Hokkaido Highway Blues

was too tight; his neck was bulging out like a boiled sausage escaping its skin. I smiled at him wanly in what I hoped was a polite but discouraging way.
    “Japanese technology, number one in the world!” he said, his smile having grown into a big, arrogant, insecure grin.
    I sighed. He was wrong, of course, as most nationalists ultimately are. I happened to know all about hovercrafts. They were invented by the Scottish-born American citizen, Alexander Graham Bell—father of the telephone—at his Canadian home on Cape Breton Island, working from an earlier design by an Italian inventor. Hovercrafts aren’t Japanese; they are Scottish-American-Canadian-Italian. I considered trying to explain this to my sausage-necked friend, but what was the point? He wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
    Japan has never originated any major technological advance. Nothing has ever come out of Japan that has ever revolutionized the world, for better or for worse. Japan has given us a lot of very creative solutions to consumer needs, however. Think of the huge American boom boxes compared to the futuristic Walkman, or the ridiculous shoulder-breaking video cameras that we were lugging around until companies like Sony began developing handheld camcorders.
    “Sure, the Japanese are clever,” said an American colleague, “but they aren’t creative.”
    He was wrong. The Japanese are creative. So are the Americans. It all depends on how you define creativity. In Japan, it’s seen in terms of problemsolving, a new approach to an old puzzle. This type of creativity encourages group effort and fuzzy logic. For Westerners, it is the rugged individual with the sudden light of inspiration. The first is practical creativity; the other, romantic. Neither view is superior, but the one is often baffled by—or even contemptuous of—the other.
    The Japanese criticize the Americans as being erratic and sloppy; the Americans criticize the Japanese as being copycats. Each contains an element of truth, but neither approach is necessarily bad. The two actually complement each other.
    “Number one,” said my seatmate, persisting in his line of thought.
    “Yes, yes, yes,” I said with a sigh. “Japan is number one.”
    He was pleased to hear this. “Number one,” he said.
    “Yes, yes. Number one. Japan is the number-one country in the world, in the universe. No one is better than Japan. Japan is the greatest. Japan is the best. Number one in the world. No one is better than Japan. Japan is God.“
    He was aghast. “No, no, no,” he said, suddenly backpedaling. “Japan is a very poor country. Very small.”
    “Yeah, well, make up your mind, will you.” And with that I shifted my body away from him.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, quietly.
    “Forget about it.”
    “I’m sorry.“
    I didn’t answer, and a few moments later he tapped me on the arm and offered me some dried fish. I declined. The Sado Island jet foil bucked a ridge of waves and for one moment, the ship dropped slightly, like a plane in an air pocket.
    On the television set, a group of pouty teenage heartthrobs were bouncing around with excessive perkiness, insufferably cute as all pouty teenage heartthrobs inevitably are. The band’s name was Cry Babies and their hair was jelled up like unusually large dandelions about to blow away. They skipped and pranced and preened and posed and moved about in what was meant to suggest dancing. But there was only a coincidental connection between their movements and the actual beat. Witnessing the spectacle, I was struck by a wonderful, liberating thought: There actually are people in the world with less rhythm than WASPs.
    Watching young, self-conscious Japanese college kids moving through preset dance steps—absolutely divorced from any connection to the music that happens to be playing—is a painful, yet sadistically pleasurable experience. Somewhere, somehow, mainstream Japanese music got stuck in the early seventies and never recovered. They might have heart-stopping drums and larger neon signs and faster jet foils, but by God they couldn’t jive their way out of an epilepsy clinic.
    And on that refreshing note, I settled down and enjoyed the ride.
     

7
     
    I THINK I caught Niigata on a bad day. Everything looked sullen and soiled and worn out. Even the city’s smokestacks, painted in stripes like candy canes, emerged from the industrial haze like sooty sweets dug out from under a sofa cushion.
    After the sparse landscapes