sorry

Okay, yeah, that took me entirely too long. The thing stretched out to twenty-seven single spaced pages in Microsoft Word, and for what? A few notes on a vacation? A million times during the whole thing I wondered: "the longest single blog entry to date, and it's just an account of a five day trip, without much of an purpose

This was basically me taking a crack at travel writing, trying myself against Alan Booth's "The Roads to Sata" and Will Ferguson's "Hokkaido Highway Blues", which are two of my favorite books, not just about modern Japan, but about life and loneliness. It was me tackling that whole form of travel writing, the little figure wandering through huge landscapes, hoping a pattern or something will fall out of it. I can't hold it up against any serious writing, but when I look at the stuff I wrote last year I can't help but think it was better than that stuff.

The whole thing could definitely use some editing and I should probably prune it down, but the idea was to just get in finished. So there it is, about three months after the fact, still pockmarked with weird grammar and typos. I'll try to be more brief from here on out.
Promise. Thanks for sticking through this.

-j

a golden week (VI.)

VI.

Nagano was overflowing, so I decided to give up on mountains and just find a place where there weren’t so many damned people. I hadn’t come all the way out here just to hang out with the same jokers that sweated and farted up my morning train. I’d had enough of Tokyo people.

I spent the next two days with Hiroshi. Hiroshi had come from Tokyo, and he looked it. He wore his clothes carefully, his backpack was covered in elaborate straps. He born in Aomori, a cold, forbidding, mumbling prefecture, famous for apples. I can do a pretty good imitation of an Aomori accent by speaking standard TV Japanese while eating a bowl of oatmeal. Brings down the house everytime, even in Aomori.. Aomori is kind of like the Idaho of Japan, the nerd so thoroughly and unashamedly himself that he’s actually kind of cool. But not really. And Aomori has apples, not potatoes.

So Hiroshi from Idaho walked up while I was squinting at a large board with a map printed on it. But we weren’t in Idah… Aomori, we were in Naoetsu, on the north coast of Japan, winds from China rattling the shutters.

I learned a few things about Hiroshi. 1) He was a university student in Tokyo, and he looked normal enough. 2) He’d never been here before either, was traveling for Golden Week. 3) Yeah, he liked to travel, he’d done two weeks in the states by himself, had been to see the Grand Canyon. 4) He’d arrived at the Grand Canyon without enough money for lodging, so he decided to sleep outside, the check-in clerk pointing him to the warmest group of rocks in the area. 5) The first night he did this he was bitterly cold and the second night a pack of coyotes smelled the beef jerky he was eating for dinner, so danced and screamed til the early morning hours to keep them at bay. 6) He had once left his disposable contacts on, day and night, for two months. "Don’t ever try that," he told me seriously. "You know you can damage your eyes that way?"

I met Hiroshi ten minutes after arriving in Naoetsu, and we quickly bonded over our shared lack of common sense. My reasons for getting off here were about as carefully considered as my desire to go to Kamikochi because of frog-sprites and cave baths: the three characters in Nao-e-tsu all had a beautiful symmetry, each one a series of strokes balanced on a vertical axis, like branches off a pine tree. It was also ten o’clock at night and the very end of the line. Right here the train line running north bumped into the Japan Sea, splitting into an east-west line than hugged the coast.

If Kamikochi was the roof of Japan, this felt like the back-door. Japan’s population tends to run along the Pacific coast, facing out into the world’s largest ocean. Somehow this little sea that divides Japan from Asia always looks darker and colder than the vastness of the Pacific. Bitter winds blow across this ocean from Asia, and sixty years ago Japan made a choice and turned their back on them, eyes turned across the ocean to America. More than once I have been told in all seriousness that “Japan is not an Asian country.” This seems to me like the Minnesotan living in New York, swallowing their accent and hiding their high school yearbook. This cold northern sea is the gap between what they were and what they want to be, it faces towards everything the country would rather not think about. Out across the Pacific anything seems possible, out here everything is wrapped in bad memories and old grudges.

I didn’t see much of Naoetsu, it was a rows of dark shuttered shops that dissolved into the full inky blackness of the ocean. I hadn’t expected so… little. One side of the station was a small pool of yellow light with two or three hotels with worried lobbies and shocking prices. The other side was black. Hiroshi approached me as I stood squinting at a public map of the area, a graph of little gray squares. “Where are you staying tonight?” he asked with a refreshing directness. I said the hotels were out of my range, so I was going to check out the green blotches on the map and see if I could find a patch of ground for a sleeping bag. He said his plans hadn’t gone farther than finding a relatively flat bench. We shook hands, spent thirty minutes wandering Naoetsu, and promptly decided to leave.

Hiroshi and I didn’t have much in common besides our aimlessness and our lack of planning. We took the last train to an hour or so down the coast, found a city only marginally brighter, found that every hotel in our budget had been fully booked months in advance, got beers at an all night bar, talked life stuff, country differences, regretted not packing warm enough clothes. There were at least a dozen people hunched in corners around the station, heads resting on duffel bags and briefcases, Golden Week travelers who had missed trains and been stranded here as well. Our conversation didn’t seem to have enough staying power to keep us up all not, so we found our own corners and joined them. And then the monsters came out.

I have never heard voices like this. These were voices warped, scraping, furious, full of bile, the voices of animals mad with pain, cartoon villains filtered through bad acid and paranoia the screams of a mind gnawing on itself. As the voices grew closer I could begin to distinguish one from the other. One had the shrieking quality of nails and blackboards, tearing sheet metal, cats rutting and fighting, high, shrieking. One more (were there two?) was a broken speaker, distorted bass amp shaking a box of nails, goats dying, every rut and pothole in his throat shattering syllables. Hiroshi and I looked at each other. “What in the hell is that?”

That was a shuffling shadow moving through the dark corners barking at coffee cans and people huddled against the walls. A stumbly shadow of a man and trailing it was a shrieking little harpy: ropy gray hair, tiny little body. “What are they saying?” I asked Hiroshi. The rhythms were Japanese, but the syllables poured out as pure sounds. “I have no idea. But it has to be Japanese, right?” The shadow heard us speaking and moved over to crouch in front of Hiroshi. It crouched against the light, a black outline, turned its head straight towards Hiroshi, breathed in and spit out a howl that seemed to last for hours. Hiroshi took the standard Japanese response to the insane or the annoying: blank indifference. The shadow got up after the roar and dragged itself outside onto the pavement, the avian little witch twittering around him, voice of broken bottles. I have never heard anything so soaked in terror, have never heard anything so desperate.

* * *

The morning came, we left on the first train. The night before I hadn’t felt fear so much as… awe. Awe at the human animal; broken, half-finished creature, grasping at the apples swaying in his mind, stumbling on the stones at his feet. Awe at the weird binding of men and women, of the things that burst out of their couplings. A lone maniac is a burst of flame in the darkness, but a couple is an infinite amplification, a circuit of emotions, a positive feedback loop.

I don’t know what they were but I know what they felt like: old and evil ghosts, wailing helplessly out of the past. They were just ghosts: their violence was all gurgling cartoon voices, their hands would pass right through us. But they could scream. Christ, they could scream,. These were not the polite shuffling creatures from the cities, the downsized and the despairing men and women building cardboard huts under bridges, curling out of sight. These were spirits from the fields and the mountains scratching on this new concrete world in a blind terror.

I know, it was just a poor old couple from the country, weird on age and time and liquor, but those voices brushed on something huge.

Epilogue:

Hiroshi and I ended up in Kanazawa, which is the loveliest city in all of Japan, but maybe that’s just me. It’s the Japan I wished for before I arrived, a clean little city between the sea and the mountains, wandering little streets of wooden houses, hunchbacked old women with twinkly faces thronging the fish market, school children screaming and pointing at white people. Everything you could want in a Japanese city. It is also one of the few cities in the country that seriously values its architecture, preserving the old stately town houses with their tile roofs and stark little gardens, preserving the stone Prussian government buildings from the 19^th century, and lining its downtown with boutiques of glass. We arrived just as the sun was sprinkling onto the mountains, walked through the temples and parks terraced along the hill. In late morning we walked down to the center of the city where a large glass circle sat in the middle of a park like a coin dropped in the grass. It was Kanazawa’s 21^st Century Art Museum, and today it was open free to the public, kids tumbling around ear trumpet lawn sculptures, old men tapping canes on benches, a DJ in a goatee and a cap spinning music, young and beautiful people dancing. Downtown everything was on sale, and I found a pair of jeans for two dollars. That night we found a rowdy little place with local sake, local food, and local people getting thoroughly toasted. The local specialty: Transparent tadpole-size fish swimming frantically in a bowl of chilled soup broth. You eat them alive, crushing the wriggling bodies between your teeth. They didn’t taste like anything, so I guess that it’s all about the texture, frantic tails tickling gums, the sadistic crunching away of those little slivers of life, breathing in their last, frantic moments. A taste of evil in Japan’s golden city.

a golden week V.

V.

Humans recreating in the great outdoors can be divided into two main types: Waddlers and Gearheads. I formulated this theory on the first day of Golden Week, when I passed a big enough chunk of humanity to get a pretty decent estimate. The quiet, carefully tended trails I had hiked along the day before were now simply overflowing with people desperate for nature, vacation, relaxation. Clans of two or three tubby generations drifted up the trail while smartly attired alpinists fumed behind them. People of every age were spilling around all over the place, tripping on rock, roots, ice and each other. Mostly each other. The last time I had seen this many people cramming through small spaces was… two days before, on my rush hour train out from Tokyo. Now they were all in their weekend attire, suited up and ready for some fun! What kind of fun depended on whether you were a Waddler or a Gearhead.

For the Waddlers, fun was pretty simple: scoop the kids into the car, head for the mountains, concentrate on doing nothing for a few days. Fun is the reverse image of work: it is sauntering along a gently sloped mountain trail in soft clothing, relatives scampering all around you. You alternately sip the crisp clean mountain air and the crisp clean beer you brought along for the morning stroll. The stream is sparkling, your children are screaming, your mom is still spry enough to keep up with everyone, the heaviest matter on your mind is lunch. You lazily observe your first born son using all his ten year old arm strength to thwack a skinny little branch against the snowdrifts. You’ve finished the can of beer and wonder whether to carry it all the way up the trail or to toss it discreetly behind an evergreen for a ranger to pick up later. But with all these people around… maybe just wait for a waste bin ten minutes up.

Gearheads know that fun isn’t quite that simple. Fun is elusive, it has to be tracked, spotted, wrestled to the ground. At any rate, fun is out there, maybe up somewhere where the air is thin and the trails prone to falling away beneath your feet, so best to armor yourself appropriately and efficiently. Gearheads are equipped for maximum efficiency: bags packed with synthetic lightweight apparel, rubber hoses snaking out of their backpacks to deposit water directly to their mouths, packs, gators and baseball caps helpfully emblazoned with brand logos to shave off seconds of valuable conversation time. Don’t want to spend all day chit-chatting about pack straps and cubic centimeters of stuff sacks. Of course not, we’re here to enjoy the mountains!

Waddlers drape their bodies in shapeless bags of soft, invitingly rippable cotton, they travel in family based packs or tour groups, matching scarfs wrapped around their necks for easy identification.

Gearheads travel solo or in small units of two or three, a few college buddies, a newly married couple,

You think I’m taking this a bit far, don’t you? Sprucing up the story, smooshing hundreds of lovely individuals into caricatures that at best describe their taste in clothes. But within my first five minutes on the trail this idea popped into my head, and it kept on snowballing the more people I passed. As a firm believer in the scientific method I submitted my theory to rigorous testing, silently judging every person I walked by. Waddler, waddler, waddler, GEARHEAD! Waddler, oh, now there. is. a. Waddler. At least he’s considerate enough to ash his cigarette in his used beer can. And a Gearhead…

Out of a random sampling of what I am estimating to be several hundred people (I told you it was crowded), I only found two specimens that refused categorization. One was a family of five Gearheads that had walked out of a television commercial, the photogenic father stooping to explain a bit of geology to his eager young progeny, a gurgling little blob strapped to his back, young healthy wife beaming at all of them. The other was a man in his early thirties with a serene expression, a walking staff and a bell clanging from the back of his rucksack to let the bears know he was coming. He was the only serious looking hiker I spotted whose equipment looked seriously used, but had clearly been well cared for: pants carefully patched, Italian leather hiking boots polished smartly. Thinking back on it there wasn’t a single logo on him. He probably felt terrible.

At first I thought you could explain away the difference by money or jobs, but from the few people I talked to it didn’t come out that clearly. The Gearheads were all over the place: a brisk and tidy executive at Goldman Sachs, a floor worker at an auto-parts factory, a dentist. The Waddlers I met included a middling looking office worker and his sour looking family, a bank teller with two plump and rosy little girls, and a construction worker with hair died the color of golden retriever with his tanned young wife. They insisted on giving me a 10 am slug from their flask. We compromised at a dainty little sip.

The Gearheads seemed to be more economically diverse than I had imagined, while the Waddlers only varied from navy to sky blue collars. But it seems to me that any Waddler with the cash would buy their way out of the crowd, find a nice secluded villa in a vallery somewhere: deep cushioned sofas, a fridge stocked with beer, massive living room windows that frame a dramatic line of mountains, peaks leaping up and down like a cardiogram.

For a good two hours I was the only person I saw walking down from the mountains, pressing against the great surge heading back into them. I spent the time honing my powers of stereotyping and social sciencing until I found the sign that pointed me the way I needed to go.

The night before I’d stayed up with a few folks at the Tokusawa Lodge, planning a route for someone with ambitions of climbing mountains and stupid enough to have left his boots at home. I heard all about the valley getting flooded with people and decided to leave it behind me, so we settled on a slender little route that took me over some of the milder little mountains to the south, out of the valley and right onto the road I’d come come in on.

Turned out the most dangerous thing about the hike were the mud patches. I didn’t see a soul the whole time I was there, just a faint little trail winding through the evergreens, all manner of birds tweeting and whooping at full throttle, all of them tipsy on the brisk spring air, screeching out their personal ads. It’s fucking spring! This is my tree! This is one virile male with plumage like you’ve never seen! Virile male virile male virile maaaaale!

I broke a sweat clambering up the incline at a swift pace; after two hours of sludgy traffic I was anxious to test my horsepower on the open road, and scrambling up one little slope I lost traction and dropped four feet down the trail, a mud patch slurping my right pants. On the way down I passed a stream and stripped to my undies for two minutes to wash off the muck that had started to dry on them. My legs were getting goosebumps in the mountain air, and when I slipped the slacks back on the icy right leg clung to me like a poltergeist. Gehhhh. Luckily, I am half gearhead, and my cheap looking slacks were made from some synthetic materials that dry unnaturally fast, and don’t need any more prompting than body heat. (I had bought them in a clearance sale six years before at a department store in Kyoto, the clerk’s face lighting up when he saw my pink Caucasian face. “I am…” he labored, “Bon Jovi fan! Bon Jovi!” That’s all he felt moved to say, and once he’d gotten it off his chest he very calmly gave me change for the slacks.)

After an hour or so of traipsing around the woods by myself, drinking up the space like the Takasaki drunks from the night before, I burst back into civilization. Civilization was a two lane strip of highway with holiday traffic of cars, vans and tour buses whizzing in both directions at impressive speeds. Most of them seemed to be carrying pop eyed faces of people gawking at a skinny white man who had popped out into a stretch of road that was at least forty or fifty kilometers near to anything you could call a town. I sucked in my courage and stuck out my thumb.

Hitchhiking is a lost art, something that Americans probably associate more with serial killers than the freedom of the open road. In the late 1970’s the bodies of dozens of hitchhikers were found mutilated by the side of the road. By the time the police and the media had the Freeway Killer case sorted out it they were left with not one, not two, but three Freeway Killers who had all operated independently of each other, unaware that anybody else shared their hobby of picking up perfect strangers and then savaging their bodies until their souls simply gave up and left. Not one, not two, but three. Based on pure anecdotal evidence I’m guessing hitchhiking somewhat survived through the 1970’s, carried on by generations that had grown up with it, but by the time I came along they were cranking out instructional videos that taught kids “The Honk.” The idea behind “The Honk” is that kids screaming for help sounds a lot like kids crying for ice cream or playing tag, and a much better way to get people’s attention is to press your hands to your stomach and emit a firm, confident HOOOOOOOONK. My third grade friends and I decided we would rather be remembered as that poor little brutally murdered child than as the boy who honked to live.

I could hardly believe the stories when I came to Japan. Friends who had traveled the breadth of the archipelago without settling for a single train, the guy who hitchhiked to work almost every single day, even hitchhiking contests ; packs of foreigners racing from A to B on waves trucks, sedans and two-doors. Possibly my all time favorite book on modern Japan is “Hokkaido Highway Blues”, Will Ferguson’s rippingly funny account of his three month journey along the full length of Japan totally on the strength of his thumbs. I had stumbled upon a lovely little byproduct of Japan’s infatuation with all things Western: free rides anywhere on the archipelago! And no serial killers! The only charge of admission was a face that did not look noticeably Asian –Will Ferguson’s advice to Asian-American hitchhikers: write your destination sign in English— and a friendly, non-threatening demeanor. More advice from Will Ferguson: when hitching give a shy, apologetic smile, as if you would never be doing something like this under normal circumstances.

This landed me a ride within minutes. I had walked a bit down the road to a nice long stretch with a decent shoulder where the cars would have plenty of time to see me, decide what to do, and have enough space to pull over. The blue Subaru station wagon stopped about fifty yards up the road in a sputter of dust, and I trotted up to meet my serial killers.

They were Hiro and Toshi, two local outdoor bums vaguely in their late 20’s, both with smooth coffee skin and ponytails. We got going once we worked out where I was going and what language we were going to speak in (they attempted to say absolutely everything in a weirdly broken English they’d picked up from compulsory high school classes and hanging out with surfer dudes in Australia.) They were anxious to get at some of the fresh fields of spring snow: you could hike right up to a virgin slope and ski down to the bottom, provided you were willing to carry up your skis with you. They were.

Toshi had just started on his hitchhiking in Australia story when we arrived. We did a screeching halt, scattered dust and pebbles, got a few horn blasts from cars swerving around us. I piled out and Hiro and Toshi disappeared up into the highland valley, dissolving with all the other gearheads. I don’t know if it really counted as hitchhiking, since I was in and out in ten minutes. There was no question of walking: every inch of the road had been scraped, carved or blasted out of the cliffs, I felt a little selfish asking for a sidewalk too.

I had been dropped off by a shack that was delicately perched between a fifty foot gorge and the black gaping mouth of a tunnel boring straight through the base of a mountain. This was the only paved road up to Kamikochi, the highland valley I had just hiked down from. Right on this narrow little strip between the mountains and the river gorge a bridge, a tunnel and two skinny mountain highways smooshed into each other. There were two men with buttoned blue uniforms and orange cone sticks who checked traffic for the proper stickers: only authorized vehicles could drive up to the roof of Japan. I wouldn’t want just anybody driving around on my roof either.

I could have stood there all day looking at this weird little house that looked like it was trying to gather up courage to jump into the gorge, but given I had a meager three feet between the door and the traffic I had to scurry inside. The whole place was probably the size of your living room, but they managed to fit quite a bit inside. There was a functional little kitchen, a heavy wooden table for eight or ten people depending on how tiny they happened to be, and shelves positively dripping with souvenirs. Even here, at the ends of the earth, there were five people on benches round the table, sipping tea and ogling all the stuff to buy. A little run off from the humanity that was slowly flooding the valley in polo shirts and North Face sportswear. Rats, I thought I would be the only one here for the cave bath.

A hurried man with a baseball cap and rough dark skin plopped me down at the big wooden monster in the middle of the room that ate up space and conversation. He hurried back to the little kitchen nook and started to dice spring onions, then remembered me again and hurried out to pour a cup of brown tea from the hot thermos. “Take as many as you want.”

Traveling as a frame of mind is all very nice, you open yourself to the Oz-ness of the world, your notebook fills up with notes and sketches, you take too many photographs, you try to make them good enough not to bore everyone afterwards. But I suppose you also need things to push you along, little details to get you out the door. I’ve read the books, I know the score. I’ve got my hand straight in the air, Life Lessons 101 is in session, and the teacher is looking for someone to call on. It isn’t the destination, it’s the journey! I had to choose a few little markers to aim for. So the cave bath it was.

A cave folded into the walls of a sixty foot gorge like a forgotten jeans pocket, walls dripping with minerals, water gurgling red with iron deposits. I admit it, I’d come out to Nagano for a bath. Are you surprised that I was kind of disappointed? I was. I mean, everything was there. A wooden Bilbo Baggins kind of door in the cliffs, the little wooden changing room, mats of dried reeds hanging for curtains, you could peek out between them to see the river crashing around fifty feet below, then slip your gangly little body deeper into the cave, into the steaming crimson bath that tastes like blood.

It sounds awesome when I write it down. It’s impossible to make it sound bad, the natural hot spring deep in the craggy mountains. It makes a great story, you can sit there and think: adventure! But you know, it was just a bath. I kept on wanting to turn up the temperature, give the walls a kick and let out a little more geothermal energy. I was like the freshman virgin with their hand up in English class. Well… I think what Lawrence is trying to tell us is that sex is like death.

So let me tell you what really hit me. I sauntered back to the little hut, gave the owner the key and paid for my thirty minutes of cave bath. The couple behind me in line sported the most incredible Osaka accents: a forty-ish man with the clothes and the posture of money, sunglasses on inside and out, a hard looking woman in her late twenties who did enough talking for both of them. They walked off to their bath, towels slung across shoulders, and I was left with my pack, the little man scurrying with the dishes, the massive wooden table, the walls of dusty souvenirs. I was anxious to get on and try the hitchhiking again, but I was afraid that another Hiro and Toshi would try a sixty-to-zero maneuver, cars screaming and flying into gorges. So the frantic little man in the baseball cap looked up bus times for me and then poured me another cup of tea. It was just me and him now, the little guy scrubbing pots and me just sipping tea. “Umm… do you need any help?” I asked. Hell, I always feel weird just sitting around when the host is fussing over you. Even if you’re paying him. Even if you don’t know his name.

He looked up. “Are you serious?” Nodded yes. “I’m almost done, really.” But I’d already made the offer, so…

He had pretty much finished up, but I scrubbed up a few noodle plates and wipe out a few tea cups. He’d shrugged his agreement and here we were, elbow to elbow, scrubbing pots and watching each other silently out of the corner of our eyes.. Just after I’d started one of the traffic guards came in from the road, patting the dust off his blue uniform, laying his stiff visored cap on the counter. It smelled of car exhaust. He reached to the shelves heaped with dusty souvenirs and pulled out a styrofoam bowl packed with instant noodles, less than half the price of a plate of local buckwheat noodles. He’d worked out the change in his pocket and put down the exact amount on the counter in a single pile, helped himself to the thermos of hot water, split a set of chopsticks over the meal. By then we were done with the dishes and sitting on either side of him at the counter.

It was funny. Here the traffic guard was still in uniform, the cook still had an apron on, but these men didn’t look at all like their jobs. They looked like… individuals. This man made soba noodles for tourists, that man stood in a dusty street and checked the stickers on cars. But that as just what they did, it wasn’t who they were. It had been ages since I’d seen that. Human beings more than their jobs. The shop man only let the scurrying seep in so far, under all that he had a gruff little life that was all his own, the traffic guard let that blue suit take all the dust.

It was Children’s Day. For reasons unclear to me, on this day people chew on sweet buns of pounded rice, each one wrapped in a pickled leaf. Like they need an excuse to chew on sweet buns. The shop owner pulled out a tray of them, and we munched away, three deep at the counter, the clerk, the guard and the tourist, eating cakes on the roof of Japan.

a golden week (IV)

IV.

The book I had brought along for the trip was Kappa by Ryonusuke Akutagawa, one of the most gifted and most depressed writers modern Japan has produced. Akutagawa finished his short writing career in 1927 at the age of thirty-five by swallowing a handful of pills and jumping straight out of his skin into the land beyond. He left behind reams of short stories, several novels, a colossal literary reputation, and a wife and three sons, aged seven, five and two years old. Kappa was published three months before he died.

I didn’t know about the final novel, the suicide, and the three abandoned sons when I threw Kappa into my backback. I only knew that Kappa were froggy little water spirits that I’ve always gotten a real kick out of. And that somewhere up in these mountains there is a bridge called Kappa-bashi where Akutagawa started his novel.

The little bus wound up through the mountain passes, the driver occasionally stopping to point out natural features of note. “These are the Oya-ko waterfalls. As you can see, the name Oya-ko (parent-child) really fits, as they branch apart into a larger and smaller stream.” We all nodded and looked appropriately awed. I went back to my novel, where the human protagonist had just stumbled out of the abrupt mountain fog and bumped straight into an amphibian kappa-man. Our own bus was rolling through alternating patches of deep fog and clear blue skies that alternated at weird and irregular intervals. When I failed to spot a kappa I went back to the book, just as the narrator begins to chase the fleeing frog-man. Right there, just as it was starting to get interesting, the dorky American two seats in front of me decided he wanted to chat.

“So you going hikin’?”

“Un. Yeah.”

“Umm, do you have any crampons in there?”

He eyed the cheapy white backpack I’d bought on sale. I tried to remember what a crampon was. Oh yeah. Those spiky things for your boots. I looked at my boots. They were closer to sneaker-boots.

“Well, how far in you planning to go? You remember all the news about the snow this year.”

It had even been written up in the New York Times: Nagano’s record snowfall, rural villages buried in snow drifts that nipped at second story windows, old men and women clambering onto roofs to clear off heavy white piles that threatened to crack house frames. The region on earth with the highest annual snowfall buried and humbled. This dude was definitely ruining my fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants travel philosophy. I didn’t like the look of that expensive looking ice-pick sticking out of his backpack.

“Yeah, you know, not too far,” I told him, trying to look as confident as possible.

I found out what he was talking about when the bus stopped to let out the hikers and the day trippers. We were in a highland valley, twenty five hundred meters above sea level. The sun was shining, the air was crisp sweater weather, and there was four feet of snow on the ground. The American and his two Japanese friends strapped on their crampons and waved good-bye, crunching down a trail and into the woods.

Luckily I had company. I had thought I would be heading for an obscure valley known only to experienced hikers and to the owners of the 2001 edition of Lonely Planet: Japan, but the place was absolutely teeming with people more clueless than I was. A string of behemoth resort hotels lined the river, and a visitors center dispensed trail information that pretty much boiled down to one thing: amateurs stay off the trails.

Kappa-bashi was just a few minutes walk up the river, which was still lined with hotels and tchochky shops. What I found was a bridge. A rather nice looking bridge for pedestrians, with nicely polished planks and suspension wires. A steady swarm of tourists buzzed around it, snapping pictures and flashing peace signs. There wasn’t a frog-man in sight. Didn’t even feel like the place to meet a frog man. Not unless you counted the millions of kappa keychains and figurines that were being hawked along the river.

Feeling vaguely cheated and a desperate need to make myself feel cooler than all these people I marched back to the visitors center, striding past two young woman who were stumbling across rocks and ice patches in high heels, past a feeble elderly couple who mounted a two-inch rise of snow like an arctic expedition. “Hah!” I thought, “When I get that old I’m not going to look that stupid and helpless.” Once I arrived I scoured the maps for a hike that was feasible in sneaker boots. Hell, I didn’t need crampons, I didn’t even need a proper pair of boots. I wasn’t some lily-livered tourist balancing in high heels or a city-slicker outdoor weenie draped in sparkling new gear: I was a young and resourceful traveler, living by his wits. Unfortunately my wits had decided against packing a tent or snow gear, so I would have to actually pay for a room up here. The map showed a lodge for hikers about an hours hike, and the trail up to it only had a few mild snow warnings posted, none of the skull-and-crossbones post-it notes that dotted the higher passes.

Aside from a few ice patches the trail was essentially clear and flat, with some deep muddy bits to skip around, and best of all, no people to make fun of my sneaker boots. The path wound along a valley, playing tag with an eager spring river. There were great drifts of heavy spring snow as high as my waist on either side of the trail. Towering over everything was a string of some of the highest mountains in Japan, jutting through a sky so blue it looked like a beer commercial with the hue and contrast tweaked just this side of real. It was like seeing movie stars in person. You kept waiting for the wonder to kick in. That is a beautiful craggy mountain. That is Martin Sheen.

Before I knew it the sky was a fuzzy gray, the trail swerved into the woods, and there I was, the Tokuzawa Lodge. They were already making dinner when I arrived, and the clerk checked three or six times that it was okay they didn’t have any dinner for me. While the rest of the lodgers ate hot meals of tempura and wild herbs in the mess hall, I was ushered into the lounge to eat the bread, cheese and apples I’d brought with me. I took a beer from the little refrigerator in the lobby and sat down to eat my dinner, trying to ignore the stuffed mountain goat on my left, his ears propped up in feigned alertness. Hark! Is that the baying of wild bears that assails my tender ears?

Luckily the lounge filled up after dinner, half a dozen hikers piling in for beers from the fridge and after dinner smokes. There was a couple in their forties with a kind of large fleshy exuberance and braying good nature that for some reason struck me as thoroughly Midwestern. There were two shy newlyweds who made faint inroads into the conversation, but spent more time with their noses buried in a large fluttery map that spread across both of their laps. There was a single furtive smoker whose innocent comments all seemed to dance atop a great well of frustration, like water drops skittering across a heated skillet. Then there was the grandfather monkey, a limber and muscley gray haired old gibbon that smoked and held court in a thick country accent from deep Kansai.

They talked trails, told tales of the mountains, made jokes about the stuffed goat. The stocky Midwesterners with their thick jolly honks of laughter wanted to with the American about the American, but thankfully the old baboon kept us on topic: we’d come for the mountains, we’d talk about the mountains. I heard about the old school of alpinists, wild eyed adventurers who roamed the mountains with rucksacks and buckets of fire in their bellies. Poets and hermits who would stick through the harsh and snow heavy winters, living in snow shelters. And they came back to this lodge, to this room, to tell stories and dry blankets by the fire. There were writers, mountain adventure novelists, whose soft and yellowed paperbacks sat on the shelves. They all mentioned this lodge, you know? The Tokuzawa lodge.The old man sat with his feet propped up on the corner of his chair, knees splayed out to either side, toes wiggling beneath the thick wool socks. Heard about the communal shared caches scattered throughout the mountains, different groups carefully marking their stashes of food and fuel, tucking them neatly into wooden boxes locked against bears. Sometimes a stash would stay there for years, untouched, and unmolested by other hikers, backcountry honor. But with all these newbies crawling all over the place now. Didn’t used to be like that, no sir, it’s all since the bullet train. No, you know, all since the Olympics! Yeah, used to just be the night bus from Tokyo. I took that bus out from Kyoto station, drove all night through the mountain passes, you woke up in Shinshu, in old Nagano, that’s for sure. Yeah, then the Olympics, and that train. You know no one knows the real way to say Azumi anymore? People come into town, look at the kanji on the sign and scratch their heads. I tell you, it’s losing the old Shinshu spirit, people don’t even talk like they’re from Nagano anymore, everyone talks all stiff and Tokyo, and hell even there they’re speaking English half the time.

The Midwesterners started to look nervous for me, but what can I say, I agreed with the guy. Cigarettes were stubbed out, last inches of beer guzzled, bodies were hauled up to bunkrooms and mattresses with clean sheets, all of us wondering what kind of hordes the next day would bring.

a golden week (III b)

The straw donkey was about as big as I was, but the two straw humans balanced on his back wouldn’t have reached my knee. They had been woven with a quick and crude artistry, arms sticking straight out to either side, the woman with two lumps on her chest. They were riding through the basement of the Matsumoto Museum and Cultural Heritage Center, perched on a little roped off pedestal. Next to them was a large black-and-white photograph of the icon being borne out of the village by a wave of weary looking old village folk. The men wore baseball caps with farm equipment logos and the women had tied back their hair with polka dotted bandannas. The tour guide must have been the same age as the farmers in the photograph, but her smooth skin and elegant bowl of silver hair radiated a life of philosophy seminars and nine-to-five days.

“This is a ritual still enacted in some of the more rural towns in these parts. The old people of the village will weave an old man, an old woman and a beast for them to ride from rice husks left over from the harvest. The icon is then carried out of the village and set aflame. This was done in the hope that it would appease death for that year and not come for any of them.”

Death, or their grandkids.

The Cultural Heritage Center was in a flat scrubbed concrete building that looked like it had been built to be as anonymous as possible. Maybe the architect was intimidated by the neighborhood. Right next door was one of Japan’s all time coolest castles: Matsumoto-jo, “The Raven Castle, a black obsidian fang of a tower that reached up and split the Nagano sky.

An extant Japanese castle is a rare thing, a great pile of timber that has somehow tricked its way through several hundred years of lightning storms, earthquakes, sieges, anti-feudal wrath and spontaneous combustion. Those that have made it through seem a little bewildered about what the hell they should be doing. There they are, propped on the highest hill, paper tigers commanding cities that ignore them. The tourists that fill them look a little confused as well, gingerly stepping through the lord’s chambers and squinting at the explanatory plaques posted here and there. The inside of a castle gets real old real quick: once you’ve seen the holes used for dropping things on people the rest is just cold floors and staircases. They spruced this one up a bit with a little exhibit on the history of guns in Japan. There was an extremely useful chart with the names of lords and the date that they got their hands on guns. There was a lovely drawing of a coterie of courtly ladies gossiping and forging bullets. The sign said that bullet forging was women’s work, right along with nursing.

There were men in baseball caps and gloves to direct traffic on the stairs. Being a castle, the stairs (or “ladders” as we call them in the West) were designed more for invader-hacking than for tourist-strolling. Old ladies with massive rear ends sweated and giggled as they tottered down, the traffic conductors always ready to jump in the way and cushion a fall. If you were fit enough to make it to the very top you were rewarded with a lovely view of the town of Matsumoto, nestled in the mountains, every apartment block steadfastly ignoring the castle. Somewhere in the slant of the windows and the dizzying height you could feel the arrogance of this place, this black tower built to look down on cowed peasants, this onyx blade to tear at the edge of their vision. The city now sat with its back to the keep. You could buy postcards, keychains and black castle cookies in the gift shop.

I had lunch at a local restaurant that handmade buckwheat soba noodles for the tourists. The rich Nagano soil makes for good buckwheat and famous soba noodles, so I felt I should have a plate before I left. Buckwheat was about six months out of season, so the noodles tasted pretty much the same as everywhere else, but we all packed in anyway. I sat at the counter and watched as two high school kids tried to navigate their first day on the job, forgetting to bring cups of tea, getting snarked at on every side by the cooks and the senior waitresses who had probably been doing this their whole lives.

Back at the train station the hikers were swarming around the coin lockers and the bus queues leaving the castles and the shopping to the tourists with large asses. I collected my stuff, bought some fruit, a loaf of bread and a hunk of locally produced cheese at a supermarket and bought a bus ticket to the mountains.

a golden week (III. a)

III.

I awoke somewhere around three or four in the morning to the whispering sound of rain. It was demure and polite, barely making a sound as it tiptoed across the ground and over my sleeping bag, and I liked the thought of drifting back to sleep on this misty river bank.

I changed my mind a few minutes later when the rain turned from Romantic to Biblical, fat drops falling like bullets and flashes of lightning detonating on the horizon. My poor loyal sleeping bag was hastily stuffed away, dejected and sopping, and I made an idiot dash across the rugby field, jumping through waterfalls and praying there wasn’t a thunderbolt up there with my name on it. I sprinted into the first shelter I could find, a little concrete tunnel shot straight through a hill for pedestrians, cyclists and sopping morons who think tents are for sissies.

It wasn’t exactly the most auspicious way to start my trip, but I had plenty of momentum in me. I changed into a dry set of clothes, confident that I was the only one stupid enough to be outside at four in the morning in a lightning storm. Like most spring storms it had the demeanor of a two year old, screaming hysterically for half an hour then fading into whimpers and forgetting about what the big deal was. So by five we were back where we started, in a transparent drizzle that instead of getting you wet was merely decorative.

The night before Takasaki had seemed atmospheric, otherworldly, and I had enjoyed the shock of wandering a city with no people in it. But in the dull drizzly morning the city looked about as romantic as my sleeping bag, wet, gray and getting moldy. I tromped into a convenience store for a cup of coffee and spooked the clerk stocking the shelves, gaping at this lanky white man who had materialized at five in the morning in a rain storm. I walked around the remnants of Takasaki castle, which was now a public park. The remaining fragments of the castle were weird little non-sequiters, carefully buffed and labeled. A single corner of the outer wall, the central gate, opening onto a playground, a two story public library sitting quietly where a towering keep had once ruled the landscape. An old man was taking his dog for an early morning walk, the mutt eagerly sniffing out traces of his medieval ancestors, then peeing all over their scents.

…

I had planned to hitchhike out of Takasaki, but the sky continued sniffling, and still threatened to break out into tears at any moment. The night before I’d decided to head for the mountains of Nagano, but without a car the only way in was by bullet train, which was a lot less badass and infinitely more expensive than freeloading rides off of strangers. Come to think of it, the ticket was just about the same price as a night in a reasonable hotel in Takasaki.

We slid through a craggy volcanic landscape, through mountain passes, in and out of tunnels and into misty valleys that plunged straight down, then disappeared before you could spot the bottom. The ghostly sleek train sliced through the landscape so cleanly it scarcely seemed real. Sharp cliffs and raging spring rivers that had swallowed centuries of travelers flicked by in bursts and flashes as petite women in suits and scarfs pushed carts of beer and coffee down the center aisle.

In Nagano city the clouds hung so low you could reach up and pluck them out of the sky. I switched to a hobbly little two car train, munching on an apple as we chugged through vegetable gardens and people’s backyards. We passed a station where every square inch of the platform was covered in screeching six-year olds in matching red hats. The whole train breathed a collective sigh of relief when they stayed put. The sign of one stop said Ba-sute, which at first I thought was funny because it sounds just like the Japanese pronunciation for “Birthday”, but when I looked closer I noticed the characters meant “Grandmother” and “Throw Away”. The nine year old sitting across from me asked her grandfather what it meant.

“In the old days when the people grew too old to work they would run them out of the villages and into the wilderness, because there wasn’t enough food for everyone.” The little girl nodded, fully satisfied and apparently undisturbed by this answer. “But,” he added, watching her nervously, “That was a long time ago.” She nodded, unconcerned.

“A long time ago…” he repeated, just to make sure.

a golden week (II.)

II. The Wrong City

I’d made a promise to let the trip determine itself, and to simply walk onto the first train to pull up to the platform. This happened to be the local bound for Takasaki, which was just fine by me. I’d only had the pleasure of visiting Takasaki once before, and all I’d seen was the inside of the station.

I’d been spending the night as a straight tourist at the gay bars in Tokyo, and after I’d kissed my tour guide off at his station I boarded the first train home and promptly fell asleep among the all-nighters, alcohol leaking from our pores. When the conductor gently shook me awake I awoke two prefectures and three hours away from Tokyo, in a broad and shiny station twinkling in the Sunday morning sunshine. Small groups of retirees walked around purposefully in sensible wide brimmed hats and nattered about how clean the air was. I blinked through my hangover and asked a twinkly-eyed woman of about sixty which train would take me back to civilization. I nodded off on the way back, head jumped with weird dreams of old women with bandannas neatly wrapped around their necks gossiping among throngs of Japanese homosexuals bumping and grinding to old Madonna hits.

This time the trip was done at rush hour, awake and sober, which was good, since I needed all my strength to ignore the briefcase wedged into my buttocks and the foreheads rubbed into my armpits. At each stop we would all heave and gasp as a few more passengers seeped out; a belt loosening itself, one hole at a time. After an hour or so the car had emptied down to myself, a few locals, and two Canadians loaded with shopping bags filled with personal electronics. The motherboard apartment blocks faded away and the stretches between stops turned pitch black; a full, rich country darkness that felt weird and primal. This was the way nighttime is supposed to look, but live in Tokyo too long and your sense of the natural world starts to loosen. There is currently a massive ad campaign for canned coffee which involves a popular television actor sipping the stuff in a twinkling forest grove, snuggled next to a grizzly bear three times his size.

I usually only crack into my book once I’ve finished reading every train advertisement around me, so once I’d gotten over the fact that the night sky outside was a real, full on dark, I turned my attention to all the lovely little advertisements around me. Out here it seemed like half the things were ploys to get you to leave Gunma and come to the big city, where there were a lot more things to buy. Special Weekend Pack train deals, a holiday sale at the Tobu department store, a Monet exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum… The only local ad I saw was for a shiny new housing development whose biggest selling points were it’s natural hot springs and the convenience of being a mere 150 minute train ride from Tokyo staion.

Two stops before the end of the line I interrupted the Canadian couple. Graham and Amy were English teachers at a small English language school in a scrawny little city twenty minutes past Takasaki. They’d done the Tokyo weekend: taken the Special Weekend Pack, bought digital cameras in Akihabara, had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the bay, spent the night on love-hotel hill in Shibuya. They were still blinking from their two days in Tokyo, where a white person can sip Spanish sherry in a corner bistro or read Jane Austen in the park, and no one will look at you twice. Now they were glumly trudging back to work over the holidays in Gunma, a rather pretty prefecture with a name that sticks in your mouth worse than peanut butter.

Maybe they felt their home needed a little more zest, so they told me that “Gunma has the most English teachers of any prefecture in Japan!” This was said with the same dubious pride as a Kiwi telling you that sheep outnumber people in New Zealand. I haven’t seen the numbers, but it seemed like a bit of semantic gerrymandering to me. Tokyo is a “capital” and Osaka and Kyoto are “urban prefectures” which pretty much knocks out all the heavy competition, giving Gunma a nice clear shot at the top prize. Celebrations ripple all across Gunma’s English education community, plaques and handshakes in every office.

They’d only been here five months, but did they know a cheap place I could spend the night in Takasaki? Without pressing it too hard I was hoping that as fellow foreign adventurers they would open their hearts and let this shaggy guy and his backpack crash on their sofa. They didn’t take the hint and wracked their brains for ideas. They suggested looking for a love-hotel in Takasaki, but when I pressed them they didn’t actually know of any.

And then suddenly it was ten at night and the end of the line, the Canadians leaving me smiles and their great bubbly shopping bags, and I had a city to explore.

…

In my home country, all fifty United States like to legislate whatever active powers are left to them by the federal government, so the state governments amuse themselves by tweaking local hunting laws and deciding if seventeen or seventeen-and-a-half is a good time to let kids start driving. Whereas in Japan a book can’t be discussed in the classroom without a stamp from the federal Ministry of Science and Education, so local governments are left with plenty of time to organize international flower shows and get the local castle approved as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.

Takasaki is the prefectural capital of Gunma, and the city looks a bit weary from all the earnest plans being foisted on it by career bureaucrats. Every other corner seemed to have a sign in rhyming prose that exhorted citizens to “talk, speak, communicate.” “One ‘thank you’ makes a thousand ‘your welcomes’”.

After living the Tokyo crush Takasaki itself seemed drunk on space, didn’t know what to do with it all. A sparkling and brightly lit boulevard cut through the darkness, spreading out into the city, with no one walking on it. I wandered out from the station, into the empty streets, peeking into a few well kept hotels whose prices would break my weekly budget for the trip. I followed the wide street for a few minutes, running smack into the prefectural government’s campus. The complex was massive: a municipal park flowed into a campus of buildings, all connected by hamster tube covered walkways for human beings to move themselves from the General Affairs Bureau to the Business Planning Bureau. The concert hall looked like it was just out of the package, not a note to scratch its surface. Small packs of skateboarders were putting the space to good use, wheels ripping and thwacking through the courtyards.

They weren’t the only ones. Moving into a cluster of brick paved streets with twee little shops and bars, I saw two guys who had jacked up their muscle car a few feet off the street, customizing the shocks in front of a Starbucks that was just closing for the night. What few people I saw trickling around the city walked with loping strides, while I was still trying get my legs to unlearn the clenched shuffle that reduces your surface area to an absolute minimum, shaving valuable seconds off your commuting time. The streets were shorn of people, just the occasional little gaggle of skateboarders or Monday night boozers walking in great weaving arcs, as if to savor every extra inch of sidewalk.

…

In one of the iconic movies of my childhood, the muppets Kermit, Gonzo and Fozzie plop into London and ask one of the locals where they can find a cheap place to stay.

“How cheap?” “Free.” “Well, that narrows the fjord a bit (for the longest time I thought all Brits talked like this). Let’s see… there’s riverbanks, bus terminals, The Happiness Hotel…” Choosing the third option, Kermit and the gang arrive at The Happiness Hotel and are greeted by hordes of ragtag muppet guests in a full on song and dance number complete with gypsy choruses, drum solos, and tap dancing rats.

I received a much colder reception at Takasaki’s “Hotel Happiness”. The sign glowed black and purple, and the check-in clerk’s body was completely hidden, just two disembodied hands sticking out of a whole in the wall. They offered rates by the night or by the hour, and a sign by the check-in window illustrated several of the theme rooms available. Just as I was deciding whether to go for the Playpen or Mistresses’ dungeon, a voice came out from behind the hands.

So, shooed out of Hotel Happiness, I thought back to muppets and chose the first option.

The river was just a few minutes walk from the station, and a park with rugby fields and trees lined the west side. I said hello to a woman out walking her terrier on the rugby field and nearly scared her witless: a lanky white ghost with a backpack slipping in and out of the darkness. I reached a copse of trees and brush, laying out a mat and a sleeping bag. A steady stream of midnight trucks glowed from across the river, their low highway rumble echoing across the water and mingling the groans of frogs.

…and was awoken at three in the morning by voices. It was the woman, back with her terrier and police! Vigilantes! Zombies! Or… English speaking Zombies?

“…always fireworks, going off all the time, they just you know these…”

And it faded off as quickly as it came, my heart thumping away with them.

Graham and Amy had been right. Gunma was crawling with English teachers.

a golden week, (I.)

a sort of prologue

There’s an urban legend out there that if you start a recording of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” at the exact second the MGM lion roars at the beginning of “The Wizard of Oz” that the 70’s prog rock album will match up exquisitely to the 40’s film. I tried this once in high school with a few friends, and the effect was unnerving. At the exact moment a black-and-white Dorothy perches on the fence of a pig sty, mouthing the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, the Pink Floyd album chants ominously “balanced on the biggest wave…”. When the nasty Kansas counterpart of the Wicked Witch of the West bicycles into the picture the album explodes in a sound collage of alarm clocks screaming. After two or three decades of being beaten to death on classic rock radio and endless TV specials, both “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wizard of Oz” have lost a lot of their initial punch, but playing them together was a stoner-psychedelic revelation at seventeen. The prancing members of the Lollipop Guild, that cheesy saxophone solo on “Money”: suddenly it all seemed beautiful and terrifying. And we were all stone cold sober at the time.

If you think into it for a few seconds, the theory that Pink Floyd spent the extra studio time just to cue their album up to “The Wizard of Oz” is pretty ridiculous. Especially considering the album was made way before anyone imagined home video, and the thought of the band constantly rewinding a massive film projector just to cue up a guitar riff to a farm girl, a tin can, a hay sack and an lion skipping down a road is pretty hard to swallow. Like any record exec would pay for that kind of studio time. The whole thing was just one of nature’s happy accidents.

Which was confirmed last night when a buddy of mine mentioned the whole Oz-Pink Floyd connection and mentioned that he’d tried “The Wizard of Oz” with some other albums. “Man, everything goes with that movie. I cued it up to this hip-hop album, and there was this surreal bit where Dorothy skips on ahead, stops (just as the beat cuts), spins around, and then begins to sing right as the lyrics pop in. Like, insanely good timing. I love shit like that.”

I. The Future.

I also love shit like that. You open your ears and eyes and suddenly the whole world turns synesthetic, senses popping off of each other like a pinball machine. You can talk about GOD or you can just enjoy the ride. I was all set to enjoy the ride a few weeks ago when I stuffed a backpack with clothes, a sleeping bag and 13 pages sliced out of the middle of the 1998 edition of Lonely Plant: Japan. I had a vague idea of heading north and wandering the land, opening myself up to a few days of chance and weirdness. So I’m not sure exactly what it meant at the moment when I stepped into my boots and suddenly my whole apartment started to quiver and roar with a mild case of the Tokyo earthquakes. I used to hate earthquakes, convinced each one was “the big one”, the one that experts tell us will shake Tokyo’s pimply landscape flat, but now they’re just gentle nudges from the earth, reminding you that no matter what the hell you’re doing, you should be grateful for the ground beneath your feet. I love shit like that.

Fortunetellers are a common sight on the streets of Tokyo, serious looking men and women with a folding chair, a folding table and a paper lamp with the characters “palm reading” printed on the shade, dispensing wisdom from the other side on the convenience of a city sidewalk. I’d never noticed them around my station, but then suddenly there he was, a boyish looking thirty-year-old, back straight up, hands on his knees, eyes looking at the world behind the world. I’d never had my palm read. It seemed like a good time to start.

Sakuma-san made sure I was aware of the 2000 yen fee up front. I had already made up my mind, so the twenty dollars didn’t really bother me. Seemed like a decent price for a good story.

Actually, he was pretty good. First off he asked me a few of the basics: what do you want to find out? (Leaving for a trip with no destination, how’s it gonna turn out?) What kind of work do you do? (I work for a photo agency in Tokyo, editing and preparing photos to sell overseas.) Are you married? (No.) He wasn’t trying to be psychic or anything, just… empathic. You know, like Lt. Commander Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation: doesn’t stick an ESP microphone into your head to record your thoughts, detects general emotional trends. (“I sense… great pain.” That sort of thing.) Besides, even if he did have a front row seat to my brain, all he would have gotten was “Pink Floyd-Wizard of Oz, optimistic skepticism, Pink Floyd- Wizard of Ox…” I don’t know if it was my initial impression that did it, but for someone who’d know me for about sixty seconds he pretty much cut to the core of what I was about. He drew a diagram of a series of peaks, and a little stick figure making his way up. “Every time you get right here,” he drew a figure just below the mountain peak “you start to become worried and anxious, wonder who you are and what you’re doing, so you decide to try something else.” I nodded and mumbled agreement with a childish wonder that really only works in Japanese. You’d sound like an idiot in cooing like that in English. “But,” he continued “just when you are at your toughest point and believe all is lost, someone will come to your aid. Always. Don’t despair.” He had a soft voice with the slightest gay lilt to it. When he spoke for long periods of time the spit would foam up inside his mouth and he had to swallow every once in a while to keep it from spilling out.

“Wow!” I said, keeping on my gee-golly voice. “You’re pretty much right on! (actually, he had been) What can I possibly do in those hard times, what I can do to overcome those obstacles?”

“I’m glad you asked. Sometimes, we need to clean up. Like in your house, little bits of yourself flake off and pile up, and then we can see our house is dusty, and we need to vacuum it, right?” I nodded. “ Well, our souls are the same way, but we can’t see our souls, so we don’t know that they need cleaning.” Hmmm… “So, if you are interested, I could initiate a three day course where I pray for you and make offers at the local shrine for you, imploring the god to clear away the confusion in your soul, just like vacuuming a room! This would be three times a day, morning, noon and night, for three days. You’ll be surprised at the results!”

“And how much does this service cost? To vacuum my soul?”

The figure he quoted could have bought me weekend in Korea, hotel, hot peppers and all.

But it didn’t stop there. Sakuma-san kept himself busy. Why, just next month he was arranging a bus trip to the Ise shrine. Was I interested in paying my respects at the most holy (and most ignored) shrine in Japan? A place so holy that only the emperor may enter the innermost shrine and implore the local god for advice on politics and girls. Was I interested in slapping down $140 US for three days with Sakuma-san and 150 of his closest friends on one of three tour buses? Well, actually, yeah! I was kinda interested.

I have a friend who spends his time as a graduate student in modern Japanese religions. According to him, modern street-side palm readers provide a convenient alternative to religion, dispensing spiritual advice in easily digestible chunks. The advantage is that people can approach them not as believers tied to a specific religious dogma, but as individual consumers, seeking a service. God knows that’s all I was looking for. That and a front seat to Japan’s newest religion making a pilgrimage to it’s oldest religious site.

(Note from the ed. I found Sakuma-san's contact info folded in my wallet this afternoon between the a restaurant coupon and the local bike shop's calling card. I missed my ride to the shrine, so that's the end of that story. But I'll be writing about my Golden Week trip in chunks. )

suited up

Today

I biked out to the interview in a week old haircut and a borrowed suit.

Last night Craig showed me the proper way to knot up a tie. My ties always end in warped and weird shapes, but Craig’s method produced a beautiful bud perched just below my Adams apple. Zoe sat giggling in the corner as her boyfriend taught me how to strangle myself in silk and wear her boyfriend’s suit. I tried the tie again this afternoon and when I gave the thing a sharp final tug to keep it in shape it fell apart into two strands of silk, dangling from my collar. I wondered if it would be possible to give a display of my knife skills slicing vegetables instead of having to show my confidence with basic competence with knots. I was back in the first grade, mangling with shoelaces and repeating rhymes about bunny ears popping through holes. And I thought this interview was supposed to test my Japanese.

Walking over to Craig and Zoe’s place last night I passed the corner sports bar, where a gaggle of English teachers I knew peripherally were spending hard earned tax payers money on beer and sake shots. Sat down for a pint and Molly told me how easy it would be to get a customer tailored suit in Vietnam. “Yieah, like you can fly there, get custom tailored a suit and fly back for the same price as a suit in Japan?” The freckly faced American in a gold chain a backward baseball cap and a freshly laundered shirt finished his mumbled Japanese cell phone conversation and asked what my interview was for.

“It’s like a resource center for foreigners, a place where they can get free counseling and legal advice in their native language. Looks pretty interesting, chance to use my Japanese for something positive, y’know?””

“That’s cool. I wanna move to Tokyo.”

Despite his freckled white boyish face he spoke with a faint black urban drawl. But after hearing his smoothly accented Japanese I don’t know if I trusted it or not.

“Oh, okay. Cool. You gonna continue English teaching or...”

“Naw, thought it would be really cool to like bartend, knowatam sayin’?”

What can I say, I left English teaching three years ago to sweat out life in the kitchen of a small restaurant, no place for me to judge. But the idea of this guy pouring my drinks was strangely unnerving. He might mix a perfect cocktail but his something about the ebonics was hard to swallow.

=

Unlike New York, where a white guy in a suit could mean just about anything, in Tokyo it usually means one of three things:

1) English teacher. Employed by a national chain of English schools. While resume shows a definite lack of skills relevant to English teaching in the interview he exuded certain zest for life. In lieu of teaching skills or knowledge of English grammar, the raw enthusiasm, confident smiling and steady flow of English words are supposed to whisk students away to the magical world of English speaking. Students are charged several hundred dollars a month to sit in the same room as this guy. They absorb English by photosynthesis and dubious textbook dialogues. The suit lends a strong professional cologne to the lesson. Unfortunately exuding a zest for life usually includes a zest for scoring with as many Japanese chicks as possible, and once the contract is up Thomas has flown back to Australia and Sachiko is left wondering where she can find her next spousal candidate.

2) Business Man (Corporate Drone). Spends daylight hours desk jockeying for the best paying firm that will take him. Occasionally an English Teacher (see #1) who has grown tired of carefully enunciating for a living, sometimes a family man who figured Tokyo was the place to be, sometimes just some rep in town for three days before flying to visit our partners in Shanghai. Unlike the English Teacher, who would rather be slicked out in a silk shirt and a pair of trainers, the business man actually knows how to wear his suit, and doesn’t think about wearing it, except when he passes one of those Armani ads where languid looking Aryans with pouty lips flash out suits that cost more than my rent. One of those would be nice. Yeah…

3) If there’s two of them, in their twenties, riding mountain bikes, with dull marble eyes, they are Mormon Missionaries. And there’re more of them than you’d expect. I used to share an apartment with a former missionary and continuing Mormon who had acquired his fluent and weirdly nasal Japanese by walking neighborhoods and getting doors slammed in his face. These guys wear their black suits unselfconsciously, like a second skin. God is their co-pilot, and the big J reassures any doubts. They also push each other to really learn the language, all the better to spread the good news about salvation and polygamy. (Note to no one in particular: That guy who played Napoleon Dynamite acquired fluent Japanese skills during his mission work in Japan. Huh.)

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I’ve only just started to realize this, but suits are one of the world’s weirdest confidence tricks. A stocky set of overalls and steely toed workboots are pretty useful when you’re pouring concrete and smashing office buildings, but the funniest thing is how the business suit, that universal icon of business, money, trade, it could have been anything. By sheer historical accident that guy approving your bank loan has a dark grey coat slithered over a sheer white button-down and a cornflower blue tie, but as long as his fingers have enough wiggle room and nothing snags too easily on the copy machine, he could be dressed like Batman and it wouldn’t make a darned difference. AOL and Time Warner executives negotiating mergers in pantaloons and cone tipped Madonna bras. Open your door to twin Mormon missionaries in testicle hugging outfits from the deck of the Starship Enterprise.

It seems the only really distinguishing feature of suits is that you’re not supposed to get them dirty. You wouldn’t fix a flat tire or mow the lawn in a suit. You wouldn’t cook a pot of chili or go cherry picking in a suit. The fine cut and soft fabric screams “I do not dig ditches for a living!” I see all these new super fiber suits that don’t get wet and can deflect oil and blood stains, but that looks a lot like the first nail in the coffin. If it’s possible to operate a jackhammer or scale Mt. Kilimanjaro and be dressed like Donald Trump. To keep up appearances our CEO’s will have to conduct their business in ruffled layers of white silk, glowering round conference tables like Roman senators in togas.

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So I left my interview shivering. I walked in with a decent resume a stomach full of confidence, the borrowed suit snappy and light. I walked out wondering how the hell people ever learn to conjugate verbs that dangle out to ten syllables. The interviewing chamber was stark white and slightly larger than my first apartment. Three career bureaucrats sat evenly spaced behind a folding table. Across from them a single collapsible chair was placed in the direct center of the room, with enough space left over to park a Volvo or two between us. I had to put down my bag in the corner and proceed to the lonely grilling chair, where absolutely no provisions were made for my hands. So I let them flap around on my lap like dying fish.

The questions were pretty innocent and straightforward. “How do you feel your experiences will contribute to this job?” “What do you see as major issues facing foreigners in Saitama?” “What do you think of Japan winning the World Cup of Baseball?” I answered in words and they nodded and seemed to understand what I wanted to say, but one question completely threw me. “Are there any recent news stories involving foreigners living in Japan that you found interesting or had an impact on you?” This is a slightly difficult for someone who doesn’t own a television and who receives most of their domestic news by reading magazine ads on the subway. After exhausting every Japanese synonym for “ummm” I mentioned that well, no, nothing, in particular, (I know stuff about foreigners in Saitama! More foreign English teachers than any other prefecture, right?), but the names, don’t come to mind, can’t recall the exact incident, but (Large Brazilian and Peruvian populations! All those Filipino ladies who work in bars!) dates, umm, well, you see that, I... (Isn’t the Chinese mafia well entrenched here? Why don’t you ask me about that sorta stuff!) We eventually determined that I did not have a television to receive news on, and I don’t know if they took it that I am cheap, weird, transient, or all of the above. For some reason the timing didn’t exactly seem right for one of my “Smash The Boob Tube!” speeches.

By the end of the interview they seemed mostly concerned about my reliability to stay in one place. Given that my transcript showed five different jobs in five different towns in three-and-a-half years they may have had a point. I gushed out my reliability credentials. They nodded and looked skeptical, and said how a young American like myself could easily get headhunted into some high paying corporate job in the city.

Craig’s suit fit me so well I’d forgotten I’d been wearing it.

The whole time I’d been worrying about the grammar my resume when all they’d really been looking at was my suit and my week old haircut. They’d seen the English Teacher and Corporate Drone on my resume, did my haircut make me look Mormon too? In a suit like that you could be just about anybody, but with my peachy white skin and cheese grater accent I was an American in Japan, and there are only a few slots those guys slip into.

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The suit and I rode home on my screamingly orange racing bicycle, light fabric pants flapping in the wind. It was a warm Thursday afternoon and half the city was pedaling around the streets, navigating that thin gap between the curb and the delivery trucks. Chattering schoolgirls in blazers and plaid green skirts, sour old men in frumpy jackets and twisted baseball caps, young mothers with toddlers strapped into little passenger seats over the front wheel. I could feel their eyes on me as we waited for the lights to change. They took in the racing bike, the suit, the skin and the curly brown hair. I’d like to know who they saw there.

paying for it

The girls and I have a running joke now. They see me stamping home through the neighborhood and press the hostess club flyers on me with an exaggerated sales pitch, helpfully translated for my benefit."Fun garls! Come on! Come on!" The standard response to this is the zombie shuffle, but after an hour on the trains I've had enough of the living dead, and want to infuse a little humanity into the evening. So I’ve been working on this special smile. My Mom’s father used to be able to catch my eyes from the other side of the party and just by twinkling his eyes he laughed at everything in the room. You and me man, we know better. Those twinkly eye genes have to be in me somewhere, so I’ve been trying this with the hookers. In my mind the eyes are twinkling out "You gotta do what you gotta do, huh. Thanks but no thanks" and I grin at our private joke, people walking around in these silly bodies, at these funny ways the world works on us.

So all they get for their trouble is a weird American who is taking the time to leer at them but not the trouble to stop and spend some money. But he might stop by tomorrow, so they grin back and hand him a flyer.

None of the girls are past twenty-five, but they all have deep voices that scrape out of their throats, clanging on potholes and debris on the way up. There they are every night, teetering on pencil thin heels, cocktail dresses swallowed up by big, blobby rayon overcoats, gnawing on a stick of gum and trying to snag some interest from the rivers of suits rushing through the neighborhood. The sports bar across the street with its skewers of roasted chicken isn’t exactly competition, but they both fight for the same few seconds of attention from the suits. I have to say I’m weirdly relieved whenever I see one of them snagging a customer: her skin parlor-tanned to the color of roasted peanuts, his moist and gray from the office lamps and whiskey. Now she can stop bothering

I’m pretty sure there are laws out there somewhere that cash for handjobs means fines or a night in jail, but somebody forgot to tell the commuters, the girls on the corner, the local cops and the proprietors of Jungle Pub, who have a painted van that idles in front of the station, color headshots of a dozen glassy eyed girls grinning over the spray painted palm tree design. Okay, so, technically it isn’t a whorehouse, just a bar where a fella can sip a few whiskeys and enjoy a nice chat with a few high school dropouts in one-piece dresses cut for maximum boobage. Or so I’ve heard.

The fact is I’m in the minority here. I had an ex-girlfriend once who refused to believe I’d never paid for it. “Come on, I’m not gonna get mad. Every guy does it; it’s like getting a period for guys, right?” She grew up in a mountain village where the only immigrants for 100 kilometers were the three Fillipina girls “hostesses” at a second story club downtown, so I wrote it all off as bumpkin delusions. I’d heard the guys down in the sports promotion section of the town government snickering over the bra sizes of the girls down at Good Times Pub, that was one thing. But when a good friend of three years, a vegetarian and an animal shelter volunteer with sweet puppy eyes, a soft voice, a young bride and a ten month old son starts gushing about living single and whooping it up with the girls down at Good Times Pub, well, now we’ve entered the realm of the profoundly weird. It’s almost like I was living in a foreign country.

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I used to sublet from a portly and middle aged South American man named Pepe who moved here in the late eighties with his young American bride in tow. She gave up on him a few years ago and went back to the US with their daughter, he stayed here with his teaching jobs and the rural Japanese home he rented for practically nothing. Propped between school portraits of his eleven-year old girl and woodblock prints of Argentinean peasants was a study was lined with worn and considered paperbacks by writers a generation or two away from myself. Sitting confidently among serious and nutritious volumes by Thomas Wolfe and Doris Lessing was a slim little number by a forgotten press: The Pink Guide to Tokyo. Since it looked like the thing hadn’t been used in a few years I probably should have swiped it for the sake of anthropology, but for all I know it’s still there, pages yellowing around black type and conveniently labeled street maps. So it looks like we’ll have to go on memory. Which – as my mother and all my ex-girlfriends know – is a fairly approximate instrument, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

Without a little biographical blurb on the back cover you had to guess at the life of the author of “The Pink Guide to Tokyo”, but he smeared himself all over the book. You couldn’t move ten pages without tripping over something about “a depravity only rivaled by the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo” or “something this reporter has never seen before.” He clearly loved the life of the foreign journalist, but unlike Hunter S. Thompson he wasn’t published in Rolling Stone and didn’t have a decent sense of humor. The book reeked of a failed marriage, a midlife crisis, a desperate need to impress the guys back at the press club. But for anyone with a personal, professional or academic interest in paid sex in Tokyo in the early 90’s the book was worth all ten dollars.

The author of “The Pink Guide Guide to Tokyo” and I do have one thing in common: we are both fascinated by the fact that the Japanese sex business doesn’t seem to be worried about hellfire or damnation, just turning a profit. Its not that being a hostess is respectable here, it’s just a fact of life. You may not want your kids to be garbage collectors, but somebody’s kids are gonna do it. Like my ex from the mountains, Japanese girls just seem to take this in stride: in the morning you scrape the ice off the windshield, in the evening boys are out paying for it.

The question, I guess, is why pay for it? Why sell it? This isn’t like selling grilled chicken skewers or giving English lessons, I hear it’s something closer to massage. I just finished Paul Theroux’s “Dark Star Africa” where he spends a surprising amount of time defending prostitution to its critics. Randy old Paul sees it all as simple economics, quoting a former factory who said she got wise when she realized that “the whole time, I was sitting on a gold mine.” If you trust my memory, I remember reading a syndicated newspaper article where a high-profile madame in Amsterdam responded to anti-prostitution proposals with the weird comment that “my girls are too lazy to do anything else! What do you expect them to do?!” The argument to decriminalize money-for-booty is pretty much the same as the cry to legalize dope: remove the stigma, cut out the organized crime and the violence, regulate it, make it safer for the working girls, the working guys, the johns, hand out licenses, spot inspections every few months.

I found a discarded copy of “Weekly Playboy” on the train the other day and picked it up: out of curiosity. The funny thing was, I did read it for the articles, and they were kind of interesting, but not the least bit edifying. Hef’s sophisticated liberal sensibilities kind of got lost in the Japanese syndication; instead of being padded with witty and intelligent articles by the nation’s foremost writers the cheesecake photos were supplemented by detailed reviews of Tokyo red light districts (a regular feature apparently) a pretty puritanical expose of urban teens doing club drugs and surprisingly detailed interviews with adult video stars on their earliest sexual experiences. It was this last part I actually found the most intriguing, and not merely to find out that Aimi-chan’s second boyfriend was a salaryman whose penis wasn’t quite as large as she’d hoped. For one thing, by some kind of weird censorship the magazine had to blank out the middle syllables of the words d*ck and p*ssy. Right next to a photo of Aimi-chan tied up with clothes pins on her nipples. Turn the page and you get a comic where two secretaries seduce some shlub in a Laundromat.

What was really interesting was reading about two people get really excited talking about sex that seemed so guilt-free, so perfectly ordinary, so, well, un-sexy. “I really liked him a lot, but after I moved to Tokyo it was hard to keep up the relationship running long distance, so we decided to break up.” “How did you take it?” “Oh, he seemed more upset than me. I was so busy with work and everything.” “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Whenever I’m back in the US I see “Porn Star” logos flashing from t-shirts and backpacks, sparking out “Sexy! Dangerous! Confident! Rebellious!” If only they could all read Japanese Weekly Playboy and learn that the love lives of Porn Stars doesn’t beat that of your average CPA. Same d*cks and p*ssies as the rest of us.

Walking home from work I can hear the hookers and their Johns talking about her student loans and his gambling debts. She wonders about a career in beauty salons and he comforts her with the slim confidence of thirty more years experience at navigating planet earth. She’s got it, he’ll pay for it, and there they are, grinning at themselves walking around in these bodies that want to do the strangest things.