Hokkaido Highway Blues

travelers pass each other on a road, surely as common an event as one could hope for. But it wasn’t another road. It was Uwajima, it was here, and it was unnerving. I often think about him, the other me, and I wonder, did he get where he was going? Did I unnerve him as he had me? Did he see himself reflected back as well, the two of us caught in a momentary infinite regress.
    With a mixture of reluctance and relief, I turned my back on Uwajima, a city where every extreme is possible and no one gets out unbruised. I chose a spot in front of a gas station and stuck out my thumb.
    And that’s when I met the Japanese mafia.
     

8
     
    I DON’T KNOW for certain he was a member of the Japanese mafia. I was making an educated guess based on several important clues: he had on sunglasses, he was wearing a shimmering lime-green silk suit, his hair was in a tight “punch-perm,” and—most telling of all—he was driving an American car. “Watch out for Cadillacs,“ my fretful Japanese friends had warned me as I set out. ‘And beware the black Benz!”
    Japanese gangsters do tend to favor such vehicles, but I suspect that the connection between foreign cars and danger reveals more about the Japanese psyche than it does reality. Good people drive small white Japanese cars. Bad people drive expensive, black, non-Japanese luxury cars. And the Americans wonder why they can’t seem to sell any Chryslers in Kobe.
    I didn’t care. After spending much of my time twisted like an amateur contortionist in cars the size of tin cans, it was nice to ride in a big, cigar-smokin’ Yankee automobile. Whether my host was a gangster or not was still undetermined. Yakuza thugs have tattoos up their backs and they are often missing the joints of their little fingers, chopped off as an act of repentance each time they do something wrong. (You can spot the really talentless thugs. They’re the ones with the nickname “Stumpy.”)
    I wouldn’t be able to see a tattoo on the man unless he took his clothes off, and I couldn’t think of a smooth way of asking him to do this. Instead, I surreptitiously counted his fingers and they were all there, which I found reassuring. If he was a gangster, at least he was an astute gangster. Polite too. The whole time we rode together he never once tried to extort money from me. He even bought me a can of apple juice.
    I was standing beside the highway, drinking said apple juice and having survived my brush with organized crime, when a figure approached on the other side. It was a man in a white robe with a bowl-shaped straw hat that covered his face. He was carrying a begging bowl, a pouch, and a pilgrim’s staff. I watched him walk toward me, trucks rattling by in clouds of highway dust and noise; it was as though he were moving in slow motion against the backdrop of a speed-addicted world.
    I wanted to run over and give him a settai, a donation, and receive his blessing, but I wasn’t sure how to approach him—or even how to cross the multilane highway that separated us. (It is the fate of many of us to always find ourselves on the wrong side of the highway from enlightenment.)
    The man was a henro, a pilgrim, and he was following a path more than a thousand years old. In 804, a Shikoku priest named Kūkai made a perilous journey to China, seeking wisdom. He returned two years later, and he brought with him a liberating idea, one that would form the foundation for a new school of Buddhism, the esoteric sect of Shingon. The idea was as revolutionary as it was simple: Anyone might attain Buddhahood in this life. One needed only to rely on the love of the Buddha to attain salvation. It was a hard road, but not impossible.
    In saying this, Kūkai had thrown the doors of enlightenment open. He was resolutely democratic. He founded the first public college in Japan where everyone was welcome, whether they be rich or poor, man or woman.*
    The esoteric movement in Buddhism failed in China, but it took strong root in Japan. With Kūkai, Buddhism became more optimistic, more accessible, more immediate, less concerned with creeds and doctrine. Less abstract, more tangible. In a word, more Japanese.
    Kūkai died in 835. After he passed away, he was given the name Kōbō Daishi, signifying a Great Teacher. He remains the most important figure in the history of Japanese Buddhism and the nearest Japan has ever come to producing a Bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint who stops at the very threshold of enlightenment