Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (34 page)

Consider the facts: I thumbed down a police car, they gave me some tea, and we chatted for a while, and then they drove me ten miles down the road in the direction I was going and said goodbye. If that wasn’t hitchhiking, what was? Had they thought about it, they would have dropped me off right back where I started, but they didn’t. In fact,
they broke the law
. They stopped for a hitchhiker.
I win! I win!

I was planning on using my copy of the arrest report in waste-paper basketball, but now I realized what I had done and the crumpled carbon copy in my pocket seemed like a personal citation. I might even get it framed. I really must send them a thank-you note, I said to myself. That and some pimple cream for Junior, ha ha! I did a little victory dance and whooped it up some more, and then I realized that I did not have a clue in hell where I was.

14

G
RASSY FIELDS
and cracked, overgrown pavement. A few farmhouses and a low line of mountains on the horizon. That was about it. I didn’t know where I was or even what city I was pointed toward. I was shuffling through my maps when a single white car appeared in the distance like a lone horseman in a Macaroni Western, shimmering in the heat, growing larger. “Please oh please oh please don’t go by,” I whispered, and at the last minute I lost my nerve and instead of thumbing I leapt out and flagged him down. All I can say is, thank God it wasn’t another patrolman. Blocking traffic is probably a violation of some bylaw.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m lost. Can you tell me where the road to Joetsu is?”

Inside was a bewildered-looking man in a denim shirt. “I will take you to Joetsu,” he said, but I had learned my lesson.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’ll take you to Joetsu, don’t worry. Please get in.”

“Don’t say you’re going to Joetsu unless you really are going to Joetsu.”

“I don’t mind. Please get in.”

“Not until you tell me how far you’re going.”

“Toyama.”

“Ha! That’s nowhere near Joetsu. I will get in, but only if you promise that you won’t go any farther out of your way than Toyama. Agreed?” Hitchhiking in Japan can be so surreal.

Hitoshi Kusunoki was an art teacher at a small-town junior-high school. He spoke English about as well as I spoke Japanese, so we
communicated in a mix of the two, with both languages often thrown into the same sentence. It worked out quite well.

The landscape expanded. The plains were wider, the fields emptier, the mountains more distant, the ocean out of view. It was, in a way, monotonous, a strictly functional landscape, pared down to the minimal requirements: mountains, field, road, sky.

Incredibly, Hitoshi had come to this very scenery for artistic inspiration. He had a carton of coloured pencils and paints and was hoping to stop along the way. He was going to Toyama City for a teachers’ conference—“We must strive to be ambitious and international”—but was taking it slowly along side roads, enjoying the view.

“The view?”

“It’s so open,” he said. “Spacious.”

“I don’t know, I kind of miss the usual Japanese clutter, the small villages, the little valleys.”

“Hokkaido is even more spacious,” he said. “You will see.” He then asked me how many cars it had taken so far.

“I think you’re number twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-seven cars. Twenty-seven ‘Hellos.’ Twenty-seven ‘What is your names?’ It must be, every time, the same questions, right? Can you eat Japanese food? Do you like Japan? What do you think of Japan? You must be tired, to always talk about Japan.”

“Sometimes.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know about Japan. Tell me something else.”

“Like what?”

“Other places.”

I tried to trace back the routes and tangents that had brought me here, to this particular place at this particular time. It seemed as random as the path rain takes across a car window. How to pick the one definitive place, the one image that shaped you above all others?

The aurora borealis of my childhood? Being robbed at knifepoint in Amsterdam? (A terrific anecdote, that, but in truth a horribly emasculating experience.) A certain pub in London’s Soho. An apartment in Quebec City. The week I spent camped in that large bog sometimes referred to as Scotland. And what else? Korea. Indonesia. The Great Wall. Just postcards, really, when all is said and done. And the thought gnawed at my heart: everything I had done, a collection
of postcards, like a zoetrope made to resemble motion while turning in circles.

“I once worked for a short time in South America,” I said, “and I lived with a family in a village at the top of the world. I was nineteen years old and I was going to live forever.”

Hitoshi said: “When you remember that village, what do you remember best?”

I thought a moment. “The sound of roosters in the morning. The smell of sugar cane, like wet grass.” And it all came back again, like an echo returning from across a bay, the town of Malacatos high in the Andes of Ecuador. The sound of guitars in the town square in the falling dusk. Myself at nineteen, a spectator speaking in broken Spanish. “Hey,
Gringo!”
Gringo. Gaijin. Outsider. And suddenly it seemed as though I had spent half my life as an outsider in someone else’s land.

“What else?” he asked.

“Nothing. Just that: roosters, the smell of sugar cane.”

“Malacatos,” said Hitoshi. “It seems far away.”

“No. It isn’t far. It isn’t far at all.”

Rice fields spread before us, as flat as a table at eye level. “And you,” I said. “Who are you? What places are part of who you are?” My syntax was tangled, but Japanese is a language of metaphors and it makes certain allowances. He understood what I meant.

“I trekked the Himalayas,” he said. “I spent a month there, in Katmandu, in the mountains. But that is not who I am. Later, I went to India. Calcutta. Have you ever been to Calcutta? No? So many people, such energy. Beggars. The Untouchables.”

“Like Japanese burakumin?”

He held up a cautionary finger. “Other places,” he said, reminding me of the pact we had made. “Spain,” he said. “I went to Spain. It was what we say in Japan, an ‘Art Tour.’ Spain and Portugal, to see Picasso, El Greco, in the original. But it isn’t the art I remember best. It is the people.”

He looked into the middle distance.

“I remember Nazarre,” he said. “In Portugal. The women waiting at the cape for their fishermen husbands to come home. They came together every evening, when the sun is low. Like gold. They were so beautiful, these women by the sea. They are there now, maybe at
this moment. Waiting. Waiting for someone. Not me.” He laughed. “Too bad.”

We rounded a long slow corner and the landscape shifted to the left. The far mountains were white with age.

“You know,” he said, “if I had the courage, I would never have come back. I would be in Nazarre now, painting. Maybe fishing.” And then he asked me, “Have you ever seen the dance called flamenco?”

“Just in the movies.”

“Spain and Portugal, very different. Portugal is strong. The heart is strong. But Spain? For me Spain is like the flamenco. Women, dancing. The body is moving fast, strong, angry even. But if you look at their eyes, they are sad. The action is not the real Spain, the dance is not the real Spain. It is the eyes. That is Spain.”

“And India?”

“I was alone in India,” he said, as though that answered some unasked question. “I was alone, solo travel. It was before Nepal. I was sweating, my shirt is like a bath. They said to me, India has three seasons: hot, hotter, hottest.” He smiled.

“Is that all you remember of India, that it was hot?”

“No,” he said, and there was a long pause. “India. Calcutta. So many poor people, hands like this, out for money please. ‘Rupee please, you give rupee please.’ One day I was in the feeling to joke. And this little girl, she is a beggar, maybe Untouchable. She asked me many times, rupee please, rupee please. I saw her every day in front of my hotel. So I wanted to make a joke, you understand? Just a joke. So I said to her, ‘Why I give you money? I am poor too. Why—’” and his voice cracked. He was staring hard at the road ahead. “—I said, ‘Why I give you money? You should give
me
money, I am poor,’ I said to her.”

He filled his chest and let it out slowly, a long, extended sigh. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.

“So what happened?” I asked. “What did she do?”

“She gave me some money.”

Much is made of Japan’s insularity. Too much. Commentators tend to treat the country as though it were disconnected from the rest of the world. But no nation looks as longingly or with such mixed
emotions to the outside as does Japan. Japan was never a crossroads of civilizations, it was always on the periphery, and the elements of other cultures, particularly Western cultures, have been imported painstakingly and at great cost. Today, as the world tilts toward the Pacific, Japan finds itself in the one position she has never prepared herself for: a crossroads of kingdoms, the meeting point of great cultural and economic currents. Worlds have collided and Japan is suddenly a pivotal point. It has been a trauma as much as a triumph.

The Japanese can never forget the world that exists
out there
, like a fog bank, beyond their islands’ edge. It is their obsession, their neurosis, their fantasy. If Westerners have an ambivalent attitude toward Japan, then the reverse is doubly true. To the Japanese, we are legion: we are conquerors, barbarians, superiors, inferiors, dreams projected, lives unlived, icons, buffoons, the purveyors of greater ideas and nobler arts, taller, louder, faster, less refined, more sophisticated. We are all this and more, compressed into a ball the size of a fist that sits in the stomach of the Japanese.

Arrogance is always an overreaction. So is self-loathing. The Japanese have been overreacting to the West since the day the American commodore Matthew Perry sailed his Black Ships into Tokyo Bay in 1854 and forced Japan to open up its ports for trade. Until then, Japan had been cloaked in a world of shōguns and clan lords, the longest totalitarian rule in human history. Japan’s vaunted insularity ended with Perry’s crusade. It was date rape and it set the tone, back and forth, between Japan and the West that has continued right through to the present. If the West loves and hates Japan, Japan LOVES and HATES the West. Japan can do everything but forget us, we who exist
out there
.

The Japanese attitude to the rest of Asia is even more problematic. On the surface, they treat the rest of the continent like embarrassing country bumpkins, related only distantly to themselves. They are proud to be Japanese; they are ashamed to be Asian. This conflict runs right down the centre of their soul. India, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Korea: they lie like a stone beside the heart.

Travellers and commentators rarely place Japan in an international context because it is in their interest to make Japan seem more exotic and otherworldly than it is. We all want to be mystic explorers, but Japan is not otherworldly. Neither is it near at hand. It
lies somewhere in between. Chiemi was right: Japan is caught in a permanent mid-step, one foot in Asia, one in the West.

It wasn’t until much later that I recognized the convergence of the worlds inhabited by old Nakamura, Chiemi, and Hitoshi. Three people and three places. Saipan. Arabia. Calcutta. Japan as a prisoner of war, as a young woman dreaming, as an artist in motion. The world from three views: the inescapable, the unattainable, and finally, the authentic.

Japan may yet become a nation of travellers; we may yet meet her, walking the same road, hitching the same rides. Calcutta is as much a part of Hitoshi’s landscape as Ecuador and the Amakusa Islands are a part of mine: the places that make and unmake us. The places that define us.

Hitoshi pulled over at an intersection. To the left, in the distance, was the angular mass of Toyama City. To the right, fields. Beyond that, mountains. I climbed out and strapped myself into my backpack. We shook hands through the car window.

“I have one question,” he said. “Why do you hitchhike? It’s not the sakura, is it?”

“No. It’s not the sakura.”

“What is it, then?”

“I wanted to find something. Something more.”

“About Japan?” he said.

“Among other things.”

“Then I am sorry for you.” He smiled. “I didn’t tell you anything about Japan.”

We lingered for a moment at the contact point of hitchhiker and driver—the roadside—like people in a doorway at the end of a party.

“Any last questions?” he asked me, half in jest. “You know, Japanese ancient secrets. Such things. It’s your chance.”

“Yes, actually. Answer me this, it’s a question that has always bothered me. Inside, in the deepest point, under all the layers, are the Japanese arrogant or insecure? I mean the kernel. The hard centre.”

He gave me a shrug. “Insecure, of course.”

“Did you hear that?” I said.

“What?”

“The way you said
of course
, it was very arrogant.”

“Was it? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

“Now you sound insecure.”

He laughed. “American humour,” he said, but I wasn’t joking.

“It’s too bad you didn’t get a chance to paint anything,” I said.

“That’s okay.” He looked at the landscape that fanned out before us. “It’s not so interesting.”

“I thought you liked open spaces, the emptiness, wabi-sabi, all of that.”

He shrugged. “Hard to paint.”

15

H
ITOSHI DROVE AWAY
and was soon lost among the gridwork of Toyama City. The road pointed north like a compass needle, and ahead of me the lines of perspective came together. I turned my face into the wind and walked toward the vanishing point.

early spring—
a single road
,
vanishing

A truck rumbled by, chased by a few cars, but other than that, the traffic on the Toyama perimeter was slight. A vehicle suddenly pulled over. It was a hatchback with a company logo on the side.