The Roads To Sata Read online

  I supposed it would, and so it proved—convenient, at least, for the ryokan—since it enabled them to charge me for two bottles of beer I didn't remember drinking and a saucer of beans perhaps Beethoven had consumed.

  "Sayonara" said the myna bird, managing to sound wistful and not, I thought, too unlike Mori Shinichi:

  When the flower falls the butterfly dies.

  Ah, how I should love to love so...

  The sea was ghostly in the mist, separated from the flat coast road by a wire fence that gave it the appearance of no man's land. High up on the cliff above the road a group of elderly workmen drilled the face with stuttering pneumatic drills. And a cannibal crow, its black eyes ecstatic, tore at the corpse of another crow that had been rammed flat to the road in the night. An old man on the island of Rebun once told me that the crows in Hokkaido attack human beings—but only schoolgirls, and only between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. It had something to do with their uniforms, he suspected.

  By midafternoon I was sitting on a rocky beach staring down the coast at the first city I had seen for nine days—the city of Rumoi. I could see its chimneys, its cranes along the giant wharves, its antennas, its gas tanks, all shrouded in a mist that on the sea was pristine, but there, as it hovered round the factory stacks, was indistinguishable from the gray-white smoke belching out of them. I had spent nine days in the wilderness arid was coming back to civilization.

  "Ziss is a PEN! Ziss is a PEN!" screamed the children as I walked into the city. They giggled as they screamed that first sentence from their English textbooks, and if I answered them, they giggled louder. I came into Rumoi by what seemed to be the back way, trudging past the Mobil Oil tanks, past the Eastern Fuji discharging its bilges, threading my way through a maze of narrow streets all of which seemed to be under repair. Drills chewed up the tarmac, and women in white scarves flagged down the cars.

  "Amerika? Amerika?"

  "England."

  "Eh?"

  "England."

  "Wonderful! Wonderful! Thank you for taking the trouble."

  The main shopping streets of Rumoi, as I discovered when I finally found them, are like those of most other Japanese cities—a bewildering exercise in juxtaposition. One shop sells electrical appliances: portable radios with names like Mac, cassette decks and televisions all in one—Zilbap, Cougar, Transam—so many knobs and digital counters they look as if they require a pilot's license. Next door a shop sells lacquered Buddhist altars, incense and candles to burn for the dead. Over the road a pastry shop called Denmark and, next to that, a shop that sells raw squid. A rack of bamboo kendo swords outside a toy store stocked with baseball bats. The cinema posters display the same eclectic tastes: Clint Eastwood squinting off one telegraph pole, two mottled dinosaurs locked' in combat on the next, and a half-naked Japanese Catholic nun salivating as she fondles a black leather riding crop.

  Rumoi seemed a lively enough city, I thought, though curiously subdued in the early morning when I left it, striding off at the beginning of the tenth day of my journey past empty coal trucks and rows of uniformed high school pupils, the girls babbling excitedly in their neat full-skirted sailor suits, the boys in their shiny black blazers and geta, dragging their satchels along the railings by the roadside and waiting till I was well past before shouting out, "Hey, yooo!"

  The morning brightened further from the city and the sun was soon glinting on the inland rice fields, turning them into small square lakes of green and silver. After more than a hundred kilometers I had left the sea behind me and would not meet it again for a further three hundred, when the sea would be the vast Pacific.

  Outside a little railway station the stationmen were busy mowing an already immaculate lawn, picking up the cut grass in their white-gloved hands and placing it in a spotless red wheelbarrow. By the time I turned off the main road into the mountains the blue sky was cloudless and July was back. The road was a real dirt mountain road, twisting and turning, climbing and plunging, crossing and recrossing the single steep railway track that ran through the gorges from Rumoi to Numata.

  "Do you want one of these? They're alive, you know," asked the man who owned the one village grocer's shop I stopped in, and he showed me a sea slug in a fat plastic tube. I opted instead for a packet of dried octopus and a bottle of chilled Sapporo beer: "Time honoured since 1876" said the label in English.

  "You're my very first foreigner, you know," confessed a little girl on a tricycle, staring up at me with wide, serious eyes. She followed me on her tricycle out of the village until her attention was claimed by the Communist Party's loudspeaker van that was doing the rounds for the local elections, repeating the candidate's name over and over again in the ritual that serves, in Japan, for campaigning: "My name is Kodama Kenji. Vote for me. My name is Kodama Kenji. Vote for me. My name is Kodama Kenji. Vote for me. My name is Kodama Kenji. Vote for me...."

  Four little boys on bicycles escorted me into the town of Numata at five o'clock in the afternoon and made me stop to look at their pictures of suupaa-kaa ("supercars").

  "What suupaa-kaa do you have in England?"

  I felt boastful: "Oh, you know... Rolls Royces... Jaguars..."

  "Is that all?"

  "Well, er... there's... er... Aston Martins..."

  "It's a shame he's not an Italian. They've got Lamborghinis."

  And with that accusation ringing in my ears, I was shown to a ryokan and promptly abandoned.

  The island of Hokkaido is a comparatively recent addition to the Japanese homeland. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the only permanent Japanese settlements lay huddled in the extreme southwest of the island—at Matsumae, Esashi, and Hakodate—within a day's journey of mainland Honshu. A few loggers ventured further north, and a handful of merchants to trade with the Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese islands who had been herded into Hokkaido by the close of the ninth century. But the loggers and the merchants returned south in the autumn, leaving the Ainu to brave the winter in their straw-walled huts and the Russians from Sakhalin to come trap-ping seals. It was not until 1869 that an official "Commissioner of Colonization" was appointed, and not until six years after that that a treaty with Russia established Japan's sovereignty over the island once and for all.

  In the last three decades of the nineteenth century the settlement of Hokkaido became a major government policy. It was partly based on a desire to exploit Hokkaido's mineral and timber resources in the rush to develop Western industries, partly to ease pressure on an already-crowded mainland, and partly to establish a military presence that would serve to deter any Russian incursions. (Japan still bases approximately a third of its "Self-Defense Forces" in Hokkaido, including its one fully mechanized division.) The authorities engaged American cartographers to map the island, American agronomists to study how best the land could be used, American educators to found and lecture at schools and colleges. They imported steam trains from America and architecture from Russia, laid out new cities, set up new administrations, licensed Japan's first beer factory and a Trappist monastery.

  But the island remained—and to some extent still is—an outpost, a frontier state. It is perceived even today as "un-Japanese"—in its climate, in the drift ice that grazes its coast, in the scarcity of cherry trees (a national symbol), in the absence of a clearly distinguishable rainy season, in the empty flat expanse of its plains, in its crops of potatoes, oats, and maize, in its lack of a local dialect (since settlers came from all parts of Japan, they tended to adopt the standard form of the language to facilitate communication), in the signs outside its dairy farms that boast of "Registered Holsteins," in the TV commercials for ski holidays that tout Hokkaido as "the Scotland of Japan." And even the folk songs of the Japanese settlers have an unmistakable echo of remoteness and suffering:

  I wake to the sound of the sea gull's cry

  and see in my mind the mountains of Hokkaido.

  The plovers wail, shearing the moon,

  a
nd the waves of the sea are choked with sobbing.

  Some of the villages and small towns I had passed through seemed outposts in a literal sense—the roads between them still uncompleted, cut off in winter by three yards of snow. The twenty-two bars of tiny Horonobe bore definite witness to its winter isolation (and twenty-two was not an especially large number, as I had learned to my satisfaction in other "frontier" towns). Conversation in these towns often plunged me out of my depth. I had spent seven years in Tokyo, an in-poster, displaying an in-poster's ignorance:

  "In winter the snow is past the lintels."

  "Oh, that must be pretty!"

  But now I was emerging from the northernmost provinces into the valley of the Ishikari River—a valley that rapidly widened into a plain— and the sense of isolation, of moving from one frontier post to another, was increasingly swamped by the evidence of industrial development. The chimneys of the local power station are visible for twenty kilometers, car cemeteries flank the sprawling towns and the towns slide conspiratorially one into another, ponds and streams are in the throes of dredging, day and night there is a rumble of trucks on the highway, for the highway was now inescapable.

  My eleventh day opened on a cloudy sky and four more little boys who pursued me on bicycles, screaming "Gaijin! Gaijin! (Foreigner! Foreigner!)" When they had overtaken me, they blocked my path with their bicycles and stood scowling up at me open-mouthed: "Ufu! Mite! Eigo no hito da! (Ugh! Look! It's an English-speaker!)" I suggested to them in Japanese that they might like to move their bicycles. They turned away, crestfallen: "Ara! Eigo ja nakatta! (Oh! It wasn't an English-speaker!)"

  The wind made the pipes of my pack frame sing and muffled the noise the election vans made, though when the wind dropped you could hear them for miles over the flat plain: "My name is Kita Shuji. Vote for me. My name is Kita Shuji. Vote for me...." I sat for ten minutes with a small white goat tethered to a railing by the side of the highway that munched grass from my hand, licked my knee, and bleated in despair when I left it.

  The night brought a summer storm and in the morning a hard rain was still sweeping the streets outside my ryokan window. Less than five kilometers away the city of Takikawa offered shelter and a day of rest. I succumbed without much protest to the offer and fled across the girdered bridge, my anorak zipped up round my nose, the rain still drenching every square inch of me, so that when I swung my pack off in a coffee shop I practically swamped the floor. I sat for an hour drinking Kilimanjaro at a pound a cup, reading Play Comic ("No Cut!! No Black Out Porno!!") and listening to the Mozart flute quartets, which just about managed to compensate for the chill of my clothes and the smell of the overflowing drains.

  At midday, with the rain still pelting down, I drifted into a cinema. It was three-quarters empty and I sat through a double bill,stiff, cold, but grateful for the dark and the rare bit of anonymity it lent me. The first film was about yakuza—Japanese gangsters—one of whom, to protest a gang decision, sliced off the tip of his little finger with a twelve-inch kitchen knife and slipped it to his boss in a cup of green tea. The result was mayhem. The second film, about a women's prison, climaxed in a scene where the prison superintendent chained one of the younger inmates to his bed and raped her while slashing her breasts with a broken bottle. When the lights went up I noticed that there were quite a lot of young children in the audience, some with their parents, so it was encouraging to remember that, according to the Japan National Tourist Organization, "Japanese cinema keeps in close touch with the people in its attempts to graphically express their hearts' desire."

  The rain had stopped when I left the cinema but the streets still shone and the late afternoon light was a muffled gray. The ryokan I managed to find was of a type specially recommended for foreigners by the Japan Ryokan Association—a type I normally went out of my way to avoid. But I was afraid, being both wet and cold, that if I didn't get a bath and a dry kimono soon, my journey would be ending at Takikawa. They gave me a bed, a "Western-style" meal consisting of a cold chick-en leg wrapped in aluminum foil on a pile of cold pink macaroni, and charged me twice what I was paying at minshukus. I bought a couple of cans of beer from a machine in the corridor outside my room (there being, in the "Western tradition," no service). They cost twice what I was paying at grocer's shops—about a pound a pint.

  Broken bottles, comic books, and severed fingers that looked disturbingly edible danced about in my dreams all night. I found, when I woke, that my legs were not stiff, that my feet stopped killing me inside fifteen minutes, and that I could bow and smile politely while paying my bill. Clearly, I was becoming acclimatized.

  Dark clouds still shrouded the mountains to the west, but the distant eastern mountains were bathed in a clear silver light. It was getting better. On the dead straight road, on my thirteenth day, I followed an open truck creeping along with a mechanical extension arm trimming the grass. On the back of the truck stood a mechanical policeman. He wore a real tie and a real helmet and was raising and lowering his flag in so lifelike a manner that, at first, I thought he was real as well. Further on, a large signboard on one side of the road showed an artist's conception of a holiday resort: a pristine blue lake, a pavilion with neat red-painted terraces, a children's playground, a tourist center, a complex of restaurants, pools, and shops. Through the trees behind the signboard I glimpsed a swamp in the first stages of being dredged— the choked remains of what must once have been a small lake, for little wooden steps led down to it and empty wooden benches over-looked it. I supposed that couples had come to sit on these benches on Sundays to gaze out over the lake towards the distant mountains. But they had done so for nothing, whereas lakes must pay their way.

  A heavy lorry coming up from Sapporo swerved across to the wrong side of the road and growled to a halt in front of me. "My God," I thought, what's coming?" The driver leaned out and gave me a pickled plum. Further up the road I passed a cattle truck parked outside a drive-in where the truck driver was eating his lunch of nikomi (gut stew), and in the truck the cows stood with shiny eyes, staring out at the stream of converted fish eaters, all speeding back in the wrong direction, towards Sapporo, away from the slaughterhouse.

  It is not pleasant at the best of times to walk along a highway, but it can be educational. You notice, for example, the changing fashions in litter. I remember once, on a trip through Greece, being struck by the fact that the commonest kind of debris on the roads of Macedonia appeared to be squashed tortoises. On British roads I suppose it is squashed birds. On Highway 275 from Numata to Sapporo it is abandoned cassette tapes. They lie unraveled along the verges, sometimes for as much as half a kilometer, looking like lost bits of survey equipment. An educational experience, but a puzzling one.

  I stopped at a grocer's shop for a beer and was invited into the back of the shop and given a wooden stool to sit on and a glass mug to drink from. The back of the shop doubled as a small savings club and an old man had come to deposit part of his pension. When he walked he bent almost double on his stick. When he listened he cupped his hand to his ear like a character in a cartoon strip. He wore baggy gray trousers and a spotless white shirt and he told me that he had been a sailor. Sixty years before, he told me, he had been to London, Glasgow, and Liver-pool, and had visited the Vickers Company at Barrow-in-Furness. He pronounced this name with very great care, articulating every syllable so precisely that he made it sound like holy writ. The grocer was visibly awed, and when the old sailor said "Barrow-in-Furness" a second time the grocer's wife gave him a free packet of biscuits.

  The evening was bright and good to walk in, but a daily average of thirty or so kilometers was starting to take its toll on my untrained body. I have always walked a lot, for pleasure and for exercise, but I had never before set out to cover 3,300 kilometers at a stretch, and the thought of the next four months, as much as anything else, was sending darts through my soles and calves.

  The white-shirted manager of the Tsukigata Tourist Center, the only place with a va
cancy for the night, tut-tutted and fussed as I staggered in: there were no slippers waiting at the automatic door so while I stumbled out of my boots some had to be fetched.

  "So difficult to find trained staff" said the manager in the hearing of the elderly maid who had run to fetch the slippers. "You really must try to forgive us."

  I asked the elderly maid if there was a washing machine that I could use. She smiled, bundled me up to my room, chatted to me while I changed into the yukata—the summer kimono—she had brought me, took my shirt, my jeans, my underpants, and stinking socks, washed them, rinsed them, dried them, ironed them, and had them in my room before breakfast next morning. So much for untrainables.

  I wondered why Tsukigata, a nondescript little town by all appearances, should have such a thing as a tourist center. But as I lay soaking in the vast bath, looking out of the picture windows at the last light fading on the wooded valley, it seemed a pleasant enough place to be. And valleys must pay their way.

  The younger maid who brought up my dinner kept holding her head in her knees and giggling. When it came to laying out the futon, she collapsed entirely, rolling about the tatami mats honking like a foghorn. She had clearly been at the sake since lunchtime, and it was the older maid's turn, as she dragged the futon away from her, to tut-tut about the lack of staff training. But I didn't mind a bit. I liked them both—the old one's chatter, the younger one's bright red wobbling cheeks. And when the manager came sniffing along the corridor, picking tiny black midges off his crisp white shirt, I shut the door before he got to us.

  I suppose there are still countries where children walk seven or eight kilometers to school. They must be very underdeveloped. In properly developed countries, the inhabitants regard walkers with grave suspicion and have taught their dogs to do the same. Shakespeare's Richard III complained that dogs barked at him as he halted by them and thought it had something to do with his hump. It made no difference whether I halted or not, the Japanese dogs that saw me flew into rabid frenzies. One dog owner guessed it was because my rucksack re-minded them of a burglar's loot, although I preferred to think it stirred in them deep canine memories of the last Plantagenet. At any rate, I was thankful that dog owners in Japan keep their pets chained up on short leashes. It is a practice that has caused more than one foreign resident to vent his spleen in the English-language press. Let him try walking from Hokkaido to Kyushu.