Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (10 page)

A sea change is under way, and Japanese women are the ninja saboteurs. In Japan it is not a revolution, but sedition. It is not about confrontation, but subterfuge. Together, Mayumi and Akemi were charting a course. A trip to Britain and then a journey through Europe, a change of jobs, whispers of work abroad. Secret passages. Hidden dens. Escape.

Mayumi was unfolding the world for Akemi, like a glass gift in layers of silk. I imagine that courtesans once opened the world for their younger novices in much the same way. It is a sensual discovery to find yourself stepping from an isolated island into a global bazaar of experiences and possibilities. Akemi had that impatient panic of people on the verge of something new. It is like a first kiss, this journey abroad, and she twisted in her seat, almost breathless, and asked me about the world.

She wanted my advice about British society. Not being British, I gave it. (It is one of those wonderful perks about being a foreigner in Japan that you are accepted as an expert on everything from Australian koalas to American gun laws.)

“Is Britain really so foggy?”

“Yes, very foggy,” said I, suddenly an expert on fog and all things mist-related.

“But how can people breathe if it is so foggy?”

“Well, they’re British, you see. Used to it.”

“Is Britain safe?”

Mayumi answered this one, speaking in near exasperation. “Of course it’s safe, I told you that many times. The world is not as dangerous as Japanese think.”

But Akemi wanted to hear it from me. “Is it
really
safe?”

“Well,” said I, “it
is
safe. Not as safe as Canada, of course, but still fairly safe, in a foggy British sort of way.” And on I went, building up steam, flinging out cultural traits and pontificating about national tics, with Akemi all but taking notes as I went. When we exhausted Britain we moved on to France and then Switzerland—a country that I have not technically visited. Not that this stopped me.

“The Swiss are a very tidy people,” I assured them.

By one of those odd quirks of life, it turned out that Mayumi and I had a mutual acquaintance: Paul Berger. Paul is a wry, perpetually perplexed New York exile who wrote his own book on Japan,
The Kumamoto Diary
.

“I met Paul in the Rock Balloon,” said Mayumi. “Do you know the Rock Balloon? It’s in Kumamoto City.”

Do I know the Rock Balloon?
The Rock Balloon is a “gaijin bar,” where debauched foreign reprobates drink cheap beer and dance themselves into hormonic frenzies as they pursue equally debauched Japanese. Of
course
I know the Rock Balloon.

I tried to get some dirt on Paul—maybe he had tried to cruise Mayumi with a line about being Paul Simon’s shorter brother, or maybe she poured her drink on his head and slapped his face or something—but no, Paul had been a perfect gentleman.

“He did talk a lot about spiders,” she said. “There were giant spiders in his apartment. He was very afraid.” (Paul has this irrational fear of spiders. It’s embarrassing. Fortunately for Paul, I would never take it upon myself to expose this phobia of his in public.)

“So did he say anything about his bed-wetting problem?” I asked.

“Does he have one?”

“No. But I just thought I’d check.”

15

M
IYAZAKI IS A CITY
of sighs. It carries a sense of faded grandeur. It was once the Budget-Minded Honeymoon Capital of Japan, a poor man’s Guam. Guam in turn is a poor man’s Hawaii, making Miyazaki a city twice removed from greatness. It is a city of also-rans, a favourite haunt of cardsharks and small-time mountebanks, a place for people starting over. Palm trees line the main streets. There are sad, romantic storefronts and bridal suite ads. (The hotels are still flogging the Honeymoon Horse, long after the beast has died.)

Miyazaki has the highest per capita number of gambling casinos in Japan. The game of choice is pachinko, a form of self-hypnosis, wherein people sit in loud, smoky, painfully lit parlours and feed silvery ball bearings into a spring-loaded trigger. The trigger sends the balls up, into the board—a kind of vertical pinball machine, but without the interactive quality that redeems pinball. The players watch, slack-jawed, cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips, as the ball bearings cascade down the board. The name is derived from the
pa-ching!
noise the balls make, a racket that echoes constantly through the parlours. It is the passion of prostitutes. There is exaggerated excitement, loud bells, and lights, and in the end a faintly dissatisfied feeling. You can almost hear the pachinko boards cooing, “Oh, yes, do it to me, baby. Gimme more.”

Pachinko parlours are the scourge of the modern Japanese landscape. They are also the mirages of the city nightlife. You see their eye-catching Las Vegas signs a mile away, and they draw you in. They look exciting from afar, but as you approach you realize,
Damn!
It’s just another pachinko parlour. The doors open, the place is deafening. The “Imperial Navy March” rouses the air, and the sound of
balls bouncing down the boards has a stock-market frenzy about it—until you see the people, numb, transfixed. It’s like walking into a bad zombie movie.

Miyazaki City is Pachinko Central. Akemi shrugs. What else is there to do in Miyazaki? I assume it is a rhetorical question. There is nothing else to do in Miyazaki, save the occasional Blue Hearts concert or overpriced disco.

Still, you have to love this city. It is like your favourite aunt, the one with the raspy voice and vodka breath, the one who has been divorced four times, the one who dates younger men. Jaded, slouch-shouldered, rough around the edges, but still able to turn heads. I liked Miyazaki in the same way some people like taverns and smoky pool halls.

The palm trees and wide boulevards, the scent of distant sea, and the faint taste of salt water and whiskey sours: Miyazaki reminds me of Miami, but without the handguns or shiploads of narcotics or Cuban exiles or ethnic tensions or—on second thought, Miyazaki is nothing like Miami. But both cities do share that same sun-bleached feel, where the colours fade into pastel shades of neglect and where the people are grateful for a breeze.

It was a muggy day in downtown Miyazaki, which is to say, things were normal. Once again, I was doing my impression of the Amazing Melting Man, the sweat as slick as oil on my skin. Mayumi and Akemi dabbed at their foreheads with handkerchiefs. They agreed that it was very hot out today. The cherry trees in Miyazaki seemed wilted, the flowers hung down like beads of perspiration, and when Mayumi and Akemi offered to take me to the park for cherry blossom viewing, I opted for draft beer and air conditioning instead.

Mayumi found a shop specializing in Chicken Nanban, Miyazaki’s local dish. Chicken Nanban was, the shop owner told us with a certain amount of misplaced pride, invented right here in Miyazaki, though how much work went into thinking up fried chicken with mayonnaise is debatable. Every area of Japan boasts its local specialty. In northern Shimokita, it is wild boar meat. In Morioka, it is small mouthfuls of noodles, tossed back in what becomes more of a contest than a meal. In my own home prefecture of Kumamoto, the main dish is
basashi
, which is—this is true—raw horsemeat. As Paul Berger noted, the only problem Westerners have
with eating raw horsemeat is that (a) it is horsemeat, and (b) it is raw. The first time I had basashi was at my welcome party, when I had just arrived in Kumamoto. I asked one of the teachers what it was I was eating and he struggled for a moment, and then said, in careful English, “This is a horse.” I gently corrected him. “No, Mr. Suzuki, in English it is called cow.” He frowned and said, “No, horse.” And then he whinnied and imitated the sound of a galloping horse by slapping his hands against his lap. “Horse,” he said again. But of course by that time I was already in the toilet with a finger down my throat attempting to redeem my meal ticket, so to speak.

Where the other regions of Japan specialize in gourmet dishes such as horsemeat or rolled seaweed, only Miyazaki has claimed Chicken Nanban, the Big Mac of Japanese food. Poor Miyazaki. Even its cuisine is second-rate.

Not that Chicken Nanban isn’t tasty. It is. It is a popular dish across Japan, and every take-out shop and box-lunch emporium has Chicken Nanban on the menu. It is almost a staple of family restaurant chains such as Sunny-Land and Joy-Full. The name
nanban
is from the characters for “south” and “barbarian,” and it refers to the Jesuit missionaries who landed in southern Japan in the sixteenth century. Apparently these Portuguese missionaries, and the traders who followed them in, were fond of fried chicken. Later, Dutch merchants introduced the concept of mayonnaise. Together, this gives us Chicken Nanban—or more properly, “Barbarian-style Chicken.” That’s right, barbarian.

You may want to pause a moment and wonder what sort of reaction you might get in the West if you opened a restaurant offering “Jap Noodles” or “Yellow Menace Sushi.” The fact that restaurant chains in Japan don’t think twice about labelling a dish “Barbarian-style” says a lot about Japanese sensitivity to outsiders—or their lack thereof. Mind you, I suppose it could have been worse. They might have named it Big-Nosed, Round-Eye, Butter-Smelling, Couldn’t-Make-a-Car-to-Save-Their-Life Chicken.

Mayumi, Akemi, and I finished our meal and said goodbye on the walking mall outside the restaurant. The concert was starting soon, though neither of them seemed thrilled about seeing any band named “Blue Hearts.”

16

H
IGHWAY 10
north of Miyazaki City is one long extended aggravation of traffic lights and intersections. I walked forever. My tongue was thick with the taste of oil, diesel, and dust, and the traffic rattled by with bone-jarring persistence. At one point, above the haze of exhaust and cat’s cradles of telephone wires I saw the Statue of Liberty advertising a muffler shop or a pachinko parlour. Or maybe it
was
the Statue of Liberty. Maybe I was hallucinating. Carbon monoxide will do that to you. To make matters worse, I was using a backpack apparently designed by astronauts. It had hooks and pulleys and compartments, and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t sit straight. I began pulling straps at random, and it lurched on my back like a drunken sailor.

Rush hour came and went like a slow swell of ocean, but eventually a polished red sports car, low along the road like a hovercraft, pulled over. This car
purred
. Inside was a worried-looking man in a chef’s jacket.

“Are you lost?”

“Not exactly.”

“Where are you going?”

“Hokkaido.”

I knew it was a long shot that he would be going all three thousand kilometres to Hokkaido. “I’ll take you to the next town,” he said. “That’s as far north as I’m going.”

Fair enough. I got in. There were plastic covers on all the seats, and when I started squirming about, trying to work my backpack onto my lap, he quickly offered to store it in the trunk. I stuffed it in beside a set of golf clubs.

“Do you play golf?” he said hopefully, and it just went downhill from there.

The man behind the wheel was a chef named Kenichi Inada who had two great passions in life, neither of which had anything to do with cooking. His passions were (a) golf and (b) cars (more specifically
his
car). Now, I can hold my own in any Japanese conversation that concerns the weather, drinking, or chopsticks, but cars and golf are complete blanks to me. I can’t even discuss them in English, let alone Japanese. When Kenichi asked me what kind of automobile I liked, I said “Blue.” Pushed for more detail I said “Two-door.” Yup, I would have to say that when it comes to automobiles I am a blue, two-door kind of man. Kenichi looked at me with an are-you-sure-you-are-really-a-guy? type of look. Then he asked about golf, and all I could contribute was that famous quip about golf being a good stroll ruined. I do not believe this endeared me to Kenichi.

His face had the creased good looks of a farmer, and he used polite Japanese, which was a nice change from all the “Hey you’s!” and “Gaijin!” that had hounded me during my stay in Miyazaki. Unfortunately, he and I had zilch in common except for my needing a ride and his offering one. He was a hard man to faze. When I told him I was going to the very end of Japan he didn’t blink, and when I told him I was following the Cherry Blossom Front he reacted as if it was the most common, sensible thing to do. It took the wind right out of my sails. So I started exaggerating.

“I might even continue across Russia.” No reaction. “Maybe hitchhike through the Gobi desert. Hard, that, what with there being no cars or anything.” No reaction. “Probably have to hitch rides on camels.” Still no reaction.

He was more interested in explaining why his car was the best self-propelled piece of internal combustion on the road today. This involved a lot of technical car words that may well have been borrowed from English but which I wouldn’t have recognized even if they were. It was a case of competing obsessions, dueling monologues: I would talk about cherry blossoms and he would nod and pretend to be interested, and then he would talk about dual-exhaust piston joints and I would nod and pretend to be interested.

For all his love of cars, Kenichi was an unusually cautious driver. We crept along well under the speed limit, and he’d begin
braking miles ahead of any intersection. All that automotive power and he was afraid to use it. I tried to get him to open ’er up and see how fast she’d fly, but he said no. Then I asked him if I could drive. No. Are you sure? Yes. But I promise I’ll be good. (I didn’t actually have a driver’s licence, but I didn’t see the point in bothering him with such minor details.) There was a noticeable chill in the air after I made my third, summarily rejected request to take his car for “a little spin.”

He dropped me off on an open stretch of highway west of Sadowara. We dutifully shook hands and exchanged addresses. He gave me his number and said, “If you have any trouble—if you become lost or if you want to play a round of golf or something—give me a call. Ask for Chef Inada.”