Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Mr. Takahashi, as he clutched the man’s arm. “Thank you so much.”

  “No problem,” said the young fellow, who was clearly warming to his role of saviour. “Do not worry. I will take care of everything.”

  The Takahashis waved us into the distance; even when they were specks fading into the vanishing point, I could still make out Grandmother bowing and Mr. Takahashi’s high waving arm, like a man signalling a ship on the horizon.

  11

  DAISUKE WAS a computer programmer and yes, some stereotypes transcend national boundaries. He wore thick glasses, he had lots of pens, and he had an inordinate interest in video games. He worked for a steel processing plant that belonged to the same company that Mr. Takahashi worked for, though his office was based in Akita and Mr. Takahashi’s was in Sakata. Or at least I think that is how it worked. The tangled web that Japanese corporations weave, and the interconnecting alliances and extended families they create, are something I have never been able to sort out. As near as I can tell, everyone in Japan is employed by everyone else.

  Daisuke had a vested interest in giving me a ride. “I want you to explain something to me.” He popped a cassette by Madonna into his car deck, and the Material Girl’s coos filled the air. “What is she saying?” Daisuke had reams of tapes, filled with hundreds of English pop songs that he enjoyed but had never been able to understand. He was dying to find out what he had been listening to all these years.

  The problem, of course, is how do you translate something like “Hanky-panky, all I need’s a good spanky”?

  “She, ah, wishes for someone to strike her repeatedly on the buttocks,” I said, and he frowned deeply, as though considering a philosophical concept.

  And how about “Slap me with your love stick!” or “C’mon and ride my pony.” Pop lyrics never sound stupider than when you try to explain them to someone in another language. Most of them boil down to this: Let’s have cheap, frantic sex right here on the dance floor.

  We went through song after song until my frontal lobes started to ache from the exertion. Could the Spice Girls have more banal lyrics than they do? And how about Bryan Adams? Could this guy string together more clichés than he does? After being subjected to two hours of Mr. Adams’s music—which is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, I should point out—after two hours of this, my patience was paper thin. Every song Bryan Adams has ever written contains the word gonna or wanna somewhere in the lyrics. The ultimate Bryan Adams song would be titled: “I’m gonna wanna gonna go.”

  It was a very long drive to Akita. The low point came when Daisuke, apparently hoping to find something with a little more depth to it, dug up a cassette of Simon and Garfunkel and asked me to translate “Scarborough Fair” into Japanese.

  “I see,” he said. “So it’s a shopping list.”

  “Basically, yes.”

  After that, Daisuke lost interest in translating pop songs. Instead, he wanted to talk about computer programming, a subject I knew nothing about. He then tried Formula 1 Grand Prix racing, which was even worse. I didn’t even know enough about this to fake a conversation; he might as well have been asking me about quantum physics or English grammar. Daisuke, alas, was a true-blue fan of racing and, like most fans, he was capable of talking for extended periods of time about his topic without having to come up for air.

  Having flunked out on race cars and computers, our conversation lapsed into silence. Daisuke began looking more and more forlornly at every video arcade we passed. “Do you play video games?” he asked.

  “Not really—but if you want to stop, please go ahead.”

  “No, no,” he said, smiling bravely in spite of the fact that he had picked up such a dud. “Ah, Street Fighter Two,” he would say wistfully as yet another arcade floated by.

  Gone were the palm trees of Kyushu and in their stead came the stunted, wind-warped pine forests of the north country. We passed stands of the trees, bent like beggars toward the road, and behind them a curtain of indigo blue: early evening on an open sea. As we approached the city, I realized that I had heard the word akita before. There were the Akita dogs that the prefecture was famous for, but there was something else as well: Akita bijin. Akita beauties.

  I had entered the area of Japan where the women were said to be the most beautiful. “Is it true?” I asked, a little too excitedly.

  “Of course.”

  This was the single best high-point apex apogee climax of my entire trip. It was like discovering the Elephant’s Graveyard or the Lost City of Troy. And why are the girls so pretty in Akita? “It is related to climate,” explained Daisuke with all the passion of a computer programmer. “Heavy snowfalls, long winters, not much sun. Makes the skin pale.”

  “And?”

  “They have round faces.”

  “Round faces?”

  “Very round,” he said, proudly. “And pale.”

  My heart sank. Big, pale, round moon faces. Not exactly what I had in mind.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Their voices are squeaky as well. High-pitched. You know, sexy.”

  The Japanese image of beauty differs from that of the West, as does its image of handsome. Japanese women, for the most part, prefer clean-cut, short-haired missionary types. Tom Cruise is a sex symbol in Japan not because he is dangerous, but because he is so inoffensive. He has the bland good looks that Japanese women like so much. I tried to explain this to Daisuke, that I actually preferred high cheekbones, full lips, a deep tan, and a low, sultry voice in women, but he looked at me like I was more than a bit nutty.

  This ended any attempt at guy talk. I went back to translating lyrics. Not long after this, a black-painted, right-wing van zoomed by, red sun flags fluttering as it passed us, its speakers blazing out angry rhetoric. “Exalt the Emperor! Out With the Foreign Devils!” As always, the van was manned—and I use the term man only in the loosest sense of the word—by young, pimply-faced Timothy McVeigh types. Only difference was, instead of being racially pure Aryans, they were racially pure Asians. What they thought of round-faced beauty versus high cheekbones I wasn’t sure, and Daisuke wasn’t too keen to stop them and ask.

  12

  WHEN I GOT to Akita, I checked into the Hotel Hawaii, a rambling, threadbare place east of the main station. I chose it from a list solely on its name; I liked the symmetry involved, echoing the Capsule Hawaii that I had stayed at in Himeji. After I dropped off my bags and bade farewell to Daisuke, I set off in search of food and pleasure.

  Akita City is a northern port and it has a reputation for being a bit dodgy, but nothing I saw confirmed this. The refineries and shipping lanes are on the coast, far from downtown, and the city I wandered through had a certain rough frontier charm to it. There were even a few Western-style shopping plazas—still a rarity in Japan’s smaller cities—and enough tall buildings to give it the appearance of prosperity, if not the fact. The time of day helped as well; the sun was low and golden, making the concrete blush. Bevies of girls hurried past, like leaves on an autumn wind. Akita bijin, every one.

  It was into this warm sunset of a city that I wandered. My stomach was beginning to growl and I went into the first restaurant I came across, a small coffee shop where the cheapest thing on the menu was pizza toast.

  Pizza toast, I should explain, is a Japanese specialty. Neither pizza nor toast, it is—in defiance of all known laws of gestalt—decidedly less than the sum of its parts. And as I sat, chewing and sighing (often at the same time), I reflected on how happy, how very very happy I was to be spending the equivalent of nine dollars for a piece of bread topped with a puddle of tomato sauce, a gob of cheese, and four thin, semi-transparent slices of pepperoni. (Essence of Pepperoni, I called it—meat that was somehow sliced one molecule thick. A remarkable feat.) My bank account was getting dangerously low. I had already exceeded my budget threefold since setting out, and the pizza toast I was now consuming reminded me of this. Which is to say, I blame the pizza toast for wh
at happened next.

  By the time I had finished my “meal” (note the ironic use of quotation marks), dusk had settled upon the city. The lights began to flicker on as I followed a small river south into the heart of the after-hours zone. It was an exceptionally bright area, even by Japanese standards of nightlife, where the motto is, “Energy crisis? What energy crisis?” There was less neon in Akita and more bulbs, giving it the appearance of a prima donna’s dressing-room mirror gone mad.

  The lights and laughter echoed across the water. The river looked more like a canal, with its many small, indecisive bridges hopping back and forth across the water, and with the buildings built flush against the reinforced banks. I waded into the crowds, followed the flow past pachinko parlours and noodle shops, then cut down a narrow alley until I came to a cul-de-sac bright with bulbs. This was definitely a naughty nook in a larger cranny. Side-door cabarets and soaplands beckoned. Touts in cheap tuxedos hovered near the doors in predatory holding patterns waiting for the first wave of salarymen to wander in. (Again, because I was undoubtedly reeking of AIDS, no one approached me.)

  No matter. I backtracked to the main street, where couples were promenading. Crowds were milling about amid sudden, unprovoked bursts of laughter. Signs in lurid pink fair dripped with innuendo and false promises. A cinema featured posters for a movie depicting the love between a young lady and her vacuum cleaner. Another poster showed two terrified office men being threatened by a whip-wielding nurse in stilettos.

  Tattered red lanterns swayed on the wind, and bands of young office ladies shouted and sang songs as they strode down the street. Equally animated bands of men rolled by the other way, and the street resembled a slow-motion pinball game, ringing with bells and whistles and flashes of strobe-lights. By now I was thoroughly impressed with Akita, a city where the women were beautiful and the nights were brimming with rivers of light.

  Rather than return to the Hotel Hawaii, I decided instead to make a deeper foray into the city’s nightlife—in the interests of journalistic integrity. I wanted to interview, first-hand, some of the city’s famed Akita bijins. This would be tricky; I would need introductions. And this in turn would cost money for drinks, snacks, and karaoke.

  This is where the pizza toast comes in. Still stinging from my undersized, overpriced dinner, I decided to cut my costs. I wanted to explore this gaudy world and I definitely wanted to meet some beautiful ladies, but at the same time I didn’t want to spend a month’s salary on the venture. Which is how I decided—how I actively sought—to become kidnapped. I followed a likely target: a group of men in navy-blue suits who were stumbling down the street. They went into a small pub. I waited outside for a few moments and then, quietly, made my entrance.

  You haven’t really lived until you have seen a Japanese salaryman sing the Frank Sinatra ballad “My Way.” It is one of those quintessential sad sights that seem to define Japan. What an odd and yet common spectacle: a tousled salaryman, living a life of bows and stifling conformity, a man married to the company, a man who—in the thousands every year—works himself to death for the sake of the corporation, a man who has to eat shit and smile every day, a man who fuels the economic engine yet remains unsung, unacknowledged, and often openly mocked. A man like that, standing up and singing in heartfelt English: that the record should show, he took the blows and did it his way! This is something you don’t soon forget.

  The men were crowded along a plush couch, toasting themselves with whiskey-tinted water as they cheerfully ignored their colleague up on stage, who was quavering away about how he chewed whatever up and spat it out, and not in a shy way. Rodney Dangerfield should have toured Japan. I have no doubt he would have become a star among salarymen as he tugged on the ubiquitous, symbolic necktie. I get no respect! No respect.

  When their compatriot sat down, another man got up to sing a spirited version of, what else, “Diana.” “‘I so young and you so old / Zis my darling, I been told.’”

  “He wrote that for his babysitter,” I said to the man nearest me. The man turned and, seeing me in the seat beside him, jerked his head back in shock. The only thing he could think to say—the only sound he could think to make—was a long, breathy “Waaaaa!”

  Soon the entire table had noticed me and they welcomed me into their fold, insisting I sit beside their section chief, who, I quickly surmised, was top dog, so I made a point of chatting to him excessively and, when he used a few words of English, I complimented him to high heaven on being such an internationally minded chap. That was all it took. Free beer and food.

  Of course, I had to sing for my supper, as is the custom. But crooning your way through “Love Me Tender” is a small price indeed for all the cold Sapporo and free snails you can eat.

  My presence signalled a shift of topics. From inter-office jealousies and who was incompetent and who was not (as always, the ones who were hopelessly incompetent were also the ones, by strange coincidence, who were not present), they began to discuss violence in America. This is one of the all-time favourite topics in Japan.

  The section chief was a frowny-faced man, bald, with a tight toupee. He kept plying me with beer, and then whiskey water, while the conversation took a familiar turn.

  Several years ago, a young Japanese exchange student had been shot and killed in the U.S. because he went to the wrong house. An American homeowner, seeing the boy prowling around his yard, came out brandishing a gun and yelling “Freeze!” The Japanese boy, apparently thinking the man in the shadows had yelled “Please!,” took a step forward and received a bullet through the heart. It was a shot heard round the world. The killing made front-page headlines in Japan—at about the same time that another killing took place: a Filipina hostess, held captive by her Japanese employers, was beaten to death. A Japanese doctor dismissed it as an accident, and no one was ever charged or convicted. The first-degree murder of a Filipina lady, and the massive cover-up that followed, were relegated to the back pages in Japan, while the death of a young Japanese boy—dead because of a tragic misunderstanding—prompted rallies, angry protests, and a public plea by the boy’s parents.

  My circle of Akita businessmen was also concerned, in a pornographic sort of way, with violence in America. They all had their pet theories about the matter, several of which were real eyebrow-raisers. In wit and insight, this group was not quite on a par with the Algonquin Round Table. One man declared that the problem was that all white people were, oh, what’s the word, racist—a statement that was so ludicrously self-contradictory I didn’t know how to respond. Whites were racist against blacks, but Japanese were not. Why? And here I quote, for it was such a memorable statement: because “our skins are slightly darker, so we can understand both white people and black people.”

  Another man immediately chimed in: “That’s why blacks in America always riot at night. It makes them harder to see. It’s very clever, don’t you think?”

  In the middle of witty repartee such as this, two more men arrived, and from their wobbly stance and unfocused gaze it was easy to see that they were already halfway looped. There were more introductions. A clammy face, a leer, a drunken flabby handshake. He was the Senior Vice Supervisor and he introduced me with hushed humility to the Vice Senior Supervisor, who clearly trumped everyone else at the table, and the seats were rearranged appropriately, with me sandwiched between the two men. “I have heard so much about you,” said the Vice Senior Supervisor enigmatically. “Please keep up the good work.”

  I assured him I would and we shook hands with great sincerity. Drinks kept arriving as if on a conveyor belt, and soon the room began to sway.

  I was trying to steer talk toward Akita bijin, but none of the men were interested. “It’s a myth,” said one. Another disagreed, but the topic wasn’t pursued. Instead, the conversation, having delved into such popular topics as “America and What’s Wrong With It,” now moved, predictably, to “Japan and Why It Is So Wonderful.”

  “Japan is a small country,” said o
ne man. They all agreed.

  “A poor country.” They agreed.

  “A poor, small country.” Again, unanimity.

  Japan is a poor, small country. From which they deduced that Japan is therefore “the number-one country in the world. Japanese companies are very strong. Japanese products are the best in the world.” It is an odd syllogism, especially that rather tricky leap from premise to conclusion, but it is nonetheless a world view that was heartily endorsed by my hosts.

  “Japan is unique,” said one man, and again they concurred. “Yes, yes—unique.” And they nodded their heads up and down in that unique way Japanese have, as if to say, “I agree,” and then they straightened their unique neckties and adjusted the collars on their unique white shirts and drank unique whiskey on unique rocks. It was all very unique.

  True, in many ways Japan is a unique country, but like a woman who knows she’s beautiful or a man who knows he’s handsome, it can be bloody annoying.

  An older man elbowed his way in and grinned at me. Teeth. Bad teeth, like broken china. “Japan is not perfect,” he said, without much conviction, “but it is good that you are here. The thing about Japan,” he said, “the thing is—what you have to understand—the thing is—” He had lost his train of thought. He tried to sort it out as the conversation proceeded, then came back in with a sudden declaration: “The thing is—you can never understand Japan. Never. You’re a foreigner, see? And foreigners can never understand Japan. You can’t. You just can’t.”

  Certainly not when you’re pissed to the gills.

  “Japanese beer,” said one man. “Number one!” Which precipitated an endless list. “Japanese cameras. Number one! Japanese automobiles. Number one!” And so on. It was rapidly becoming tedious. Having drunk my fill and entertained the troops, I got up to leave. A hand clamped down on my shoulder and forced me back. “We are not through.”

  “Yes, but—”