Hokkaido Highway Blues

admiring masks and seething in envy over the sensual, hedonistic lifestyles of ski instructors and sun-browned scuba divers.
     

4
     
    SADO ISLAND, IF not lost in time, was certainly adrift in it. The villages were like fallen stacks of wooden crates surrounded by seascapes and embraced by rolling hills.
    We stopped for coffee at a viewing spot along the way, and Say Ya, stretching and yawning, wandered into the tourist shop. Say Ya had to try everything, squeezing horns in the toy section, trying on hats, spinning tops, playing plastic flutes. Then, as soon as we were back into the car, he dropped into sleep as suddenly as someone under a hypnotist’s command. A torrent of energy, then a nap.
    “He is just like a kid,“ said Hot Sushi approvingly.
    At Senkaku Bay we stopped to visit an aquarium, with listless fish and giant mutant crabs and stir-crazy sharks turning cramped circles. The bay itself was a deep turquoise inlet of sea amid jagged rock formations and overspills of green. We walked along a narrow footbridge onto an observation deck perched on an outcrop of rock.
    Say Ya looked around and said, philosophically, “Good place for a barbecue.”
    As we continued up the west coast, we passed a sign near a beach: CAUTION: WATCH OUT FOR BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.
    “Next week,” Abo assured me. “Next week and the beaches will be filled with beautiful women.”
    Story of my life.
    From the Senkaku Bay area, we turned inland toward a place called Kinzan, “the Gold Mountain.” This was no hyperbole. In 1601, the very year that Lord Tokugawa unified Japan under his rule, gold was discovered at Kinzan. It was a rich vein, near the surface and easily separated from the bedrock. This discovery on the fringes of Tokugawa’s realm proved fortuitous indeed, for the gold of Sado funded the coffers of the Tokugawa dynasty and kept them in power for the next two hundred fifty years. The gold of Sado outlasted the shōguns themselves. It helped fund the Meiji Reformation and it supported Japan’s imperial adventures in China. Sado gold helped pay for the planes and ships that attacked Pearl Harbor, and it helped fund the winged bombs of the kamikaze pilots. Gold was still being mined at Sado right up until 1990.
    At the height of the gold rush, the main site was near the boom town of Aikawa, the Klondike of Japan, a brawling community of gold miners, samurai overlords, imported prostitutes, wealthy wine merchants, assorted mountebanks, and thousands upon thousands of slave laborers. It was a major, albeit makeshift, city. Today, little is left of Aikawa to remind you of its once reckless past.
    As we drove inland toward the old gold mines, the ragged green peaks called Doyu-no-Wareto rose above us. They were formed, it was said, by a gold miner enraged with greed who struck the mountain so hard with his hammer and spike that he split the peak in two. The mountain was split, but not by any mythical figure. It was the ceaseless mining activity of thousands that cracked the mountain.
    The mines have since been turned into a sort of Disneyland of the Oppressed, with walkways built deep into the wet chilled depths. Mannequins dressed in ragged clothes are arranged in mini-dioramas, reminders that it was grunt work, performed by slave laborers, that made the gold mines viable. The mine shafts, now a tourist attraction, were a kind of mass grave. Thousands of slaves died in these mines. Their average life expectancy, upon arrival at Aikawa, was less than four years. Meanwhile, on the mainland of Honshu north of Tokyo, lie the baroque, extravagant mausoleums at Nikko, burial place of the shoguns. The contrast between Nikko and the mines of Aikawa, between two tombs, is so vast as to be obscene.
    There was an awkward moment outside the Mine Museum when Hot Sushi pulled me aside and said, in a hushed voice, “Hey, man. It costs six hundred yen to enter. If you can’t afford it—I mean, if you need some money, or—”
    “No, no—’’ I waved his offer away.
    Michelle eyed our exchange warily.
    From the gold mines, Hot Sushi decided to follow the O-Sado Skyline Highway along the spine of the isle and then down into the port city of
    Ryōtsu. When Hot Sushi began to yawn, lionlike, Michelle became concerned. ‘Are you sure you aren’t too tired to drive?”
    “Tired?” said Hot Sushi. “Who—me? I never get tired. Never.”
    Again Michelle tried to catch him in a contradiction, and again he managed to elude her. “But