Hokkaido Highway Blues

(When I asked a Tokyo friend for advice on how to speak the Tohoku accent, he said “Fill your mouth with mud and chew on all your consonants.”) She pointed out Mount Chōkai, the “Dewa Fuji,” ice-blue and dissolving into crystals at the top, and told me a long, involved tale that was apparently off-color, because at one point her daughter-in-law turned around and said, “Mother! You know that isn’t true!”
    But the old dear just clasped my hand and chuckled softly. “Oh, but it is,” she said to me, in one of the few phrases I was able to catch. “It’s true all right. I was there.” And she laughed.
    What had happened up on Mount Chōkai, what scandal or gossip she had imparted, was lost on me but it helped to break the tension, and soon Mr. Takahashi’s wife was laughing and gently scolding the mother, who continued to share her stories with me, as juicy as plums.
     
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    Guidebooks are great for surface-skimming—and I’d be lost without them— but to really get in and get dirty, to muck about in the back country, to really worm your way into off-track Japan, you need to travel in the company of the people who live there. Train passengers, no matter how independently they are traveling, ultimately remain spectators. Hitchhikers are co-conspirators, fellow travelers.
    On the road north of Sakata, near the border of Yamagata and Akita prefectures there lies an entire stone coast, a miniature mountainside, really, that has been carved into the shapes of Buddhist deities and saints. It is a striking landscape to stumble across, and one that was not listed in any of the guidebooks I was using: not in the Lonely Planet guide, nor in Gateway to Japan , nor in New Japan Solo.
    The site, known as the Jurokū Rakan, was carved over the course of several centuries by monks from a nearby temple, carved, it was said, to comfort the souls of dead fishermen who had perished off the coast. The sculptures were like a flowing, gentler Mount Rushmore. And the comparision to Rush-more is apt. The two contrast in several significant ways: the Japanese carvings are smaller and more fluid, shapes worked into the lay of the land; Mount Rushmore, with its granite-jawed faces blasted from the bedrock, is far more imposing.
    Mr. Takahashi pulled into the parking lot and we walked down to the open-air carvings. A few sightseers were scrambling about it, taking pictures, laughing, pointing out oddities and details.
    A mountain of gods. I climbed up an outcrop of rock and looked out at the crash-and-roll of waves on the other side and then, with a start, I realized that the rock I was clambering over was shaped into the form of a beggar god’s face. This one sculpture was as large as a car—a Japanese car—which is to say, it was somewhat small. The entire coastal expanse, the shapes hidden like faces in a cloud, was more of a dreamscape than a landscape. The gods were emerging from the rock as you watched.
    “The mountain is alive,” said the grandmother in a very pragmatic, unsentimental way.
    Further north, at the prefectural boundary itself, was a green park of sloping hills and grassy outlooks. We had a picnic on a small knoll overlooking the sea, and the grandmother made an effort to speak standard Japanese. She said to me, her voice as soft as a wisp of smoke, “I used to picnic over there—just over there, with my husband. I would make a bentō lunch and we would sit there.” She pointed a tiny finger to a hillside. A couple was lying there now; the boy had his head on his girlfriend’s lap. “Right there,” she said. “Right where those two are now.”
    “Would you like a drink?” said Mr. Takahashi, as he offered me some sickly sweet Chinese wine—once again strengthening my resolve to seek a complete world ban on Chinese wine production. This wine—this syrup—had a certain antifreeze piquancy about it, bold yet coy, horrible yet disgusting. I am a fervent believer in the notion that countries should stick to what they do best. Japan should produce videocameras, America should produce pop stars and computers, and the Chinese should stick to producing kung fu movies and short-tempered waiters. And they should be made to write a letter of apology to every Frenchman and Italian on earth for the crimes they have committed against wine. Thank you.
    When it came time to say good-bye, Mr. Takahashi had tears in his eyes. “It is good,” he said, “good that we can get along like this.” His