Monthly Archive for October, 2010

A penny for wish:
A wish, it won’t make you a soldier.
A pretty kiss or a pretty face
Can’t have it’s way;
There’re tramps like us who were born to pay.
—Bruce Springsteen

I rested in Hiroshima at a youth hostel with WiFi, showers, and a rack on the rooftop where I might dry my washed clothes, though the highlight was surely that I shared the facilities with two English girls and that we stayed up late drinking beer from the vending machine and chatting about nonsense. In the morning I took my leave. One girl said something that I wondered about.

“She said you look like a shabby bastard. She said that yesterday, too.”

“Well I guess I could do worse.”

I had a threadbare look and a wild countenance, and the stories of my thrifty adventures won laughs and admiration but as little feminine affection as might be expected.

I was off for Kyoto, the ancient capital of imperial Japan, in the old south-central heartland called Kansai. Jean of Paris, who had been in Japan four months, had told me about a deal that Japanese Railways offered in October, to ride the slow trains all day for a minimal price, but it had expired on the seventeenth and this was the twenty-first, a Thursday. It would have cost six thousand yen, about eighty dollars, for a ticket to Kyoto, and twice that to ride the lightning fast Shinkansen. So I paced around the train station until I saw a New Yorker I knew. He had a John Travolta haircut and wore a tight black shirt from the 1950s and was dragging a rollerbag down the line for tickets.

“I think I’m going to hitchhike,” I told him. “I’ll take the train a few stops outside Hiroshima then go to the highway. I don’t know.”

The New Yorker coolly approved of my plan, but as he already had a rail pass, and as this wasn’t really his thing, he declined to join me.

I bought a ticket to Onomichi but did not get off when the train halted there. I rode to a small town past Fukuyama, and then dropped my haversack on the platform and fiddled with it until I was alone there. Then I slid down the grassy hill, around the ticket booth, and onto a quiet street that led through a tunnel to the highway, on the other side of the tracks. This was the method I devised to travel cheaply around Japan—taking advantage of the trust and respect inherent to that country’s prosperous people to overcome the deficiencies of my greedy nation’s currency—and I would employ it a number of times in the future.

In the meantime, I hitchhiked with an old couple to a convenience store parking lot, where I met a young mother with her son who took me down the highway a long way. Two teenage girls took me to the Ide Station, near Aioi, and by then it was after dark and I was barely halfway to Konsai. I took the trains onward, arriving after ten at the overwhelming train station, and feasting on discounted sushi in the outer courts.

I laid out my bedroll on the concrete, a dozen paces from a dignified old couple who had done the same, and slept despite the chilling air and the roar and whistle of the trains. My restfulness could not overcome, however, the disruption of a volleyball team that began to practice around my resting place just around dawn. To their credit they never looked round as I packed my things and shouldered my bag, but a weird shame and spite stole over me, placing me in a foul, judgmental mood on the day of the Jidai Matsuri—the Festival of Ages.

I tried to amend my mood with a large breakfast: a bowl of rice and beef with pickled ginger and miso soup. Then I put my things in a locker at the train station and walked north toward the imperial palace, preferring the back streets. A woman squared the hedge along the curb, and the road was channeled so narrowly between the buildings that it might look like London, if it were not so nuanced with careful attention and open sentiment.

Kyoto is not so large a city, hemmed in by hills and tradition; and because it escaped the American firebombs during the Second World War, by its place on that exclusive list of potential atomic targets, it retains all its old charms. These can be observed like the strata of rocks, different materials denoting the different ages the city has weathered, but all ground together like gravel. Building materials ranged from aged and undecorated wood under eaves of rounded tile, to cement walls with wooden frames, and bits of ancient brick. It was a rather ugly hodgepodge, but a closer glance at the alleys, the courtyard gardens, the corners of the rooftops, the smallest shrines, and the unmapped places revealed Kyoto’s charms.

A man laid out his lunch on a white cloth on the park bench next to him, and a tabby cat was curled up asleep on his leather bag. Willows and maples mourned autumn along the canals, and creepers twined about the metal of the window grates with heart-shaped leaves. A pretty face blew smoke out through the mesh on a fourth floor balcony. Across the row of buildings, joggers paced the banks of the Kamo River, and teens congregate on the stepping stones. The roadwork crew bowed to passing pedestrians, who nodded politely in turn. There were lanterns everywhere, pebbly gardens and latticed doors.

The ramen shops began to steam, with great tureens of hakata pork broth, out from the short curtain in the portal. They were long and narrow, counters and stools and quick economic meals, though always polite in taking orders, burlesque in handing out food, and gregarious in saying farewell. I ate noodle soup in a neighborhood of shops close to the palace. There were bikes parked everywhere, outside book shops and calligraphy stationary stores and small kitchens and fashion boutiques and French boulangeries.

From the marketplace I crossed some narrow neighborhoods and came to the gate of the palace. Wide gravel trails, crowded with Japanese and Western tourists, turned back around hillocks and tranquil copses to a weird gathering along the walls of the Sentō Palace.

The Festival of Ages was a celebration of the long-expired Heian court, in all its costumed finery. There were samurai in crested armor, bannermen in vested uniforms, piled spears and parked palanquins, geisha and little handmaidens being painted, and everyone otherwise resting, napping, chatting, or eating packaged lunches in preparation for the great parade. I love the romantic irony of anachronisms, and so I delighted in the scenes of the noble caste and their retainers lounging about the lawns of the imperial palace. I spent an hour photographing it and in truth enjoyed this preparation more than the eventual parade.

They proceeded down from the gates of the palace toward the southern gate to the palace grounds, the route lined with spectators, who also stood on the iron posts meant to stop traffic. The lords waved from their carriages, and one nobleman on an excited mare was tumbled off into the road and sent away with a sore back, leaning on the shoulders of some guardsmen. Then came a marching band: eighteen flutes and five drums, followed by bannermen and men-at-arms with rifles, swords, and daggers; old noblemen in pale blue vests with daggers tucked in their skirts; ranked companies of samurai in long robes or armor or straw cloaks. There was a minister with a train so long that his guardian walked ten paces behind him, and two more ministers followed in more modest robes, with a dozen guardsmen in flat straw hats, their left hands on hilts. Acrobats in blue tunics shouted as they tossed from man to man their high banners, which looked like long-handled mops. Behind came a long line of swordsmen in flat hats and olive, blue, or black jackets, with a black horseman here and there. Some carried chests of treasure, hung from long poles. After the last of these had passed came two bannermen in white, who preceded a sedan displaying three ghost-faced geisha, pushed along by their attendants. The madames walked triumphantly behind, then the lesser geisha with their maiko handmaidens. Another column of flower-print grandees and guards came along after the ladies, in red or gold or blue or black and all the long-sleeved drapery of Heian Kyoto, and in their midst was a massive coach, all sealed up, that the single hitched ox refused to pull unless he himself was dragged down the road.

There were wise ministers and mighty samurai, with high-plumed hats and higher banners, but I will not weigh down the Reader with their complete enumeration—Gulliver’s way of excusing boredom with a subject. As I left the field the line began to slow and stagger: the police had not closed the roads of the city, and once they left the grounds those mounted knights and banner-waving squires had to wait at the intersections for a green light.

Another festival began that evening in the village of Kurama just north of Kyoto. I had arranged to meet Jean of Paris there, but the erratic work schedule that the Frenchman had worked up to pay for his stay in Osaka disturbed our plans. (I had also arranged to meet Sergi of Terragona somewhere in Japan, but I moved so slowly that the Catalonian had left for Australia by the time I arrived in Konsai.)

Yet I was far from lonely, finding the train to Kurama. A great crowd had gathered, evenly split in number between Westerners and Nipponese, in front of the first station on the line north. Conductors moved efficiently through the winding line to distribute tickets, and it all moved with the crowded order characteristic of the Eastern Orient. I stood on the train—and for all those packed around me could not have fallen even if I intended to—as it turned into a valley like a serpent’s tail, between green hills and through Ichihara, Ninose, and Kibuneguchi, ending at the feet of the mountains in Kurama.

The moon was a fuzzy silver disc behind the clouds, lit gray against the black brush of the tree-lined ridges. On the hill above the station, the small town flickered with a gold, pagan light and resounded with revelry and tumult, even before the ceremony had started. Most of this came from tourists, jostling for camera angles, and most of the townspeople still prepared for their roles. This festival, the Kurama-no-Himatsuri, or the Fire Festival of Kurama, was the only reason people came to their otherwise charmingly backwoods hamlet, and had once been a quaint mystery.

Immediately on stepping off the train, I was filled with a world-weary rage at what the festival had become—a crowd, a circus, a fetid swamp of breath. There were police and lines of yellow tape, and a great horde between, lining up to take the road to the center of town. Groups flaked off from the shuffling flood to cling to the yellow tape like fat in an artery, in case any event might pass down the lane that the cops kept cleared. Fires burned in braziers here and there, each surrounded by a swarm of vulturous photographers. And there were so many foreigners, drinking beers and complaining, and so many out-of-towners with cameras—I fought my way out of this bullshit mob and found some peace on the village’s southern stretch, downhill from the town square on the road to Kibuneguchi.

Here, where few tourists ventured for fear of missing some later marvel up above, the families prepared for the spectacle they were about to perform. Before each house there was a carefully tended brazier, and a few yards had bonfires burning high as a man, with green trees sticking out from a tent of trimmed logs and an upward shower of sparks. There were the torches that would later be lit and carried: tapering bundles six feet long and three across at the widest end, of stripped pine bound together with some flexible bit of wood. The families were all donning their costumes. The women wore kimonos, the older men feudal vestments, and the torch-bearers had on loincloths and shirts made of ropes. Anything else would have been singed to shreds during the ceremony.

I reflected on what had happened to change this once local peculiarity into a circus or sideshow. It was as if any group of humans on the earth that remained behind or retained some unique character was a stud or a depression in a level field of conformity, either stamped down by prejudice and pretentious disdain, or filled in by the hoi polloi of humanity—modern men with beer in cans and cameras on straps, out to ruminate on a tradition that had become a foreign novelty.

At one corner I watched two boys light a torch in a bonfire, with a constant commentary from their mothers, who adjusted the boys’ costumes even as they lifted the burning brand, and continued to do so up until they slowly edged out of the yard with that torch over their shoulders. The boys were beaming with adventure, the mothers wringing their hands in despair.

The photographers rushed down like there was a breach in the castle walls, and I found my cultural complaints overflowing onto an amenable American woman who happened to be standing by that corner with a banana, as averse to the crowd as I, though not so maddened by it.

We later moved into the immobile sideline that had formed along the road, stretching from the center of town past the train station and south into that quiet lane where the march would begin. It was crowded and noisy, kept back by a line of serious uniforms and a yellow tape that must have been either sacrosanct or incredibly dangerous, for all the fuss they made over it. I hated this intensely. There was a group of young Americans to one side, a half pretty face and two rumpled boys, fuming with a dialog of unimaginative wit derived from reruns of South Park and exhaustive tours of the Internet. A fat man was muttering behind me: “. . . and when we got off, they just guided us down here. That door behind them leads right to the center of town, but we all went down here like sheep.” I considered this with slitted eyes, my mind mapping the possibilities of an excursion. I am one who hates waiting in lines, and I would brave any hardship to avoid it.

So I stepped under the tape and over to where some men were standing around a brazier. A policeman came over with his index finger out and would not leave me alone until I moved. There was some laughter and whispering in the crowd, from the direction of the Americans, and it put me in a rage. Instead of returning to my spot, I shoved through the crowd on the track down from the train station, and went on through that door the fat man had observed that led right to the center of town.

Now Kurama had been well-organized by the policemen, who by a few barricades turned it into a mazy counter-clockwise loop, so that visitors entered one way, wandered up the hill in a slow-shuffling crowd, and turned back down into the station from the square atop the hill. The fat man was right: one might get directly to the heart of the town by going against the flow of traffic, going clockwise I mean, and see all the best parts of the festival without the wait. I meant to go back and tell the American woman, but by then the parade of torches had begun, a heathenish blur of fire and gold under the trees, and the way out from the train station was all crowded with photographers, suddenly as stolid and implacable as linemen. There was no getting back out to the street. So I went alone.

I walked along the slope above a path, passing the line of the retreating crowd, and I brushed past the guards by saying, with irrefutable confidence, that I had to meet someone or just shouting, “My friend!” and pointing wildly as I slipped around their every gestures. Finally I made it to the square, just in time to see the parade go past and into the beating heart of the night’s climax.

There were the torch bearers in their naked outfits, shimmying from side to side and chanting, “Saiya, sairo,”—Festival, good festival—with each sway of their heavy, burning burdens. Men and women in kimonos followed, and there were men carrying great banners and golden emblems on up to the top of the hill. Escaping the fence of spectators, I ducked across the street through a gap in the procession to an empty patio and stood there with an old Romanian who had been living for twelve years in Toronto. The rest of the torches passed right in front of us, and the Romanian thought they were going to come back, and just go up and down the street all night, but was not sure. None of the gaijin present, and few of the Japanese travelers, had any idea what this festival was about or what would happen.

I told the Romanian I had been to the country he had left behind, and he said, “It can never be a country again”—communism, the great leveler of men, had ironed out its brain. He had found a Romanian community in Toronto, lonely aliens who stayed together to pick bitterly away at one another, but eventually worked up the confidence to make his way alone in a city of immigrants.

“Canada is the worst of both worlds,” he said. “They have all the British stiffness of mind, with none of their subtlety, and American naivety and mass culture, without any of the friendly warmth you see in American people. . . . Shall we walk?”

We went up to where the torches had gone, and the cops had blocked off the square to visitors. Beyond there was an open space, then a line of costumed locals, and then a massive bonfire in the middle of an intersection. The torchbearers marched around it and up some stone terraces to the right, hidden from my view behind trees and some scaffolding, so that I could not get a good look at what they were doing. All the visitors were hustled into the left side of the street, behind some tape, by the hands of the policemen, and not permitted to get any closer to the fire or into the crowd that had gathered before it in the square.

I was looking around for some way of climbing around this barricade when the Japanese found a much better one. The front ranks apparently all rushed at once into that open space on the road, where they could get a much better view. The cops were shoved back, and they all started screaming through megaphones. There were more up in the scaffolding, roaring down at us from towers, with bullhorns for artillery. I ran in as well, but the cops had closed the gap by the time I got there, leaving the Romanian, some old women, and a few photographers in a pocket surrounded by police. I got right in the cops’ faces so I could take some pictures and get a look at the ceremony.

The men were all standing in ranks up the stepped terraces, holding their torches over their heads. The wood showered them with sparks as it burned down and even began to collapse. When it was close to death, the team threw it on the bonfire below. Sometimes they did not make it and were covered with burning embers as the bindings gave way. I savored the view—“If only those fool Americans could see me now!” I thought with low vengeance.

As I observed this, the cops were shoving at me and howling in my ears with bullhorns. I tried to push by three of them, saying that my friend was over there, but they shoved me back and looked enraged. More tourists began to break through on the other end of the street, and when the cops were distracted a sly old Japanese lady grabbed my arm and pulled me into their besieged pocket. I stood in the rearguard of the salient when the cops returned to get us out of there. They kept grabbing at us and shouting with bullhorns into our faces. Finally some of the costumed locals came over and politely asked us to move, and held the arms of the old ladies to move them back into line. The bemused cops put down the bullhorns.

I chose this time to stage my escape: I was not about to wait in that long slow line snaking back to the train station. I climbed down a wall behind a parking lot and crossed the crowd, up a hill and into the woods, past some cut wood and a court of dogs who let loose their snapping jaws from chains and cages. Trains of three cars pulled in empty to the station and departed like Holocaust boxcars, and there was a raving mob in the yard of the station all waiting to leave on the meager line. I saw the Romanian walking off down the highway—“I’m not waiting in that line. I’ll just go to the next town and get on at the station there.”

It was a warm night and the moon had turned the cloud banks into a great silver lampshade, and after a while talking to those English girls I had met in Hiroshima, I followed the Romanian’s plan without regret. I fell in line with a young, very pretty, and rather sweet girl named Yuki, who was walking home to the next village with her mother and older sister, and we charmed each other in pidgin. A grin and a laugh cheered my heart. It is the simple truth of my nature that with a good breakfast and a smile from a pretty girl, I am in the best of moods: so from the bitter angst of morning I ended the day free and full of favor. I would have married Yuki on the spot. But I slipped away to the village train station and found a place on a crowded carriage, where I could only see things to adore in a family from Oregon that lived at a nearby university.

Well some Japanese dames showed me the express train back to the Kyoto Station. The three Americans, the loud-mouthed girl and her fawning supplicants, who I had not forgiven for laughing at me much earlier, leaped aboard at the last minute. I made sure they knew where they were going. While the boys tried to fold down the doorway seats in the crowded train the girl asked me, “What did you think of the festival? We thought it was not worth the effort. All that waiting in line, for nothing.”

Rather than agreeing with her and denigrating the spectators and ranting about the ruination of culture—suddenly I was in too good a mood for that dark business—I dissented slyly and gave an account of all my adventures and all that I had seen and they had missed: how I had avoided the line for the great fire and the line for the tram, by bold adventures, leaving out only Yuki’s merry smile. The girl seemed at a loss. One of her stooges said of the fold out chair, “It won’t open. The thing just won’t open.”

“Well, we’re going to go up to the elderly seats. Later.”

“Later,” I said. I thought to myself, “You asshole, bragging like that,” but in a smug and satisfied way. I had after all been able to rub my victory in the faces of my detractors. Ah, Triumph: but one taste did corrupt mighty Caesar!

My brain’s the weak heart and my heart’s the long stair.
—Modest Mouse

Ten other people slept in my room on the ferry, a room with no windows or bunks, only a tatami mat floor and a few foam palettes on which passengers might get comfortable enough to doze. A cabinet was filled with simple blankets of a size ideal to travel—so much so that I traded my teddy bear blanket from the foreigner’s market for one, though I neglected to ask about the trade beforehand, and conducted it by slinking back into the room once the other passengers had departed to wait in line by the ramp. Those who stayed in the plebeian cabins had to wait for almost an hour while the wealthier Nipponese and Korean businessmen disembarked with their well-dressed families before shuffling off the ship and down the steps onto the asphalt of the wharf of Fukuoka.

This is the largest city and port on the island of Kyūshū, southernmost of the Japanese archipelago’s four main islands. Immediately to the north, across the narrow Kanmon Straits that divide the tips of the two by the slimmest space, is the large island of Honshū, always the center of Japanese culture. Honshū nestles on its southeastern bend the sacred island of Shikoku, with its eighty-eight Buddhist Temples, and is in turn protected from the typhoons of the open Pacific. The bay of Tokyo is only halfway up Honshū, which from tip to tip is greater than the distance between Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, or New York City and Jacksonville, Florida. But Japan is mostly mountains, and despite the country’s great size the thousands of islands in the archipelago wear most of the one hundred and thirty million inhabitants in densely packed cities along the coast.

I was fascinated with Japan, with its solitary path through history, its aesthetic of sublime restraint, and the longevity and uniqueness of its culture. Chinese civilization began over four thousand years before the Japanese progressed from the stone age, but that tower of culture, stacked slowly by generations of artists and intellects, had cracked and toppled during the popular seizures of Maoist communism and Cultural Revolution, will have to be rebuilt from the fragments lodged in pop culture and the isolated countryside. Korea suffered a more brutal castration under the Japanese during two decades of occupation, when only Japanese was taught in schools, and every effort was made to excise from Korea anything that would distinguish it from the conquering power. Compared to these long infections, in which generations went silently necrotic, the carpet bombing and the twin nuclear strikes that punctuated Japan’s Second World War were brief traumas: painful, but pain is never remembered.

What I fear worse, in considering Japan, was the cancer of Westernism, implanted during the American reconstruction of the Marshall Plan years, and never entirely removed. Japan’s heritage had always proved resilient in the face of cultural intrusions by the long and pudgy fingers of imperial China and the colonial powers of Europe—not only resilient, but stimulated by foreign exposure: absorbing and learning in a fever, as the body does a dose of a harmful virus given as a vaccine. It was my first goal, on landing in Japan, to see how far the country had changed from the simple beauty, subtle art, and love of nature of its past masters.

It was a Saturday and the sun made bright promises between the warehouses, and then the office buildings and colorful billboards as I walked into the stirring city. I knew where I could find a map of the country, but the store did not open for a few hours. So I bought three onigiri snacks, egg-sized balls of rice in triangles of seaweed dried to a crisp, and a bottle of milk tea from a shop and had my breakfast in the urban valley of a park. The trees had begun to yellow, and the air was crisp and sun-warmed, as clouds swirled to patterns overhead. Some Japanese slept on the grass or walked their dogs or their young daughters around the field. I sat there with this fantastic sense of uncompromised liberty—self-assured, self-dependent, and self-sustaining, carrying all I required on my back, with nowhere to be, no taxes to pay or projects to finish, no appointments or demands, and nothing to shop for but a little food. I might sleep anywhere I chose to lay my head, so I did not have to find a place nor did I feel inclined to check if my Couchsurfing requests had been granted; and when I did check my email, and had received no news, I was overjoyed. I wanted to head north and see how far I could get.

“Perhaps to Honshū,” I thought,—“perhaps only to Kokura, to sleep in the castle. Imagine it!”

I would sleep in a park or a shrine, which was legal and entirely safe to do: Japan is a country where one might leave a wallet or even a pile of bills on a picnic table in the morning and go to retrieve the treasure from the same spot at night.

Maps were posted at regular intervals around the well-organized city, and I followed them and my compass north and east. I passed through a long commercial arcade that opened onto a cobblestone courtyard between tiled slopes, that would have felt anachronistic if it were not so crowded. There were many people at the Kushida Shrine, young and old, that Saturday morning, to clap their hands and ring the clacking bells by the great ropes, light incense and ask the gods of Japan for good fortune. As atheist as Japan has become in the modern era, people still follow the old customs, at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, excluding neither, more for the sane sake of tradition than actual belief. A young woman I glimpsed, at the other end of a corridor of wooden arches between the trees, prayed solemnly with her hands pressed together, then rang the great bell and took an oracular proclamation from a box of them. I passed her as she strolled out through the gateways and I did the same as her, though I could not read my oracle, and did not take nearly as long about it. We both tied them onto a rack of rope, next to other proclamations, at the same time, and I left through a different courtyard. I bought two rice cakes filled with bean paste and ate them on the steps, then strolled on to Hakata Station.

I planned to take the subway out near the edge of town, where I could find a highway heading northeast to Shimonoseki and hold a thumb out, but the subway was as expensive as everything else. I took it out to the two hundred yen point and emerged from underground into a park between some government buildings. There were bronze statues of Kameyama-Joko and Nichiren Shonin, a monument for the defeat of the Mongols, and a temple that echoed with chanting and bell-ringing. I walked on north, following the rail lines and passing at length a number of stations. I saw places of worship as well: the Hakozaki Shrine, hidden away in a thick grove of urban forest, and the small Yineichimanu Pagoda: Shinkansen bullet trains rushing overhead like focused typhoons, and firemen practicing their ladder climbs nearby, clapping at successes. (Yineichimanu was a legendary samurai, and when his lord coveted his beautiful wife, he ran, making it as far as this suburb of Fukuoka, where he killed himself.)

Japan’s reverence is hidden from view, behind shopping malls and glass towers, beneath webs of power lines and elevated railways: in those secret spaces are concealed the small pagodas and wooden temples, the cultivated gardens and beautiful old trees, nuanced testaments to the Japanese reverence for nature. If it were not for these minutiae, the care with which they are tended noticeable only with great patience, every Japanese city would look entirely the same.

From Yineichimanu’s shrine, I turned away from the main road, which narrowed as it passed under an expressway, and walked through the campus of the Agricultural College. All the trees were labeled, and the late sun turned them to emerald. The swirling clouds that I had seen in the park were gone; only a few wisps of white remained. Four men rode by on bicycles with hot grills balanced on the handlebars and rear carriers, and one yowled as his bike was jostled and his hand singed. I passed some lively tennis courts, followed another railway, and crossed the Tataragawa River on a lion-guarded bridge, then turned straight north, for I had seen a much busier bridge in that direction and assumed it was a highway.

I passed through a park where old people strolled in track suits and boys played baseball and came to a busy road beneath the elevated highway. I could see the northbound onramp, where any hitchhiking would be attempted, and I also saw a sign pointing to the ruins of Najima Castle, not far away. With a shrug, I crossed the road. Around a bend a beach looked westward onto a bay, with warehouses on the southern shore, apartments and shipyards to the north, and the sun setting red over a long bridge. A Shinto gateway opened behind onto some steps up a hill, and in a grove on the slope there was a wooden shrine with a steep tile roof and a stone basin of water with bamboo ladles for washing. Stairs led further up to the citadel’s remnants—half a square of stones, where a corner watchtower once stood, was all that remained of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s sixteenth century fortress, by which he controlled all Kyūshū—and next to them a hundred red archways, each marked with the passages of some heathen scripture, led back beneath the bower on a winding trail to a smaller red shrine, clean and neat, with an altar for offerings and a stand for candles. It had been moved down from the peak to accommodate the rising fortress and weathered the storms that ruined the same. War is temporary, but this endures, a little lower and a little quieter than before.

I came back to the main shrine beneath the castle stair and saw a sort of platform ringing the wooden building, just covered overhead by the slanting eaves, which would be a fine, albeit narrow, place to sleep. I had been picking out sleeping spots the whole way there, in happy preparation for the coming darkness: the more romantic the better, and this one was best. Somehow the shrine made me feel that it was more secure. And, as it was already half past five, I decided to remain, and spend the night in the ruins of Najima Castle.

All I could think of, sitting on the rocks to watch the sun’s final plummet into the Sea of Japan, was the Black Knight of Ivanhoe, “reduced to the usual expedient of knights-errant, who, on such occasions, turned their horses to graze, and laid themselves down to meditate on their lady-mistress, with an oak-tree for a canopy.”

I woke with a start to the Sunday drumming of the priest inside the shrine. He began to chant in a deep, earthy voice, tones swelling like waves, as I climbed down from my perch with all my kit, and with a great noise that he surely heard, though he would not interrupt his devotions to investigate. I rushed up the stairs to the ruins at the top of the hill, where it was only six in the morning and quiet as fog, and nested in my blanket on a cold stone to watch the sun rise. I broke my fast at 7-11 on noodle soup and sandwiches, then marched north, many more miles, through the suburbs and through a forest, before finding a good spot on Highway 3. Hitchhiking is easy in Japan, where the custom of hospitality overrules an absence of a local tradition of hichuhaiku, and it is the best way to avoid the prohibitively expensive local transportation.

(I broke every rule on hitchhiking in Japan to appear on the WikiTravel Web site, which says to make a sign with kanji characters and emoji smiling faces, and to look harmless and friendly: “This is not the place for a mop of unruly hair, ripped jeans and sunglasses—foreigners are by default scary, and you need to do your best to look like you stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. Neat trousers, clean shirt, a hat to protect you from the sun instead of sunglasses. If you have a huge rucksack, put it off to the side and make sure it’s clean and that there are no things sticking out.” Use the inversion of this, Reader, to conjure an image of me hitchhiking, though I never had to wait long at it in Japan.)

I did not have to wait long for a woman driving alone to pick me up: an elementary school teacher a year younger than me, with a plain face and a good grasp of English. It was the last time I thought it remarkable that a woman picked me up, which before arriving in Japan had happened only once, with a chain-smoking woman on the island of Crete, but on this island would become the norm. The teacher took me past Koga, her hometown, to the Max Mart, and an older woman with no English brought me from there to Moji in her older husband’s high-tech smart car, with a GPS screen and doors that opened robotically. I walked a long way down an esplanade in this city of fisheries to the pier of Kitakyūshū at the tip of the island and took an expensive ferry across the Kanmon Straits to the great port of Shimonoseki on the southern point of Honshū, because I could not find a way of crossing the high span of the Kanmon-Kaikyô Bridge before nightfall. I sat on a wooden bench on the pier next to an old man who looked wearily out to sea and sunset, and I checked my map and my surroundings.

Japanese girls have a reputation for being adorably desirable—kawaii in the vernacular—a reputation they pursue with their doll-like makeup and fashions. I brought this up a year ago with Jean of Paris, who was then on his way to Japan, as was I, and I wondered if he was going to Japan with the intention of marrying a local, as many foreign workers do.

“No way, man. Japanese girls are not cute. They have faces like horses and tiny teeth like . . . like sharks, and they’re all bowlegged so they walk like this . . .”

In Jean’s defense, his own mother is Japanese, yet he insisted in his violent refutation of their beauty. Sometimes a severely negative preface can affect the way we view what is new. A spectator might have thought thought such-and-such a film was good, had not a friend pointed out the mistake in the third scene, and thus spoiled the whole perception. In the same way I could not help but check out the Japanese girls on the Shimonoseki pier and think, “They really are bowlegged.” I would make a girl laugh and think to myself, “Look at those shark teeth.” It could not all be the influence of prejudice; there must be some truth to the Parisian’s observations. I concluded sadly that Japanese girls were not very cute.

Something happened later that night, after it was dark, to change my judgment. I had wandered down to a street near the train station, with my eyes fixed skyward to search the neon signs for anything like “Internet.” I saw a girl out of the lower corner of my eye, a slim girl in a kimono standing in front of a seafood restaurant with a sign in her hands, and I stopped in front of her. She had scattered hair, wide cheekbones and a rounded chin, but what distinguished her most, made her more than lovely, were her big brown eyes, liquid pits contained in slits like almonds that they seemed to fill entirely with color, and with adorable activity. I forgot every thread that I had been ruminating on, and nearly forgot what I had approached her for. I stalled by saying good evening.

“Konbanwa. Ah, interunetu kafe wa doko desu ka?”—Where is the Internet café? (The little Japanese I had learned in college was slowly trickling back.)

“Mmm, nai. There is no. Maybe in Sanyouonoda City.”

Her drawn expression of pondering, reflexive and unintended, was so appealingly kawaii that I kept on with the questions.

“Sanyouonoda City. It’s far?”

“Hai. Mmm, haruka. Far.”

“Can I walk?”

“No, take taxi. Interunetu, none here.”

“Your English is very good.”

“No!”

“Really.”

Flattery works best when it’s over the top, but I had no idea how to call her beautiful—and I wished her English were better!

I said farewell to those pondering brown eyes and wandered off dreamily, even longingly, giving up on the Internet in an instant and returning to the train station, where the cops politely wrote me up for rinsing a T-shirt in the sink and then told me I could not sit on the floor. It did not bother me.

I went to sleep near the wharf where I had earlier landed, in the Akama Shrine. I climbed through the great red and white gate and past the fortress towers to the very top of the stairs and began to set myself up in a sort of concession stand near the principle shrine. I was on a step below, looking for a better place, when a light came on in a side building. I realized with horror that the grounds were occupied, and that I had been heard! I watched from the shadows and, once the light was off, took my things down to a wide wooden bench to the side of the main court, protected by the wind and lit by the green sign of a telephone booth. I lay down under my blanket, my knapsack for a pillow, to “meditate on my lady-mistress”—the brown-eyed seafood waitress I would never see again.

My preoccupation with thrift in Japan was perhaps unwarranted. The Japanese yen was rising in worth as the American dollar of my decreasing horde declined precipitously, which made the country more expensive than ever before, but I reflected in the Akama shrine that this country was not so expensive, when compared with Europe or even Turkey, rather than the countries of China and India where my meter of expense had been thrown into the gutter—it was not so expensive that I had to live like this. I remembered that I once considered forty dollars a day in London or a forty dollar bus ride across Turkey a modest amount, and the cost here in Japan was the same or less.

However it was not the cost that left me sleeping on benches in Japan: “I wanted the adventure of it.” I wanted to test myself to live simply, and earnestly enjoyed the clean and wild freedom of not needing and not possessing. So even though it was within my means to afford to travel Japan in the same style I had traveled Europe, I did not renounce my intention to travel without paying for accommodation or transport. I wonder if that means growth.

I woke at dawn, on my wooden pallet between the telephone booth and the vending machines of Akama Shrine, with the blasts of a ship in the harbor, and I quickly packed my things and slid down the temple steps and through the arch, towards the Karato fish market on the bay. This was a long warehouse full of twenty thousand caught fish and their stench, organized into the stalls of fishmonger families, and famous for fugu, “river pig”—the Japanese word for the poisonous flesh of the pufferfish, which is in Japan a supreme delicacy.

The liver and ovaries are packed with tetrodotoxin, and a small amount of this, if spread through the flesh during catching or carving, is enough to paralyze a man’s every muscle, though leaving him conscious to appreciate his painful asphyxiation. There is no antidote, and the only prevention, other than abstaining from the treat, is the skill of the sushi chefs. The license to serve fugu requires intensive training: seventy per cent of students never pass the final exam. Diners still die, mostly fishermen who cannot restrain themselves from eating the delicacy fresh, but most famously a kabuki performer and national treasure, Bandō Mitsugorō VIII, who demanded an illegally large serving of fufu liver and could not be refused. The danger adds to the flavor and makes fugu a cathartic retreat. As the poet Yosa Buson once wrote:

I cannot see her tonight.
I have to give her up
So I will eat fugu.

I walked off my hazardous breakfast by heading north, following the water of the straits up the peninsula and towards the heart of Honshū. The road passed under the great bridge and over the even more impressive tunnel, and went on around hills and promontories to the old castle town of Chōfu. New buildings surround an ancient heart, where each wide lane passes down high stone walls; and at the top of the hill there was an old temple and an old wooden house with a mossy garden in the back, though I smiled more as I passed by the next door school, where the girls were singing.

And I walked on, north along the water, until I reached the Chōfu Station. There was a ramen shop across the street where I had lunch, which was perhaps the Platonic form of a ramen shop, of which all others are shadows: a line of seated customers along the bar, more seated on cushions around wooden tables on a raised dais under the window, and waiters and waitresses in aprons and white hats shout commands in gruff, military Japanese, between the dining floor and the steaming, clattering kitchen, and just as often bow and present the customers with grinning honorifics, prolific in the Japanese tongue. I slurped up noodles and stared around in wonderment at how close the shop was to how I imagined it, and how much more was also there that I never could have imagined.

I took a train to the next station, and from there a bus into the Chugōku hills, to Tawarayama Onsen: too small a place to find by hitchhiking. Old Japanese women occupied every seat on that bus with their dignified and well-dressed presence, because Tawarayama Onsen is famous for its tōji, or curative bathing. The Japanese have long followed this healthy tradition of soaking in hot spas to improve their health, though most of the great onsen hot spring towns are these days converted to gleaming strips of neon karaoke bars and less obvious brothels: hygienic and Japanese variants of Las Vegas, which happen to include hot spring baths.

Tawarayama Onsen is an austere place for serious tōji bathers, who strolled the streets and bridges of the hamlet between the hills in kimonos and pleated hakata, on their way to or from one of the two public baths. There are no private baths in Tawarayama Onsen, there being not much water, but what water there is is rich with therapeutic alkali. I went directly, on arrival, to cheaper of the two, called Machi-no-Yu, stuffed all my things in a locker in the small outer cloister, showered on an upturned bucket—to bathe seated is the Japanese way—before settling into the too hot water of the two connected basins with an easing sigh as relaxed as the trickle of water into the pool. Two old men already soaked away their rheumatism there in the steaming mineral water, stark naked and utterly dignified. Their calcified faces stared unceasingly forward, at the water or the wall. What do the old see, when they stare? The cold, closing arms of death, or maybe some house of memories where they dwell, all the world reminding them of the warmer, livelier life of the past.

The old women who ran the small bathhouse were very kind and gave me water when I came out red and lightheaded and repaired my rusty trousers, which had ripped one way during my Metal Gear infiltration of Najima Castle, and ripped another, far more embarrassing way while climbing over the tiles of a stone wall into a serene garden in Chōfu. I propose that the ninja wore loose pants, and not cheap dress trousers from Bombay, for this reason.

Happily clean and properly dressed, I strolled through the town at sunset and ate some fried bread I had bought in Chōfu below. Hills and forests flanked the town, beyond a buffer of fields, and pierced only by a solitary road that escaped to the highway. There were maybe one hundred homes and businesses, and they were often the same thing, packed into a sloping circle and crowded around the rock-walled canal that intersected the center. A clean sheen of water flowed over fields of pebbles, crossed overhead by pipes and bridges of all shapes. Some ryokan inns rested on the walls over this tranquil scene, but I passed them and crossed an iron bridge, then walked down some steps to a parking lot just under the northern hills, with a public bathroom and a pavilion. I washed under the faucet some clothes that suddenly became very filthy now that I was so clean. While inspecting the vending machines, I found an electrical outlet, and so made the pavilion my home, as it allowed me to watch Seven Samurai.

There were two or three cars in the parking lot that were occupied by the tōji faithful as cheap as I, apparently living off the two vending machines that hummed near my pavilion, though equipped on their car seats with far better dwellings than my wooden bench. Some boys from the country drove in and went to the bathhouse, and a girl, and an elderly couple, and drove off with a wild slant of headlights an hour after arriving; and I was still there, a nose and eyes between a hat and a blanket. I curled up on my side and awoke three or four times with chattering teeth, having thrown off the quilt, and with dreams half-remembered and by morning entirely forgotten.

With my blanket rolled up and lashed to my backpack, I walked south along the canal and took the road west out of town—I adventured to keep from freezing before the stores opened and I could get food and hot water for my bowl of freeze dried noodles. The low blur of mountain fog receded around me, and I took one turn and another, following my compass and the cartoon map I had seen in the parking lot, until I was beyond sight of Tawarayama Onsen, alone on a highway in a valley of Mount Akahi.

In the wilds of Japan, the forests are dense and old but as well pathwayed as a museum, and no voyager can go long without seeing a house, shrine, or vending machine under the bower. The Japanese revere nature for its temperate, delicate, and ephemeral beauty, and rather than fearing the uncontrollable forces that the heathens in the dark and barbarous forests of Europe warded off by sacrifice and careful observance, the Japanese worshiped God in the symmetry of a tree’s branches or the subtle curves that wind or water gave to a rock, erecting shrines before objects of exceptionally divine construction. A God of trees, transcending flesh, and immanent in the grace of forests and the strength of mountains, and in the cataclysm of a storm, the death of leaves, and the promise of a first snowfall. Theirs was the oldest argument for religion—how can you see the world and disbelieve in the Creator?—but said with a sly whisper and a knowing laugh rather than a zealous, proselytizing cry. The term “God-fearing” is utterly foreign to this country.

There were houses here and there amid the trees, with short statues of the cosmic savior Jizō in front, wearing red knit hats and aprons. Six of these stood in a line in front of the Mara Kanon shrine, one of the last fertility shrines in Japan, two miles down the road from Tawarayama Onsen. Stairs led up from the road into a grove of trees and a phallic statuary to the small wooden shrine. Through the dragon-watched gateway with its hall there was a recessed altar, with a stone spirit house containing a stone penis of a tremendous size, with several smaller variants to either side, as well as a statue of a woman, presumably the goddess of this anatomy. There was a vase of flowers and a bowl of incense, and on the left a shelf was filled with ceramic phalli, perhaps a hundred in all, each marked with writing. A small shed to the side of the shrine contained a thousand more, arrayed in ranks on four shelves and on the floor and piled on the top shelf in disorder, up to the very ceiling.

I wondered at the fertile scene, took pictures, and went out to the road to look out across the forested hills and valley plains full of houses, roads, canals, and gardens, far easier to appreciate. I walked back to town and had breakfast outside a wooden shop, where I bought some cakes and asked for hot water for my bowl of noodles. The women insisted on showing me how to stir together the instant food. A man arrived who spoke some English, and he showed me on a map how to get to Highway 2, heading south to the rebuilt city of Hiroshima, a few hours away. I then went to the onsen for another bath, soaked in the water until I was lightheaded and too relaxed to be capable of much more than finding a nice spot to read for an hour and more.

Finally, in the early afternoon, with the anxiety of this worst time of the procrastinator’s day, too late to accomplish everything and too early to quit entirely—I walked along the eastern road, and a woman picked me up who made me a sign and told me which way would lead to a main highway. I walked a long time on a back road that wound through a scarcely peopled valley, though I did not mind, since the scenery was very beautiful. Dirt roads led straight off the highway through small hamlets ringed with fields and ended at the red gate and stone stair of a shrine within the forest. I hitched with a therapist from Nagano through hilly vales of old houses, painted shrines, and late blooming flowers, until my road turned south and his went north; and then a cooking teacher from Ube took me south through ramshackle industrial and mining towns with fading signs. She dropped me off at a convenience store near Ube on the coastal Highway 2 that shot north to Hiroshima, and I stopped inside for some food.

Picture me, Reader, with rolled up sleeves of blue plaid, sitting in the Turkish fashion on the curb of a 7-11 just off the highway: arms bent, noodles slurping up into my mouth from a cup, through well-managed chopsticks. My knapsack sits against my side, the strap always across my shoulder like a bandolier, and my modest, road-stained haversack is propped up to the right; and that’s all there is of me.

Well I found a good spot, lots of room for an interested car to pull over, and assumed the position: a smile and a thumb. Dusk was descendant, but I had time for one last ride: a man who worked insurance stopped for me and took me on towards Hiroshima, though he was only going so far.

He saw a truck with Hiroshima plates at a red light, and I got out to ask the driver if he might take me. The man behind the glass made an X with his forearms.

“He said no,” I told the businessman, climbing back into his car.

“He is afraid.”

“Yeah. I think maybe the truck companies here won’t let them take hitchhikers. Only kuruma. Are you afraid?”

“No. When I am younger, forty years ago, I hitchhike to Tokyo.”

“Do many Japanese still hitchhike?”

The man hesitated in his reply, with many noises of linguistic pondering, and I said one of my favorite Japanese words: “Tokidoki?”

“Tokidoki.”

Sometimes.