Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  I was drunk on flowers. I was choking on cherry blossoms. That night, looking for someone to ground me, I called Terumi from a pay phone at the edge of the castle grounds. Back in Kyushu, the sakura had scattered weeks before and the rainy season was now dribbling to an end. The first waves of summer were beginning. I was several seasons out of step. “You missed spring in Minamata,” said Terumi. “The trees behind your apartment were beautiful.”

  As we spoke, the sakura were swirling around the phone booth in a flurry of pink and white. I had spent more than a month surrounded by them, more than is possible, more than is natural. And it struck me then, with a deep sense of unease, that what I was doing was fundamentally wrong. The sakura are meant to be transitory. To try to cling to them was like trying to cling to youth. Following the Cherry Blossom Front was a denial of time, of seasons, of mortality even. It was like spraying lacquer on a lily. Like embalming a mirage. Like trying to stop time.

  Back at the inn, the bathwater was tepid and yellow, and the mirror gave my skin a tallow-waxy look. For some reason, I couldn’t stop sighing. I climbed the stairs to where my futon waited. The shutters had been left open and the wind was searching my room. Outside, the moon was lost in a sea of clouds. I turned out the lights and was a long time falling asleep.

  17

  MORNING SEEPED back in on a musty, wet scent. The blankets were cold and clammy.

  I had planned on leaving Hirosaki right after breakfast, but the sky cast doubts, aspersions, and eventually rain on my travel plans. I sat in the front room of the inn with the doors opened to the street as the rain fell. Umbrellas moved past. The streets filled up with water. Vehicles crept by as slow as funeral processions. There was only me, the maid who passed through now and then, and the perpetual yawn of a television screen, the volume muted and the movements flickering frantically across the screen like the antics of a small child who knows it is losing our attention. It was one of those long, grey mornings that seem to last forever.

  Even the rain was listless, falling down in sheets, letting gravity do all the work. No gusts or swirls, just a dreary constant downfall. The tea cooled, lukewarm and bitter, and the air had that dank smell of dentures and wet newspaper. The television continued to flicker, the rain to fall.

  The sky didn’t clear until late in the afternoon, and when it did, I decided to make my break. I had already paid for another night at the inn, but after pleading poverty and ignorance, I was allowed to leave with a grudging refund, and I hurried to pack and clear out.

  Hirosaki after the rain was even more bedraggled and tattered than before. I had spent the morning studying my rail maps and had discovered a rural train station just west of a major highway. A highway that would take me all the way to Aomori City. From there, I would catch the ferry to Hokkaido.

  The train rattled its way slowly east and then north, across the flatlands and through the farming village of Onoe, where I disembarked.

  Everything would have been fine if I had just stayed on the main road. In the distance, at the far edge of the rice fields, I could see a tiny parade of vehicles running alongside the mountains. All I had to do was make my way across the plains, toward the mountains, to this mystery road and then hitch along it until I came to the highway. Simple.

  I could have cut directly across the fields, but I decided instead to follow a small side road. I didn’t walk across the fields because the rain had turned them into mud. But more important, in Japan there is a strong taboo about walking through someone else’s land. When I was living on the Amakusa Islands, I once spent an evening tramping about my neighbour’s place with my camera and tripod, looking for the perfect sunset shot. I carefully avoided stepping on any of the rows of rice stalks, but I left footprints all over the place. The man was enraged when he came out the next day. Police were called in. They measured the footprints, concluded that the culprit had to be the local Bigfoot foreigner, and when they found mud on the shoes in the entranceway of my house, the case was closed. I was taken down to make a formal apology to the man. It was, I later learned, like jumping someone’s fence and then tracking mud all over his patio.

  You can walk across rice fields, but only along the raised earth dividers that separate the paddies. These access strips are sort of “neutral territory,” but they are also very slippery and hard to negotiate with a poorly arranged, sadistically heavy backpack on your shoulders. Which is why I chose to follow a side road through the fields instead.

  Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, it was one of those roads that seems to have no sense of direction, no purpose in life, no reason to exist. It didn’t connect anything with anything, it just sort of meandered around like a slack-brained teenager in a shopping mall. It headed for the mountains but then turned and took a leisurely detour through some overgrown grassy fields, then it found a small stream and followed that for a while, just for something to do. It leapt across the stream on a small bridge and loped alongside the other bank before petering out in an open field, as though tired of life itself.

  I had walked for over an hour and still I was in the middle of a vast, lazy flatland. Fuming and snorting, I set off overland, walking along the balance-beam dikes that separated the rice paddies, careful not to step on the rice fields themselves. And I saw a snake. Of course. Right on my path. And when I tried to run away, I slipped off the dike and ended up with one leg in mud up to my knee and a shoe that would squish and smell of compost for days. All in all, not a good way to spend an afternoon.

  When I finally made it to the highway, the sky had begun to darken with clouds. Visions of Fukui dancing in my head, I started frantically waving my thumb at anything with wheels—and I was promptly picked up by a UFO. Well, I don’t know for certain it was a UFO, but it looked like one. It had throbbing purple running boards, a neon licence plate, and tinted glass. It was more than a van, it was a Love Hotel on wheels. The driver was a wiry young man with tight-permed hair and wraparound sunglasses. Beside him was his girlfriend, a chubby-faced young lady with short hair, tinted orange. (Blond dyes don’t take with Japanese hair, something that Japanese women refuse to accept.)

  Grateful to escape the pending storm, I crawled into the back, where the only place to sit was a plush velvet bed, beside which was a statuette of a nude cherub. I looked up to confirm, and yes, in true Love Hotel fashion, there was a mirrored ceiling. Hot damn. Japanese swingers. Finally!

  The young man chewed a toothpick thoughtfully but didn’t speak. His girlfriend, however, was bubbly with excitement. She turned right around and smiled at me with deep red lipstick. I smiled back in that suave and debonair manner that has made me famous on four continents. Unfortunately, she showed a little too much interest in me, and within twenty minutes I was back on the side of the road. No explanations were given; the man simply pulled over. His girlfriend became pouty and, crossing her arms, settled in for a good long sulk. At first I assumed they let me out because they themselves were turning off, but no, their van disappeared down the road straight ahead, exactly where I was going. It was the oddest encounter of my entire trip.

  I stood there pondering this when it began to rain. Great spiteful bullets from Heaven, and me on an open road. It was Fukui all over again.

  Swearing and kicking at my pack, I managed to wrestle my rain poncho from the secret compartment it had scurried into. I pulled the plastic poncho around me and buttoned it up to the chin just as the rain stopped and the sun burst back onstage like an actress looking for an ovation. This was followed by a new round of profanities as I launched into more of my ravings, yanking the poncho off and trampling it underfoot. (Perhaps I belong in Japan because I am at heart an animist; inanimate objects are subject to curses, punishment, exhortations, abuse. Certainly my backpack and rain poncho were inhabited by kami—stupid kami, true, but kami nonetheless.)

  The next ride was with a young mother who was studying English conversation. She smiled shyly, so shyly my heart melted into a puddle-size pool of butter. It
was already getting dark with intimations of night when I crawled in, and I was shocked to discover that her two children were in the backseat: a toddler in a safety seat and a two-year-old beside her. The lady drove me all the way to the Aomori ferry terminal, more than an hour out of her way and despite my pleas to the contrary. “You don’t have to do this, really.”

  “No, no,” she said (in Japanese). “I want to practise my English” (again in Japanese). “And anyway, you looked so sad out there by the side of the road” (still in Japanese). Then, with her smile showing a hint of pride, she said, “This is the first time I have ever picked up a hitchhiker.”

  “Can I give you some advice then?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “Don’t pick up hitchhikers,” I said. “Not late in the day when you have your children in the car.”

  “But you looked so—”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  She nodded. “I see.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s not a good idea.”

  “I understand. Thank you.” Her voice was almost a whisper at this point. I had taken the fun out of her adventure. “It’s just that you looked so sad beside the road, and I have always wanted to travel, to speak English.” And for a moment I thought she might start to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you really shouldn’t.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I was foolish. I am—I am always acting foolish.” She didn’t say another word, except goodbye.

  18

  THE NIGHT FERRY was not leaving for several hours. I left my backpack at the dock and hiked into town, across the Aomori Bay Bridge, over the train tracks, and into the city centre. Aomori City, seen from atop a windy bridge suspended in space, is a remarkable sight, an arrangement of geometric shapes—circles, squares, triangles—that gave the city one of those rarest of things in Japan: a distinct skyline. Repeated throughout it, from the glass triangle ASPAM building to the spans of the bridge itself, is the shape of the letter A. A as in apple. A as in Aomori.

  From such abstract heights, I descended into the city itself through a shantytown of corrugated metal shacks near the port. I eventually found the central avenue and was intrigued to see two Japanese Jehovah’s Witnesses standing by the corner, impassively, as people swept by. They were holding out Japanese-language versions of the Watchtower in the time-honoured style of Witnesses the world over. I stopped to chat, but they had that glassy, opaque look of the firmly converted, so I wandered off. (It’s a sad day indeed when even the Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t talk to you.)

  With another hour to kill, I stopped in at a second-storey bakery / coffee shop beside a wooden Shinto shrine just off the main street. It was called the Red Apple Café, and the décor was very Japanese. Which is to say, it was a hodgepodge of French chalet, Swiss Alpine, and generic American styles. Lots of dark wood and bright lights. You know, Japanese.

  I had a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie. You have to eat apple pie in Aomori; it’s like haggis in Glasgow, fish and chips in Liverpool, or Rice-a-Roni in San Francisco. The lady of the shop was a pink-faced, smiling woman who was tickled even pinker when I ordered in Japanese.

  “Your Japanese is very good,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And I think you understand the True Heart of Japan.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And you are very fat.”

  “Ah, thanks.”

  “And your nose. It is very big.”

  “Listen. You can stop with the compliments any time.”

  And for the record, let me state once and for all that I am not fat. I’m hearty in a solid, robust sort of way, like a rugby player. Really.

  The ferry to Hokkaido was a floating hotel with potted plants and polished mirrors. It foghorned its way out of Aomori harbour, past the grey silhouettes of trawlers and oil refineries. On either side, the pincer claws of Aomori’s northern peninsulas closed in as we slid free like a lover escaping an embrace.

  I pulled my hood down and stood on the deck, face in the wind, the taste of salt water in the air. I might have stayed out there in my heroic pose for the entire crossing, but the winds were cold and I had to pee.

  Inside, there was only the hum and throb of the engines and that suffocating silence of a ferry at night. Bodies were asleep at all angles, as though nerve gas had swept through the cabin. I wandered among strangers and ended up sharing a room with a cigarette-smoking, swampy-eyed man and a woman who scowled in her sleep.

  INTO A NORTHERN SEA

  Across Hokkaido

  1

  HOKKAIDO IS A VAST, underpopulated island with a climate that is closer to Oslo’s than to Tokyo’s. The summers are short and the winters are long; this is a place that sees icebergs off its northern coast.

  In many ways, Hokkaido is the least “Japanese” of all the main islands. It’s Texas and Alaska rolled into one. The last frontier and the end of Japan. It was not formally colonized until after the Meiji Reformation of 1868, and even then it wasn’t completely opened up by settlers until the 1880s—at about the same time that the American Wild West was at its peak, with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday blasting away at the OK Corral. Hokkaido even looks like the American West.

  This is cattle country, with rolling fields, high mountains, and shimmering Texas-style metropolises. They even have their very own oppressed aboriginal minority, the Ainu. The Ainu were seafarers, fur trappers, and hunters, and though they had no written language, they passed down yukar, epic sagas, from generation to generation. They worshipped the bear, they tattooed themselves in elaborate—almost Celtic—patterns, they built a complex system of salmon weirs and lived in interconnecting communities along the northern riverways.

  Where the Ainu came from remains something of a mystery. The consensus seems to be that they migrated from the Siberian steppes. Their skin is paler than that of most Asian people, but they are not—as many commentators purport—Caucasian. Nor are they particularly “hairy.” (The fact that the Japanese describe the Ainu as being hairy—and, as often as not, “smelly”—says more about Japanese prejudices than it does about actual Ainu physiognomy.)

  Although not formally conquered, the Ainu in the northern regions were brought under heel by the early shōguns. In 1669 an Ainu uprising was crushed, and for two hundred years they remained a subjugated population. It was only in the late nineteenth century that they were annexed as a people—and as an island. The Ainu were stripped of their ancestral rights, forced onto farmlands and into enclaves, and made to renounce their religion and culture. Their language was banned, and they were deemed “non-citizens.”

  The Ainu were not officially recognized as being Japanese citizens until 1992. Even then, the Japanese government refuses to use the term indigenous when discussing the Ainu (to avoid having to accept responsibility for what happened and to stave off growing demands for a land claims settlement). An important point: the Ainu never ceded their homelands nor ever acknowledged Japanese authority, making them one of the few aboriginal groups in the world that have never been offered a treaty by the people who invaded their territory. In a nation like Japan, which has decreed itself “racially and culturally homogenous,” people like the Ainu simply do not enter the paradigm/mythology. At best, they are a novelty, a source of amusement. At worst, they are simply pests.

  Today, twenty-four thousand people claim Ainu ancestry, but few are pure-blooded and their language is all but dead, thanks largely to a relentless and concentrated campaign of assimilation mounted by the Japanese government. The Ainu influence appears to have once extended quite far south into Honshu—the “Fuji” in Mount Fuji is thought to be of Ainu origin—but the present-day Ainu have been reduced to a tawdry tourist sideshow. Ainu elders sit stoically baring their tattoos like lepers on display while Japanese tourists giggle and pose beside them for photographs. It is very dispiriting, these human zoos, and it was one
of the reasons I decided to avoid the main tourist areas around Akan Lake, once an Ainu heartland and now, well—not an Ainu heartland.

  A stubborn renaissance of Ainu culture has taken root lately, primarily around the music, legends, and dance, but overall the situation is fragile. Australian Aborigines, North American Natives, South American Indians—there is something in the psyche of the colonist that is unnerved by prior ownership, as we patronize, brutalize, ignore, and then wax poetic about the people we displace.

  It was with thoughts like these that I entered Hokkaido to begin the last leg of my journey.

  2

  AT THE SOUTHERN TIP of Hokkaido lies a small hook of land anchored at one end by a dormant volcanic peak. It was here, upon this geographical anomaly, that Hokkaido’s first Japanese settlement began, an imperial toehold on the great island above. The Russians had been using Hakodate Port as a landing base as far back as 1740. In 1854, Japan moved in to counter Russian expansion. Hakodate became an open city and, for one brief period, while the imperial powers moved their chess pieces into position and the fate of the northern island hung in the balance—for one brief period, Hakodate was a centre of intrigue and power.

  Today, Hakodate has fallen half asleep. A threadbare, somewhat seedy city, it is one of the few areas in Hokkaido where the American influence doesn’t dominate. Here the flavour is European—eastern European. Russian architectural styles are everywhere in evidence, even though the people are resolutely Japanese.