Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  “I’ll kill you, you little shit.”

  “Hey,” he called to his dad, “he’s talking poetry again!”

  When my inner ear had stopped spinning like a gyroscope and my stomach had ceased its amusing Spasm Dance, I joined the others at the tunnel. Mr. Migita had paid my entrance fee and there was no way I could talk him out of it.

  “You are my guest,” he said.

  No, I am a freeloader hitching a ride. “Thank you,” I said, as I accepted his generosity.

  I did manage to decline the squid, however, even though Migita’s daughter offered me her last tentacle. Standing at the top of the observation deck overlooking Cape Sata, I told her and her brothers about the mythical, faraway land of Ka-Na-Da, where children didn’t have to go to school on Saturday or wear uniforms or even actually learn anything, and they sighed with understandable envy.

  “Do you have a gun?” the youngest asked, and his older brother, Toshiya, immediately chimed in, “Yes, did you ever shoot anybody?”

  “No,” I said. “Only evil Americans shoot people. In Ka-Na-Da everyone lives in peace and harmony.”

  It sure is great being a Canadian. You get to share the material benefits of living next door to the United States, yet at the same time you get to act smug and haughty and morally superior. You just can’t beat that kind of irresponsibility.

  “Tell us more about Ka-Na-Da,” said the children, and I obliged.

  It was almost dusk when we left Sata. The sun was throwing long shadows across the road, and Mr. Migita had decided that I should come back to Kanoya City and have supper with him and his family. He pulled over to stock up on beer, and while he was gone his daughter leaned up and whispered in my ear, in English so soft I almost missed it, “My name is Kayoko. I am fine. And you?”

  She then leaned back in her seat, obviously pleased with herself. Her brothers were dying to know what she had said. “Tell us, tell us!” they demanded, but she held her head high and proud and didn’t say a word.

  5

  THE MIGITAS lived on the outskirts of Kanoya City, in a two-storey apartment block that faced an open field. Mr. Migita’s wife welcomed me without batting an eye and, like a conjurer, she produced a full-course meal out of thin air. We nudged our way in around their low dining-room table and the food never stopped coming: raw fish with sinus-clearing horseradish, fried vegetables, noodles, more fish, salad, seaweed, soup, mini-sausages. It became a challenge to see if they could ever fill me up. Mr. Migita kept topping my glass with beer and encouraging my gluttony until finally, bloated to the brink of bursting, I conceded defeat. Mrs. Migita cleared the table of the wreckage and debris, and her husband and I settled back, sucking on toothpicks like a pair of feudal lords. This may sound sexist and insensitive and politically incorrect—and it is—but I had long since learned that had I offered to wash the dishes, or worse, had I insisted, I would only have humiliated Mrs. Migita. And anyway, I’m a lazy git and I was weighed down with forty pounds of excess food at the time.

  The kids were doing their homework in front of the television. Which is to say, they were not doing their homework, they were watching television. It was clear that my presence had caused a lapse of household rules, and whenever their father absentmindedly looked over at them, they began to scribble away with feigned studiousness. A sci-fi animation show was moving stiffly across the screen. Everyone in it had huge blue eyes and ridiculous yellow hair and all the fluidity of a comic book being flipped through—slowly. Man, I hate Japanese animation. Give me some good live-action drama any day: Ultraman or Godzilla or Mothra. Oh no! A giant moth! Those were the classics. But you tell that to kids today and they just don’t listen.

  This isn’t true, of course. Godzilla and Ultraman are still superstars with Japanese children, and with adults as well. You know how Godzilla is always turning up to stomp on Tokyo? The filmmakers churn those movies out like clockwork, and Tokyo Tower has been destroyed so many times you’d think they’d have given up by now. Rebuild it? What’s the point? Godzilla will just come and knock it over again.

  Sometimes, Godzilla destroys other major metropolii, like Osaka or Nagoya, just for a change of pace, but mainly he sticks to Tokyo. The smaller cities in Japan have complained about this. They’re jealous. The citizens of Fukuoka City even went so far as to circulate a petition asking—nay, begging—the producers of the Godzilla movies to destroy their fair city instead. Thousands of people signed these petitions and after years of pressure the producers relented and said, “All right, we’ll destroy Fukuoka. Quit whining.” Everyone in Fukuoka was delighted to hear this. Newspaper headlines boasted GOOD NEWS! GODZILLA TO DESTROY OUR CITY, and when it was later revealed that Godzilla would in fact rampage over all of Kyushu, the entire island was simply delirious with joy. So don’t tell me the Japanese aren’t a weird bunch of people.

  Mr. Migita eventually did notice what his kids were up to, and they had that immortal parent-child conversation, one so innate I believe it is embedded right in the DNA. It goes something like this: Hey you kids, turn off the TV, it’s bedtime. Just a few minutes more, please, Dad, please. No, you have school tomorrow. But the good part is coming, please, Dad, please. No! I said no, and when I say no I mean no, so the answer is no.

  As usual, the children won. The animated characters blew up the planet and everyone was very happy, and the three kids filed off to bed. Mr. Migita and I, meanwhile, were on our sixth bottle of Yebisu Beer. He cleared a space on the table and began spreading out maps like a general planning a campaign.

  “You can do it,” he said. “But we must chart your way with great care.”

  We sat up late into the night, he and I, tracing highways with red pens, and with me making copious notes.

  Eventually we came up with a complex course that zigzagged brilliantly across Japan and that made complete sense to us at the time. But the next day and miles away, when I unrolled Mr. Migita’s maps, the routes we had marked and the cryptic asides I had jotted down with such conviction were now completely incomprehensible: “Good here, but not overland—highway changes to new one, must check to always see—Do not (and here I had underlined the word not forcibly several times) cross highway—wait at other places—West instead?—Check as I go.”

  It was two in the morning by the time Mr. Migita and I finished our cunning plan. We congratulated ourselves heartily and opened another bottle of Yebisu. By this point, he and I were blood brothers and we vowed eternal loyalty and friendship. He rolled up the maps with that careful deliberation people get when they have consumed too much alcohol, and we shook hands. Again. We did that a lot, often in lieu of coherent conversation.

  Mr. Migita straightened himself up and said, with sudden determination, “You are my friend. You do not need to hitchhike. I will give you the money for a train ticket.”

  I was taken aback. “I’m not hitchhiking because I can’t afford a train ticket.” Had he offered me food and shelter because he thought I was broke? He was equally puzzled. If I wasn’t short of funds, why was I hitchhiking? Why did I want to go all the way to Hokkaido in the company of strangers?

  I assured him that the reason was not financial. Then I told him about Amakusa. For my first two years in Japan I lived in the most beautiful place on earth: the islands of Amakusa, south of Nagasaki. I taught in fishing villages lost in time, in misty coves with weathered temples and unexpected church spires. Amakusa is where the Jesuits of Portugal first landed in Japan, and it was in Amakusa that I first discovered the Power of the Thumb.

  It was a discovery born of necessity. My work involved commuting between fishing villages without a car in an area where the buses apparently ran only on odd-numbered vernal equinoxes. Buses in Amakusa were like UFOs; I heard a lot about them but I never actually saw one. So I began hitching rides from school to school across the islands, much to the consternation of my supervisor. What began as a necessity soon became something else. It became a way inside. The car is an extension of the home, but
without any of the prescribed formalities that plague Japan. The hitchhiker in Japan slips in under the defenses, as both a guest and a travel companion. Bumming rides became its own reward, the journey its own destination.

  In this spirit, I had set out for Hokkaido.

  Arduous solo travel has a long history in Japan, and I was following in a proud tradition. The mendicant poet Matsuo Bashō wandered the highways of the deep north in the late fifteenth century and wrote a classic travel narrative about it. Three hundred years later an Englishwoman named Lesley Downer retraced his footsteps, and in 1980, Alan Booth walked the entire length of Japan, north to south, and wrote a travel narrative of his own. But these are solitary ways to see the country. I didn’t want to travel among the Japanese, I wanted to travel with them. I didn’t want to walk Japan, as Alan Booth had done, precisely because it is such a lonely, aloof way to travel. Also, it would have involved a lot of walking. Personally, I preferred zipping along in an air-conditioned car. Tromping down a highway all day often put Booth in a sour mood; but when you are constantly prevailing upon the kindness of strangers—as a hitchhiker must—it keeps you in a positive frame of mind. Call it Zen and the Art of Hitchhiking. The Way of the Lift. The Chrysanthemum and the Thumb. Heady on beer and the sound of my own voice, the aphorisms spilled out unchecked.

  Mr. Migita had nodded off. The beer glass was empty, and it was time for me to crawl into one of those enormous cumulus futons that are always on hand for unexpected guests and other such freeloaders.

  6

  KANOYA CITY, where the Migitas made their home, was one of the main departure points for kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. I tried not to think about the implications of this as I prepared for my own departure. One thing that did intrigue me was the imagery used to describe the pilots. Most of the kamikaze were mere boys, many were under sixteen, and they were honoured not as tigers or dragons or defenders of the faith—but as sakura, the cherry blossom flowers that fall in their prime. Spring cut short. The kamikaze, it is said, did not die yelling “Long Live the Emperor.” They died crying out instead for their mothers. The last word from their lips, as their planes plunged into fiery death, was “Okāsan!” Mom.

  Kanoya City has its own kamikaze museum—more accurately known as the Special Attack Force Museum. The nickname kamikaze comes from “wind of the gods,” and refers to the typhoons that twice scattered Kublai Khan’s Mongol invasion force in the thirteenth century. Just as the typhoons had saved Japan at the last possible moment, so too would the suicide flights of young pilots save Japan from an American invasion in 1945. When you establish military strategy on myth and religion, this is where it leads you: mass insanity, wasted lives.

  Ironically, the kamikaze did save Japan—from an invasion—and led instead to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Americans waded through blood and shrapnel to take the tiny islands of Okinawa. Faced with mainland Japan, a nation capable of producing kamikaze and an army that would rather be burnt out of caves than surrender, the U.S. High Command wanted to avoid a full-scale invasion at all costs. And so it was, a single plane appeared over the skies of Hiroshima. Bodies melted. Shadows were seared into the sidewalks. Three days later, another plane appeared over Nagasaki. When sakura fall from the branch, the shock waves can shatter entire cities.

  The kamikaze departed with only enough fuel for a one-way trip. Mr. Migita, thankfully, made sure we had a full tank of gas before we left.

  It was early morning. The sun had not yet cleared the hills behind the Migitas’ apartment building, but the morning’s warmth was already coaxing earth aromas from the fields.

  Mr. Migita backed his car out of the driveway, and the children loaded me up with goodbye presents: cartoon stickers, unusually shaped rocks, origami frogs, a picture of Sailor Moon, and a tiny, folded card from Kayoko that read, in English, Have a fine day. Their mother gave me a boxed bentō lunch, and they waved and waved and waved as the distance between us grew and grew. And then they were gone.

  Mr. Migita and I were still sleepy and hungover, but the green fields of Kanoya soothed the pain. “I’ll take you east of the city on Highway Two-Twenty,” he said. “From there you can catch a ride down to the coast.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. He had to be at the office at 9 a.m. “We can just make it.”

  Kanoya City was still half asleep; we could have driven through most of the traffic lights without stopping. I tried to think of some cheerful early-morning topic to discuss. “Kanoya is fairly high,” I said. “Will the tidal wave reach it when Sakurajima explodes?”

  “There won’t be a tidal wave. That’s a common misconception. Kagoshima Bay is too shallow for tidal waves. It will be the explosion that will destroy Kanoya, not a tidal wave.”

  Oh.

  Kanoya City thinned out into open fields and the highway widened. Mr. Migita didn’t stop. He decided instead to get me through the next town and let me start hitching from there. The highway curved like a lazy river through the flatlands east of Kanoya and into the small town of Kushira. Then, before we knew it, we were already into the outskirts of Osaki, the next town. Mr. Migita glanced again at his watch, made some quick mental calculations, and said, “I’ll take you through Osaki. Highway Two-Twenty meets Highway Four Forty-Eight, and you really should get past that intersection before you start hitching rides.”

  Osaki came and went, we passed the intersection, but still Mr. Migita didn’t stop. “We are almost at the coast now. I’ll drop you off there.”

  It was five minutes to nine. “Won’t you be late?”

  “I’ll call. Don’t worry.”

  The highway crossed a river and there before us was the blue of Shibushi Bay. Palm trees filed by like telephone poles.

  Nine o’clock passed. Mr. Migita said, “I’ll take you to the next town. The rail line begins there. That way, if it rains, you can catch a train.”

  The sky was a clear, cloudless blue. “I don’t think it’s going to rain,” I said.

  “I’ll take you anyway.”

  Houses began appearing at quicker and quicker intervals, the rice fields became smaller, a cluster of buildings and then we were through the town and back in open countryside. The train tracks followed the highway, crossing under and over it. A huddle of hotels appeared and beside them, oddly, a Ferris wheel.

  Mr. Migita pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Across the parking lot, the empty Ferris wheel was turning against a backdrop of sea and sky, carried by its own momentum. The trick with any Ferris wheel is to get the motion started and then maintain the spin. Momentum is the only force capable of defeating both inertia and gravity. Satellites in space do not orbit the planet. They are falling, continually falling, carried past the arc of the earth by the angle of their descent. And what is walking itself if not simply maintaining a fall? It takes a great effort to set an object in motion, yet once you do, the motion becomes easier and easier to maintain. You strain to push a car but, once it’s moving, it becomes almost effortless: You keep it going with its own momentum. Travelling is a matter of maintaining momentum. Resisting gravity. Free-falling past the horizon; falling, never landing.

  Mr. Migita returned. “I told them I would be late.”

  “You already are.”

  “I told them I’d be more late.”

  We left the Ferris wheel receding behind us. The waves rolled in and broke along the bay. Mr. Migita didn’t stop. “Just a little farther,” he said, and then again, more to himself, “Just a little farther.”

  For a moment, I thought he was running away from home, but I was wrong. It wasn’t about escape, it was a matter of momentum. He was caught in it, the centrifugal force of the traveller, the force that moves satellites, nomads, and Ferris wheels.

  The southeastern coast of Kyushu is part of Oni-no-Sentaku, the “Devil’s Washboard,” a natural ridge-rock formation that runs in striated claw marks along the coast. It gives the entire region a j
ust-finished feel, like pottery freshly thrown. Or wood unpolished, still showing the mark of the adze. The rain-forest green of Kyushu spills over the coast and then, suddenly, the scoured stone of the Devil’s Washboard begins, as though the gods themselves had run out of sod.

  It was low tide as we drove north, alongside the Washboard, to the Grand Shrine of Udo Jingū. Udo Jingū is built inside a cave overlooking the sea. To get to it, you have to leave the main highway and take a short side road in. Mr. Migita stopped the car at the entrance of the shrine grounds. A large torii gate divided the secular world from the sacred, and Mr. Migita—the momentum finally broken—said, almost apologetically, “I have to get back. Home. Family. You know.”

  We shook hands, and I promised to send him a postcard from the top of Japan. “When you get to Hokkaido, look for horses. They have horses in Hokkaido.”

  We stood in the shrill white light of a parking lot at noon. He didn’t want to leave. Neither did he want to continue. Once interrupted, motion is hard to renew. We said goodbye and he drove away.

  7

  IN THE BEGINNING, there was Water and Chaos. The High Gods of Heaven, Izanagi and Izanami, God of the Male Aspect and God of the Female, stirred the brine with their spear, and the churning mud and falling drops formed the islands of Japan.

  Thus begins the long and complex Shinto myth of creation, which is actually a surprisingly accurate description of how the Japanese archipelago itself was thrust up by the bubbling fires of an underwater volcanic rupture.