The Peace Correspondent (4 page)

In the evening, a restive air of excitement hangs over the town, with roving revelers getting into the festival spirits. A group of wandering minstrels sings “Sake is my Friend,” a long paean to the rice wine with much hand-clapping and jolly, red-faced drunkenness. Men in head-bands appear bearing straw torches the size of apprentice sumo wrestlers, like blazing, smoking battering rams. Reeling down the narrow streets, they pass liter boxes of iced sake to shopkeepers and bystanders to sip from.

Despite the sub-zero temperatures, 8,000 excited skiers and townsfolk jam the town square. From the press stands, where they have set aside a section for us, we look down to a floodlit, three-story tower of sticks and branches standing on a small, icy rise. Where it spreads out slightly at the top, dozens of the town's 42-year-old men are jammed together as though on a front row
balcony. Clad in hard hats and blue coveralls, they wave white Japanese-style paper lanterns, clap white-gloved hands and sing.

Several dozen 25-year-olds, the defenders, circle the base of the tower, while the attackers gather round a giant bonfire several hundred feet away.

When I try to slip away by myself, one of our guides, armed with his walkie-talkie, escorts me through the dense crowd to the public toilet where municipal workers squat on the ground swigging sake. Standing in the cubicle, I hear him hollering into his radio, “Ahhh, Marchant-o san …” The media gathered on the platform get a full report of my progress.

The festival is a fierce mock battle with bands of young men charging the tower with flaming torches. The defenders beat them off with kicks, punches and shoves, throwing the attackers down the hill, and thrashing at the flames with pine branches. The men atop sing, and chant, wave the lanterns and taunt the attackers, throwing down long bundles of sticks to give them more firewood. From back here, it appears vicious, with the attackers shoving flaming torches in the defenders' faces.

The crowd roars whenever the tower catches fire. Huge billows of smoke, cinders and sparks rise into the black night, and flames lick up around the men on the tower who appear to chant even more vigorously. The battle wages for hours until, when it appears that the men on the tower will be grilled like human yakitori, they exit down a ladder out back.

With the tower blazing like a steam locomotive's boiler, flames and cinders rising hundreds of feet in the air, our guides abruptly announce, “Let's go,” and we head back to the cars.

Forty minutes later, we arrive back at our hotel in nearby Iiyama. The itinerary I got weeks ago in Vancouver said “22:40 Transfer to your accommodation. Arrive at 11:20.” Tumbling out of the car, I spot the clock on the front of the hotel. It says 11:22.

Next morning, the foreign press all have lighter luggage, while Sarah's duffel bag looks suspiciously like a ripe pod bearing
three peas. We bow our last good-byes to her and the relieved prefecture officials, who frantically light up Hope cigarettes as soon as we turn to board the Tokyo train. It has been an educational and useful trip, we all agree.

At the brief Nagano stop, city emissaries meet us at the platform with more smiles, handshakes and bowing. And they graciously return my wayward Matsumoto ball.

MATSUO Basho, Japan's famous bard of the back roads, was delighted by Matsushima, a bay of hundreds of odd islets near the city of Sendai.

“Much praise had already been lavished upon the wonders of the islands of Matsushima,” the 16th-century itinerant poet wrote. “Yet if further praise is possible, I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan.”

The early travel writer and master of the haiku form of poetry traveled to northern Honshu Island when it was considered a wild, unexplored territory, a “far province beyond the roads.” His famous book The Narrow Road to the Deep North describes his two-and-a-half year trip in prose and poetry.

Sendai, 350 kilometers north of Tokyo, is now the hub of northern Japan. The Shinkansen bullet train reached it in 1981, and international flights began in 1990, with direct connections now to Seoul, Chengdu, Guam/Saipan, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Basho strapped on his straw sandals and walked to the north from Edo (now Tokyo). Taking an easier route, I hailed a cab to Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport and flew on Dragonair's new direct flight.

On the plane, over pre-dinner drinks, I learn something about the city from my seat mate who is returning home from a holiday in Hong Kong. “Sendai is the center of everything,” she says, not
meaning to be as immodest as she sounds.

This former “unexplored territory” has become a modern industrial, commercial and cultural center for Tohoku, Japan's northeastern district. It is a city of learning, with 10 universities and 10 junior colleges, high-tech industries, 30 labs and research institutions such as the 21st-Century Plaza Research Center. The Tohoku Intelligent Cosmos Plan aims to turn the region into an international high-tech center.

After dinner, she shows me photos of her home in the Izumi Park Town, an industrial and residential area on the outskirts of Sendai. It is Japan's version of a pleasant American suburbia, with spacious houses (rare in Japan), real yards, and a futuristic research center where outside companies rent time on computers and advanced lab equipment.

“With so many branch offices of major companies there, men are often transferred without their families. We call them ‘Sendai bachelors,'” the young lady says with a slight glint in her eye.

Feudal lord Masamune Date, the warrior who established Sendai as his castle town in 1600, was known as the One-Eyed Dragon, because he lost his right eye as a child. We agree that Dragonair and Dragoneye make a fortuitous sounding parallel, and toast the new flight.

However, this is not just a Japanese Silicon Valley, but a scenic area with historical sites, ancient temples, shrines and castles and famous local delicacies. Numerous hot springs and ski slopes are within easy reach of Sendai, a major outdoor recreation center.

The first impression when the plane doors swing open is that this is a northern country, the air as sharp and clear as the famous local sake -- the best in Japan, Sendai aficionados insist.

After the crowds of Hong Kong or Tokyo, Sendai is a spacious, uncrowded city with parks, broad streets and the scenic Hirose River winding through the center. “We call this Mori no Miyako, City of trees,” explains my friend. “Families of trees line the streets.”

Although Sendai means one thousand years, or longevity, the
city was destroyed in an air raid in 1945, so most buildings are new. And it is growing rapidly. The suburbs we drive through from the airport were rice paddies just 10 years ago. Despite its newness, there are beguiling traces of old Japan -- cherry trees growing along the riverbank, satellite dishes sprouting on tile roofs, traditional low houses among the modern office buildings.

The Sun Mall Ichiban-cho typifies modern, prosperous Japan, where East and West meet and mix. A life-size plastic Santa Claus -- with a slightly Asian face -- stands outside one store, American fast-food places such as Mister Donut, Baskin Robbins, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's feed the strollers, while American brand names such as Levi's and Lee clothe them. But a few place names in Western script and signs such as “I feel Coke” and “Let's sport” are the only concessions to a foreign language.

My stay coincides with the winter Pageant of Starlight, when half a million tiny bulbs glow like fireflies in the branches of the zelkovas (a kind of elm) on Aoba and Jozenji Avenues. The happy young people walking along the fantastic streets of lights give the evening a festive, college-town atmosphere.

Next day, I visit the forested park on Aobajo Hill in the center of the town, where Date built his castle in 1602. With the evergreen forests of giant pine and cedar, the morning chill in the air and ducks swimming in the pond, Sendai feels like a town on the Canadian Pacific Coast. But among trees growing tall and straight are some that are twisted and gnarled and topped, as in Japanese prints.

And at the local temple, devotees' wishes scribbled on pieces of paper and tied to tree branches resemble winter blossoms. A stone tower, like a chess castle hidden in the woods, and the famous mounted statue of Date, the one-eyed dragon, are reminders of the hilltop's military origins, but below, the river now twists through a contemporary city of a million people, instead of forest or rice paddies.

Down there among the 20th-century buildings, the
Shokeikaku restaurant is a remnant of an earlier Japan that Basho might have recognized. The Date clan's former summer home is a classic low Japanese structure with tile roofs, cedar beams, woven tatami mats, sliding paper partitions and doors and windows overlooking an outdoor stone garden. The menu is as traditional as the building, presenting local delicacies, excellent Sendai sake, and the area's fine rice, especially a sticky version called Hitomei Bore, “Love at first sight” rice.

“Sendai people like to eat and drink, and once we start, the party never ends,” a man sitting across the tatami mat assures me, over tiny cups of the local brew.

The distinctive Japanese feast starts with familiar sushi dipped in soy sauce mixed with wasabi (horse radish), but from there everything is new, and mostly unrecognizable. A dozen dishes of all shapes are spread before us on the low table, with pickles, vegetables, including a bright green leaf in batter, some fish products and rice with a fine powder sprinkled over it. It is dried, crushed plum leaf, my lunch companion explains.

Now into our sake cups, we talk about the city's quirks. “Lord Date was a stylish man, a dandy, so there are many dandies in Sendai,” he boasts. In winter they have a naked festival. “Naked men and half-naked women pay homage to a shrine.”

Japan's tallest Buddha statue, 30 meters high, a female incarnation (like the Chinese Kwan Yin? I wonder), stands on a hill near the city center. “Inside are 108 small Buddha statues,” my companion says. “She holds a rice wine bottle in her hand, blessing the harvest and the pleasures of alcohol. Kampei (cheers).”

Skiing is a popular winter sport in Northern Japan, and special buses take skiers directly from the city to places such as Zao Mountain, where visitors can rent equipment. But with limited time, I can only see the nearest slopes, the Spring Valley (spring, as in stream) on the outskirts of Sendai. Because it is warmer than other mountains, they use snow-making machines on these runs, but the dryness creates the famous powder snow so beloved by skiers.

However, part way up the hill, icy patches stop the bus from going further without tire chains. So the passengers get out, have a snowball fight, then hurry into a well-equipped, spacious ski lodge for tins of hot coffee from a vending machine and look out at the city spread out just below in the fading afternoon sunlight.

From the mountain, I turn to the sea, to see Matsushima, just 20 kilometers from Sendai and accessible by bus or fast train. The methodical Japanese rate this area that so enthralled Basho as one of the country's three most beautiful places. On an afternoon trip, I find it both changed, and the same, as the poet saw it. Souvenir shops along the waterfront sell local food delicacies, attractive wooden Kokeshi dolls, lacquerware and postcards and books advertising the “Three noted views of Matsushima.”

It is raining when I arrive, so I slip into a traditional shop with great iron kettles hanging over beds of charcoal for a cup of tea and some fish cake. This is old, unchanged Japan. Back in the street, I happen on a cartoon character statue outside a store: Basho in his trademark straw sandals and turtle-shell shaped hat.

Further on, I encounter more ancient Japan, where a small vermilion bridge leads to Godaido, a traditional Buddhist shrine the size of a summer cottage. It is a classic scene, the natural weathered wood building surrounded by gnarled trees, standing exposed out on the tiny island. Then the sun breaks out of the clouds, illuminating one of Matsushima's most photographed sites in a pale winter light.