Hokkaido Highway Blues

better than hitchhiking is not hitchhiking, and, whenever I can, I make a point of sidling up to potential car people in cafés and parking lots and other such public places. The man across from me looked like a good mark. He was well groomed, he had on a company jacket, and outside the window I could see the corresponding company truck. I leaned over and said, “Excuse me, do you know the way to the main highway?”
    “Sure.”
    I waited. No answer. Apparently he thought I was taking a survey. “Is it far?” I asked and then, dropping the hint like a wet bag of cement, I said, “I don’t have a car, you see, and I was wondering if it was possible to walk to the highway from here.”
    He looked at me from across his bowl of miso soup. I grinned in what I hoped was a vulnerable but expectantly optimistic manner. He chewed his rice, sipped his tea. ‘All right, all right,” he said, finally, “I’ll take you out to the highway.”
    The Travel Weasel strikes again. I reveled in my cunning.
     

2
     
    SUKUMO IS A thin, spearlike city contoured by the shape of its harbor. It is also a surprisingly rural place; we drove past marshes and fallow fields, well within the city limits. The company man dropped me off on the highway east of town and, pulling an impatient U-turn, drove back in toward Sukumo proper. I felt good. The road before me was a wide, easy one to hitch and, sure enough, the second vehicle that came by stopped. It was a minivan filled with sailors.
    The driver cranked down the window and asked me where I was heading. When I said Hokkaido he answered “Uso!” a distinctly Japanese expression that can mean either “Really?”
    “No kidding!” or “Liar.”
    The sailors were wearing matching polyester track suits in synthetic blue, making them look more like a sports team than a fishing crew. They conferred with each other for a moment, and the driver nodded. I crawled into the van, over knees and elbows, and had to wake up a young man stretched out in the back so that I could sit down. He woke up with one of those startled “Where the hell am I?” looks, only to find himself staring up at my looming face. The van accelerated and I fell into him. By the time I had shifted my pack around and settled down, he was awake. Groggy, but awake.
    His name was Yuichi Watanabe and he was just sixteen, the youngest crew member on the trawler Myofin-maru, outbound for the south seas of Okinawa. They were on their way to Nishiumi, a fishing port located on a spur of land an hour north of Sukumo.
    Yuichi was a quiet boy, still a child really. It was hard to believe that he was heading out to open sea for a three-month voyage. Many ships went out, he acknowledged. Some never returned. By virtue of his age and inexperience, Yuichi was the kōhai to the entire crew, and the way he flinched when the other crew members yelled back at him to pass up cans of cola and balls of rice (none offered to me, I duly noted) seemed to suggest that Yuichi was having a hard time of it. Did he like his life? He gave a noncommittal answer. Was it difficult? Well, he said, It couldn’t be helped, he had dropped out of school, and—realizing that the man in the seat in front of him was listening—he was very lucky to get this job. His senpai treated him—they were kibishii , he said, using a word that can mean anything from “strict” to “cruel.”
    “It’s my fault, you see. Because I’m stupid. I’m still learning. Sometimes it’s hard.”
    I asked him about the sea and he told me about waves that rose four stories high and storms that rocked the trawler like a cork in a bottle. He hated storms more than tangled nets. Did he still get seasick? He nodded. Yes, he still got sick. Some days he vomited so much he became fura-fura, lightheaded. He lay in bed all day and the others, well, they treated him as can be expected. He was young, you see, and new at this.
    He turned to watch the fields moving by outside. It must be nice to be a farmer, he said. The ground doesn’t move—except in earthquakes of course, but here in Shikoku they don’t get many of those. Yes, it must be nice to be a farmer.
     
    * * *
     
    Of the four large islands that make up the Japanese mainland, Shikoku is the one most often overlooked and the one least traveled through. They call it “Japan’s forgotten island,” a place that gets so little attention it is almost invisible.
    I know the feeling. The crew of the Myojin-maru dropped me off