Hokkaido Highway Blues

train tracks, on the opposite side of the peninsula from where I wanted to be.
    I walked for hours. I walked across long endless anonymous tracks of pavement, past equally anonymous houses, through a series of identical intersections, none of which were the least bit Japanese or exotic or memorable. The landscape was shaggy. The fields were shaggy. Everything was shaggy.
    On a map, the highway I wanted to reach looked very near, but the reality of the matter was just so much drudgery. It was only after I examined my maps for the third time that I realized the road I was walking on, Highway 227, did not actually intersect the road I wanted, Highway 5, but actually ran parallel to it. I had been walking alongside Highway 5 for hours.
    Spouting such witticisms as “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I made a short walk across some shaggy-looking, unkept fields and soon found myself on Highway 5.I was on the outskirts of Nanae Town, which was—and here’s an interesting coincidence—exactly the town I had planned on taking a train to before Mr. Saito talked me into going to the ferry port instead. In fact, just as I arrived, the very train I would have caught went rolling by at a zippy speed.
    There is nothing like wasting an entire morning to put you in the proper frame of mind. I came to Onokayama Station just as a torrent of black-suited junior-high-school students came pouring out in a barrage of “Harros!” and “Zis is a ben’s.”
    “Piss off,” I said with a growl.
    The streets leading into Nanae Town were wide and flanked with tall, leafy trees. Shaggy trees. A bicycle-and-pedestrian path ran down either side of the road, making it a perfect spot for hitching rides. And so it proved. The tenth car pulled over.
    Inside was a man not much older than I, dressed in a corduroy jacket and wearing a relaxed smile. His hair was slightly shaggy.
    I was bracing myself for something like, “I’m only going to the end of this block, can I let you off at the next tree?” when he said, “Sapporo?”
    One ride. All the way from Hakodate to Sapporo. One ride. It almost made up for my mindless trek across the barrenlands. I congratulated myself on being such an astute world traveler and climbed in.
     

8
     
    IT WAS A dead-straight, cruise-control highway of the type I hadn’t seen since Canada. We blew down it like a rocket in a wind tunnel. “You know,” said Takayuki, rather proudly, “Hokkaido has the highest number of traffic fatalities in Japan.”
    “Really? But the roads are so wide and straight,” I said.
    “Exactly. It is easy to fall asleep at the wheel or lose control on corners. It’s too fast. Too few obstacles. Drivers become relaxed. A lot of people die.”
    This is not the sort of thing you want to hear when you are hitching rides. Takayuki worked for a drugstore north of Sapporo, and within moments of introducing himself he had invited me back to his home to meet his family. A few weeks ago I would have accepted, but my funds were dangerously low, the clock was ticking, and my final destination was too near to allow—or enjoy—a leisurely detour.
    Takayuki Ideta, I realized, was a perfectly normal Japanese man. He had a wife, two kids, a house, a car. He wore a necktie and he liked baseball. “You are normal,” I said.
    “Yes?”
    “Average.”
    “Yes?”
    “You are the first normal, average person who has picked me up.”
    This bothered him. “Well, I suppose I am normal—but I’m not so average.” And for the rest of the trip he wore a slightly furrowed brow.
    Highway 5 is a magnificent road to travel along. It skirts the edge of Uchura Bay, and we could see right across its cold clear waters.
    Bamboo grass, thick and leafy—shaggy, really—had choked out other plants. It was everywhere. It overran abandoned farms and spilled over the edge of the road. It grew in trellises up telephone wires and it hung in vines around the poles. In southern Hokkaido, land is not so much cleared as it is wrestled free from bamboo grass. It was like a plague of crabgrass. It was Day of the Triffids in slow motion.
    I couldn’t get used to the sense of size. Everything seemed wide and open and thin on the ground. There was breathing space, elbow room, a landscape to look through. Nothing cramped the view, and the sky was grand and theatrical. The air seemed cleaner too—alpine, chilled. If Hokkaido were a bottle, it would have cold condensation running down the sides.
    Communities were spaced out along