Hokkaido Highway Blues

stubborn renaissance of Ainu culture has taken root lately, primarily around the music, legends, and dance, but overall the situation is fairly grim. Australian Aborigines, North American Natives, South American Indians— there is something in the psyche of the colonist that is unnerved by prior ownership. We patronize, brutalize, ignore, and then wax poetic about the people we displace. But never do we approach them as humans of equal value.
    It was with thoughts like these that I entered Hokkaido to begin the last leg of my journey.
     

2
     
    AT THE SOUTHERN tip of Hokkaido lies a small hook of land anchored at one end by a dormant volcanic peak. It was here, upon this geographical anomaly, that Hokkaido’s first Japanese settlement began, an imperial toehold on the great island above. The Russians had been using Hakodate Port as a landing base as far back as 1740. In 1854, Japan moved in to counter Russian expansion. Hakodate became an open city and, for one brief period, while the imperial powers moved their chess pieces into position and the fate of the northern island hung in the balance—for one brief period, Hakodate was a center of intrigue and power.
    Today, Hakodate has fallen half asleep. A threadbare, somewhat seedy city, it is one of the few areas in Hokkaido where the American influence doesn’t dominate. Here the flavor is European —Eastern European. Russian architectural styles are everywhere in evidence, even though the people are resolutely Japanese.
    I arrived in Hakodate late in the evening, and I found a room at a bed-and-breakfast called the Niceday Inn. When I entered, the owner received me with boisterous English. “Come in! Come in!“
    His name was Shigeto Saito. “But call me Mr. Saito,” he said, generously. He had the face of a boxer who has seen one too many fights. Heavy, lugubrious features. (I’m not really sure what “lugubrious features” means, but if anyone had them, it was Mr. Saito.) “Welcome to my small inn. I hope you find it comfortable.”
    “Your English is very good,” I said. “Do you study?”
    “Self-taught,” he said. “Completely self-taught.” And then, anticipating my next question. “Why? Why so good? Because I never had a fear of foreigners. Never. I don’t have a complex. Most Japanese are afraid.”
    “Shy,” I said.
    “Afraid, ” he insisted. “But why, of all people, did I not develop a complex? Why?” We sat back to consider this. It was a question he had clearly puzzled over for some time. “I have a theory,” he said after a suitable pause. “When I was a child, Russian sailors would come into port. My father was involved in business, and the Russians often came to our house. My mother was very nervous; she would hide in the back room. But the Russians liked me, a little boy. Maybe they have children also back home. Who knows? They used to pick me up and speak to me. Big hands. Loud voices. I was so small a child. But I remember it very well. Looking up at them, at their faces. Sitting on their knee. Hearing their big Russian laughter. Maybe that is why. Maybe that is why I never developed a complex. That early experience broke the barrier.”
    I thought this was a fine theory, and we toasted it with Japanese vodka. My liver began whimpering again, but what the hell, how often do you have a chance to be enlightened by the likes of Mr. Saito, innkeeper and self-taught speaker of English in a Russian town on a Japanese island that was taken from Ainu natives?
    Mr. Saito’s wife stopped in and we chatted a bit in Japanese. Mr. Saito listened with a keen ear, and as soon as his wife excused herself, he leaned over and said to me—in what would be the first and only honest assessment I would ever receive of my second language ability—“Your Japanese is terrible.”
    “Um.” (What could I say?)
    “Your accent is very thick. That is from living in Kyushu.” (The idea being, I had been infected by living amidst such a poor dialect.) “Here in Hokkaido, everyone originally came from somewhere else. We soon lost our different accents. In Hokkaido, we speak Standard Japanese. Some people say that our Japanese is the finest in Japan. You should study Hokkaido Japanese. And you also need to study”—we consulted a dictionary for the right word— “the prepositions. You knowga, wa, ni, de, no. I was listening to you speak Japanese, and it sounds like you just put them in at random.”
    Damn. He was on to me. I hated