Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (27 page)

Hookers, young girls, strippers, women, sex: the man had a wide repertoire of topics. And as he detailed his imaginary exploits and molested passersby from afar, I thought to myself,
Wow, guys really talk like this
. I thought they only did in comedy skits and feminist films.

The day was hot and the traffic was terrible. We crawled away from Himeji, slower than continental drift, and along the way we passed a Japanese gas stand with its well-groomed fleet of attendants
who ran out like cheerleaders every time a car pulled in. One girl waved cars back into traffic and bowed to departing customers.

Sukebe grinned at me. “What d’you think of her, eh?
eh?”

She had a nice bum. “She has a nice bum.”

“Haw! You pervert!” He was almost squealing in delight. “You like our women, eh? Like to screw, eh?”

He then pointed to my crotch and said, “You must have a big dick. I bet you do, all you gaijins are big.
Big!”
He made a fist and held out his forearm.

This was not the first time I had been leered at like this. In Japan, white males have all the nasty sexual innuendoes surrounding them that blacks do among whites. At first, I took it as some kind of lewd compliment, but it isn’t. What it says is this: You are animalistic, a caricature, abnormal. When I was teaching high school, one of the gym teachers was absolutely obsessed with my dick. At parties he would make juvenile jokes and ridiculous gestures. I tried to defuse him first through bravado. When he held up his hands, like a fisherman exaggerating the size of his catch, I would say, “No, no, that isn’t true, I am much bigger than that.” But this only egged him on, until finally I decided to hit back, below the belt so to speak. The next time he started carping on and on about how well-endowed white men were purported to be, I said, “That isn’t really true. It’s not that our penises are big, it’s just that Japanese penises are so small.” His smile withered. The joking ended. He never hung out with me much after that, which suited me just fine.

My present travelling companion, meanwhile, was all but slavering. He was, I realized, less a man than he was a slug, a sack of phlegm that had somehow assumed human form. At one point he came dangerously close to actually grabbing my crotch. I smiled grimly and considered bouncing his forehead off the dashboard. That such an invertebrate had learned to operate a motorized vehicle was rather amazing.

Finally, I thought, to hell with it. No ride is worth this. “Big?” I said.
“Big?”
My little friend’s eyes gleamed. “It isn’t true,” I said. “It isn’t that we foreigners are
big
, it’s just that—”

And once again I saw a smile wither and a once jocular rapport chill. He stared ahead, snarling at traffic, and then, abruptly, stopped the car and let me out. It had been a very short ride.

“Thanks for the lift!” I said in an overly singsong manner.

He muttered some reply, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever,” and drove off. I was quite proud of myself.

Although it was the type of encounter that makes you want to wash your hands afterward, this short hop had put me far enough away from the downtown core to allow me to breathe a bit freer. The city had thinned out by this point, and the traffic was no longer bumper to bumper. The Human Slug had barely disappeared when the next driver pulled over. It was a large freight truck. Large by Japanese standards, you understand. Which is to say, it was quite small. You don’t see the fourteen-wheel, rocket-fuelled, amphetamine-powered cannonball rigs we have back in North America.

The driver, a young man in his mid-twenties, gave me a hand to shake even as he pulled his truck back into the flow of traffic. “Going to Osaka?” he asked—ominously.

5

J
APAN IS A LONG
twisted rope. To cross over, to traverse the spine of the country, is to go against the grain. No roads go straight across. To get from one sea to the other, from the placid Inland Sea to the cold and stormy Sea of Japan, I had to zig and zag from one route to the next.

The truck driver I hitched a ride with dropped me off on the side of an expressway. “Are you sure this is legal?” I asked as I got out.

“Sure. Completely legal. Don’t worry.”

I was on a high curve of asphalt, miles from the nearest town. A silver river ran through the valley below like a trail of mercury. Farther out, railway tracks cut a suture line across green fields, adding to the sense of space and distance.

I walked into the landscape. I was on the watershed of Japan; to one side the mountains sloped toward the Inland Sea, on the other they sloped north toward the colder, wilder Sea of Japan. The air was clean and the views were panoramic. As long as the highway patrol didn’t drive by, I was fine.

I walked toward what I thought was a small village. It turned out to be a graveyard, stacked up along the side of an embankment. There was a scattering of farmhouses nearby, but little else.

“What on earth are you doing way out here?”

It was the first question asked of me by a couple in a large family sedan when it pulled over. He was puzzled. She was concerned. “Are you lost? Are you in trouble?”

They were Masaru and Teruko Ito. Masaru was a kindly man, with a heavy face and gentle eyes. His wife, Teruko, although in her fifties, had the energy of a schoolgirl. They were on their way into
Maizuru City, and they welcomed me into their vehicle and fretted over me like parents anywhere. They had a daughter my age, they said. She could speak English, a little, and wasn’t it a shame she wasn’t here to meet me.

In lieu of her daughter, Mrs. Ito flirted with me instead. Did I have a girlfriend? Sort of. Was she Japanese? What did I think of Japanese girls? “Well,” I said, “like you they are very attractive.”

She laughed. “He’s charming,” she said to her husband, and he gave me a congratulatory nod.

We compared our countries, our lifestyles, our differing approaches to dating and romance. And wasn’t it a shame that their daughter—who was single, by the way—wasn’t it a shame she wasn’t here to meet me.

The Cherry Blossom Front was only now coming to this side of Japan. “They use officially designated cherry trees,” said Mr. Ito. “The trees are planted at one hundred and two different weather stations across Japan, and the degree of blossoms is carefully monitored. That’s how they decide the percentage of flowers and the location of the Front itself.” It sounded very scientific. And it was.

Mr. Ito warned me that the cherry blossoms were late this year. The radio had announced that they were only at sixty percent bloom. His wife paused, suitably worried on my behalf, and then immediately launched into an inquiry about Western weddings. Was it true that the bride and groom kissed, right up there in front of everybody?

We began our descent in lazy looping corners, down from the mountains and into a patchwork of fields and rolling foothills. We passed stands of top-heavy bamboo, listing in the wind like giant feather dusters, and soon came upon the naval port of Maizuru and the Sea of Japan. I had expected to see the cold blue colour of slate, with relentless waves and windswept houses perched along its shore, but for all the foreboding images, it wasn’t that bad. A few waves, yet not much worse than the calm, flat waters of the Inland Sea.

“You should see it during a storm,” said Mr. Ito. “It
attacks
the coast. Frightening.”

“But exciting,” said Mrs. Ito. “Storms are full of life.”

A flutter of cherry blossoms flitted by outside the window. Mr. Ito frowned. “Those don’t look sixty percent in bloom,” he said, and we
then had a long, guy-oriented discussion about whether the flowers were fifty percent in bloom or only forty percent. We compromised in the spirit of friendship and decided that they were in fact forty-five percent in bloom. Mr. Ito formally apologized to me on behalf of the cherry trees.

“The younger trees blossom later,” said Mrs. Ito, making it sound almost poetic. “The older flowers are pink, the younger ones are whiter—purer.”

“So there is beauty in age,” I said.

And both Mr. and Mrs. Ito laughed. “You are too charming,” she said, accusingly.

They were supposed to drop me off outside of Maizuru, but when I told them I was heading to the Bridge of Heaven, they decided, with that unspoken agreement that married couples have, that they would take me up the coast, I made a perfunctory protest, but they insisted, and we swept through Maizuru without stopping, swinging in and out of inlets, up along the coast, and then, coming up quickly on my right, was Ama-no-Hashidate, the Bridge of Heaven.

It is a natural, wooded causeway, a thin ribbon of forest unrolled across the bay. It began as a sandspit, created slowly over thousands of years as grass took root and then pine trees. This narrow bar of land divides Miyazu Bay almost in two. On the one side are choppy waves, rolling in from the Japan Sea. On the other side, in the lake-like lagoon silted with sand, is a calm mirrored surface. When viewed from above, it forms a trestle of forest that seems to float just above the water, an “avenue of pine trees.” The Bridge of Heaven.

It was here, in the murky depths of time, that Japan was born. It was here that the drunken sexual forays of the siblings Izanagi and Izanami brought forth the thousands of deities and countless islands of Nippon. A male jewelled staff was plunged into the primordial wetness, withdrawn, and then waved, scattering its drops of seed across the void. When Izanagi and Izanami met—here on the Bridge of Heaven—they made the first, primal observation. “You have something that I do not have,” said the sister.

“And you have a hidden place that I lack,” replied the brother. Not the best pickup lines in history, but soon there were babies poppin’ out all over. The two were so fertile that children were born from tears, sweat, sighs. The land was ripe, and everywhere moist life
bloomed. The world began in forest and sea and rain, thick, wet, and humid, pregnant with possibilities.

“The Bridge of Heaven is three-point-five kilometres long,” said Mr. Ito. “According to the official tally, four thousand seven hundred and sixty-three pine trees grow along it.” We had parked the car and were now waiting for the pedestrian swing bridge to be brought into position. “No cars are allowed on the Bridge of Heaven,” said Mr. Ito. “But we can rent bicycles.”

Against my further protests, they paid for the rental and we set off down the Bridge of Heaven. Mrs. Ito kept swerving in and out ahead of me, almost crashing, gasping in laughter, as Mr. Ito trudged on, straight as an arrow and just as unwavering. The sand slowed us down now and then, and the wind came in with determined blasts.

The pine trees we passed had been shaped by the wind, forming a forest of gentle curves, and even the sandspit itself, while appearing straight, arced slightly. Framed by the banks on either side, the entire Bridge of Heaven forms a long, languid S shape. It is one of Japan’s “Three Most-Scenic Spots,” as ranked by tradition and tourist board promotions.

A research team from Meiji University spent several years analyzing the site. The scientists studied infrared images of the landscape, and a newspaper report—without the slightest hint of irony—made the following proclamation: “Using photographic computer analysis, researchers have succeeded in isolating the specific elements of beauty that compose Japan’s most scenic locations … They have discovered that the famous white sands and blue pine trees of the Bridge of Heaven are relatively minor features of the view. A scientific breakdown shows that pine trees compose just 8.2 percent of the overall picture and the sandy beach a mere 0.4 percent. Sky, on the other hand, is more prominent, taking up 31 percent of the scene. Mountains make up 23 percent.” (Who says you can’t put a number on beauty?)

“There are
two
Bridges of Heaven,” said Mr. Ito. “One that you ride through and another that you see from above. The two views are completely different.”

“And you look through your legs,” said Mrs. Ito. “Shall we go?”

I had heard about this. The proper way to view the Bridge of Heaven was to climb a mountain and then turn around, bend over,
and look at it from between your knees. With your head upside down and your senses disoriented, the effect was said to make the bridge seem to float in air. I couldn’t wait to see, first-hand, Japanese tourists striking these ungainly poses.

The brochure went one better and had a picture of a cute Japanese girl in a miniskirt bent over, smiling to the camera from between her legs. Directly above her derrière were the proud words:
One of the Three Natural Wonders of Japan
. Another pamphlet urged visitors to “enjoy the beautiful view between your legs,” and the local tourist souvenir is a wooden carving of a very flexible man who appears to be attempting self-inflicted fellatio. He looked more like a novelty act in a burlesque show than a nature lover, but Mrs. Ito bought one for me, insisting that the man was, in fact, “contemplating the Bridge of Heaven.”

A chairlift took us up to the viewing platforms at Kasamatsu Park and, sure enough, standing on special “looking-between-your-legs” platforms, a group of sightseers filed through, bending over and admiring the view. I did the same and, yes, the bridge did kind of, sort of, almost float, but it wasn’t really worth the embarrassment and dizzying head-rush that followed. I suspect the whole idea was dreamt up by bored locals. “These tourists are so gullible, I bet we could get them to kiss their own ass. I bet we could make them
stand in line
to kiss their own ass.”

Having viewed the Bridge of Heaven (which, by my estimation, composed 8.9 percent of the beauty and not 8.2 percent as reported), we drove back around the bay to find an inn. The Itos had adopted me with the paternal instinct and affection that couples often get once their own children have grown up. I think Mrs. Ito liked me because I seemed a little devilish; she liked storms and adventures and bad boys. We dined in the hotel restaurant, overlooking the view and enjoying a meal that must have cost a small fortune, but the Itos waved away my proffered wallet. “You are our guest.” “A friend.” “A very nice boy.” We talked until nightfall, and the lights of the bay glimmered across the water. The Bridge of Heaven was now a silhouette and the Itos were saying goodbye.