Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (5 page)

It was early morning. The sun had not yet cleared the hills behind the Migitas’ apartment building, but the morning’s warmth was already coaxing earth aromas from the fields.

Mr. Migita backed his car out of the driveway, and the children loaded me up with goodbye presents: cartoon stickers, unusually shaped rocks, origami frogs, a picture of Sailor Moon, and a tiny, folded card from Kayoko that read, in English,
Have a fine day
. Their mother gave me a boxed bentō lunch, and they waved and waved and waved as the distance between us grew and grew. And then they were gone.

Mr. Migita and I were still sleepy and hungover, but the green fields of Kanoya soothed the pain. “I’ll take you east of the city on Highway Two-Twenty,” he said. “From there you can catch a ride down to the coast.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. He had to be at the office at 9 a.m. “We can just make it.”

Kanoya City was still half asleep; we could have driven through most of the traffic lights without stopping. I tried to think of some cheerful early-morning topic to discuss. “Kanoya is fairly high,” I said. “Will the tidal wave reach it when Sakurajima explodes?”

“There won’t be a tidal wave. That’s a common misconception. Kagoshima Bay is too shallow for tidal waves. It will be the explosion that will destroy Kanoya, not a tidal wave.”

Oh.

Kanoya City thinned out into open fields and the highway widened. Mr. Migita didn’t stop. He decided instead to get me through the next town and let me start hitching from there. The highway curved like a lazy river through the flatlands east of Kanoya and into the small town of Kushira. Then, before we knew it, we were already into the outskirts of Osaki, the
next
town. Mr. Migita glanced again at his watch, made some quick mental calculations,
and said, “I’ll take you through Osaki. Highway Two-Twenty meets Highway Four Forty-Eight, and you really should get past that intersection before you start hitching rides.”

Osaki came and went, we passed the intersection, but still Mr. Migita didn’t stop. “We are almost at the coast now. I’ll drop you off there.”

It was five minutes to nine. “Won’t you be late?”

“I’ll call. Don’t worry.”

The highway crossed a river and there before us was the blue of Shibushi Bay. Palm trees filed by like telephone poles.

Nine o’clock passed. Mr. Migita said, “I’ll take you to the next town. The rail line begins there. That way, if it rains, you can catch a train.”

The sky was a clear, cloudless blue. “I don’t think it’s going to rain,” I said.

“I’ll take you anyway.”

Houses began appearing at quicker and quicker intervals, the rice fields became smaller, a cluster of buildings and then we were through the town and back in open countryside. The train tracks followed the highway, crossing under and over it. A huddle of hotels appeared and beside them, oddly, a Ferris wheel.

Mr. Migita pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Across the parking lot, the empty Ferris wheel was turning against a backdrop of sea and sky, carried by its own momentum. The trick with any Ferris wheel is to get the motion started and then maintain the spin. Momentum is the only force capable of defeating both inertia and gravity. Satellites in space do not orbit the planet. They are falling, continually falling, carried past the arc of the earth by the angle of their descent. And what is walking itself if not simply maintaining a fall? It takes a great effort to set an object in motion, yet once you do, the motion becomes easier and easier to maintain. You strain to push a car but, once it’s moving, it becomes almost effortless: You keep it going with its own momentum. Travelling is a matter of maintaining momentum. Resisting gravity. Free-falling past the horizon; falling, never landing.

Mr. Migita returned. “I told them I would be late.”

“You already are.”

“I told them I’d be more late.”

We left the Ferris wheel receding behind us. The waves rolled in and broke along the bay. Mr. Migita didn’t stop. “Just a little farther,” he said, and then again, more to himself, “Just a little farther.”

For a moment, I thought he was running away from home, but I was wrong. It wasn’t about escape, it was a matter of momentum. He was caught in it, the centrifugal force of the traveller, the force that moves satellites, nomads, and Ferris wheels.

The southeastern coast of Kyushu is part of
Oni-no-Sentaku
, the “Devil’s Washboard,” a natural ridge-rock formation that runs in striated claw marks along the coast. It gives the entire region a just-finished feel, like pottery freshly thrown. Or wood unpolished, still showing the mark of the adze. The rain-forest green of Kyushu spills over the coast and then, suddenly, the scoured stone of the Devil’s Washboard begins, as though the gods themselves had run out of sod.

It was low tide as we drove north, alongside the Washboard, to the Grand Shrine of Udo Jingū. Udo Jingū is built inside a cave overlooking the sea. To get to it, you have to leave the main highway and take a short side road in. Mr. Migita stopped the car at the entrance of the shrine grounds. A large torii gate divided the secular world from the sacred, and Mr. Migita—the momentum finally broken—said, almost apologetically, “I have to get back. Home. Family. You know.”

We shook hands, and I promised to send him a postcard from the top of Japan. “When you get to Hokkaido, look for horses. They have horses in Hokkaido.”

We stood in the shrill white light of a parking lot at noon. He didn’t want to leave. Neither did he want to continue. Once interrupted, motion is hard to renew. We said goodbye and he drove away.

7

I
N THE BEGINNING
, there was Water and Chaos. The High Gods of Heaven, Izanagi and Izanami, God of the Male Aspect and God of the Female, stirred the brine with their spear, and the churning mud and falling drops formed the islands of Japan.

Thus begins the long and complex Shinto myth of creation, which is actually a surprisingly accurate description of how the Japanese archipelago itself was thrust up by the bubbling fires of an underwater volcanic rupture.

It was a time of great upheaval. Gods were born. Gods of the sky and the clouds and the trees and the earth. Gods of strength, of art, of love and anger—and of war. Until at last, the heavens and earth were filled with
kami
, god-spirits inhabiting every hidden corner and cranny of Japan, the Land of Wa, the Islands of Harmony. Key among them was Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess.

It was Amaterasu’s grandson, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, who descended from the High Plain of Heaven to a windswept mountaintop in southern Kyushu. He brought with him the three Imperial Insignias of Divine Rule, still in existence today: a sword, a curved jewel, and a polished mirror. The immortal Ninigi-no-Mikoto had come to rule the islands of Japan, but through intrigue and insult his ancestors were cursed with a finite existence—immortality was lost—and from them came the human race, otherwise known as “the Japanese.”

The Grand Shrine of Udo Jingū is dedicated to Ninigi-no-Mikoto’s grandson. He in turn fathered Jimmu, the mythical first Emperor of Japan. And thus, through this long, convoluted family tree, the present Emperor of Japan traces his lineage directly back to Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess.

Shinto, the Way of the Gods, is Japan’s homegrown religion. Buddhism came much later (via Korea), and in some ways remains an imported faith. Buddhism has a founder, a doctrine, and an historical basis: Shinto has none of these. Shinto’s origins are lost in the mists of prehistory. As a faith, it grew from the natural awe, the fear and trembling, that humans have for the world around them: the fertility of womb and earth, the natural forces and the mysteries of life.

In Japan, the world is filled with primordial spirits. The kami are everywhere. The unseen world is pregnant with them, rich in life and charged with energy. Historical figures have been elevated to kami, and so have abstract nouns and animals.

Deeper still, Shinto is about
being
Japanese. One is not converted to Shinto. One is born into it. One simply
is
Shinto in the same way that one simply is—or isn’t—Japanese. The idea of Shinto proselytizing is absurd. During World War II, the Japanese Empire built massive Shinto shrines in the countries it occupied: Singapore, Korea, Taiwan. But, removed from its Japanese soil, Shinto withers and dies. It is perhaps the only religion in the world that failed to convert the people it conquered.

Although it was used as a propaganda tool during World War II, and still contains heavy imperial connections, Shinto has largely returned to the more earthy, joyous roots from which it sprang. Shinto celebrates life. It is optimistic. Buddhism, in contrast, is gloomy. Shinto is for weddings; Buddhism is for funerals. Buddhist festivals are sombre. Shinto festivals are freewheeling, drunken affairs, intent on entertaining the gods. Buddhism worries about the afterlife. Shinto is concerned with the everyday and the here-and-now.

You will find Shinto shrines throughout Japan. Some are crumbling, some are well-tended. A few are lavish; most are small and humble. The object of veneration is often a polished silver mirror, a surface that reflects—and contains—the world around us. These mirrors, polished to a sheen, yet still clouded, are both reflective and obscure—a perfect symbol for the numinous nature of the religious impulse. Mirrors and local gods, the universal and the tribal.

You approach Shinto shrines through torii gates, and the entrances are usually guarded by a pair of stone lion-dogs. Like so many things Japanese, these lion-dogs came to Japan from China through a Korean intermediary. When they define themselves, the
Japanese tend to skip Korea, the middleman, and claim a connection to China that is direct and overemphasized. But here, in the shrine grounds of the gods, the Korean connection is acknowledged: the guardians are called
koma-inu
, “Korean dogs.” That Korean icons should protect the repositories of all that is Japanese in spirit—the Emperor’s Church in a sense—that Korean dogs should be given such a high-ranking position is something rarely commented upon by the Japanese. These stone guardians provide a telling clue about the ancient Korean roots of the Japanese Imperial Family.

The lion-dogs were originally a lion
and
a dog, and were very different in appearance, but over the years stonecutters found it easier to carve them to the same proportions. The two figures grew more and more alike, until their features blended. One lion-dog has a mouth that is always open, the other has a mouth that is always closed. The open-mouthed lion-dog is named
Ah
, the other is named
Un
, or more properly, nn. “Ah” is the first sound you make when you are born, “nn” the last sound you make when you die. “Ah” is the breath inhaled that begins life, “nn” the exhale of release, the breath that allows life to escape. Between the two lies all of existence, a universe that turns on a single breath.
Ah
is also the first symbol in the Japanese alphabet,
n
the last. And so, between these two lion-dogs, you also have the A and Z, the Alpha and Omega. In the original Sanskrit,
ah-un
means “the end and the beginning of the universe; infinity unleashed.”

In Japan, people who are in perfect tune with each other, such as a pianist and a violinist playing in duet, are called
ah/un-no-kokyū. Kokyū
means “breathing,” and the phrase suggests perfect, exquisite harmony:
ah/un-no-kokyū
, two or more breathing as one. If self-actualization is the ideal to which the Western world aspires, then common breath is the ideal to which Japan—and indeed, much of Asia—aspires. The word
harmony
in Japanese has the same cachet that the word
freedom
has in the West.

In Japan, the word for freedom,
jiyū
, carries with it the nuance of selfish or irresponsible behaviour. Group harmony is a higher value. This doesn’t make the Japanese a nicer people. There are thieves and cheats and nasty characters in Japan, as there are anywhere. But the values that Japanese society subscribes to are starkly different from those of the West. If you had to embody the ideals of the West it
would be the Statue of Liberty, or the Goddess of Jiyū as she is known in Japan, standing defiantly, the torch raised: a singular, powerful, one-of-a-kind presence. This is not the type of thing you would choose if you wished to give form to Japanese ideals. The ideals of Japan are captured instead in a thousand small stone guardians, in a thousand shrines, big and small, across Japan. A dog and lion so near in spirit that they have blended into one.
Ah/un-no-kokyū
.

On a less esoteric level, ah-un also refers to old married couples (or even old friends) who have been together for so long that they no longer have to finish their sentences. One begins with “Ah …” and the other agrees with “Nn …” (which is the Japanese equivalent of “uh-huh”) and the entire meaning is understood.

As you enter a shrine ground, beyond the lion-dogs, you will find a fountain and a dipper. If you are planning to approach the gods you must first rinse your hands and mouth with water. Having made yourself presentable, you may now step up. You toss in a coin, bow, clap your hands once, and ring the bell. It is a rattle really, a dry hollow sound that nudges the gods awake. You bow again, make your silent petition, and clap twice more before you step away, making sure not to turn your back on the god enshrined within, behind the mirror.

Most of Japan’s two thousand festivals revolve around the local Shinto shrine. The god is drawn from his inner sanctum by the shrine priest, coaxed out with a paper wand, and then paraded through the streets in a palanquin. It is thought that these processions were originally very slow and serious events, with the shrine priest himself carrying the altar through the village to ensure harvests, safety, prosperity. But, human vanity being what it is and the vanity of the gods being even stronger, the temporary containers of the gods grew larger and larger and more and more elaborate, requiring more and more people to carry them. Small armies of strapping young men were conscripted to carry the palanquin. And as these young men—girded with saké and priestly blessings—hauled the gods through the street on their shoulders, the rite descended into hilarity. The gods were bounced and jostled and ridden like runaway bulls, tipped over, sprayed with beer and saké. Competing gods even began jousting with one another in spectacular clashes. The gods, it was decided, enjoyed this. After all, they had spent the rest of the
year in fitful sleep, their slumber constantly interrupted by worshippers rattling the bell and asking for favours. That the festivals of Japan are Latin in their revelry is a fact that takes many Western visitors by surprise. Shinto cajoles the gods into action. It entertains them, and in doing so it celebrates the world around us.