Hokkaido Highway Blues
of Japanese grandmothers to chart the entire Japanese social hierarchy, from outcast to outsider, from doctor to lawyer to Emperor.
“A foreigner, look!” A flock of high-school girls burst past in a flurry of nervous laughter, and boys, brave after the fact, whispered “Harro!” to the back of my head. “Ah, we have an international guest from America here today,” said the disembodied voice of the P.A. system, the voice of a decidedly tinny god. “Maybe he will sing a song for us later.”
That I, so very average and unexceptional, should cause a stir among these bright crowds of costumes gives a new perspective on the idea of exotic. I remember a trip to a Japanese zoo, and how the children turned their backs on the caged wildebeest and watched me instead. More interesting than a wildebeest, became my personal motto after that. It was oppressive at times. When your face doesn’t fit the national dimensions you find yourself in an observer-affected universe; your presence alters actions, and the very act of observing changes that which is observed. You cannot slip by unnoticed. You cannot forget the pigment you present to the world. If nothing else, Japan has taught me what it is like to be a visible minority.
The crowd shifts. On some elusive cue, the drums begin, and the first group of dancers advances, a troupe of severe-looking women, their faces white as bone, lips lacquer red. They move from posture to posture with studied ease, their hands shaping the air in preordained patterns, effortless, unsmiling. They are followed immediately by a confusion of schoolchildren who make up in enthusiasm what they lack in coordination. After the children, an electronics company’s managers and sales clerks, misstepping and fumbling side by side-—then another column of precision-bowing grandmothers, then one of junior-high-school boys, then one of insurance salesmen. The three central divisions of Japanese life are thus represented: age, gender, and the workplace.
Near the end, a ragged band of farmers comes down the line in drunken disarray, swigging from flasks and improvising lyrics and dance steps as they go. They are crowd pleasers and you can see the lacquer-lipped women absorb this usurpation with stoic indifference.
One by one, the processions continued, down to the castle and then a turn, falling in like army cadets in blocks of color schemes: high-school blue, young-girl yellow, sakura pink.
When the last group of dancers reeled to join the ranks, the music stopped. Then came the deer.
From behind the wall of dancers and into the open field they came, young boys in gilded antlers, eyes painted wide, movements unsure. They were dressed like Asian princes, the avatars of the deer-child. Siddhartha afoot. They formed and dissolved patterns. They gathered in circles, they moved in half steps. The dance built slowly in a crescendo of motion, moving toward free-form, flirting with chaos.
Then, the hunters. Young girls, sashed in silk and armed with arrows: girls dressed as boys dressed as men. They stalked in stylized movements, and the hunt became a dance. Flowers fall from the stem. Youth comes to an end. The arrival of spring also marks its imminent departure. In pairs, the hunters and the deer moved in circles. They crosshatched their movements, braiding pathways in wider and wider curves until at last the circle broke and the hunt ended.
I was never asked to sing my song. When the dance of the deer and the hunter had finished, the attention of the gods turned elsewhere and the crowds reverted to profane preoccupations: group photographs, salutations, the long walk home. Young girls and boys, no longer deer or hunters, the spirits having passed from them, chased each other around the castle in a series of squabbles and taunts. I passed one such deer as he demanded of his mother, “Chocolate! Give me chocolate!” When he saw me, he cried out, “Harro! Harro!” and soon the entire herd had joined in and I was chased down the hill by the human shells of magic past.
I never feel more like an outsider than when I attend a festival in Japan. Here is Japanese culture at full gallop, and all you can do is stand aside and watch it pass you by. As I left the castle grounds, the last of the drums were beating out a message, and the message was not for me.
It wasn’t the lack of Western faces at the Uwajima Festival that made my chest feel so hollow. The truth be told, I prefer to be the only
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