Author's Note
Few people (warns the publisher, grumbling) are likely to know where Sata is, so I had better locate it in this note. Sata is the name of the southernmost cape of the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. I walked there from Soya, the northernmost cape of the northernmost island, and the roads between, and the things I saw and heard and did along them, are the subjects of this book.
Japan is a long country. If I had walked the same distance across the same latitudes in North America, the trek would have taken me from Ottawa to Mobile, Alabama; and if I had started in Europe, I would have marched from Belgrade through the Middle East to the Gulf of Aquaba. The distances I walked are given here in kilometers, not miles, because it is in kilometers that most Japanese think, and that I thought every morning, noon, and evening of my journey.
If I could, I would individually thank the men, women, and children who populate these pages, but I never knew the names of most of them, and I have thought it in their interests to alter those names I did know. Where names are used, they are used in the Japanese manner: family name first, given name last.
I have tried to avoid generalizations, particularly "the Japanese." "The Japanese" are 120,000,000 people, ranging in age from 0 to 119, in geographical location across 21 degrees of latitude and 23 of longitude, and in profession from emperor to urban guerrilla. This book is about my encounters with some twelve hundred businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, fishermen, housewives, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, soldiers, policemen, monks, priests, tourists, journalists, professors, laborers, maids, waiters, carpenters, teachers, innkeepers, potters, dancers, cyclists, students, truck drivers, Koreans, Americans, bar hostesses, professional wrestlers, government officials, hermits, drunks, and tramps.
***
A light went on in the hut. Through the condensation on the window I could see the wood stove the old man had burning. I saw his shadow move across the dry wall and watched him peer out through the lighted window and stare at me lying on his step. Then I heard him move to the door. The door opened a little and, by turning an inch, I could see his face silhouetted in the doorway. He stood there for what seemed a very long time and I tried to think of something to say, but in the end, I was spared the necessity of saying anything. Quietly but firmly he closed the door of his hut and turned the key in the lock.
It was light by five and the rain had stopped. I got up, shivering, retrieved my groundsheet from the beach, beat the sand off it with a sodden branch, and began to pack my rucksack. The caretaker sat staring at me through the window of his lodge. He looked as though he had been sitting there all night. His old face was tired but his eyes were remarkably sharp. I knew he was staring at me as I rolled up my sleeping bag and strapped it to the pack and as I folded the groundsheet and laced my boots.
"Sayonara," I said as I got up to leave.
I expect he was still staring when I reached the trees.
The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one.
Like most Hokkaido people, he knew the value of hot water. He had an oil stove going now, in mid-July, and he poured the water that he had pumped up out of the ground very carefully into his small metal teapot and set it on the stove to boil.
Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals—far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.
"There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."
He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.
"You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they're really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want."
I nodded pleasantly, having no food.
"If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's thirty meters away from you, you've no need to worry. The bear will run away. It'll be far more frightened than you are."
"Well, well!" I said, and sipped my tea.
"If you turn a corner and you see a bear, say, twenty meters away, there's still a good chance it won't bother you. It'll roar a bit just to let you know it's there, but if you stand quite still it'll probably get bored and go back into the forest."
"Mm," I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance.
"And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's five or ten meters away from you..."
"Then, presumably, I should start to worry," I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.
"Not really," he said. "You've no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it's five meters away it'll certainly kill you. There's no point in worrying at all."
*
The offshore island of Sado—the largest of japan's many minor islands—was notorious from the twelfth century as a place of exile, and its rocky shores and misty valleys have furnished a prison for some of the glummest characters in Japanese history.Mongaku was one—a sort of twelfth-century Japanese Rasputin. He began his career by lusting after his cousin and killing her by mistake (he had meant to kill her husband), for which piece of carelessness he shaved his head, became a monk, and religiously persuaded the powerful general Yoritomo to wage all-out war against his rivals at court. Yoritomo was successful, and for a while Mongaku enjoyed the fruits of victory. But, alas, not content with provoking mere war, he went on to hatch a plot against the emperor Gotoba, and when his protector Yoritomo died in 1199, Mongaku was whisked off to Sado, where he fretted away the rest of his life.
The other famous clergyman to suffer in Sado was the militant evangelist Nichiren, less a Rasputin than a thirteenth-century Ian Paisley. Nichiren insisted on a firm bond between church and state—so long as it was his church, and his alone, that the state paid any attention to. So vehemently did Nichiren denounce all other Buddhist sects (he once exclaimed that the government would have done better to execute the "heretic" priests than the emissaries of Kublai Khan) that he was packed off" to Sado in 1271, where he passed two years in a mud hut and suffered from chronic diarrhea.
The highest-ranking exile was the emperor Juntoku, sent to Sado in 1221 for attempting to overthrow the military regents. He spent 20 years there, died on a hunger strike, and had 650 years to wait before he was officially reinstated. The founder of the Noh theater, Zeami Motokiyo, lived eight of the last years of his life in Sado. The courtier Hino Suketomo, who had tried to raise an army on behalf of the powerless emperor Godaigo, was shipped to Sado in 1324 and assassinated there by the glum governor. And as late as the mid-nineteenth century a penal colony was working the dreary Sado gold mines.
The afternoon grew overcast. I sat on the beach at Teradomari—the beach from which all these exiles had set sail—and stared across at the gray mounds of the island, remembering my walks there, the meadows and caves and the lingering snows of Mount Kimpoku in May, and thinking of my own seven-year exile in Tokyo.
Ah, toward Sado
the trees and the grass bend.
Ar'ya ar'ya ar'ya sa.
Near Izumosaki a bent old woman was scrubbing out a dusty little wayside shrine and lighting candles. The houses in the villages had been battered by the wind and salt to a uniform gray-brown. They were fenced off from the sea by gray bamboo palisades, the tops of which were rough and frayed, and the houses were so patched and weatherblown that they looked as if they had been camouflaged for an invasion. Between the oily, littered beaches the sea pounded on high stone walls and in the first shower of rain I went for a swim and cut my foot on a broken whiskey bottle.
The shops in the town of Izumosaki displayed four or five sticks of baked flyblown fish in each of their windows and little else. Down the coast towards Kashiwazaki a solitary gas rig straddled a small patch of rain-pocked sea, and in one tiny village an incongruous Hotel Japan loured over its own private bit of beach where three young girls paddled aimlessly about under torn, wind-whipped umbrellas.
"What are you doing, arubaito?" asked a toothless woman pushing a wheelbarrow. (Arubaito is the German word arbeit, which the Japanese have commandeered to mean a part-time job.) The rain had blown over and I was sitting on a beer crate under the awning of a grocer's shop.
"No, I'm not doing arubaito. I'm having a rest."
The woman stopped, and the three dogs that were following her lurched, yapping and sniffing, into the grocer's rubbish bins.
"You speak good hyojungo (orthodox Japanese). Where did you learn it?"
"I live in Tokyo."
"Ah!"
The woman brushed away a bluebottle that was caught in her head-scarf
"I was born in Tokyo. In Toyo-cho. I bet you don't know where that is."
"I bet I do. I had a friend who owned a futon shop there. We used to go drinking at a folk-song bar in Asakusa."
The woman's mouth dropped open so wide I thought she was trying to catch the bluebottle.
"Maa! Asakusa! Natsukashii! (Ah! Asakusa! That brings back memories!) I haven't heard anyone talk about Asakusa for more than seventeen years. That's how long I've lived here. Seventeen years and four months. Asakusa, ah! Have you seen the Sanja Festival?"
"All three days of it."
"Maaaa! Natsukashii! And the log-rolling festival on the Sumida River? And the old Tokyo firemen's dances...?"
She pulled back her headscarf and grinned me a toothless grin that was half rueful, half delight.
"My husband comes from Kashiwazaki though."
"And you've never been back to Tokyo?"
"Never. Not once."
She shifted from foot to foot and I patted one of the dogs that was trying to scrape an empty sausage skin out from under the crate I was sitting on.
"Asakusa, ahhh...!"
"Don't you like it here?"
She nodded once, perfunctorily.
"I like it." And she looked at the sea as though it had just materialized. "Oh, I like it. Kashiwazaki's all right..."
She called to the dogs and lifted her barrow, smiling the same wide toothless smile.
"Yes... oh, yes... and you knew Asakusa..."
The exile walked on with her barrow and dogs.
Above the city of Kashiwazaki a layer of mist sliced Mount Yoneyama in half like an orange. Sado had disappeared, hidden in the rain clouds, and the column of smoke from the city rose to merge with the dense pall of the sky. On an empty beach a solitary painter sat, daubing his canvas with the grays of cloud, the brown-gray of the smoke, the white-gray of the mist, the pink-gray of the buildings.
*
Eiheiji is a vast, beautiful temple, its rooms and halls connected to each other by corridors and long flights of covered wooden steps. Black-robed monks with shaven heads and trainee monks in loose black jackets and trousers sauntered through the corridors and halls with little smirks on their scrubbed faces, ignoring the tourists who were being ushered about, shuffling and whispering; and as the rain still fell, the rustle of robes, the ring of curious fingers brushing a gong, the patter of slippered feet on the cold, smooth boards or the shush of silk tabi socks over soft straw matting—all rose and fell in volume like the gasps of air in a bamboo flute and left in their wake a greater silence than before.The churches of Europe—the great ones—soar up in dizzying verticals at the sky. Eiheyi hugs the contours of the earth. When the sun strikes the stained-glass windows of a cathedral they explode in primary colors like a carousel. But the colors of Eiheiji are earth colors—the somber greens of the garden, the browns and grays of smooth polished wood and slate, the soft gold color of old tatami. The builders of the Christian churches of Europe―churches in which a religion of humility is preached—seem often boastful, often to be saying to us: "Now, look here, this is the House of God. It is here—here—not over the road with those dingy Presbyterians but here in this church that God dwells." The builders of Eiheiji were a lot less strident: "Oh, God dwells in our temple, if you like. But then, he dwells in everything else as well—in clods of earth, in the eyes of the blind, in the pebbles of the seashore as well as in our shrines."The landscape of the mountains,
the sound of streams—
all are the body and voice of Buddha.
Eiheiji was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century by the author of that poem, a priest named Dogen. Dogen had spent four of his most formative years in China, being trained in Zen at Mount T'ien-t'ung, and because the Chinese are a practical people, his revelations, when they came, were of a practical kind. Dogen did not look for spirits in the air or worship an arcane, invisible Buddha who moved only in mysterious ways. "The truth is everywhere," he insisted. "The truth is where we are. One small step separates earth from heaven."
Despite the comparative sobriety of its architecture, Zen often seems to inspire in its adherents a supercilious attitude to the rest of mankind; an attitude that delights in one-upmanship, in riddles, puzzles, and the power of extraordinary experience. But Dogen maintained that in order to grasp the meaning of existence it was not necessary for a per-son to be unusually clever or to spend his life doing remarkable things. Simply by "sitting still and doing nothing" a man could discover what there was to be learned about life. Prayer and ritual .were important to Dogen, but not much more so than cooking or sweeping the yard. All functions of the body, including the most basic, became, in the temple he founded, limbs of Zen. The toilet in Eiheiji contains an altar to Ususama Myo-o (The Guardian of the Impure), and together with the bath and the meditation hall, it is one of the three places in the temple where speech is forbidden and where a particularly strict code of contemplative behavior is observed by everyone who enters. It was Dogen's intention to make of Zen not an abstract philosophy, but a practice. The advice he gave his meditating disciples was blunt, straightforward, and mind-wrenchingly practical:
Think of not thinking.
How do you think of not thinking?
By not thinking.
The rain had stopped when I left Eiheiji and began the long descent of the mountain. Blue dragonflies danced over the grass by the road-side and parched brown grasshoppers with lemon-colored wings flitted with soft clicks from stalk to stalk. I imagined the dragonflies dancing around Dogen on his trips to and from the temple, and his seeing in them, as he saw in all things, an endlessly renewable shard of the Buddha.
No comments:
Post a Comment