Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (7 page)

“Now then,” he said, “up in Shimokita, in northern Japan, it is very cold and the monkeys sit in hot-spring baths, just like Japanese.”

I had heard this before, about how Japanese monkeys prefer Japanese-style baths. And a birdwatcher once told me that Japanese snow cranes bow to each other during their mating dance because,
well, they are Japanese birds. Apparently, were they American birds they would shake hands instead.

“In Shimokita,” the Professor said, “the monkeys form smaller groups. I once watched a monkey, named Momo, die from loneliness and stress. She was separated from her mother and thus could not fit in anywhere. The group rejected her and she died, not because she was hungry but because she was an outcast. It was very sad, even for an objective scientist such as myself.”

“Just like the Japanese,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“The monkeys in Shimokita,” I said. “It’s just like Japanese society.”

“How do you mean?”

“Keeping strangers outside. The closed circle. Outcasts. The group picking on someone. Individually nice, but often cruel in a group. You know. Like Japanese society.”

“That is not like Japanese society at all,” he said, his voice brusque.

“But you were just saying it was like—”

“In this case it is completely different.”

“No it isn’t.”

He clenched his jaw. “Completely different. Do you have monkeys in your country?”

“But what does that—”

“Do you?”

“No, I can’t say we do.”

“I have studied monkeys for more than twenty years. I am a professor at Tokyo University.”

“Yes, but—”

“I have been on several government committees. Twelve years ago, Prime Minister Ohira invited me to take part in a Social Economic Committee. My advice on how monkeys organize their society was taken very seriously. I have been on Tokyo urban planning committees as well—as an expert.”

That explained a lot. Tokyo certainly appeared to be a city designed by monkey-experts.

“But surely,” I persisted, “monkeys and humans are completely different species. I mean, if your point is just that the Japanese people are supposedly some kind of separate race from the rest of us—”

The back of his head was flushed red and he was almost choking on his attempt to respond. I have this innate ability to step on people’s toes, especially academic types, and being tossed out of the car and left by the side of a narrow, backwoods road was now a distinct possibility.

Then, just when things were at their tensest, the Professor’s wife leaned over and said, with a painfully polite smile, “Can you eat Japanese food?” And for the first time ever, I was glad to hear the question and be back on familiar ground again.

We talked about Japanese food for the rest of the way, agreeing wholeheartedly that foreigners can’t possibly eat pickled plums or fermented beans or raw fish or horseradish.

9

T
HERE ARE TWO ISLANDS
. Kojima is the larger one. Torishima is half hidden behind it. Both are home to wild bands of macaque monkeys. At one time the entire Kyushu mainland teemed with them, but human encroachment has left only a few scattered groupings, mostly on remote islands such as these. The monkeys here are some of the least affected by man, and as such are the object of intense study by academics.

A few years ago, the monkeys on Kojima made international news (as far as monkeys go) when it was discovered that the females were
teaching
the younger monkeys how to rinse the sand off their food before they ate it. The monkeys of Torishima, meanwhile, did not rinse their food, so clearly this was not a case of instinct but of taught behaviour, something that was once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. Then, suddenly, incredibly, the monkeys of Torishima Island began washing their food as well!

This sent the academic world into a tailspin, and teams of researchers descended. How was it possible that such a rare social trait should suddenly appear in two geographically distinct areas? Was there some recessive “food-washing” gene that had only now kicked in? Could the monkeys on Torishima have peered across the water and somehow understood what the other monkeys were doing and then copied them? Could this be some kind of simian extrasensory perception? Or were we witnessing a rare leap from one evolutionary plateau to another? The theories grew and grew, yet the mystery seemed intractable. Someone asked the local fishermen what they thought. “Well,” the fishermen replied, “the monkeys do swim back and forth between the islands. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

And that was how the Swimming Monkeys of Kojima were discovered. The mystery of the telepathic primates was over. It was common knowledge to everyone in the area, of course, but it had taken the Tokyo experts ages to figure it out.

The Professor drove down a narrow-laned road and we came to a crescent of beach. Across the water was Kojima, a rounded cap of deep jungle green. A few freelance fishermen were hanging about, brown-skinned, young, almost lethargic. They exhibited a certain jungle-cat conservation of energy; they barely moved when we approached them. The encounter went something like this: The Professor strides up. He wants a ride out to the island. It can be arranged, they say. How much? There are shrugs. A price is given. The Professor tells them that he is from Tokyo University. The fishermen contain their excitement. The price is repeated. The Professor haggles with them, first as a group and then one on one. They don’t budge. A professor from Tokyo is no match for a southern Kyushu fisherman. We pay the initial, unchanged exorbitant fee to take the boat across.

Professor Takasugi was almost belligerent in his offer to cover my cost, but I declined. It was the only time on the trip that I would insist on paying my own way. The pilot of our boat was a study in muscle and sinew. He had a long ponytail and an Errol Flynn moustache. I thought: If pirates attempt to board us on the journey over, we will be in good hands. Unless of course our captain is a pirate as well, in which case it is every man for himself.

The boat was paint-peeling white, and the motor was disproportionately loud for such a slow putt-putt of a vessel. Our captain had to yell to be heard above it.

“There are about ninety monkeys on the island,” he shouted. “They are called the Wisest Monkeys in Japan.”

“How so?” I shouted back.

“Well,” he said, “they wash their potatoes before they eat them.”

I was going to ask him how washing potatoes qualified one as “wise.” I mean, I wash my potatoes all the time but no one refers to
me
as being particularly wise. Maybe “the Cleverest Darn Monkeys in Japan” might be a more accurate title. But I felt I had annoyed enough people for one day, and I wisely decided to keep my comments to myself. It is one thing to be kicked out of a car, it is quite another to be kicked out of a boat.

“The monkeys of Kojima are wild, so whatever you do,
don’t make eye contact!
If you have any food or drinks or valuables, make sure you leave them on board.”

The boat snouted its way up to the slipperiest, roundest boulder the fisherman could find and we climbed out, the waves lifting and dropping the small vessel as we went. “I’ll be back to collect you later,” he said. He threw the boat into reverse and in a spew of black smoke propelled himself backward like a squid in a cloud of ink.

It was a long, scary scramble along the boulder-toss of Kojima’s shoreline to a small clearing on the shore. The monkeys congregated on the beach, enticed out of the jungle by a scattering of seeds, potatoes, and what appeared to be old corn cobs. The monkeys were small—not much bigger than large house cats—grey, short-tailed, and obsessed with fleas.

This was the first time I had seen monkeys without a cage between us. They walked on their knuckles, just like zoo monkeys, and they looked just as smelly. I watched them for a few minutes, and I soon made an important social observation of my own: Monkeys are miserable little bastards. They spent their time biting, screaming, and picking on each other. The hierarchy was continually being reaffirmed, from the gnarly old ruler who prowled the beach looking for smaller monkeys to terrorize, to the toddlers who got battered about by everyone. There was little social interaction that didn’t involve cruelty or intimidation; even the ones who were grooming each other were obviously gossiping viciously about their neighbours.

Monkey Harmony is about as smooth as it sounds. Every few seconds somebody would bite someone else and the bitee would run, screeching like a band saw on sheet metal. A barrelful of these vile little creatures would not be fun, it would be mayhem.
Loud
mayhem. I did like the babies; clinging to their mothers in wide-eyed wonder at the world around them, chewing fretfully on leathery nipples and hugging onto mom for dear life whenever one of the mean-spirited males chased their mothers away.

When not fighting, the monkeys crouched around, picking invisible bugs from each other’s hair and then chewing them with great exaggerated jaw movements, as though they were eating wads of toffee and not, say, an insect the size of a speck of dust. (Do you even
need
to chew a flea?
Can
you chew a flea? You should be able to swallow the average flea whole, right?)

It was not a very holistic society. Many were picking at their anuses. Occasionally they would flick bum-gunge at each other just for spite. Sometimes they flicked it at us, the viewing public. Bullies and bad personal hygiene: It was high-school gym class all over again.

Not once, the whole time I was there, did I see a single monkey wash a single goddamn potato.

The Professor and his wife were making notes and counting monkeys. I wandered away. The beach had formed as a washout from a small stream, and I followed it back into a tangle of vines. In a clearing I came across an abandoned plyboard building. No one lives on Kojima, so this sway-backed, falling-down structure must have been an old research station.

The vines of the jungle were slowly embracing the shack, tendrillike, and it looked as though one good kick would take it down. A lordly old monkey was sitting on his haunches on the corrugated tin roof, eying me with undisguised hostility. I held his gaze a heartbeat too long and he lunged, teeth bared, with a horrible monkey scream. I fell over myself trying to get away, but it was a bluff and the monkey swaggered off, leaving me alone amid the green-leaf scent of the jungle, drenched in sweat and high on adrenaline.

The forest was thick with must and the smell of wet rot. A tree had fallen across the path, a great waterlogged, fern-festooned rainforest turd of a tree trunk. And, as I stepped over it, something slithered through the tall grass below—and across my ankle.

I froze, foot raised, arms out, poised like the Karate Kid. I heard a voice squeak from somewhere in my chest, “Oh no.” I was trapped, hopelessly trapped, until someone came along and rescued me or until my leg atrophied and fell off. A serpent was somewhere
down there
, near my foot. I stood in premature rigor mortis as my mind frantically flipped through its Rolodex of options. There didn’t seem to be many.

I eventually solved my dilemma in the only rational way possible: I ran away without once touching the ground. That’s not true, of course. I did touch the ground, but in a quick, high-stepping manner known among native islanders as the Humorous Panic Dance. I also screamed, “Get away get away get away get away
get away!” on the off chance that this particular serpent had—freak of nature—evolved ears.

I would have made a piss-poor explorer indeed. The embarrassing thing is, I am a direct descendant (this is true) of Doctor Livingstone, the legendary explorer of “I presume” fame. The good doctor must have been spinning in his grave as his great-great-great-grandson ran screaming in terror not from a snake, but from the
sound
of a snake.

I made a mental note: Highways good, jungles bad. When you are on a highway, snakes get flattened by traffic and you have only to worry about the occasional head-on collision, which—although statistically more of a danger—is nowhere as frightening as the thought of a snake slithering up your pants leg. In most areas of Japan, it is the dreaded
mamushi
you have to watch out for. The other snakes—and there are lots of them—are not dangerous in the least, unless you count fear-induced coronaries. When I asked my fellow teachers how you can tell whether or not a snake is poisonous, they said, easy, just look for small brown circles the size and shape of five-yen coins. I thanked them for the tip and filed it away under “Utterly Useless Information.” If they think I am going to get close enough to a snake to be able to recognize pocket change, they have vastly underestimated the power of my phobia.

With my heart still throbbing in my ears, I made my way back to the beach, and boy! wasn’t I glad to see the Professor and his wife, and boy! wasn’t I interested in what they were doing. “So what are you up to? Collecting monkey poop! Fascinating!” And I stuck to them like glue until the boat returned and took us back to shore.

The Professor and his wife were staying at a hotel farther south, at Cape Toi. To my surprise, they invited me along, though how much of it was simply a sense of duty was hard to say. “You will like Cape Toi,” said his wife. “There is a nice view and a lighthouse, and there are wild horses there.”

The wild horses of Cape Toi are free-ranging ponies that have grown so tame they eat out of your hand. I remembered Mr. Migita’s parting advice (“Make sure you see the horses of Hokkaido!”) and it struck me as odd that he found the domestic animals of Japan’s far north exotic, while in his own backyard there were semiferal ponies. I suppose it has to do with the way that familiarity breeds myopia;
the people who live around Mount Fuji barely notice it any more. Distance has its own allure—this is what draws the traveller, magnetlike, toward the horizon, and the very fact that Hokkaido is at the other end of Japan from Kyushu must have captivated Mr. Migita.

I had never been to Cape Toi, and I was tempted. Maybe pitch my tent on the grassy highlands. But no, it would have involved too much backtracking. Cape Toi was halfway to Kanoya, and I think Mr. Migita would have been disappointed if I had shown up at his door again, my journey having been one from Cape Sata and then back to Cape Sata. This is the problem with destinations, they take over. They preclude a good deal of serendipity. They override everything. Far from being some free-flowing vagabond-type traveller, I was in fact being very linear. My route sliced Japan down the centre. It was almost a straight line. End to End. Cape to Cape. There was something very obsessive about it, but I didn’t have the courage to shake myself from my plans, and I said no to the Professor’s offer.