Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Page 29

  “Yeah,” he said groggily, peering out the window with one eye. “It’s Sado all right.”

  Some towns seemed to have blown onto the shore like flotsam. Such was the case with Ryōtsu, with its shaganappy patched-up, tumbledown, falling-in-on-themselves houses with their rusting corrugated-metal roofs and sea-bleached walls. The colour of Ryōtsu was the same silvery grey of old temples and driftwood.

  It was the end of the line for me. Hot Sushi dropped me off near the ferry port and gave me a pamphlet for the Pacific Island Club in Guam. “I’m in the picture,” he said, pointing to a faintly recognizable dot. Diminished to a few pixels on a compugraphic imprint, Hot Sushi’s smile was still visible, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, the last of his features to fade. I wished Abo the best, I shook Say Ya’s sleepy hand, and I gave Michelle one of those awkward half-hug/half-handshake—type farewells that are so popular among North Americans. The four of them then piled back into the car and set off in the pursuit of experience and a never-ending present. God, how I envied them.

  5

  THE TOWN OF RYōTSU, indeed the entire island of Sado, was gearing up for its spring festival of drums and horseback archery, performed at full gallop in medieval garb. The art of the Noh mask was turned into burlesque above Ryōtsu Port, where a four-metre mask was hoisted up atop a tower as a tourist attraction. “It celebrates the life of Zeami,” said the man at the information desk. “And the fact that we have more than forty Noh theatres on this island, making Sado the centre of Noh in Japan.”

  “Do you go to the theatre?” I asked.

  “Noh is very popular on Sado.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but do you yourself attend?”

  His voice dropped to the hushed tone of a dissident criticizing a military regime. “Noh is a little slow,” he said, and then with a wide smile, “I prefer pro wrestling. Do you know Giant Baba? I met him once. He was very nice. I was surprised.”

  “But pro wrestling is fake.”

  “So is Noh,” he said. It was one of the most reasonable things I have ever heard regarding public entertainment.

  Sado Island is also home to the internationally renowned Kodō Drummers. You may know them. These are the drummers you see stripped to loincloths, muscles sheened in sweat, torsos like washboards, headbands twisted around foreheads, and a wild grimace of battle in their faces as they hammer out a war cry, the drumbeats raw and primal, until your head swims and your chest tightens as though a tourniquet were tied around your rib cage and you have to step back, head reeling, from the fire. That is Kodō.

  The Kodō Drummers of Sado Island have taken drumming to an intense, almost cultish level. The drummers perform high-speed, overlaid rhythms, and to effect this union of spirit and sound they eat together, cook together, clean together, and live together. (Most members of the troupe share communal living quarters.) If it sounds vaguely counterculture and hippyish, it’s because it is. The roots of the Kodō movement go back to the late 1960s, when the Japanese youth movement opted out of mainstream consumer society and sought to reconnect with the past. Being Japanese, their approach was anything but lackadaisical. Joining the Kodō Drummers is like joining the Marines. It is a tough regime: up before dawn for a ten-kilometre run, near naked even in the howling depths of winter. (Long-distance running teaches you the rhythm of the human body. It also builds stamina.)

  Kodō Drummers play to the point of exhaustion, and stamina is crucial. They often perform leaning back, like a man in mid-situp, and it made me ache just to watch. They can make the drums tremble as softly as rain falling on a leaf, or come crashing to a head like sudden artillery. The drumming builds up, in waves, a hailstorm of drummers—relentless—reckless—unchained—and it rolls across the audience in volleys and echoes back again. The largest of the drums, the ōdai-ko, weighs more than half a ton and is wheeled out like a creaking god at the climax of the performance. It is large enough, as they say, for a man to drown in. The drummer stands, stripped to loincloth and headband, his back knotted in exertion, and—wielding drumsticks the size of baseball bats—he pounds out a punishing rhythm, a deep reverberating boom-boom-boom that rattles the rib cage and alters the heartbeat.

  After a demonstration of drumming at the town’s public hall, I walked through a deep blue evening in Ryōtsu. The hammering heartbeat of the drums echoed in my chest all through the night.

  I took a room in a ramshackle harbourside inn, where I had to wrangle with the lady of the establishment for half an hour before she would consent to renting to a foreigner. She tried to tell me she was “all full,” a common-enough ruse pulled on foreigners in Japan, but an easy one to disprove. The entranceways of Japanese inns are where customers’ shoes are stored, and if an inn truly is filled up, the entrance should be stuffed with shelves of shoes. In this case there was not a single pair in storage. When I pointed this out she changed tack, saying that I would have to sleep on a futon and as an American I would be more comfortable on a bed in a hotel.

  It was aggravating, trying to convince this lady to take my money, and in the end I had to resort to what I call my “cousin routine.” Whenever Japanese innkeepers are reluctant to rent me a room—they are afraid of misunderstandings, improper taking of baths, sudden violent murders; all understandable fears—I simply introduce myself in the following way:

  “Hello, I am the cousin of [INSERT TOWN NAME HERE]’S foreign English teacher.”

  As a former exchange teacher myself, I can attest to the fact that Japanese schools are simply crawling with foreigners. Virtually every high school and most junior highs have a token gaijin on staff—be he or she from Australia, America, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, or Canada. We called ourselves GODS, that is, “Gaijins On Display,” and we were looked upon by townspeople with a mix of apprehension and affection. GODS are highly visible, and everyone in town, even if they have never been formally introduced, will know of them. So when I came up against a wall of Japanese xenophobia, I simply stepped inside the circle. As the cousin of the local GOD, everything changes. Often, the innkeeper’s children will materialize upon hearing this. “You are Smith-sensei’s cousin?” they ask excitedly. “Yes, yes!” I assure them. “Good old Smith, how is he/she doing, anyway?”

  This may seem devious and rotten and dishonest (because it is), but look at it this way: Not once have I abused my position. Several times, especially when things were going really super, I had been tempted to skip out and leave the bill on Smith’s tab, but every time I have resisted the urge. After all, I may be a Travel Weasel, but I’m not some common grifter.

  6

  I SPENT the next day wandering Ryōtsu, its meandering streets and hard-luck homes. Some of the houses were truly remarkable: self-supporting jumbles of boards and patched-up planks that were piled like firewood. Remove one plank and the entire structure might collapse.

  Late in the day, I hitched a ride out to Mano, where the exiled Emperor Juntoku lies buried. I rode with a taciturn delivery man who apparently picked me up by mistake and who seemed annoyed by my very presence. Once again I wished I was a ski instructor who summered in Guam, simmering among bodies, tanned and taut, and who was filled with hedonistic vitality. Sigh.

  When you are feeling sorry for yourself, nothing perks you up better than visiting a gravesite. And if the gravesite also happens to be that of a disgraced and demeaned exiled ex-emperor whose life was far worse than your own, the experience is positively uplifting. All that was needed was a funeral procession to really top things off.

  For the tomb of an emperor, Mano Goryo was remarkably understated, but then Juntoku, as noted, had been disgraced, a man who died in obscurity, far removed from his dreams of destiny and grandeur. The grave was said to be haunted by his homesick ghost, searching for an escape from this island of exile.

  Not far from the tomb was the temple of Myōsen-ji, where a pagoda, centuries old, stood like an abandoned watchtower, its joinery creaking in the wind.

  From the traditions of Sado, d
ry with dust, to the high-powered hormonal shine of latter-day technology. From the sublime to the ridiculous. From the tatterdemalion towns and fallen-away fields of Sado to the slick velocity of a jet foil hovercraft. I loved it.

  The jet foil rides on blades that cut across the water, slicing through like a razor. The ship had pretensions to flight—and indeed, riding the Sado Island jet foil was as close as you could come to flying without actually leaving the water. A voice asked us to fasten our seat belts prior to departure, there was a bowel-shaking rumble from the depths, and then, well, hell, we hit warp three and screamed toward the mainland like a villain in a James Bond movie. Waves rose up to stop us, but we crashed through. Across the horizon, another storm was growing, the sky bruise-blue and roiling in with biblical wrath. What did I care, I was riding a jet foil. Ten million dollars’ worth of yen for what? So we can fly a little faster, soar a little higher, and feel that extra squirt of adrenaline light up our synapses. It was well worth it.

  “Jet foil, number one,” said the man next to me, a salaryman intent on starting a conversation. His necktie was too tight; his neck was bulging out like a boiled sausage escaping its skin. I smiled at him wanly in what I hoped was a polite but discouraging way.

  “Japanese technology, number one in the world!” he said, his smile having grown into a big insecure grin.

  I sighed. He was wrong. As luck would have it, I happened to know all about hovercrafts. They were invented by the Scottish-born American citizen Alexander Graham Bell—father of the telephone—at his Canadian home on Cape Breton Island, working from an earlier design by an Italian inventor. Hovercrafts aren’t Japanese; they are Scottish-American-Canadian-Italian. I considered trying to explain this to my sausage-necked friend, but what was the point? He wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

  Japan has never originated any major technological advance. Nothing has ever come out of Japan that has ever revolutionized the world, for better or for worse. Japan has given us a lot of very creative solutions to consumer needs, however. Think of the huge American boom boxes compared with the futuristic Walkman, or the ridiculous shoulder-breaking video cameras that we were lugging around until companies like Sony began developing hand-held camcorders.

  “Sure, the Japanese are clever,” said an American colleague, “but they aren’t creative.”

  He was wrong. The Japanese are very creative. In fact, this is one of the most consistently creative countries I know. So are the Americans. It all depends on how you define creativity. In Japan, it’s seen in terms of problem-solving, a new approach to an old puzzle. This type of creativity encourages group effort and fuzzy logic. For Westerners, it is the rugged individual with the sudden light of inspiration. Japan vs. the West. The first is practical creativity; the other, romantic. Neither view is superior, but the one is often baffled by—or even contemptuous of—the other.

  The Japanese criticize the Americans as being erratic and sloppy; the Americans criticize the Japanese as being copycats. Each contains an element of truth, but neither approach is necessarily bad. The two actually complement each other.

  The Sado Island jet foil bucked a ridge of waves and for one moment the ship dropped slightly, like a plane in an air pocket.

  On the television set, a group of pouty teenage heartthrobs were bouncing around with excessive perkiness, insufferably cute as all pouty teenage heartthrobs inevitably are. The band’s name was Cry Babies and their hair was jelled up like unusually large dandelions about to blow away. They skipped and pranced and preened and posed and moved about in what was meant to suggest dancing. But there was only a coincidental connection between their movements and the actual beat. Witnessing the spectacle, I was struck by a wonderfully reassuring thought: There actually are people in the world with less rhythm than WASPs.

  Watching young, self-conscious Japanese college kids moving through preset dance steps—absolutely divorced from any connection to the music that happens to be playing—is a painful yet sadistically pleasurable experience. Somewhere, somehow, mainstream Japanese music got stuck in the early seventies and never recovered. They might have heart-stopping drums and larger neon signs and faster jet foils, but by God they couldn’t jive their way out of an epilepsy clinic.

  And on that refreshing note, I settled down and enjoyed the ride.

  7

  I THINK I caught Niigata on a bad day. Everything looked sullen and soiled and worn out. Even the city’s smokestacks, painted in stripes like candy canes, emerged from the industrial haze like sooty sweets dug out from under a sofa cushion.

  After the sparse landscapes of Sado, it was odd to be sucked into the crowds of a city again. The downtown streets were overflowing with bodies in motion. I checked into a generic business hotel, dropped off my pack, and then found a fiery Korean restaurant in which to fill my stomach. (The spiced kimchi would inflame my rectum for the next two days. No wonder the Koreans always look so pissed off.)

  The weather was markedly cooler than it had been, and I found that even layering myself in T-shirts was not enough to stave off the creeping dank and cold. In search of warmer garb, I threaded my way into the rabbit hutch of retail shops that spread in tunnelled corridors beneath Niigata Station. It took a while just to find something that fit, and even then I had to settle for a hooded pullover with arms that were five inches too short, giving me that long-limbed gorilla look that women find so endearing. Fortunately, as a sort of bonus, the pullover had a bold message across the back, written in Japanese-English, or “Englese” as it is sometimes known. The message had a definite rap-music rhythm to it, and over the course of the next few weeks, whenever I was alone in front of a mirror, I took to rappin’ it out loudly (with the proper angry, urban-street-gang scowly face and postures, of course). It went like this:

  Piece by Piece

  We Can’t be Born Special

  be my power

  present international!

  Produce Selection Since 1976

  Hit It!

  This is one of the most surreal aspects of life in Japan: seeing your language reduced to decoration, removed from any context or meaning, rendered into LSD musings. The Japanese approach to language—and most everything else, now that I think about it—is relentlessly deconstructionist. Everything is reduced to the bare elements and then reconstructed. It is less a form of mimicry and more one of reinterpretation. This works great with cars, cameras, and clocks but is less effective with something as organic as language.

  My students in Japan were determined to reduce English to mathematical dictums that could then be reassembled. One student, who was a diligent pupil but refused to speak English with me in class, said with perfect sincerity, “It’s just that I hate to make mistakes. So, first I will become fluent in English and then I will speak it.” When I tried to explain to him that learning a language was a process and that making mistakes was a necessary, even desirable aspect of it, he politely dismissed my suggestions as being eccentric. Learn by making mistakes? Ridiculous.

  The result is a nation of grammar-sharp, language-shy people. And the primary victim in all of this is English itself. When I ran into one of my high-school students in a T-shirt that read ENJOY MY BROTHER! I challenged him to explain the phrase. It was a wager, really, because I promised him ten thousand yen if he could do it. This young man was our top student, destined for one of Japan’s finest universities, and he took up the challenge with confidence. “Enjoy is the verb,” he said, “my is a possessive pronoun, and brother is the object. The subject is understood to be you, which makes the sentence a command phrase. The exclamation mark adds urgency.” He then held out his hand for the money. “But what does it mean?” I said. He looked at me, utterly baffled, and said, “Enjoy is the verb, my is a possessive pronoun, brother is the—” Needless to say, I didn’t pay him the ten thousand yen and he is still bitter about it. In his mind, he did explain it and all I did was welsh on a bet.

  The idea that a sentence can have a meaning that i
s greater than the sum of its parts is hard to get across in Japan. My neighbour’s wife had a favourite shirt that said LUSTY TOY, which I could never bring myself to explain to her. (For all I knew it was true. Maybe she was a lusty toy and proud of it. Who knows?)

  Corporate Japan, with millions of dollars in resources at its fingertips, still can’t come up with brand names that make any sense. English has a definite cachet in Japan, much like French once did in America, hence the irresistible urge to add a sprinkling of English on everything, from pop cans to political posters. Some of the most celebrated examples of Japanese brand names include a sports drink named Sweat; powdered coffee cream called Creap; round, chocolate plugs labelled, disturbingly, Colon; and a soft drink dubbed Calpis, a name that always suggests bovine urine to me. (I sent a package of Calpis to my friend Calvin Climie, an Ottawa-based animator, along with the note: “What a brilliant move, Cal! Marketing your own urine! You’ll make a fortune. As long as you have access to tap water, the supply will never dry up.”)

  A lady friend of mine from Britain once showed me the tiny instruction pamphlet that came with a box of Japanese feminine hygiene products. The instructions were in Japanese, but even here the company had thought it necessary to jazz things up a bit with a display of English. At the top of the page was the stirring motto: Let’s All Enjoy Tampon Life!

  Harder to understand are the bizarre English slogans of American companies operating in Japan: I feel Coke! and Speak Lark! (a cigarette company) and I am Slims! (Virginia Slims). I was bothered by this—after all, you’d think that if anyone would get it right it would be American companies—but then one day I realized that these slogans were not aimed at me but at Japanese consumers. And Japanese consumers have all studied basic English and they can remember and recognize beginner phrases such as “I feel,” “I speak_____,” and “I am_____.” That the actual slogans used make little sense is not important. They instill a sense of cool cosmopolitan awareness in the consumer and in the product. Once I realized what they were doing, these oddball phrases seemed less like a joke and more like a brilliant marketing ploy. This is also why so many mottoes use the command phrase “Let’s all enjoy ______” and variations of it. This is not because it is common English (how often do you use the phrase “let’s all enjoy” in a normal English conversation?), but because it is common textbook English, in much the same way that “This is a pen!” is such a popular English greeting in Japan.