio, an alarm clock, and even a television set. The rows of capsules/pods are arranged like storage bins, but the rest of the hotel is more spacious. There is a large, smoke-infested common room full of coughers, lots of vending machines, a coffee shop, and a spacious Roman bath where you soak in luxury before crawling into your space pod for the night. In the West, our beds are big and our baths are small. In Japan, it is precisely the opposite.

  The clientele at your average capsule hotel is made up largely of riff-raff, ruffians, college students, shady characters, late-night pachinko players, and overworked salarymen who missed the last train home.

  Capsules cost half as much as regular hotels, they are open twenty-four hours a day, and no reservations are required, which makes them ideal for the independent traveller. The bad news? Many capsules don’t like to rent to foreigners. We make their other clients uncomfortable, we walk around in our shoes, we soap ourselves inside the bath, we rarely speak Japanese, we can’t understand how anything works, we keep pushing the red emergency button on the control panel, and the pyjamas never fit us. The list of our transgressions is long.

  Which is why, when I caught a taxi to the Hawaii Capsule in Himeji City, I made a big show of taking off my shoes and putting on the plastic slippers laid out for guests. I wanted the man at the front desk to realize that, although I was a big clumsy barbarian, I knew enough not to go tracking dirt through the hotel. But before I got two steps toward him, he stopped me cold, holding out a hand in traffic-cop fashion. “Japanese,” he said with a voice full of gruff. “Do you speak Japanese?”

  His name was Ogawa and he was trying to look stern, but it didn’t work. He was a square-faced, middle-aged man with his hair slicked straight back in a style that was appropriate for someone associated—however circumstantially—with the seedier side of life.

  “Yeah, I speak the lingo,” I said in what I hoped was an equally gruff Osaka accent. It worked. His face spread into a wide grin, his gruffness being the thinnest of charades, and he happily checked me in. He went over the various charges and options and the endless rules, and then in a whispered aside he said, “There is an extra charge of five hundred yen if you want the ‘special’ videos.”

  I had seen Japanese “special” videos before. “Are the good parts scrambled out?”

  He shrugged philosophically. “They are. But if you squeeze your eyes together like this”—he showed me how—“you can kind of see what’s going on.”

  “The capsules don’t have karaoke machines as well, do they?”

  I was kidding, of course, but Ogawa didn’t brush the suggestion aside. He sighed. “Not yet. Maybe someday.”

  And he was probably right. I could well imagine a Japanese salaryman, lying prone in a pod no bigger than a coffin, singing soulfully about his old hometown and the woman he left behind.

  Ogawa didn’t have much use for karaoke. He was one of the few Japanese people I ever met who was openly hostile to it. Karaoke, it turned out, had cost him his livelihood. He hadn’t always been a capsule hotel manager. No, he was once an entertainer who travelled the showbiz circuit of Japan as—I swear I’m not making this up—a freelance accordion soloist. He had been involved with bands, but his rugged spirit and the constant back-stabbing power plays among the performers soured him on the group experience. No, he had to be free. Just him and his accordion. But, alas, karaoke had driven travelling musicians, such as himself, out of business. And the way he said it, you couldn’t help but agree that the end of barroom accordion artistry had been an irretrievable loss to Japanese culture.“Nowadays,” he said, “when I try to play my accordion music, people tell me to stop. I blame karaoke for this.”

  Having checked in, commiserated with the manager, and forced my much-beleaguered backpack into a locker, I went out to explore Himeji by night. The streets were alive with activity. At the end of the boulevard, lit up like a neon mirage, was Shirasagi-jō, the White Heron Castle, the finest castle in Japan—and possibly the world.

  The city of Himeji was firebombed into ruin during the war. The castle survived—scorched, but intact. When, through the fire and smoke, the people saw that the White Heron was still standing, the castle became a symbolic rallying point. What they didn’t know was that the Americans had spared the castle. They needed it as a reference point for their bombers. Turn right at the castle and you were soon over Osaka’s shipyards. Turn left and you would be over Hiroshima.

  Whatever the reason, the castle’s continued existence is a miracle worth celebrating. Built in 1581, and expanded in 1609, it remains the pre-eminent example of warlord architecture in Japan. It stands perched on a small bluff of land, like a bird about to take wing, and the nearer I got, the thicker the crowds became. Most were leaving, streaming out from the grounds, heady with cherry blossoms and rice wine, their faces a deep red—almost purple. So many Japanese get red-faced when they drink alcohol, because of a hereditary lack of the liver enzyme that breaks down acetaldehyde. It is this chemical byproduct of alcohol that causes their features to become flushed.

  Some were singing, many were staggering; a few were hurrying to make the last trains; others, flagging down taxis. It was the type of charged atmosphere you find in a parking lot after a rock concert. I crossed the moat and entered the castle grounds. Stubborn party-goers were still active in the pockets of light beneath the sakura.

  At Himeji Castle, the flowers were in full bloom and everywhere there was activity and laughter. Hands waved me in. Voices cried out. It was such a wonderfully friendly atmosphere. Long-lost friends I had never before met clasped my hands and smiled nostalgically. I made a few guest appearances, drank a bit of saké, shared a few laughs, and cadged a couple of cans of beer, but everyone was too far gone and I was still distracted by the castle itself, rising up in all its glory above the pink-and-white spray of sakura.

  There are three thousand cherry trees around the castle, and I stood looking up in something akin to reverence. Fringed with flowers, it was so well presented, so impressively arrayed in spotlights, so perfect, that it was all I could do not to applaud.

  Downtown in Himeji, the bars were closing and customers were be
ing turned out. I headed back to the Capsule Hawaii. Along the way, I passed a man in a crumpled suit, reeling drunkenly. He was defiantly keeping his balance, as his eyes focused on mine.

  “You,” he said, “are a foreigner.”

  “And you,” I replied, “are drunk.”

  But even as I walked away, I knew full well that in the morning he would be sober, and I felt deeply depressed.

  Farther down, I came across something you rarely see in Japan: a fistfight. Well, it was more of a lapel fight, really. Two very drunk salarymen were grappling with each other’s jacket collars, while a third man, even drunker than they, was trying to get between them as he repeated, unconvincingly, “Stop it, stop it.”

  There is a sad lack of profanity in the Japanese language. Just about the only bad thing you can call someone is “fool.” So around and around these two went, yanking at each other’s lapels, shouting abuse at each other as best they could.

  “Fool! Fool!”

  “I am not a fool. You are a fool!”

  “Fool!”

  I sidled up beside one of the spectators and asked, “Do they know each other?”

  “Sure. Same company. Different departments.”

  “Really? So what’s the problem?”

  “They are having a disagreement about next year’s sales plan.”

  And for once I was able to say, with no small amount of pride, “Well, you would never see two people getting violent over something like that back where I come from.”

  Ogawa of the Lone Accordions was still at his post, and he gave me a grin and a wave when I came back in. (We were now old friends.) I went to the Roman bath, a luxurious affair with pseudo-European décor: fake marble, fake gold leaf, fake frescoes, and very real scalding water. After simmering myself for a while, I changed into the hotel pyjamas and went down the rows of capsules until I found my number. I wasn’t really tired and I would have liked to lounge awhile in the common room, but it was filled with the hacking coughs of chain-smoking reprobates, so I declined. Instead, I purchased some clean underwear from a vending machine—just for the novelty of purchasing underwear from a vending machine—and climbed up into my space pod. It was a tight fit, what with the television set hanging down in my face, but I eventually worked my way in. Capsules are not for the claustrophobic.