Hokkaido Highway Blues

one last bit to go.”
    “I hope you make it.”
    I dropped several hints (“So, I guess whoever I meet next will be the very last person I hitch a ride with.”) but Tomio didn’t offer.
    We said our farewells. “Next time,” I said. “I’ll teach you about hockey.”
    I could have walked to Cape Sōya in less than an hour, but as a matter of pride I decided to hitch.
    “You came from Cape Sata?” said the young woman in the front seat, almost swooning with disbelief. “Today?”
    I laughed. “Not today. Today I came from Toyotomi.” But even that elicited gasps of wonder.
    “But Japanese people never pick up hitchhikers,” she said.
    The car was crammed full with bags and skiing gear. Inside were three college kids, clean-cut, cheerful, and brimming with an enthusiasm I never remember possessing, even in college. The driver’s family name was Kitajima, which meant “Northern Island,” and the young man in the back was named Takeyuki, which could mean “Snowy Bamboo” if you screwed up the translation a bit. Up front was Yoko Tanaka, a very cute, very boisterous young lady, with a big smile and dimples. I was in love with Yoko.
    We went to Cape Sōya, took silly pictures, ate at a lunch counter, bought postcards, and basically goofed around. The cape itself was secondary. It was a low point, with rocks piled along it so you could go down and dip your hand into the cold north sea and say, “Here I am, at the end of Japan.” At Cape Sōya you look back, toward Cape Sata in the south, across an archipelago that curves like a vertebra toward Okinawa.
    In Roads to Sata Alan Booth suggests that the landscape around Sōya is similar to that of Sata, the idea being that nothing really changes no matter where you go. (Alan was a bit of a pessimist that way.) But this isn’t true. You can drive right up to Cape Sōya and stroll down to the water. There were no cliffs or jagged rocks. These two capes—Sata to the south and Sōya at the north—are just about as different as any two points could be.
    There were a few shops at Sōya, and even an inn, but little else. Other than the fact that you were at the northernmost point in Japan, there wasn’t much reason to stop at Sōya. Japan ends not on an exclamation point but on an ellipse: Sata! to Sōya...
    Yoko came bounding over, dimples ablaze. She shook my hand, squeezed it, and said with vicarious joy, “You did it! You really did it!”
     

19
     
    MY TRIO OF college students took me back to Wakkanal City (“the northernmost city in Japan!”), where a reporter with the Yomiuri , Japan’s national newspaper, was waiting.
    The Yomiuri has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world, so you’d think I would have been treated to dinner and drinks, but no, we held the interview in a hotel lobby.
    “You traveled end to end solely on the kindness of strangers, is that correct?”
    “That’s right.”
    “No one has ever done that before?”
    “Not to my knowledge.”
    “And you were following the Cherry Blossom Front.”
    “Well, I got ahead of it in Sapporo, but it should catch up to me any day.” This was a new experience for me, being interviewed. I felt like a celebrity. I felt like Alan Booth. I felt like I had done Something Significant. I was droll, witty, deep. I even joked about getting a sunburned thumb in Shikoku. The reporter took all kinds of low-angle, heroic photos of me, thumb extended, and asked me all sorts of weighty questions. We spoke for over an hour.
    Why had I wanted to make such a trip in the first place? Because I wanted to see Japan, I said. Not as a spectator, but as a participant. I wanted to experience the Japanese as individuals and not as a nameless, faceless block.
    My own progress was similar to that of many expatriates. Before I came to Japan, I had tremendous respect for the Japanese, but I didn’t really like them very much. Now, after five years in this aggravating, eccentric nation; having traveled it end to end; having worked and lived and played with the Japanese; having seen beyond the stereotypes; having come up against their obsessions and their fears, their insecurities and their arrogance, their kindness and their foibles; having experienced firsthand all the many contradictions that are Japan, I found I did not respect the Japanese as much as I used to, but I liked them a whole lot more.
    The reporter asked. ‘And how will you return now that it’s over? Will you hitchhike back down as