Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (17 page)

For most Westerners, one urge or the other eventually wins, and instead of inseparable feelings you have only to go or to stay. But there are some who are caught in the middle, suspended by opposing desires. They are lost and not sure if they want to be found. They try to run in two directions at once and fail. Like a deer on a highway.

Such were the morose thoughts that pursued me through the drizzle and oily refractions of Uwajima. Just be glad you weren’t keeping me company that night; I was as deep as I ever want to go. Everything was fraught with significance, every gesture portentous, every glance an omen.

I sought refuge from myself in a crowded bar and grill, and from the moment I stepped inside, I was everybody’s best friend in the world.
“Welcome! Welcome! Come in!”
This was in the time-honoured tradition of Japanese blue-collar eateries: to be as noisy and as nonphilosophical as humanly possible. Everything is everyone else’s business and you never whisper when you can shout.
“Ah, Mr. Foreigner! Welcome, Mr. Foreigner!”

The Japanese call these places
aka-chōchin
, “red lanterns,” what we in the West might call greasy spoons. But in red lanterns it is not just the spoons that are greasy. The chopsticks, the menus, the table-tops, the plates, the walls, the cooks permanently and the customers eventually, everything gets covered in a thin film of grease, what might otherwise be called “atmosphere.”

No tea-ceremony subtleties here. It was in-your-face hospitality, back-slapping, boisterous, and very loud. I had learned to be wary of such welcomes. Westerners are often treated as sources of amusement and ridicule in Japan, and it can be difficult to spot the difference between derision and friendly chiding. The line is fine, almost invisible, between someone mocking you and someone genuinely curious. Tonight, thankfully, there was no mockery in the air. I sat down at the counter across from a choreography of cooks performing
circus feats with knives and whisks, their hands a blur, dicing cabbage, stirring woks, and tossing up plate after plate of Japanese shish kebab.

One of the cooks, a haggard young man with a week’s worth of stubble, leaned over the counter and screamed,
“What do you want!”
I was two feet away. I gave him a preliminary list and he announced to the room, “He speaks Japanese! The foreigner speaks Japanese!” but no one was much impressed save the cook himself. The owner came over and chased him away.

The shop was named Sasebo, after a city in the owner’s home prefecture of Nagasaki. The Amakusa Islands where I used to work had once been a part of Nagasaki, and even now there is a sentimental bond between the people of the islands and those of the peninsula. When I told the owner that I had lived in Amakusa it was as though I had declared myself to be his long-lost brother come home with a winning lottery ticket in my pocket. “Beer!” yelled the Master of Sasebo like a wounded soldier calling for a medic. “Beer!”

The Master of Sasebo was a man of immense girth and good humour. The Uwajima City High School baseball team, which his shop helped sponsor, had gone to the national championships in Osaka and been thoroughly trounced. He gave me a souvenir baseball cap. His previous restaurant had burned to the ground last spring. He gave me a souvenir lantern from the place. I half expected him to present me with photographs of some distant dead relatives as well, but he didn’t.

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
ka
s 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

T
HE 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, because 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.”