Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (6 page)

Even here, at the Grand Imperial Shrine of Udo Jingū the atmosphere is more festive than sacred. Souvenir shops and snack-food stalls flank the approach, and visitors pass through a gauntlet of distractions on their way to the shrine. Men snap your photo and then try to sell you a copy. Round-faced ladies in aprons offer soft icecream cones and fried squid impaled on sticks. The smells swirl like oil and water. You catch the sweet scent of octopus steamed in dough. Snails, still in shell, simmer in broths. Trinkets and toys and yells of welcome ricochet around you. Cartoon characters, super-heroes, and the god-son Ninigi-no-Mikoto are rendered in the same pink plastic and they all compete for the same jingle of coin in cup. Stalls sell good-luck charms and talismans and sacred tablets. And right smack beside them are fake doggy-do and large novelty buttocks. Everything is jumbled up in postmodern anarchy.

The approach to Udo Jingū bustles, and the closer you get to the main altar, the thicker the crowds, the quicker the tempo. Touring parties march through in phalanxes: schoolgirls in sailor uniforms, boys in brush-cuts and school caps. There are couples, new and unsure and excruciatingly aware of each other’s presence, couples comfortable, couples sullen, and couples past caring. They move like tributaries through the main torii gate. The sound and scent of the sea increases as you approach. A wooden boardwalk descends in steps along the cliff face. Waves break below, rolling up against the Devil’s Washboard. People begin hurrying as they near the cave.

The sun is oppressive. It shimmers in a haze. The world is overexposed, reflective surfaces are painful to look at, the colours are washed out. But here, inside the womb of the cave, the shadows are damp and the air is wet. The cave breathes, and its exhalations are cool against your skin.
Ah … Unn …

Your eyes slowly adjust to the dark, and details emerge. The shrine takes form, appearing from the murk like an image on a photographic plate. Sounds: whispering voices, dry rattles, and the hollow plonk of water dripping.

The shrine roof is in copper green, its angles fluid. It has the slope of a caravan tent. The style harkens back to the Mongolian steppes and the temporary tents of nomadic tribes. A message embodied in the very architecture of Shinto: The world is in flux, life moves, the rivers flow, and even the homes of the gods are but temporary shelters. Someday they, too, will be folded down like tents and put away.

I buy a bag filled with small clay pebbles and go outside to try my luck. In front of the cave a wooden balcony juts out over a jumble of boulders and salt spray. The sea throws herself up against the cliff face again and again, but the shrine remains just out of reach, tucked into its cave.

In among the sea rubble, at the bottom of the cliff, is a large misshapen boulder called “Turtle Rock,” and atop the turtle’s back is a
shimenawa
rope, looped in a circle. The rope signifies the presence of a kami and marks the area inside the circle as hallowed. Being (a) a Westerner and (b) a male, my first thought at seeing this holy circle, perched atop a large boulder at the bottom of a cliff, is to wonder, “How the heck did they ever get that rope down there?” I imagine it is one of the duties of the novice priests. “Send Hiroshi down, he’s the new guy.” Or maybe they tossed it, Hula Hoop style. The mysteries of the universe never held such appeal for me as the mystery of how they got that rope out there onto that boulder.

The circle on Turtle Rock is part of a sacred shooting gallery. Remember the clay pebbles I bought earlier? It is time to win favour with the gods. At Udo Jingū you lean over and toss the pebbles at the rock. If they land and stay within the circle you will be rewarded with great fortune, long life, good health—the usual stuff. People crowd the edge of the boardwalk, laughing and flinging pebbles. The sea is afloat with them, they cover boulder tops and rock ledges like rabbit droppings. Mounds of pebbles are inside the rope circle, but most have bounced out. Many are wildly off the mark. Not me. When it comes to tossing clay pebbles onto large rocks, I am pretty well the Omnipotent Master of the Universe. I try not to snort
too
loudly at the awkward misfires of my fellow worshippers. A voice beside me says, “He’s cheating.”

I looked around to see who was doing the cheating. They were referring to me.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, scanning the crowd with a kind of How Dare You! look on my face, but no one would meet my eye. I continued tossing the pebbles. I was going for the world record slam-dunk pebble toss.

“What a cheater.”

I spun around to face my detractors. Nothing. No one said a word. Finally, out of pity I suppose, an elderly couple stepped out toward me. She was wearing a trim blue elderly-aunt-type skirt, her hair suspiciously black. The gentleman she was with had heavy-framed glasses, a string necktie, and a balding head with strategically combed strands of camouflage.

The man smiled at me. He had his camera out and for a minute I thought he was going to ask if he could take my picture. This happens occasionally. Japanese tourists like to take snapshots of exotic white people in Japan, along with the usual pictures of flora and fauna. High-school yearbooks inevitably have photos of the school trip to Nara and Kyoto, with students posing first beside temple deer and then beside foreign tourists. In both cases, whether they are feeding the deer or feeding the foreigners, the students have the same nervous smiles. Personally, I hate posing for photographs. But no, the man didn’t want my photo. He wanted to correct my error.

“You are not doing it properly,” he said. “Men must use their left hand when they throw the pebbles. Women may use either, but it is better if they use their left hand also.”

So I switched hands. I missed every shot. The crowd around me began chuckling and saying things like, “Jōzu desu ne,” and other such derisive comments, so I decided to stop.

The gentleman who had corrected me carefully folded his handkerchief over and dabbed his forehead a few times. The Japanese don’t seem to have any sweat glands. I know that sounds like a gross generalization, but it’s true. I was sweating like the proverbial pig, beads dripping from my eyebrows, my shirt plastered to my back like a really bad job of wallpapering, and yet this elderly man needed only a few token dabs to mop
his
brow. As usual, I had forgotten to bring a handkerchief. He offered me one of his spares and I wiped my face and neck and forearms, stopping just short of my armpits. We both agreed that it was very hot out. His wife nodded deeply at my astute observations regarding current weather conditions (hot), and I knew
that I had been adopted. I wrung out the handkerchief and then reached out to shake their hands. They seemed to hesitate.

“I am Professor Takasugi of Tokyo University,” he said, and then paused. When I didn’t react, he repeated his introduction. “Tokyo University,” he said, and I realized that I was meant to be impressed by this, so I said, “Ah, yes, Tōdai, a great university.”

He smiled modestly. “Thank you. My wife, Saori. She is also my assistant. We are in Kyushu for research. We are studying the social life of wild plates.”

“Wild plates?”

“Not plates,
monkeys.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “That would make more sense.”

The words for plate
(sara)
and monkey
(saru)
sound similar in Japanese, and for some reason I can never keep them straight. And like many Westerners, I also get confused by “human”
(ningen)
and “carrot”
(ninjin)
, which once caused a lot of puzzled looks during a speech I gave in Tokyo on the merits of internationalization, when I passionately declared that
“I
am a carrot.
You
are a carrot. We are
all
carrots. As long as we always remember our common carrotness, we will be fine.”

On another occasion I scared a little girl by telling her that my favourite nighttime snack was raw humans and dip.

Once Professor Takasugi and I got the wild plate thing sorted out, he explained that he and his wife were planning to travel south, toward Cape Toi, to visit a remote wild monkey island. They invited me along, and even though I was originally headed north, I accepted their invitation. After all, how often is it that you get to see plates in their natural habitat?

8

T
HE
P
ROFESSOR’S CAR
was cluttered with academic detritus. We had to move several boxes filled with loose papers to make a space for me in the back. All the while his wife was nodding with that painfully polite smile that many uninitiated outsiders mistake as being a sign of friendship. It is actually a sign of extreme unease.

Her husband slipped into his professor posture. “The social life of monkeys is very revealing,” he said, with the air of a man who has spent his life studying something to the point where he has lost all perspective on its importance. (University does that to you.) “Japanese monkeys,” he assured me, “are a unique breed.”

He eased his car out of the parking lot. Did I know that Japanese monkeys were the most northerly in the world? No? Did I ever see monkeys in the wild before? No? Well, this would be a very interesting trip for a foreigner such as myself.

I tried to get the Professor to perform a monkey call for me, but he wouldn’t take the bait. “I study the social life of monkeys, not communication,” he said, so I did my own call and asked him if I was close. His wife giggled behind her hand.

The Professor spoke English exceptionally well, and he was clearly an expert in his field. His wife showed me a book he had written and nodded in deep agreement whenever I complimented him, shutting her eyes as she did so. She wasn’t so much a wife as a fan. Unfortunately, I just can’t take any bald man seriously when he oils his hair and combs it over, in long mutant strands, across his head. I was in the backseat as well, which didn’t help, because I had this hardboiled-egg view of things. Instead of paying attention to the social life of Japanese monkeys, I was more fascinated
with the Comb-Over Strategy itself. Do these people really think
anyone
is fooled? Don’t they have mirrors? Or is it mirrors that are the problem? Straight ahead in your bathroom mirror must be the only way that combed-over hair looks even remotely natural. And even then, how often do you see people with hair growing horizontally across their forehead? The Japanese, who have a certain flair for comic description, refer to the comb-over look as
bar-code head
, in reference to the bar-code prices in supermarkets. Sitting in the backseat with this uncomplimentary view of a Tokyo University (pause) Professor, I was longing to pass a light wand over his head and see what kind of price would come up.

“And so, you can see how important the social life of the monkey is,” he said in conclusion.

“Absolutely,” I said.

South of Udo Jingū, the sea was the clouded silver of a shrine mirror. The highway unrolled low along the water, slipping and sliding and falling off the shore entirely at times in a series of bridges and causeways. The mountains crowded in, almost pushing the villages into the sea. Regimented forests, planted generations ago in straight lines for easier cutting, marched up the mountainsides in perfect formation. In Japan, even the trees behave themselves.

The Professor talked to me through the rearview mirror. I talked to the back of his head.

“Japanese monkeys are more advanced than other monkeys,” said the Professor. “Foreign monkeys are individualist. They don’t get along. But Japanese monkeys have very complicated social something-or-other and blah blah blah blah blah, therefore Japan is unique.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

The Professor was a closet nationalist. The academic world of Japan teems with them. I have had experts tell me—straight-faced and sober—that the Japanese use a different side of the brain from other people (which is why the shrill cry of the cicada is a thing of beauty to the Japanese, while Westerners find the insect annoying); that their tongues are shorter (which is why they have trouble pronouncing English words); that their intestines are longer (which is why they have trouble digesting beef, especially foreign beef) and so
on. In Professor Takasugi’s case, it was monkeys he was interested in but the subtext was clear.

“Japanese monkeys have social patterns that are very different from foreign monkeys’. They prefer stability. Just like the Japanese. In the Oita Monkey Park,” said the Professor, “a new leader has taken over. His name is Dragon and he has the respect of six hundred monkeys even though he has only one front paw. He lost the other in a train accident.”

“A train accident?”

“That’s right. I studied Dragon, and I believe that the experience of losing his paw taught him compassion for the other monkeys. Together with his fighting spirit, he could become leader even though he is handicapped. What does that teach us?”

“Perseverance?”

“Exactly. Now, Dragon’s lieutenant is named Schola. Schola is larger and younger than Dragon, and could certainly beat him in a fight, but Schola knows his place and does not challenge the older monkey. Schola does not have a secret ambition for higher office. If a group has a strong leader and sincere lieutenants, the group will have unity and increased power.”

“So Japanese monkeys like strong leaders.”

“But there is much more to it than that. It is not simply a matter of raw power, as in foreign countries such as yours. In his book
The Frontiers of Monkey Studies
, Professor Tachibana”—he said the name as though I should recognize it—“has shown that the dominant-male theory does not apply to Japanese monkeys. It is more subtle. Professor Tachibana has shown that
consensus
is the key to understanding Japanese monkeys. The monkeys watch the actions of other monkeys very carefully, and when one moves, the others move in synchronized motion. This,” he said with a satisfied smile, “resembles the behaviour of people in Japanese society.”

I thought the Professor had used up his store of monkey anecdotes, but I was wrong.