Hokkaido Highway Blues

rain.
    Pass me another beer, eh?
     
    A fellow exchange teacher named Bill Robinson lived in a nearby town, and he wrote a haiku about school parties as well. His haiku is so subtle, so complex, so deep it actually requires footnotes. Heck, it even rhymes:
     
    School enkai 1
    You’ll laugh, you’ll cry—
    Kiss ichi-man en 2 good-bye.
     
    One year, drunker than usual, I announced to my circle of Japanese teachers that I was going to follow the Cherry Blossom Front all the way to Hokkaido, at the northern end of Japan. Or rather, that is what was reported to me. I don’t recall making this vow exactly, but I was repeatedly reminded of it. My supervisor, for one, constantly fretted over my plans.
    “If you follow the cherry blossoms it will take at least a month. You should arrange a rail pass.”
    “Ah, yes. About my plan. When I said I would follow the blossoms, I was speaking figuratively. What I meant was—”
    “The Principal is very impressed with your resolve. He says that you understand the True Heart of Japan.”
    These kinds of compliments are meaningless of course. Japanese lavish hollow praise on Westerners. If a Westerner masters the art of chopsticks he is complimented on his skillful hand-eye coordination; if he catches a lazy pop fly in left field he is complimented on his sports prowess; if he learns how to say hello in Japanese he is praised as being fluent, and so on. The phrase most often encountered in these situations is jōzu desu ne! which means, “Boy, are you talented!” but which might be more accurately translated as, “Not bad for a dimwit.”
    The best illustration of what jōzu desu ne! means is the way my next-door neighbor taught her five-year-old son to ride a bicycle. Eschewing training wheels, she simply put him on a bike and pushed him off, down the driveway, where he inevitably flipped over or hit a tree or skidded to a stop on his face. After a few of these lessons, the kid was a wreck: his knees scraped, his elbows bruised. But he kept getting back on and trying again and again, sniffling back the tears as he went. It was all very entertaining, and it provided me with hours of amusement as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping my coffee and charting little Taro’s progress. I applauded his more acrobatic flips. Without fail, every time he set out on another foray, his mother would shout—in the brief moment he was in control —“Jōzu desu ne!“ After which he would crash. Again. And again.
    Whenever someone in Japan compliments my second-language skills with the exclamation “Jōzu desu ne!” I think of little Taro on his bicycle, barely in control and heading for disaster. Keeps me humble.
    Anyhow, I had committed myself to discovering the True Heart of Japan. “William is going to follow the sakura all the way to Hokkaido,” my supervisor would tell people at random, and I would grimace in a manner that might easily be mistaken for a smile. I stalled for three years.
    When I finally did set out to follow the Cherry Blossom Front north, I went armed only with the essentials of Japanese travel: a map, several thick wads of cash, and a decidedly limited arsenal of Japanese, most of which seemed to revolve around drinking or the weather. (“It is very hot today. Let’s have a beer.”)
    Japan is not a small country, no matter what the Japanese themselves may think. The main island of Honshu alone is larger than Great Britain. Were Japan in Europe, it would dominate the continent. Japan is larger than Italy, larger than Norway, larger than Germany. A journey from Cape Sata in the south to Cape Sōya at the north covers three thousand kilometers. In North America this would be a journey from Miami to Montreal—and at roughly the same latitudes.
    So why this persistent image that Japan is a tiny little place? One reason is due to a cartographical optical illusion. On a map, Japan looks small because it is surrounded by the largest nations on earth: China, Russia, Canada, the United States and Australia. But there is more involved than this. Japan is small because Japan prefers it that way. It supports the image Japan has of itself: the beleaguered underdog, small but mighty, the little engine that could. If you tell the average Japanese person that their country has a larger population base and a far bigger land mass than that of Great Britain, they will either resent it or refuse to believe you.
    Oddly enough, despite their conviction that they live in a small