Hokkaido Highway Blues

you do extend yourself across a landscape. The danger, of course, is that it cuts both ways; when the traveler stops moving, he ceases to exist.
     

15
     
    KATSUYA WAS IN his late forties, but he had a youthful, shaggy haircut. “I’m an English teacher,“ he said. “A private tutor. I also sell textbooks. Here, let me give you my card.” He fished one out from the inside pocket of his blazer. “You never know.”
    He smoked With Class, a brand of cigarettes I knew quite well, even though I don’t smoke. On the front of every pack of With Class cigarettes is printed the following message in English:
     
WITH CLASS: Defined as an expression of true sophistication intellectuality and appreciation for equality by trend-setting independent people creating new customs for life enjoyment.
     
    “So you’re an English teacher, you say?”
    “Yup.” He pulled back on his cigarette like a college student latching onto a joint. “Hokkaido is all right,” he said. “I’m from Tokyo originally, but I’ve gotten used to living out here in the sticks. It’s a very conservative area. Too conservative. The people are behind the times.”
    “Well,” I said, “the roads are nice. I’ve been traveling at record speed since I arrived.”
    “Do you know,” he said, “that Hokkaido has more traffic fatalities per year than anywhere else in Japan?”
    I gave him a wan smile. “So I’ve heard.”
    “I hitchhiked myself one summer, back in the early seventies. It was during the Vietnam War. An American G.I. jumped ship in Hokkaido, and a friend and I spent the entire summer protecting him, hitchhiking from one town to the next, moving all the time.” He exhaled a cloud of blue death and said, “Most people don’t realize how violent the anti-Vietnam protests were in Japan. They had to close the schools down. There were riots. Tear gas. Plastic bullets.” He smiled warmly at the memory of it, sweet with nostalgia. “It was terrible—worse than on American campuses.”
    “Did you take part in the riots? The tear gas, the truncheons, all of that?” He gave me a politician’s smile. “I am a private teacher now. It is a very respectable job. I don’t discuss certain parts of my past.”
    “What happened to your friend, the American? The one who went AWOL.”
    “He stayed in Japan illegally for several years, but eventually he went home. They signed an amnesty. He lives in San Francisco now, with his Japanese wife.”
    Katsuya had been to America as well. “I was married at twenty, which was a mistake. We were too young. I lost my wife. I dropped out, went west— well, east really. You know how it is, to travel west you have to go east. I went to America. My life in Japan was smothering me and I wanted to travel. But I became involved with the wrong people—I was naïve, I think—and I ended up broke, without a visa, and stranded halfway across America. Not even halfway. Utah.”
    “Utah?”
    “A family took me in. A Mormon family”
    But he wasn’t a Mormon and he wasn’t interested in selling me anything, not textbooks nor the Word of God. He said, simply, “They were very good people. I always remember how much they helped, and now—” a grin and a shrug “—now I try to pass it along. That’s why I stopped for you. I’m passing it along.”
    “Doling out karma, as it were.”
    “Something like that. So don’t thank me for the ride, you should thank that Mormon family I met twenty-four years ago.”
    The irony was too sharp to bear.
    We drove through haphazard villages, thrown together like boxes in an attic. He stopped to drop off some textbooks, to visit a student’s family, to pick up a package. And the day bled slowly away.
    “Tell me something,” I said as we drove north into a deep, purple dusk. “The Japanese. In their heart of hearts, are they arrogant or insecure?”
    “Arrogant or insecure? Or?” He looked at me as if to say, Well, there’s your problem. Perhaps the problem is in the question itself. “We Japanese,” he said confidently, “are not arrogant or insecure, we are both. You know, it is possible to be insecure in a very arrogant way—and vice versa. Look at America. I have always thought that you Americans manage to be dumb in a very smart way. Very smart.”
    “And the French are clever in a very stupid way” I said, catching on.
    “Exactly. You have to stop thinking in opposites. You have to start uniting opposites.”
    “The British?” I