Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (15 page)

It was nothing but neurotic clutter, a novelty-cum-oddity shop lit in sickly green fluorescent and crammed to the corners with every sexual image you can imagine, and then some. It smelled uncomfortably of sour milk. Walking through it was like creeping through the attic of some sex-crazed ferret.

This has been going on for generations. The sex collection has been passed down from father to son, and the physiognomy of the current priest/curator fits perfectly with his occupation. He has a thin face, slicked-down hair parted on the side, heavy-rimmed glasses, and beads of sweat permanently affixed to his upper lip. His father started it all and was, in a way, the Doctor Livingstone of Japanese sexual exploration. He travelled the world, tromping among the hill tribes of long-necked Thai women, canoeing through Papua New Guinea, and hacking his way through the Amazon rain forests. He ranged the African savanna. He roamed the Persian plains. He even—and here’s the scary part—visited Soho. And instead of T-shirts and postcards, our intrepid adventurer brought back stone vulvas, phallic fetishes, and wooden sex totems. Do you think the people at Japanese Customs were getting a little tired of this guy?
“Anything to declare?”
“Well, just this seven-foot stone vagina.”

It was all jumbled together. The walls and the corridors, the stairwells, even the ceilings. Everywhere you looked there was sex, sex, sex. It was inescapable, it was obsessional, it was relentless. It was like being a teenager all over again.

Blow-up toys, love chairs, marital aids, the complete
Kama Sutra
, catalogued and unabridged, with positions basic, advanced, and impossible. Peruvian pottery, dolls from Nepal, figurines from Bali, wall hangings from India: endless variations on such a common theme. Leather straps hung like horse harnesses, and bondage paraphernalia cluttered shelves. There were groovy, black-lit nude zodiac charts from California (boy, am I glad I missed the sixties); there was even a display of “British erotica”—surely a contradiction in terms. Paintings from Pakistan depicted an assortment of fanciful bestiality, including a man and a camel, a man and a gazelle, a man and an alligator (don’t ask), and a young princess with the entire Bronx zoo.
(What is that? A
giraffe?)
There was a woman with a giant octopus, her body covered with suction-cup hickeys.

Mind you, some of it
was
educational. A chart of Tantric hand signs demonstrated how to delay orgasm through finger position and breathing patterns. I was practicing one such arrangement when a tour group went by and I burned red from embarrassment. “Scientific interest,” I mumbled, and hurried on to the next floor.

From Hinduism to pop-art porno. Marilyn Monroe over a steam grate,
sans
panties. Disney characters in flagrante. Anatomically correct versions of Mickey and Minnie. The Mona Lisa topless and the Statue of Liberty in a leather bra. There was something to offend everyone. The Seven Dwarfs had added a new member to their ranks, a well-endowed little chap named Sleazy. The trio of See-No, Hear-No, Speak-No monkeys had recruited a new participant: Feel-No-Evil. My head was swirling. How to make sense of this rummage sale of the psyche? There was even a collection of Cubist Nudes, which is possibly the stupidest concept ever in the history of art. “Is that a breast? I think that’s a breast. Or maybe a chair.” Cubist Nudes give you a headache; it’s like watching the Playboy Channel after they’ve rescrambled the signal for nonpayment of bills.

A display case depicts the various fertility festivals still being held in Japan. They are disarmingly unabashed. In one, women pull portable altars containing enshrined decorated penises. They aren’t in the least bit embarrassed to be doing this. One penis is made of stone and weighs two tons. In another festival, men in red demon masks, with suspiciously shaped sausage noses, run amok in the crowds, poking phallic staffs at women. In another, more solemn event, women in kimonos queue up, each with a giant wooden penis, and proceed down the street like soldiers bearing arms.

As I stood marvelling at the sheer weight of the museum’s collection, a tour group came through. They were led by a requisite Perky Tour Guide in a perky outfit with white gloves, a perky stewardess-style hat, a perky smile, a very perky hairdo, and just a general all-round perkiness. She was leading a group of retired men and women through the museum and they dutifully filed past each display case with the same dulled half-attention one gives to any museum. “On our left we have erotic ukiyoe prints, or
shunga
, that date to the days of the Floating Pleasure World. Notice the careful attention to detail.”

The tour group shuffled by and only a pair of grey-haired matrons held back, giggling like schoolgirls and pointing surreptitiously at various displays. I tried to imagine my own grandmother coming through this place and enjoying it as much as these two ladies were. I couldn’t do it.

“Do you see anything you like?” I asked them.

“Oh yes,” they said, and broke into fits of giggles. They fled, hands over their mouths and almost weeping with laughter.

By now I was growing numb, as though Novocain had been injected directly into my brain. I was getting awfully tired of looking at penises. Pound for pound, male body parts were overrepresented. Every second display case was stuffed with penises: strap-on penises, corkscrew penises, telescopic penises, penises with wings, penises with wheels, and penises in shapes truly imaginative—fish, deities, flutes, candles, saké bottles—all worked into that same familiar shape. One room contained hundreds and hundreds of wooden phalluses crowded into the centre of the floor like a crop of mushrooms. A rope partitioned the harvest from passersby, and you walked around clockwise as you might an altar. Or an accident scene.

Farther along, where certain photographs and woodblock prints of locked loins were deemed
too
graphic, the museum curators had simply glued tiny fluffs of cotton batting over the naughty bits. Thus, the engaging sight of men and women peering intently at cotton batting, straining their eyesight like art aficionados examining brush strokes on a Van Gogh. They would lean forward, craning their necks as they tried to see around the fluff, and then, with a satisfied nod, move on to the next print.

I did make one genuine historical/sociological observation that afternoon. So you can see that my trip to the sex museum was not some cheap ploy to pique reader interest and increase sales of this book. No sir. What I noticed was this: the old pornographic ukiyoe prints from the Tokugawa Era, with their ludicrously large and grotesquely detailed depictions of copulation, are not offensive to womanhood. They are graphic, certainly, and unappealing, perhaps, but they are not offensive. The women in them take a very active part, their kimonos fanning out as they climb astride noblemen and sumo wrestlers with the utmost decorum and at unthinkable angles. It is only later—after Japan’s contact with the West, coincidentally—
that the depiction of women in Japanese erotica becomes more and more passive, until, finally, they have been transformed into the submissive offerings presented in Japan’s adult comics and magazines.

“And here on the left we have the Seven Stages of Seduction as portrayed by the French artist Pierre la Préverse—” Another tour group was coming up and it was time for me to escape.

It was an exhausting experience. I never would have thought it possible, but I had reached my point of prurient satiety. Spend an afternoon in Uwajima’s sex museum and the last thing you want to think about is sex. It’s like gorging yourself on chocolate: you feel queasy for hours afterward and can’t face sweets for a week. It is more of an
anti
sex museum, so mind-gnawingly incessant that it dims desires and mutes interest from sheer sensory overload. Force high-school students to make a field trip to this place once a week and you would end the problem of teenage pregnancy.

I staggered out, shell-shocked and limp—literally—and ate lunch in a small café near the shrine, where I shoveled rice into my mouth like a dazed automaton. “So,” said the proprietor with a knowing yet sympathetic smile, “you’ve come from the sex museum.”

5

T
HERE IS MORE
to Uwajima than sex. The city is also home to one of Japan’s few authentic medieval castles. I checked into a quaint (read: decrepit) hotel not far from the station, and I asked the owner—a man permanently attached to a television screen—where I could find the best place to view Uwajima Castle. Without looking up from the television, which was playing a particularly engrossing commercial for foot powder, the owner waved his hand in the general direction of Tokyo and mumbled something about a mountain. “There’s a giant statue of Kannon at the top, you can’t miss it.”

Kannon is the multiple-formed Goddess/God of Mercy and is easy to spot. When I stepped outside I saw Her/Him high above the town like Christ over Rio de Janeiro. The only thing that stood between me and the Kannon of Uwajima was a small cluster of houses.

Trust me to lose a mountain.

I strode purposefully toward the Goddess of Mercy only to exit from the maze of narrow streets, minutes later and facing the opposite direction. Again I plunged in, and again I ended up chasing a mirage. First I would find Kannon on my left, the next time on my right. Cursing loudly and glaring about me at this conspiracy of city planning, I did what any intrepid traveller would do: I gave up.

Only then, as though a fog had lifted, did I notice the neighbourhood I had been trying to escape. It was one of those timeless villages-within-a-town-within-a-city that Japan contains like gift boxes within gift boxes. I abandoned any hope of obtaining Mercy. Instead, I walked deeper and deeper into the side streets and avenues. I turned randomly at every corner and I never found myself
at the same place twice. The scent of spring and woodsmoke folded itself around me.

I followed an alley so narrow I could run my hands along the houses on either side of me. I looked in on people’s lives. A man in an undershirt shakes his head at a newspaper. A student stops to sigh amid a stack of textbooks. Two old men sit motionless before a game of
go
, one plotting his next move, the other waiting; it is impossible to tell which man is doing what.

Vignettes: a woman raking the driveway gravel, a man tending a garden of bonsai, futons hung out to catch the sun from upstairs windows like seasick passengers slumped over the edge of an ocean liner. Clothes drying on bamboo poles, the pants legs strung up as if in mid-karate kick.

The alley ended at an arthritic cherry tree that was sweeping its blossoms into an old canal. The petals floated atop the water, soggy pink islands that broke over rocks and were washed away. School kids rattled by on bicycles, pursued by a squat little dog who followed, wheezing and sad. I crossed the canal on what would have been a footpath in North America but in Japan was part of a working residential street. Halfway across, a car squeezed past with only inches to spare. You could continue forever into Japan, turning corners, moving down alleyways, lost in the layers, captivated by vignettes.

Having abandoned my search for Mercy and the Mountain, I stumbled upon the way. It was like a Zen koan: when you pursue, it eludes, when you stop, it seeks you out. Or maybe it was just dumb luck. Either way, I was happy. I had discovered a path that ran behind a temple and wound its way through a wooded park and a cemetery, and then finally to the Goddess Herself/Himself.

Kannon is sometimes male, sometimes female, but after the bombardment of the sex museum this gender-shifting ability didn’t seem that remarkable. The Uwajima Kannon is in the form of a woman. Chalk-white and marble-cool, she looks out with the deep serenity of Buddhist statuary, across a valley filled with city, to the castle, perched on a hill of its own. These two peaks are islands on an urban sea. The city flows below and around them: Kannon and Castle, looking at each other across a gulf, refugees separated by a flood of ferroconcrete.

6

T
HEY CALLED IT
Sengoku-Jidai
, the “Era of the Warring States.” It was a time of civil war, when the samurai clans of Japan fought for control over the Land of Wa. It began with the uprisings of 1467 and didn’t end until 1600, with the Battle of Sekigahara and the ascension of the first of the Tokugawa shōguns. With this, the longest, most successful totalitarian regime in human history began: two and a half centuries of isolation and central control. Japan was tossed from one extreme to the other, from anarchy to tyranny, and between the two you have four hundred years of human history.

The Sengoku Jidai, immortalized in saga and song, has inspired countless sword-and-samurai
chanbara
movies—so named because the hero’s theme music is inevitably “chan-chan-bara-bara-chan-bara-chan.” In the West, children play cowboys and Indians. In Japan, they play chanbara, chasing stray cats and younger siblings down alleyways while armed with only a pair of sticks, one long the other short, the sword and dagger of the samurai class.

Japan was once a chanbara country: a land of noble warriors, ninja assassins, feudal lords, beautiful courtesans, and lots of castles. Castles hidden in valleys, fortified on plains, buttressed behind walls, haughty atop mountain passes. Today, only a dozen are still standing. Many more have been rebuilt as tourist attractions, with varying degrees of accuracy, but it is the extant castles that are treasured.

A persistent myth holds that most were destroyed by the United States during the firebombing of Japanese cities. This is not entirely true. There were a few glaring examples: Nagoya Castle with its golden tiger-fish, and of course Hiroshima Castle. Both have since been rebuilt to original scale. (In Hiroshima City I once overheard a
tourist ask his Japanese guide, “Hiroshima Castle, is that an original or a reconstruction?” I winced so hard I got a facial spasm.)

Most of Japan’s castles were destroyed long before World War II, first during the feudal wars and then later during unification, when the Tokugawa shōguns systematically dismantled and destroyed hundreds of castles under an edict limiting each clan lord to a single fortress. (In typical bureaucratic fashion, lords without castles were required to
build
one.) The goal was to confine the clan lords and solidify Tokugawa rule. It worked, and two and a half centuries of relative stability followed—but at what a cost.