Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (18 page)

“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. The 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?

With a mixture of reluctance and relief, I turned my back on Uwajima, a city where every extreme is possible and no one gets out unbruised. I chose a spot in front of a gas station and stuck out my thumb.

And that’s when I met the Japanese mafia.

9

I
DON’T KNOW
for certain he was a member of the Japanese mafia. I was making an educated guess based on several important clues: he had on sunglasses, he was wearing a shimmering lime-green silk suit, his hair was in a tight “punch-perm,” and—most telling of all—he was driving an American car. “Watch out for Cadillacs,” my fretful Japanese friends had warned me as I set out. “And beware the black Benz!”

Japanese gangsters do tend to favour such vehicles, but I suspect that the connection between foreign cars and danger reveals more about the Japanese psyche than it does reality. Good people drive small white Japanese cars. Bad people drive expensive, black, non-Japanese luxury cars. And the Americans wonder why they can’t seem to sell any Chryslers in Kobe.

I didn’t care. After spending much of my time twisted like an amateur contortionist in cars the size of tin cans, it was nice to ride in a big, cigar-smokin’ Yankee automobile. Whether my host was a gangster or not was still undetermined. Yakuza thugs have tattoos up their backs and they are often missing the joints of their little fingers, chopped off as an act of repentance each time they do something wrong. (You can spot the really talentless thugs. They’re the ones with the nickname “Stumpy.”)

I wouldn’t be able to see a tattoo on the man unless he took his clothes off, and I couldn’t think of a smooth way of asking him to do this. Instead, I surreptitiously counted his fingers and they were all there, which I found reassuring. If he was a gangster, at least he was an astute gangster. Polite too. The whole time we rode together he never once tried to extort money from me. He even bought me a can of apple juice.

In a cunning ploy to uncover his yakuza identity, I casually asked what he did for a living. He answered, cryptically, “I’m a city engineer for Ehime prefecture, Uwajima Department of Resources. Here, take my business card. It has my address and phone number right there.” It was all very mysterious.

I was standing beside the highway, drinking said apple juice and having survived my brush with organized crime, when a figure approached on the other side. It was a man in a white robe with a bowl-shaped straw hat that covered his face. He was carrying a begging bowl, a pouch, and a pilgrim’s staff. I watched him walk toward me, trucks rattling by in clouds of highway dust and noise; it was as though he were moving in slow motion against the backdrop of a speed-addicted world.

I wanted to run over and give him a
settai
, a donation, and receive his blessing, but I wasn’t sure how to approach him—or even how to cross the multi-lane highway that separated us. (It is the fate of many of us to always find ourselves on the wrong side of the highway from enlightenment.)

The man was a
henro
, a pilgrim, and he was following a path more than a thousand years old. In 804, a Shikoku priest named Kōkai made a perilous journey to China, seeking wisdom. He returned two years later, and he brought with him a liberating idea, one that would form the foundation for a new school of Buddhism, the esoteric sect of Shingon. The idea was as revolutionary as it was simple: Anyone might attain Buddhahood
in this life
. One needed only to rely on the love of the Buddha to attain salvation. It was a hard road, but not impossible.

In saying this, Kōkai had thrown the doors of enlightenment open. He was resolutely democratic. He founded the first public college in Japan where everyone was welcome, whether they be rich or poor, man or woman.
^*

The esoteric movement in Buddhism failed in China, but it took strong root in Japan. With Kōkai, Buddhism became more
encompassing, more accessible, more immediate, less concerned with creeds and doctrine. Less abstract, more tangible. In a word, more Japanese.

Kūkai died in 835. After he passed away, he was given the name Kōbō Daishi, signifying a Great Teacher. He remains the most important figure in the history of Japanese Buddhism and the nearest Japan has ever come to producing a Bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint who stops at the very threshold of enlightenment and, instead of becoming a Buddha, chooses instead to stay on this earth to help others make the same journey.

As Kūkai, he was a charismatic, hard-working, progressive priest. As Kōbō Daishi, he became something more, a divine figure, a source of miracles and wonders. Legends about the Daishi grew: he gathered disciples, he cured the sick, he healed the lame, and he gave sight to the blind. (Any of this sound familiar?) And when the Daishi struck his staff against the ground, fresh mountain water gushed out. Indeed, you can’t turn around anywhere in Shikoku, or even Japan for that matter, without stumbling upon a spring created by Kōbō Daishi. He is also credited—apocryphally—with inventing the
kana
, Japan’s phonetic writing system. The kana, simplistic yet beautiful, freed Japan from some of the restraints inherent in the ill-suited, yet doggedly preserved, system of Chinese kanji characters. In this too he helped separate Japan from China and set it on a markedly different course.

After Kōbō Daishi’s death, a pilgrimage route slowly took shape on Shikoku. It has been followed by the faithful ever since. The Eighty-Eight Temple Route, as it is known, more or less follows the coast clockwise, in a circle that begins and ends north of Tokushima City. Because it is a circle, one needn’t begin at the first temple. You can join at any point, and you can even complete the journey counterclockwise. It covers twelve hundred kilometres (seven hundred forty miles) and takes two or three months on foot, though in older times it took much longer and the route was harsher. The anonymous graves of pilgrims who died on the journey litter the way.

The Daishi only founded a handful of the Eighty-Eight Temples, and for the most part he was following even older paths. Ancient pilgrim routes were absorbed into the larger circuit, which remained a somewhat disjointed collection of holy sites until they were united
in the journey of a man named Emon Saburō, the first true pilgrim. Emon was the Saul/Paul to Kōbō Daishi’s Christ.