Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan Read online

  Hakodate is a city of endgames, where history begins and empires fade. It was here, in Hakodate, that the forces of the Shōgun made their fateful last stand. It was here, in the Battle of Hakodate, that the troops of the Tokugawa shōguns were finally defeated by the upstart civilian army of the newly modernized Emperor Meiji. It was the last hurrah of the samurai class, and it brought to an end two hundred and fifty years of the shōgun rule. In its stead was an outward-looking, imperially minded modern government. The Battle of Hakodate centred on the city’s star-shaped British citadel, and the irony was sharp: a European-style fortress would be the last refuge of the samurai.

  —

  I arrived in Hakodate late in the evening, and I found a room at a bed-and-breakfast called the Niceday Inn. When I entered, the owner received me with boisterous English. “Come in! Come in!”

  His name was Shigeto Saito. “But call me Mr. Saito,” he said, generously. He had the face of a boxer who has seen one too many fights. Heavy, lugubrious features. (I’m not really sure what “lugubrious features” means, but if anyone had them, it was Mr. Saito.) “Welcome to my small inn. I hope you find it comfortable.”

  “Your English is very good,” I said. “Do you study?”

  “Self-taught,” he said. “Completely self-taught.” And then, anticipating my next question, “Why? Why so good? Because I never had a fear of foreigners. Never. I don’t have a complex. Most Japanese are afraid.”

  “Shy,” I said.

  “Afraid,” he insisted. “But why, of all people, did I not develop a complex? Why?” We sat back to consider this. It was a question he had clearly puzzled over for some time. “I have a theory,” he said after a suitable pause. “When I was a child, Russian sailors would come into port. My father was involved in business, and the Russians often came to our house. My mother was very nervous; she would hide in the back room. But the Russians liked me, a little boy. Maybe they have children also back home. Who knows? They used to pick me up and speak to me. Big hands. Loud voices. I was so small a child. But I remember it very well. Looking up at them, at their faces. Sitting on their knee. Hearing their big Russian laughter. Maybe that is why. Maybe that is why I never developed a complex. That early experience broke the barrier.”

  I thought this was a fine theory, and we toasted it with Japanese vodka. My liver began whimpering again, but what the hell, how often do you have a chance to be enlightened by the likes of Mr. Saito, innkeeper and self-taught speaker of English in a Russian town on a Japanese island that was taken from Ainu natives?

  Mr. Saito’s wife stopped in and we chatted a bit in Japanese. Mr. Saito listened with a keen ear, and as soon as his wife excused herself, he leaned over and said to me—in what would be the first and only honest assessment I would ever receive of my second-language ability—“Your Japanese is terrible.”

  “Um.” (What could I say?)

  “Your accent is very thick. That is from living in Kyushu.” (The idea being, I had been infected by living amidst such a poor dialect.) “Here in Hokkaido, everyone originally came from somewhere else. We soon lost our different accents. In Hokkaido, we speak Standard Japanese. Some people say that our Japanese is the finest in Japan. You should study Hokkaido Japanese. And you also need to study”—we consulted a dictionary for the right word—“the prepositions. You know ga, wa, ni, de, no. I was listening to you speak Japanese, and it sounds like you just put them in at random.”

  Damn. He was on to me. I hated Japanese prepositions. I hated them with a passion, and I did indeed use them at random, much like a slot machine, hoping they would occasionally come up correct. This had also been my approach to the feminine and masculine in French, just picking either le or la at random and crossing my fingers.

  “Well, I would like to study Japanese more,” I lied. “Someday, I’d like to become completely fluent.”

  “Fluent?” He raised an eyebrow. “No, no. Not fluent. Big mistake. We Japanese don’t trust foreigners who speak our language perfectly. It makes us nervous. You should improve your Japanese, but never, never become completely fluent.”

  I promised him I wouldn’t. “But only if you insist,” I said.

  I was shown to my room. It was dormitory-style with four bunk beds and crisp sheets freshly turned down. The only other occupant that night was a large, sad-eyed beanbag of a man. He was in Hakodate for some unspecified reason and was clearly not happy with being placed in the same room as a foreigner. He put on a brave face, he even smiled at me in a sorrowful, fatalistic way, but when he battened down for the night I noticed he carefully drew his bags in around him and hid his wallet under his pillow. Not to be outdone, I did the same thing with my bags—just to let him know that I was perfectly aware of what was going on. (This is how wars start.)

  Travel fatigue hit me in a wave of yawns and sighs, and I fell into sleep like a body down a well. It was a deep, rich, chocolate sort of slumber, and it lasted all of—oh, ten minutes, before I was jolted awake by the sound of an asthmatic seagull being throttled to death by a mad bagpiper. It was my roommate. He was snoring. Loudly. So loudly, the walls were being sucked inward with each inhalation and bulging outward with each exhalation. In between, he made this high-pitched gawking sound that set my nerves on edge. I wrapped a pillow around my head, and I was considering my options—murder, madness, insomnia—when the man stopped breathing. Entirely. I had heard of sleep apnea, but this was alarming. It lasted for long, agonizing minutes and now, damn it all to hell, I couldn’t sleep because of the silence. (It’s hard to drift off when you may be sharing a room with a corpse.) A few minutes later he started breathing again with a startled gasp, and I relaxed ever so slightly. With a mumbled moan, he rolled over and began releasing farts into the blankets like depth charges.

  I had horrible symbolic dreams, and I woke before sunrise. I got dressed—quietly at first and then, remembering the ordeal my roommate had put me through, loudly and with much crashing about and whistling—and walked out, into the city.

  3

  EARLY MORNING in Hakodate. Even the very air was drowsy. I walked down among some brick warehouses as the dawn slowly filled with sounds and smells: traffic, trolley bells, car exhaust. I ended up in the city’s morning market, a large, low-ceilinged building stuffed with stalls and wet smells. You could buy anything you wanted at the Hakodate market, as long as it had gills or was made of polyester.

  A woman in a rubber apron, rubber gloves, rubber boots, and—for all I know—rubber underwear was hosing down a sheaf of freshly caught fish. There was that smell—that smell of fish. It fills your mouth. It’s like breathing cod liver oil. “Tasty, ne!” exclaimed an old lady behind me, scanning the fish with a greedy eye.

  Right next to the fish stall was a stand selling sweets. Is that bad market research or what? Kind of like putting a perfume factory downwind from a sewage treatment plant. I had a cup of green tea at the sweets shop, but it tasted like fish.

  The further I ventured into the market, the thicker became the crowds and the narrower the lanes between stalls. Women examined floppy octopi with the critical gaze of connoisseurs. I saw every sort of slimy sea creature imaginable slopped up on tables and carefully appraised. Voices rattled and echoed under the corrugated tin roof, voices haggled, endlessly haggled, and bodies pushed past me on every turn. For the most part, Japanese markets are sorely disappointing. They are too restrained, too orderly, too reserved. But here, in the clutter and clutch of Hakodate, was a market worthy of the name. It was almost Korean in its exuberance and bad manners. I wandered through this smell-sodden arena like a sensory voyeur, taking in the sights, sounds, and malodorous tastes that hung in the air.

  The building itself could not contain the sheer mass of the market, and shops spilled out on all sides the way that cotton will burst from an overstuffed pillow. I found a tiny café in a nook by the back alley and I decided to stop for exacting gastronomical reasons; namely, the woman behind the counter was beautiful. Stunningly beautif
ul.

  The power of beauty to stop you dead in your tracks never ceases to amaze me. Here we were, perfect strangers, she and I, and yet my entire universe was suddenly focused on this woman. Her eyes were distant (sadly distant, I decided) and she looked as though she were perpetually on the verge of sighing. Her hair was a loose tumble of curls, an ode to a perm that didn’t take, and her skin was as unblemished and smooth as warm honey. I saw myself leaping across the counter, sweeping her up in my arms, and then, reaching out for a vine placed there solely for this purpose, sailing off into the distance with her in my arms. The female urge to mother men is something that is often commented upon. The male urge to rescue women, equally as unrealistic, is one less noted. Yet here I was, no longer a lower-rung, corporate-kept English teacher in a grubby coffee shop, but Errol Flynn about to take flight. It was, it was—

  “What do you want?” She was looking at me the way most people look upon drek.

  “What is the least expensive thing you have?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. True, I was on a budget, but she didn’t have to know that. “Or the most expensive,” I said, desperately trying to salvage my dignity. “Either is fine.”

  I ordered pizza toast. “Nice shop you have here,” I said as she went about her work. There was no response. Leaning in, I raised my voice. “I said, ‘Nice shop you have—’”

  “I heard you the first time. Here.” She slapped down a slice of not-pizza-and-not-quite-toast. “Enjoy your meal.” (I’m assuming she was being ironic.)

  This woman had what writers call “a cold beauty,” meaning she was beautiful but didn’t respond when I tried to flirt with her.

  “Well,” I said as I got up to leave. “As an eccentric millionaire and close friend of Tom Cruise, I suppose I should be going.”

  But that isn’t really what I said. I just mumbled some banality and left. She hadn’t smiled once and had completely crushed my heart. For the rest of the afternoon, I kept burping up pizza fumes. It tasted a lot like fish.

  4

  THE HEART OF HAKODATE is the historic, time-battered Motomachi District, which curves around the base of Mount Hakodate. Mr. Saito, the innkeeper, insisted I borrow his wife’s bicycle to go sightseeing, and it was a good thing too. The Old Town is spread out over a far enough distance to make walking tiresome.

  “Just make sure you lock the bike whenever you park it. The Russians are in port today.”

  “The Russians?”

  “They steal bicycles. They take them back to Russia and sell them. Sometimes they even steal the tires off of cars. We have to be very careful whenever they’re in town.”

  Jeez. From thermonuclear superpower to bicycle thieves; no wonder the Russian hardliners are so pissed off. I assured Mr. Saito that I would indeed watch out for nefarious bands of spanner-wielding Russkis, and I set off.

  What a wonderful place. Cobblestone streets. A beautiful Greek Orthodox church, rising up in onion domes and spires. Winding alleyways. Faded glory. Knocked about, meandering—Hakodate wore its past like an old sweater. Even better, I now had a choice of three gears: slow, very slow, and really very slow. This was a vast improvement over the previous rent-a-bikes I had used.

  I bicycled down to a crumbling old wharf where the smell of the sea permeated the very wood and where houses were falling into ruin, the windows cracked, the walls patched up. It was as though the Japanese had moved into an eastern European city en masse. As though Belgrade had been foreclosed by the bank and sold to Japanese investors. I wobbled up and down the side streets. Parked the bike and wandered into alleyways. Got lost. Got unlost. Got lost again. It was like playing hide-and-seek with yourself.

  A Russian man was having a futile conversation with a Japanese store clerk over some sort of purchase. Russian is not an international language, nor is Japanese—neither is spoken much beyond their borders—and this forced the two men to meet on neutral ground: English. Or at least something that resembled something that might have been mistaken for English.

  Q: How much this is being two for each?

  A: That have good tension for you. It gives four.

  Q: Four? I am asking two for each.

  A: Yes, yes. Many good for you.

  I stood nearby eavesdropping on their increasingly surreal dialogue and tried to decide who was the worse speaker of English, the Russian sailor or the Japanese clerk. It was hard to say. Kind of like comparing infinity with infinity plus one.

  Hakodate’s prime cherry-blossom-viewing spot was at the city’s star-shaped fortress, where four thousand cherry trees were now coming into bloom. More than one person heartily encouraged my attendance in much the same way that people root for their home team. “Hakodate cherry blossoms rule! Go Hakodate!”

  Even better, for the first time since I set out, for the first time ever, I was not assumed to be a Mormon or an American. Here in Hakodate, everyone mistook me for Russian. I thought this was splendid and to help it along I began speaking Japanese with a Russian accent. This was more difficult than you’d think. Shop owners would narrow their eyes and ask me questions that were tinged with suspicions waiting to be confirmed.

  “Are you a sailor?” they’d ask.

  “I am being from Vladivostok,” I would say in what I hoped was a suitably Slavic manner.

  “Here on business?”

  “Nyet, nyet. I am, how you say—” and here my voice would drop, “—shopping.”

  “Shopping?”

  “For bicycles.”

  It was all very entertaining, and I like to think I helped escalate international tensions ever so slightly, for which I am suitably proud.

  I expanded the scope of my travels, venturing out to the international graveyards on the edge of town. There were several cemeteries to choose from: a well-kept Chinese graveyard; an overgrown Russian one; and a kind of miscellaneous, assorted-dead-foreigners one. It must be very sad to be a Belgian sailor or an Irish missionary and end your days here, dumped in the ground and categorized as “other.” Normally, a visit to three graveyards in one afternoon would have left me pondering life, death, and my own (theoretical) mortality. But I was in too good a mood to let even a bunch of dead foreigners spoil it, and I bicycled back into town humming happy songs to myself.

  The route I followed that day rambled across the map like an alley cat with Alzheimer’s. I passed the Greek church several times, and at one point I came upon an imposing sign—in English—on a restored brick building:

  life design shop

  BLUE HOUSE

  live together with my sensitivity.

  we have abundant original for your enjoy

  life coordination.

  we, life design shop blue house,

  give aid to your self principle life style.

  As near as I could figure, BLUE HOUSE was either a fashion-consulting agency or a New Age cult of some sort. Either way, I decided that my lifestyle was self-principled enough, thank you very much, and I didn’t need to live together with anyone’s sensitivity. Still, it was heartwarming to think of the Japanese and the Russians working together on that sign, translating from one language to the other and then back again before finally coming up with this ode to miscommunication. I pedalled away, uplifted by the thought of it.

  —

  Having criss-crossed Hakodate all morning, I was now ravenously hungry. I saw several places advertising themselves as “Biking Restaurants,” which I took as an odd sort of specialty: cuisine geared toward cyclists. It wasn’t until I peered into half a dozen of these places that I finally figured it out. Biking was actually the Japanese pronunciation of viking. Vikings ate at rowdy, communal tables laden with food. Hence, if you can follow the logic, “biking” is any large buffet-style meal. (Is it any wonder that no one understands what the hell the Japanese are talking about?) I found one Biking Restaurant that called itself the King of Kings, and—ignoring the theological implications—I went inside and gorged myself on an all-you-can-eat meat bar. That’s right:
all-you-can-eat meat. And they let me in. It was not a pretty sight. The manager and waitresses cowered in the corner, the other customers fled, and the cook came out and began frantically shovelling slabs of beef and lamb directly into my mouth. Every now and then I would lean back to drain a flagon of ale and roar, “More meat! Hahahahaha! More meat!” They had obviously never seen a real Viking sit down for a meal before, and I waddled out an hour later, satisfied beyond gluttony and having pushed the King of Kings to the point of bankruptcy.

  “Come again,” said the waitresses in quavering voices, fearing that I might take them up on the offer yet still bound by protocol to make it.

  “Oh, I will,” I said, my mouth still full, as I chewed on my last handful of sheep’s flank. “I will indeed. Hahahahahaha!”

  5

  IT IS A TESTAMENT to Japanese engineering that the Hakodate cable car managed to get my heavy body up the mountain. It cost a small fortune, but I was in no condition to walk. I forked out a pile of yen and climbed on.

  As the cable car groaned under my weight, I looked out across the city as the evening lights began to blink on. Hakodate’s night view, it turns out, has been officially designated as one of the “Three Best City Night Views in Japan” (the other two are in Kobe and Nagasaki). Earlier in the day, however, the chap at the Hakodate Tourist Board had said in a hushed aside that really, “The night view of Hakodate is one of the best three—in the world—right after Naples and Hong Kong.” Had he been to Naples? No. Hong Kong? No. But he had seen pictures.

  Either way, Hakodate by night is magnificent, if not for the scope or brilliance, then for its striking shape. The city is built on a low neck of land, an isthmus actually, and the lights are funnelled in at the middle like an hourglass. The reflections glimmer upon water on both sides. It looks like a river of lights. Like a cup of jewels spilled. Like a wineglass filled with electric rhinestones. Like—like a woman’s waist. Yes, I tilted my head and squinted my eyes. (The same technique I used to descramble adult videos.) Yes, definitely. It looked like a ruby-studded corset, slipping from a woman’s body, it looked like—I stopped and cleared my throat.