Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (23 page)

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

S
HōDO
I
SLAND
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 1
686
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 compact, 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.

There is an even larger subclass of Koreans in the country, many of whom are the descendants of slaves (sorry, “forced labourers”) taken to Japan from their Korean colony, a practice which started centuries ago and which lasted right up until 1945. These Korean families have been in Japan for generations. They speak Japanese. They work and live and die in Japan, and most have never even
been
to Korea. Yet they will never be treated as “true” Japanese citizens.

None of these three Japanese subcastes—burakumin, Chinese, or Korean—are what we would call visible minorities, but they are easy enough to detect. A six-hundred-page blacklist of burakumin communities was circulated among companies well into the 1980s. The list was eventually suppressed (or at least, better hidden), but the practice still persists. Japan has an extensive Orwellian system of public records. Every marriage, divorce, and relative is recorded by the local town hall. One cannot separate from one’s past, or from one’s family, or its past. You are trapped. It is like inheriting your grandfather’s reputation or your uncle’s nickname. Corporations routinely acquire these family records to screen out “undesirables,” and parents expect to check over their children’s suitors’ backgrounds. A boy who falls in love with a burakumin girl, or a girl who wants to marry a Korean boy, is in trouble.

The Japanese never talk about burakumin; they are the ghosts of the society. If you ask a colleague about this lower caste, he will either brush it off or frown thoughtfully and try to change the subject. Those in even deeper stages of denial will insist that there is no such thing as burakumin.

Akihira was very uncomfortable when I asked him about them on Shōdo. (Burakumin towns traditionally did not exist; they were not marked on maps nor were they signposted, a habit that lingers in present municipal attitudes if not in the actual cartography.)

“Some burakumin are very good,” Akihira conceded. “But some are very bad. Most, however, are just average people like you and me.”

What a wonderfully evasive statement: some are good, some are bad, most are average. This could apply to any group of people on earth. It was a non-answer, but it did mark Akihira as being at least sympathetic to their plight.

East Indians in England. Aborigines in Australia. Natives in Canada and the United States. We have our own castes as well. It is a human urge, I suppose, this need to create outcasts; you will see it on Indian reserves and South African homelands. And in the burakumin villages of Japan.

20

A
FTER A FULL DAY
of exploring the island, my ride with Akihira was coming to an end. This was not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t want to sound ungrateful: Akihira was a gracious man, patient, generous, intelligent. But he was also—and I say this with the utmost respect—the worst driver in the history of the universe. He ground gears the way some people pull chainsaw cords. His truck never moved ahead in a linear fashion. It rolled backward, it lurched, it balked, it took running starts and made false stops and had second thoughts. It bounced and bucked across winding mountain roads and along sheer-drop coastlines. Perhaps it was a form of spiritual guidance; by the time it was over, I had taken to whispering the mantra
Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo
as we went around corners. When I climbed out, my vertebrae were out of line, like a stack of broken dishes, and for days afterward my back was racked with muscle spasms. I am not exaggerating. The Blind Swordsman had been the most dangerous driver of my trip; Akihira had been the most physically punishing.