Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (9 page)

She invited me inside for tea. I accepted and stepped up, removing my shoes. The house was cool and dark, but the main room looked as though it had been ransacked in years past and never straightened up. Corners were filled with folded newspapers, books piled in random stacks, clothes half-folded and forgotten, absently left bowls and cups and photo albums and bric-a-brac. It was like a museum that had been turned upside down and given a couple of good shakes.

The dust was as thick as dryer lint. The tatami mats were faded and soft underfoot. They had long since lost that fresh green scent of cut grass; many were threadbare and splitting at the seams. The walls were adorned with grandchildren’s crayon art. The screens on the sliding doors were tattered, patched here and there with newer, whiter squares of paper.

This lady, alone in her disheveled home, was nonetheless wearing a freshly starched apron and a clean dress, as though she were expecting company at any time. She herself was perfectly graceful. I always feel like such a great ungainly mess of a person in Japan, a sweaty bull in a forest of deer, and whenever I return to North America I am surprised at how loud, large, and disorderly everyone seems. It’s great. It’s liberating to be back in my element. But it also increases my discomfort when I return to Japan—as I always do—and find that once again I am this clumsy, unwieldy figure, shirt untucked, shopping bags in disarray, hair uncombed, groping for a handkerchief that I do not have.

The lady who invited me into her home was so small it felt as though I were conversing with a hand puppet. We sat at the hearth and she stirred the ash in the fire pit. A cast-iron teakettle was suspended
by a large hook—and even this was heavy with dust. She tilted hot water into a ceramic teapot, and we waited for the tea to steep. This is the most beautiful sentence in Japan.
The tea steeps
. A smell of topsoil and perfume rises up. It tastes the way that rice fields smell. And the final swallow, where the powder collects in the bottom, is also the most bitter.

In the adjoining sun parlour, she showed me further forests of bonsai. “The bonsai outside are in process. These are complete. His grandfather’s.” A pine tree clung to boulder, its trunk twisted, its branches curved by an imaginary wind.

“Oi!”
It was the husband returning. He saw my boots in the entrance, but he wasn’t prepared for a foreign face in his house. He recovered his decorum remarkably well.

“American, eh? What brings you to Nango?” He was wearing a spotlessly clean white undershirt and a pair of polyester jogging pants—there must be more polyester jogging pants per capita in Japan than anywhere else in the world. I liked him because he was unapologetically bald. His hair was combed straight back, defiantly; no comb-over camouflage here. A retired rice farmer, he was also an artist.

I admired his bonsai. He thanked me. I persisted. He thanked me again. There was one tree, a young one, still unshaped, that I particularly liked. I went on and on. His smile tightened. It really is a beautiful bonsai, I said, and then, before I knew it, I had gone too far.

“Please,” said his wife. “Please take it. It is our present.”

“No! Really, I just like it, that’s all.”

She persisted. “It is our present to you. Please.”

Her husband was smiling as though someone were slowly tightening a vise on his nuts. His wife continued in her efforts to give me the tree, and he kept trying to throw her some of those
ah unn
nonverbal understandings, but she was oblivious. “I’m sure you would want him to have it, wouldn’t you, dear? Such a nice young foreigner, travelling so far. It will make a nice memory of Nango. I can wrap it for you. It’s very light. No, I’m sure my husband doesn’t mind.”

Fortunately, I managed to outlast her, and the man did not have to hand over one of his beloved bonsai. I always forget that in Japan complimenting something highly is good manners, but complimenting
too long
is gauche. True, no one is going to hand over his family sword or giant-screen Sony just because you keep prattling on about how much you like them, but he will be annoyed at the hints you are dropping, and as a hitchhiker, when you lose the goodwill of the people, you lose everything.

The husband in turn tried to give me one of his wife’s flower-arranging vases. It was her turn to smile tightly, but I managed to decline his gift. The wife then offered me a ride out of Nango with her husband, and he graciously offered to have his wife make a box lunch for me. I half expected her to up the ante by offering me one of her husband’s gold teeth, but it didn’t come to that. They were a good couple, not exactly
ah
and
unn
, but close enough.

13

“
GOODBYE
, G
AIJIN-SAN
,” said the lady of the house, bowing from the driveway as her husband and I drove away. “Goodbye and thank you.”

There was a time I would have rankled over someone calling me
gaijin-san
. The word
gaijin
means “outsider,” and is derived from the term
gai-koku-jin
, “outside-country-person.” When the suffix
-san
is added to
gaijin
, it means Mr. Outsider. This was how the lady in Nango referred to me. Most Japanese insist that the word
gaijin
is strictly an abbreviated form with no undertone of racism intended, but they are wrong. Like
gringo
, the word
gaijin
has an edge to it. And when I ask my Japanese friends how they would feel if I were to refer to them in a similarly abbreviated form—
Jap
—their jaws harden and they insist that it is not the same thing.

Like most visible minorities living in Japan, I went through a hypersensitive phase. It happens after the initial euphoria has worn off and you realize, “Hey! Everyone is talking about me! And they’re looking at me. What do they think I am, some kind of foreigner or something!”

We become Gaijin Detectors. It’s like a silent dog whistle. It got so I could detect a whispered, “Look, a gaijin!” across a crowded street, and spin and glare simultaneously at everyone within a fifty-mile radius.

Even when I could understand the language, I ran into problems. The word for the inner altar of a Shinto shrine sounds exactly like
gaijin
. I remember visiting a shrine in Kyoto and having a tour group come up behind me. The tour guide pointed in my direction and said, “In front of us, you can see the
inner altar
. This
inner altar
is
very rare, please be quiet and show respect. No photographs. Flashbulbs can damage the
inner altar.”
Except, of course, I didn’t hear
inner altar
, I heard
foreigner
. It was a very surreal moment.

Looking back, the biggest culture shock about Japan was not the chopsticks or the raw octopus, it was the shock of discovering that no matter where you go you instantly become the topic of conversation. At first it’s an ego boost. You feel like a celebrity. “Sorry, no autographs today, I’m in a hurry.” But you soon realize that in Japan foreigners are not so much celebrities as they are objects of curiosity and entertainment. It is a stressful situation, and it has broken better men than me.

And yet it seems so petty when you put it down on paper: They look at you, they laugh when you pass by, they say “Hello!” They say “Foreigner!” They even say “Hello, Foreigner!” But it’s like the Chinese water torture. It slowly wears you down, and this relentless interest has driven many a foreigner from Japan.

It is still fairly mild. I tried to imagine what would happen if the tables were turned. I think of my own hillbilly hometown in northern Canada, and I wonder what kind of greeting the beetle-browed, evolutionarily challenged layabouts at the local tavern would give a lone Japanese backpacker who wandered into their midst.

I still hate the word
gaijin
and I still hate it when people gawk at me or kids follow, shouting, “Look, a gaijin! A gaijin!” But I have also learned an important distinction, and one that has made a huge difference to my sanity. It was explained to me by Mr. Araki, a high-school teacher I once worked with. “Gaijin means outsider. But
gaijin-san,”
he insisted, “is a term of affection.” Sure enough, once I started paying closer attention to who was saying
gaijin
and who was saying
gaijin-san
, I discovered that Mr. Araki was right.
Gaijin
is a label.
Gaijin-san
is a role.

In Japan, people are often referred to not by their name but by the role they play. Mr. Policeman. Mr. Post Office. Mr. Shop Owner. As a foreigner, you in turn play your role as the Resident Gaijin, like the Town Drunk or the Village Idiot. You learn to accept your position, and even take it as an affirmation that you do fit in—albeit in a very unsettled way—and you begin to enjoy Japan much more.

14

M
S
. M
AYUMI
T
AMURA
and Ms. Akemi Fujisaki were on their way into the city to see a concert by a Japanese rock band called Blue Hearts. Mayumi and Akemi were young, high-spirited women, and together we managed to wedge my pack and my oversize self into the backseat of their Incredible Shrinking Car (it seemed to grow smaller and smaller as we drove). My knees were resting under my jaw. Akemi turned around to talk with me as Mayumi pulled out onto the highway and pointed us toward Miyazaki City.

Initially they wanted to talk about Japanese pop music, but my knowledge was limited to a handful of names. I asked them if Blue Hearts was a popular band. No, not really. Did they like Blue Hearts? No, not really. Then, laughing at my puzzled look, they explained that there was so little to do down here in this southern corner of Japan, so few distractions, that they take what they can get.

I asked them if they were good friends, and their eyes met, almost slyly, and a smile passed between them. “Best friends.” Akemi reached over, lightly, and touched Mayumi’s hand.

Great. I’d caught a ride with Thelma and Louise. Which was fine, as long as they didn’t go driving off a cliff.

Mayumi, the driver, could speak English. She studied it with a determined passion, fitting her studies in during afternoons and work breaks and free evenings. She was a maid at an inn near Cape Toi. She was single, female, and gainfully employed—which in Japan translates as “world traveller.” One of the acute ironies of the Japanese corporate-male philosophy is that the men of Japan do not have much time to enjoy themselves on extended holidays. Young women, on the other hand, may be underpaid and underappreciated,
but in many ways they have more freedom. Their work is rarely their life, and it is they who are Japan’s new breed of traveller. The men of Japan are lousy travellers and even worse expatriates. The women, in contrast, are more aware of the world: less xenophobic, more adventurous.

This newfound worldliness of Japanese women has also been partly responsible for a phenomenon known as “the Narita divorce.” It begins during the honeymoon, when the young husband discovers—to his eternal chagrin—that his new wife is more sophisticated, more self-assured, and more at ease in a foreign country than he is. He also discovers that his samurai prerogatives are meaningless once he leaves the maternal bosom of Japan. The young wife, in turn, notices how
un
worldly, how bumbling, how
inept
her husband is, and by the time they get back to Narita International Airport in Tokyo, they can’t stand the sight of each other. Fortunately, in Japan the marriage certificate is not usually signed until long after the ceremony, often not until the honeymoon is over. This acts like an escape clause. A couple returning from their disastrous first trip abroad can part ways at Narita, never to see each other again, and the marriage is effectively annulled.

Mayumi had travelled through Canada and Europe, and she was now planning a trip to London—and this time she was taking Akemi. The relationship between Mayumi and Akemi was, to a certain extent, one of
senpai
to
kōhai
, senior to junior, teacher to student. In Japan, absolute equality between two people is very rare. One person is always older or better-trained or more knowledgeable. This is true everywhere in the world, but nowhere is it quite so entrenched as in Japan, where the senpai/kōhai system is the basis of virtually every relationship. It is not always apparent, but the more attuned you become to the nuances of relationships in Japan, the more often you see it. The senpai/kōhai system is not meant to be an antagonistic master/serf relationship, though it does degenerate into this at times. More properly, it is the sense of a chain of knowledge being transmitted from one to another. In the case of martial arts or company training, the position is explicit, but even among friends there is usually an unstated understanding of who is to be the senpai and who is to be the kōhai. (And every kōhai naturally aspires to becoming a senpai one day.) Everyone in Japan is entangled—or nurtured,
depending on your bias—in an interconnecting web of uneven relationships, here the senpai, here the kōhai.

In Mayumi and Akemi’s case, their friendship easily divided into senpai (Mayumi) and kōhai (Akemi). Mayumi was the same age as Akemi, but she had travelled more, done more, seen more. It wasn’t a matter of Mayumi dominating Akemi, it was simply a rapport that they—like most Japanese—felt comfortable slipping into. Just as Americans feel most at ease with unpretentious jocularity.

Mayumi and Akemi were a society of two. They had a secret map that would take them away. They told me far more about themselves than they really ought to (and more than I feel comfortable divulging). When you are a hitchhiker, people spill their lives into your lap. Things they would never tell their family they gladly surrender to a hitchhiker precisely because the hitchhiker is a stranger, a fleeting guest, a temporary confidant. But there is also something about the physical position; there is little eye contact. Drivers watch the road and you talk with parallel vision, without the extended face-to-face of normal conversations. It is almost like talking to someone at night in bed, when the voices are disembodied and anything seems possible.