Hokkaido Highway Blues

with fried squid and octopi, but I appreciated the gesture. Heck, it was on the house, and how many times can you say you have been handed a raw octopus as a gift and not as a practical joke?
    Having taken care of my immediate material needs—baseball caps and multilegged sea creatures—the Master slapped his hand on his chest and said, “My name is Taiyano. And you?”
    “William.”
    “Wi-ri-mu!” he cried. “His name is Wi-ri-mu!” He repeated this again for the benefit of the cooks, who passed my name down the line like a state secret. The disclosure of my father’s name was a further cause for celebration, as was my age, my occupation, and my prowess with a set of chopsticks.
    “You sure are talented with those chopsticks! More beer!”
    I think Taiyano took a liking to me because he saw me as a fellow nomad. He was born on the Goto Islands, even more distant and more wreathed in history than Amakusa. He grew up in Nagasaki City. Later his family moved to Sasebo, near an American army base, where he failed to learn any English beyond “God damn it all to hell!” which he peppered his speech with while talking to me. “More beer, goddamn it all to hell!” he would yell, which impressed his cooks to no end. “The boss speaks English! Did you hear that? He’s talking to a foreigner.”
    After Sasebo, Taiyano had drifted east. He worked his way across Kyushu and southern Honshu, and eventually he found a wife and a livelihood here in Uwajima. We talked about baseball for a while, the scandal being that the Uwajima High School team lost to Osaka Central because of a suspicious call made by one of the umpires, who just happened to be from Osaka and was clearly favoring the hometown team. The final score was 14 to 2. As this tale of treachery was retold, the cooks paused for a moment of silence. They shook their heads sadly at the injustice of it all. Then Taiyano told them to get back to work.
    He asked me why I had come to Uwajima. “Foreigners never come to Uwajima. Never.”
    “But I’m a foreigner, and I did.”
    Once again my powerful Western logic was ignored. I told him about my own ongoing journey and suddenly I was a celebrity again, elevated to a level beyond that of any mere soccer player. “On his way to Hokkaido!“ he roared. “More beer!” The cooks crowded around their side of the counter and fired questions at me about my journey: how long did I have to wait, what kind of cars stopped for me, could I eat Japanese food, that kind of thing. “Fourteen minutes and a white Honda Civic,” I replied. ‘And yes, I can eat Japanese food.” Taiyano shooed them away like alley cats.
    Then, in a cryptic aside, he said, “Be careful. There are good people in Japan, but there are also bad people. Very bad.”
    For one skin-crawling moment I thought he was going to tell me about some lone Japanese psycho who was picking up hitchhikers and eating their livers, but fortunately that was not the kind of thing he was alluding to. “Most Japanese are kind,” he said, “but some are very bad.“ And before I could stop him, he was spilling out his woes of how, in his first shop, yakuza thugs had threatened him and demanded money and how the police had brushed his complaints aside. How in one town the yakuza were practically a parallel government, and how he had settled in Uwajima mainly because it was small enough to be relatively free of extortionists, the bane of Japanese small businessmen.
    Japan is a safe country. There is no word for “mugging“ in the Japanese language, nor are there separate words for lock and key. Murders, drug trafficking, and burglaries are exceptionally rare; muggings are almost nonexistent, except in Osaka and Tokyo, where they are sensationalized by the press and cravenly ascribed to “foreign elements.” A mugging in Japan is considered a major news story. That should tell you a lot.
    Crime does exist, but it exists on another strata. Instead of robbing passersby on the street corner, the Japanese prefer extortion, bribery, embezzlement, cabals, monopolies, and price-fixing. It’s not as messy and has a higher profit margin. What this means is that in Japan the politicians are all on the take, but you can walk down almost any street in any city at any hour of the night and be completely safe. After all, how many times has somebody jumped out of an alleyway and attempted to embezzle from you?
    The Japanese, unfortunately, have derived the following flawed