Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  If nothing else, that ride to Uwajima was the first and will probably be the only time in my life that I have been mistaken for a professional athlete. I just wish a beautiful woman and not a middle-aged mayor had made the mistake. Had a single female asked for my autograph, I would have signed it with a flourish and perhaps even thrown in some celebrity soccer anecdotes as well. Life can be so cruel.

  4

  THE CREATION MYTH of Shintoism begins not with an apple, shamed nudity, and original sin. It begins with the drunken, fumbling incest of the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, a pair of siblings who brought the first humans into existence not from clay and rib bone, but in the good old-fashioned way: they got drunk and jumped in the sack. From this came several thousand children, most of whom became gods as well; but a select few became Japanese.

  As a folk religion, Shinto has a lusty enough history, replete with sex shrines, fertility rites, naked festivals, and rituals suspiciously similar to orgies. Most of that has since been cleaned up, alas, and only a few sex shrines remain. I choose the term carefully. To call them “fertility shrines” is too limiting; these shrines encompass all aspects of couplings, both human and supernatural. The sex shrines that have managed to survive various waves of puritanism in Japanese history have lost much of their original sensuality and are now treated more as titillating curiosities than as living religious sites. But they are not abandoned. Nothing historical is ever completely discarded in Japan, it is just added onto, like another layer of papier-mâché.

  At Taga Shrine in Uwajima, the main object of veneration—or envy, as the case may be—is an enormous battering ram of a phallus. This massive, veined wooden penis is more than mere wishful thinking on the part of the Japanese; it is a bona fide cultural icon. As in, “Hey, get a load of that cultural icon.”

  Demure Japanese women, dressed in Western fashions and carrying Chanel bags, come to Taga Shrine to pray before the phallus. They pray for easy childbirth and good health, and it isn’t in the least bit incongruous. Japan has a way of transcending incongruities. This easy eclecticism is one of the country’s greatest strengths.

  The only disturbing part of this ritual (if you happen to be male) is when these same demure women fold up the slips of paper their fortunes are printed on and then wedge them into the wood-grain of the phallus. The phallus has dozens of these paper slips jammed into it like acupuncture needles, some of them in areas so sensitive that it causes me to double over in sympathetic pain even now.

  Taga Shrine is not lurid, it’s rather subdued. Granted, the lily-pad ponds were decorated with stone penises, but tastefully. The land the shrine is built upon was first consecrated seventeen hundred years ago. And although none of the original structures have survived, the present shrine is still so old its origins have been lost. In fact, Taga is referred to as both a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple, syncretic not by design but through the blurring of borders. Like the union of man and woman, the point of contact between Buddhism and Shinto is a bit messy and you can’t really tell what belongs to whom.

  The mythology traces it back to Izanami, the archetypal goddess who died giving birth to fire. Transformed by death into a Goddess of Destruction, she roared out, “I shall kill a thousand lives a day.” To this, the God of Life replied, “If you must. But know this: I will give birth to one thousand five hundred lives a day, and I will win.”

  They call Taga “The Shrine of One Thousand Five Hundred Lives.” It rejuvenates worshippers, it cures illnesses, it helps married women get pregnant and pregnant women give birth. They come to pray at the stalk of life: the penis, from which life is transferred from man to woman to world. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so strange.

  Sex is religion, philosophy, morals, science, life. This is the creed of Taga Shrine, and it was here that the first Taga priest was spiritually awakened to the principal of opposites in union. And thus began his quest: to seek and find and gather symbols of this vital life principle.

  Which brings us to the museum. The museum, beside the understated calm of Taga Shrine, is a three-storey box of a building, circa 1974: Disco Architecture. Appropriately enough, it is dedicated to sex.

  I’m not sure what I expected. Soft lights, red wallpaper, sitar music, wafting incense, maybe an instructional diagram or two. Who knows, I thought, as I paid the exorbitant entrance fee (I have long since passed the point of caring about costs in Japan; I just open my wallet and let them loot it of whatever arbitrary amount they decide upon), I might even pick up a few pointers.

  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. The
y 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 antisex 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

  THERE 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

  THEY 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.