The Peace Correspondent (2 page)

IT was old Nemoto-san's lyrical reminiscences that induced me to go north. We were sitting at one of the cramped yakitori stands that line an alley under the railway track in Ginza, Tokyo's nightlife district, eating skewers of barbecued chicken, when the subject of onsens, the hot mineral springs, came up.

“Ah,” my friend sighed, recalling a scene from long ago, “It was so beautiful in that ofuro, men and women bathing together.” We poured more sake into our tiny cups and, following proper etiquette, downed it in one gulp.

Nemoto-san continued, his eyes clouding at the memory, “It was like a dream. Everything looked soft through the steam rising from the bath water.

“And then,” the old man became agitated, the light from the paper lanterns overhead glinting from his gold fillings, casting a reddish sheen on his pearl grey hair, “and then a class of young schoolgirls came through the rock garden, into the ofuro. They were so young and soft, so round through the mist.” Lost in the
revery of that treasured moment, Nemoto-san fell silent, oblivious to the bullet train overhead, rumbling south to Osaka.

Early next morning, I squeeze onto the crowded monorail at Hamamatsucho station with thousands of sarari (salary) workers, and arrive at Haneda airport in time for the first Japan Airlines flight to Hokkaido, Japan's northern island. Before noon, we land at Chitose, where broad farmlands and distant, snowcapped mountains give a spacious feel atypical of this country. The Japanese consider the lightly populated northern island, with its rugged mountains, volcanoes, forests and lakes, its “Wild West.” Short on temples, shrines and castles (which weary tourists may find a blessing), Hokkaido offers instead spectacular scenery and outdoor sports. And hot springs.

Sapporo, the island capital 41 kilometers south of the airport, is an oddity among Japanese cities. Wide streets set at right angles on the “American plan” make it easy to find an address - a rare luxury in the chaotic maze of streets elsewhere in Japan. So I strike out without a guide to see the city of Asia's first Winter Olympics (1972), famed for its snow festival with fantastic ice sculpture and its beer.

A hilltop observation platform 40 minutes by bus overlooks the neat city and the vast farmlands of the Ishikari Plain. Here stands a statue of my favorite Hokkaido character, Dr. William S. Clark, his right arm flung boldly outward. Dr. Clark came to Hokkaido from the U.S. in 1876 as colonization minister, established the Sapporo Agricultural College and left a deep Christian influence upon his students. His parting words, inscribed on the statue, were: “Boys, be ambitious.”

The Botanical Gardens near the center of town reminds us that Hokkaido is, both physically and culturally, more a northern than an eastern area, with familiar elm, fir and spruce trees. Two museums, in decidedly Western-style buildings, house exhibits that could almost come from Canada's north country, or Alaska: stuffed bears, seals, wolves and other animals; Ainu artifacts similar to those of Eskimos, such as dogsleds, dugout canoes,
harpoons, skis, mukluks; and native costumes.

Back in the streets, I find yet another similarity to North America's Wild West. Tanuki Koji (Badger Alley) is a long, enclosed shopping arcade with restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. In one, a pseudo-Ainu in long hair and native jacket carves a bear. And all along the street, shops peddle Hokkaido-nalia: stained wooden carvings of bears with oversized fish in their mouths, or clutching a Suntory whiskey bottle; endless shelves of Ainu artifacts; wall plaques, native costume dolls, doorway curtains, key chains, purses, Hokkaido maps on tea towels; and pictures of the famous Sapporo Tower, cheap jewelry and handicrafts. There is hemp junk, wood junk and stoneware junk, all reminiscent of the worst kind of fake Indian souvenirs sold in American West resort areas, proof of the universal poor taste of tourists.

There is nothing fake, though, about the Sapporo Brewery, the oldest in Japan, where young guides in long plaid skirts, cowboy hats and black Sapporo beer T-shirts conducted tours daily. Our guide points out the significant fact that Sapporo is on the same latitude as Munich and Milwaukee, but refuses to sell me a T-shirt which, she insists, is a uniform and not a souvenir.

The brewery's wood-beamed, red-brick beer hall, which has been designed for serious eating and drinking, offers one of the best bargains in Japan. It is an almost irresistible invitation to gluttony: all the beer you can drink and all the Jingsukan you can eat for two hours for about $12. (Jingsukan is a Hokkaido specialty of mutton and a little cabbage, cooked on a grill at the table, Korean style).

My own modest appetite can not do justice to this offering, so I take instead a small draft beer for about $2, which seems a little steep for wellhead prices. Normally, Japanese and Chinese do not like mutton (they say it stinks), but three Japanese businessmen at the next table have risen to the challenge with gusto. They are into their second hour, still going strong, with mutton-splattered paper bibs, ties loosened, faces lobster red. They wipe the sweat from their faces, call for more massive mugs of beer, and
gorge on plate after plate of meat. The whole busy, cavernous room reeks of mutton grease, and I leave smelling like a New Zealand barbecue chef.

Later, I rest in Odori Park, the wide boulevard intersecting the city, noting more “Western” influence in the form of a horse with a Calgary-style chuck wagon waiting for tourists. I am distracted by a rushing sound that brings to mind a verse by the great 17th-century Japanese traveling poet, Basho:

Bitten by fleas and lice,

I slept in a bed,

A horse urinating all the time

Close to my pillow.

Basho Matsuo traveled on foot or horse throughout medieval Japan, writing of his experiences and of his love of nature using the strict, 17-syllable haiku form. His journeys are recorded in prose and verse accounts such as The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel and The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton.

It is an evening for poetry. Another sound reminds me of another poem an American Zen friend (appropriately named Abbot) wrote back in Tokyo:

Summer night,

Sitting,

Zzzzzzzzz,

Giving blood.

It is time to move on.

Sapporo's busy, neon-lit wonderland of 3,000 bars, cabarets, restaurants, snack shops and gaming houses, while perhaps pale compared with Ginza and Shinjuku, out-dazzles anything this side of the Pacific. My finances dictate that my appreciation of the nightlife leans toward the voyeuristic, but after a few hours of just looking, my journalistic code of ethics and curiosity demand that I experience as well.

Amidst the jumble of signs, I spot the one bit of Japanese script I know, the kata-kana for beer. It is 300 yen, almost $2. (I
also know the sign for “big”, but this does not precede the beer symbol here.) At the bottom of the steps, a wood and paper door leads to a traditional restaurant, while a Naugahyde door opens into a dark bar. Inside, where student types sit and listen to music, a dimply schoolgirlish barmaid serves me a small beer and a saucer of what appear to be jellied fish intestines.

The saucer is untouched when I call for the bill and produce 300 yen. The smiling lady behind the bar rings up 850 yen on the cash register -- for a mini-beer and a plate of fish guts I didn't touch. There is some mistake here, and I made it: The price list in the street refers to the restaurant.

I sulk back to my hotel room to watch television. On one channel, I catch the Japanese women's wrestling championship bout, and cheer up while a lady as big and ugly as a Hokkaido bear slams into submission a pretty, delicate girl who resembles my barmaid. On another channel, two disco ladies dance and sing in perfect unison to the tune In the Navy (all in Japanese, except for a chorus of One, Two, Three, sung in English).

But I am not here for the beer or even the striking mountain scenery we pass next morning as the bus winds up through the forests. We stop to view the perfect cone of a far off volcano, as perfect, to my eyes, as Fujisan, though not as sacred to the Japanese.

Toyako Onsen, on the shores of Lake Toya, is considered one of the finest hot spring resorts in Japan, partly because of its striking setting. But also, the official guidebook says, because “The spa has colorless, weak common-salt springs and sulfated common-salt springs, with temperatures ranging from 55 to 60 C. The springs are said to be efficacious against rheumatism, nervous diseases and abrasions, while the spring water taken internally is good for chronic stomach catarrh, hyperacidity of the gastric juices and constipation from atonic dyspepsia.” Have I stumbled into a hypochondriacs' haven?

My particular problem is not chronicled here, but I retire to my lakefront room in the Hotel Manseikaku to wait for the baths
to open. Distracted by the sound of music outside my window, I put aside my Japanese novel and walk out to the balcony.

My heart leaps. There, below me, an entire high school girls' band is pumping out the best of Souza. They are demurely dressed in traditional uniform of white blouses, black, calf-length skirts, black shoes, black bangs and baby fat. It is two hours before the hotel bath reopens.

Cognizant of the punctilio of the ofuro, I don the hotel's white-and-indigo striped yukata (light, indoor kimono) and, miniature towel in hand, stride eagerly through the lobby. My swagger is carefully patterned from the samurai movies: shuffling along, slightly sway-backed, belt pulled down almost to crotch level, kimono pushing out slightly to accentuate the manly paunch, feet slopping carelessly along the floor in green hotel slippers. I am a samurai, returning from battle for a hot, restive soak in the curative waters.

The lobby this evening is full of young Japanese men, all attired in the same way, swaggering along in twos and threes. Meek, clerk-like creatures in Western business suits, they suddenly change their entire demeanor in native costume. We are the 47 Ronin, the leaderless samurai from the classic tale Chushingura, gathered to plot revenge for our disgraced feudal lord, then to commit suicide.

The first hint that all may not be as hoped for comes as I strut down the stairs: there are separate entrances to the bath. But years of dealing with the idiocy of Canadian liquor laws tell me that this is the same as the separate Men's and Ladies and Escorts' entrances to beer parlors, leading to one big communal pleasure room.

It is not. The Hotel Manseikaku ofuro is a substantial tiled room with three separate kiddie-pool-sized baths and a glass wall overlooking a garden of miniature pines and jagged rocks. It is also decidedly segregated. Along the wall opposite the window facing the lake, naked men squat on low, plastic stools before hot and cold water taps, shaving, washing, shampooing and
rinsing. Then, with great sighs and groans of satisfaction, they immerse themselves to the neck in the hot water.

An hour later, a crowd of exuberant hoydens, their firm bodies tightly wrapped in yukata, wet black hair hanging in strings above lively brown eyes, gambol about the games room outside the ofuro. Chattering, laughing and playing electronic Star Wars games, they do not even notice the streaming pink body of a thwarted Humbert Humbert (of Lolita fame) stalking through their midst, grumbling about the loss of Japanese customs in the hotel.

Back again in mufti, I wander the few streets of the town, peering into soba (noodle) stalls, poking among the mementos. A life-size wooden carving of a urinating bear forms an ursine fountain at the entrance of a souvenir shop. On a side street, crude paintings touting a strip show portray naked women with enormous mammaries, putting to rest that misguided notion about breast worship being singularly American.

Middle-aged Japanese couples (I am the only gaijin, or foreigner, in town), now in heavy brown outdoor kimono, clatter along on wooden geta (clogs). It is the sound I once heard from my paper-walled apartment in Meidaemai, in Tokyo, lying awake on the tatami floors. The little house was across the street from the neighborhood public bath, and every evening the noodle cooks, just finishing their shifts, would clop-clop down the road (dragging their feet for maximum effect) for their baths. On cold winter nights, I would see them leaving the bath, steam rising from their reddened bodies as they tottered home in high spirits.

Reluctant to repeat my performance of the previous night with the $5 beer, I buy a cup of sake from a dispensing machine in the street and heat it under the hot water tap in my sink. Then I return to the novel that Nemoto-san has given me for this journey: Junichiro Tanizaki's classic Diary of a Mad Old Man. It is the story of an elderly gentleman's obsession with his young daughter-in-law, a sort of Japanese Lolita. I read:

“Today, you can kiss me.” The shower stopped. A leg appeared between the curtains.

“Nothing above the knee…” Then she added: “Today, I'll let you use your tongue, too.”

Noborogetsu Spa, the most famous in the country, sits 200 meters up in the mountains. Nestled in a large ravine of the Kasurisambetsu River, walled in by timbered mountains, the spa is said to contain 11 springs of various kinds, with temperatures ranging from 45 to 93 C. My guidebook assures me it is one of the few remaining mixed bathing places in Japan.

A half-kilometer from my hotel, the Takimoto, the Jigakundani (Valley of Hell) festers and bubbles in the miasma of a backed-up toilet. Fierce red devil statues guarding the road add to the impression of entering a hell, which on this breezy day attracts a number of visitors. In the floor of the valley, honeymooning couples pose amid the bubbling, steamy, dirty, stinking sulfur pools. Wind whips sand from the cliffs, and between the sulfur steam and dust gritting in my eyes, I feel like I need a bath.

The Takimoto ofuro is a small, unimpressive affair, so after a perfunctory soak, I cross the street to its sister establishment, the Daichi (or big number one) Takimoto. True to its name, this has the largest bath in the country, some 40 tubs and pools and 10 different kinds of water so bathers can select that which is best for what ails them.