Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

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  I returned to the Nakamura house the next afternoon just as they were stepping out.

  “Hello, Willy-chan!” said Mr. Nakamura, without a flicker of what had passed between us the night before. In Japan, saké time is dreamtime; all is forgotten in the light of dawn. Mr. Nakamura, I noticed, no longer addressed me as Mr. but as “chan,” a suffix reserved for friends and small children. As a Westerner, I would always be a bit of both.

  “You stay our house tonight,” said Mr. Nakamura. “Hotel is too expensive. You stay with us. I see you after, okay, Willy-chan?”

  Chiemi and Ayané were on their way out. Ayané was dressed in the standard uniform: a pink sundress, little purse, and a straw sun hat with a ribbon around it. There is nothing cuter in this world than a little Japanese girl in a sun hat with Meca-Godzilla under her arm. Chiemi was carrying a parasol and a boxed lunch tied up neatly with a scarf.

  “Ayané and I are having our cherry blossom picnic today, why don’t you come?”

  It was the third time I had been to Kenroku Park in as many days, but I didn’t tell her this. It was a nice enough park. Same old pond, same old waterfall. Ayané was ahead of us, examining an especially interesting bunch of pebbles, having granted me joint custody of Meca-Godzilla. Which is to say, I got to carry him while she was out on her geological expeditions. Chiemi and I were near the water’s edge when Chiemi pointed out the lantern.

  “Do you see the lantern?” she said, and we stopped to look. “This is my favourite place in the park. That lantern is my favourite view. Do you see how it is? Half in the water and half out. When you look at it, what do you see?”

  I hate these kinds of questions. I always come off sounding stupid. “Ah, wabi-sabi?” I guessed.

  She was kind enough to pretend I was kidding. “No, really, what do you see?”

  “Japan?” (Always a good second choice. Japan is a common theme in Japan.)

  “Yes,” said Chiemi. “That lantern is like Japan. Halfway between Asia. Halfway between the West. One foot in the past, one foot in the present. Now, does it look stable?”

  “No,” I said. “It looks like it might topple over any minute.”

  She nodded. “That lantern was built two hundred years ago. And it’s still standing.” A single cherry blossom fell into the water, lightly, in a ring of circles.

  Ayané picked up a pebble and showed it to us. We all agreed it was the most amazing thing, a pebble, and right here in the middle of a park. Who would have guessed it?

  Once Ayané had hurried off on another spontaneous but very serious scientific quest, I turned to Chiemi. “Tell me about Arabia,” I said. “What’s this I hear about you and Peter O’Toole?”

  She blushed, ever so slightly. “Yoshihiro said to you?”

  “Yup.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  Chiemi loved Arabia from afar. She loved it because it was so different from Japan: arid where Japan was lush, nomadic where Japan was agricultural, dangerous where Japan was safe. Arabia was passionate; Japan, reserved. Arabia was united by Islamic monotheism. Japan was polytheistic. Arabia was stark, Japan was subdued.

  Chiemi knew the names and tribes of the Sahara, she knew which way to circle the pillar in Mecca, she knew the title of Mohammed’s wife, and the five creeds of Islam. She knew everything about it except how it tasted, how it smelled, what it felt like. It was an unfinished landscape because she had not entered it. Until she did, it would always be unfinished.

  I had been to Arabia only nominally—a two-hour stopover in Dubai—but this alone was enough to incite Chiemi.

  “What was it like?” she said. “Was it hot? Did they wear traditional dress?”

  “Well, I only saw the airport. Lots of people in Arabian dress, armed soldiers, flowery writing—can you read it?”

  She nodded. “What else?”

  I had such a paltry story to tell. “Some women in veils. Lots of Mercedes. That’s about it.”

  But it was enough; Chiemi smiled deeply to herself. Every story of Arabia seemed to corroborate its existence, proved it was real, separate from any dream. We walked on, trailing behind Ayané’s meandering route through the park. Ayané seemed inordinately interested in pebbles. She gets it from her mother.

  After the bentō lunch had been tidily consumed and the dishes just as tidily put away, and after the cherry blossoms had been dutifully admired, Chiemi turned to me and said, “Is Japan still exotic to you?”

  “It used to be.” I remembered the geisha disappearing. “There are moments still.”

  “How long will you stay?”

  “In Kanazawa?”

  “In Japan.”

  I laughed. “Until they kick me out.”

  13

  THE GUIDEBOOK I was using spent less than a page on hitchhiking (about as much space as it dedicated to Japanese toilets), and the little that it had was wrong. The authors advised hitchhiking at the entrance ramps of freeways. Which I did. Which is how I got arrested.

  The only time I had ever had a run-in with the law was when I was fourteen and I spray-painted GRAD ’79 slogans across a rival junior-high school—a Catholic school no less, which means serious time in Purgatory once this is over. Since then, I have been a scrupulously law-abiding citizen. I even turned down marijuana proffered at rock concerts, which not only got me labelled King Dweeb Forever but also greatly reduced my enjoyment of the music presented (Das Vömit-Burger and the Highly Annoyed Power Tools).

  I have this vestigial respect for policemen; I tend to call them “sir” a lot and I almost never jaywalk unless it’s an emergency or no one is watching. In Japan, I am even more respectful. Japanese police have frightening powers, no one having the courage to tell them that Japan’s feudal age has ended and that Japan is now a democracy. When I was taken in for a genuine Japanese police interrogation I was quivering like a sack of gelatin and ready to confess to anything before they even had time to apply the thumbscrews.

  “Tell us!” screeched police officer Bone Head (I have changed their names to protect their identities). “Why were you hitchhiking on the Japanese National Freeway?” Bone Head was a highly-strung, wiry prepubescent in a police suit several times too big for him and a hat that stayed above his eyes only because his large, batlike ears were holding it up. His partner, Old Tired Guy, was stocky and taciturn. He had a crew cut, no visible neck, and knotted muscles in his forehead. Old Tired Guy dragged out a chair and motioned for me to sit upon it. The interrogation had begun.

  “Have some tea,” he said, as he offered me a cookie.

  The police station was a small trailer beside the highway, little more than a parking lot for highway patrol vehicles. They had never had a stir quite like this and were leaning across desks, piled high with folders and reports, to get a better look at the foreigner.

  I finished my tea. They poured me another. And so went the interrogation.

  The younger officer was champing at the bit. He had caught a real live American and a lifetime of Hollywood movies was bubbling in his brain. He had even wanted to frisk me, but the older officer had given him a look of barely concealed contempt and had brushed him aside. The young officer’s voice kept breaking whenever he tried to get tough with me, which tended to diminish his potency. The old guy was much kinder. They weren’t so much Good Cop/Bad Cop as they were Good Cop/Really Annoying Cop.

  The older man took down my name and address and then, with a world-weary sigh, he pulled out a big book of rules and began laboriously to flip through it. You could tell that a couple of times his mind had wandered and he was thinking about something else, then he would remember with a jolt and begin studying the book with heightened concentration, only to drift away a few minutes later.

  “Ah, here we go,” he said finally. “Walking on a national highway. Obstructing traffic. That’s a thousand-dollar fine, a court appearance, and a revocation of work permit.”

  One hundred forty-one thousand yen. I almost gagge
d on my cookie.

  “We’ll need your Foreign Registration Card, your passport, two pieces of—”

  Right about then I went into Dumb Foreigner Mode. “I was lost,” I bleated. “I was trying to find a shortcut. I can’t speak Japanese. The sun was in my eyes.”

  “Do not speak!” squawked the young officer.

  The older man decided to give me one more chance. “Why were you on the freeway?”

  It was hard to deny I was hitchhiking. The police had driven right up to me while my thumb was out and, when they stopped, I moronically assumed that they were merely concerned about my well-being. They were about to arrest me and there I was, grinning away like the dumbest kid in daycare. “Don’t worry about me,” I had said just before they hustled me into their patrol car and drove me here: Highway Patrol Station 71.

  Outside the window, trucks and other traffic rolled by. The air conditioner in the station was one of those audible units, more rattle and hum than actual temperature modification. The room was muggy and hot. Maybe they were going to sweat it out of me. I drank my tea. They hadn’t even offered me a phone call like on TV. Then it dawned on me: This wasn’t TV. They were serious.

  My trip might be over. I might lose my work permit. I might have to leave Japan and say goodbye to my paycheque. What was it I had said? “Until they kick me out.” Never tempt the gods. My worst fear was staring me right in the face: I would have to go home and get a real job.

  So I confessed.

  My Lonely Planet guidebook had assured me that “the rules for hitchhiking are similar to anywhere else in the world.” It also advised expressway entrances. I had waited outside just such an entry, beside the automatic toll booth, as cars sped past, just meters away on the main road. Other than perhaps inside a tunnel, expressway entrances are just about the dumbest places to hitchhike. Memo to Lonely Planet: nobody stops at expressways, that’s why they are called expressways.

  People zipped up, punched in their tickets, and then zipped off; sometimes they didn’t even notice me standing there. During a lull in the traffic, I saw a single car coming down the freeway, so I ran out, through the toll entrance, and stuck out my thumb in a bold manner. The car stopped. It was a patrol car. And that was my whole sordid tale.

  The older officer leaned back in his chair, and for the first time he smiled at me. He seemed genuinely amused with my story. “You came out to the road because you saw us coming?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And when did you realize that we were in fact the police?”

  “When you turned on your flashing lights.”

  “You tried to hitch a ride with the Japanese police on a national expressway?”

  “Yes.”

  It was all he could do not to slap his desk and laugh out loud. His mouth twitched with suppressed laughter.

  “Ah, yes. Well—” He started to giggle and tried to stop himself. He wiped his eyes. “Well,” he said. “This time I—I’ll just give you a warning, but don’t—don’t do it again, okay?”

  I thought back to when I crossed Japan from the Inland Sea to the Bridge of Heaven via expressways and considered confessing to that as well, but fortunately a few extra brain cells kicked in just about then and I kept my mouth shut.

  “Foreign Registration Card!” said Squeaky Voice.

  I didn’t have my passport but I did have the above-mentioned FRC (a.k.a. the Gaijin Card). In Japan, foreign residents have to submit to being fingerprinted and registered and must carry their ID cards with them at all times. It stops just short of having our ears tagged. It’s nothing short of bureaucratically entrenched xenophobia, true. But I kind of like my Gaijin Card. It makes me feel like an émigré in a spy movie, stopped at border patrols and mulled over by security men who eye you suspiciously and say things like, “Your papers are not in order,” in deep Slavic accents. Not that this has ever happened. This was the first time that any Japanese policemen had ever asked to see my card. I was delighted.

  The older officer typed out an arrest report and asked me to sign it. When I pulled out an inkan instead, he raised an eyebrow. The Japanese do not sign things. When they formalize agreements, cash checks, draw up contracts, or hand in office reports, they use inkans, little sticks with their names carved on one end. They use these to stamp their imprint on the paper in red ink. Some are made of cut stone, or even ivory, but most inkans are plain bamboo. I love my inkan. It makes me feel like a medieval lord, sealing letters with a signet. I wish I could get my inkan put onto a ring that I could press into red wax. It feels so aristocratic. Gentlemen, my personal seal!

  Many Westerners had their names put in simple phonetic kana, but mine was in genuine Chinese hieroglyphics and it drew a crowd. Officers came over and tried to decipher it. My inkan was designed by one of the clerks at my first high school, using symbols that roughly corresponded to the syllables in my name. I had my heart set on using Fugu-san (Mr. Blowfish) for “Ferguson,” but my supervisor thought it undignified for a teacher. Instead, I ended up with an inkan that combines the initial kanji characters in Fuji, Aso (from Mount Aso, a volcano in Kumamoto), ga (me), and son (village), making it Fuji-Aso-Me-Village, or Fu-a-ga-son. As the officers unraveled its meaning and made the connection to “Ferguson,” they laughed approvingly and congratulated me. Then they remembered I was this dangerous, foreign-type criminal and they clammed up and returned to their desks.

  Old Tired Guy let me finish my cookie and tea and then he and his annoying partner drove me down the highway to the next exit. It was the first and I hope the last time that I have ever been in the back of a patrol car. They dropped me off on a secondary road and, with a pair of curt bows and one last ridiculous glare from prepubescent Patrolman Bone Head, I was once again a free man.

  And then it hit me, in a rush of pride, a thought so large I could not contain it: I had hitched a ride with the Japanese Highway Patrol! Possibly the first person in history to have pulled it off and gotten out alive.

  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

  GRASSY 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 ne
ar 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?