Hokkaido Highway Blues

own. The mountain shuddered again, like a grumpy old man shifting in his sleep, and then slowly returned to silence. The echoes were a long time dying. Only then did I exhale.
    Southern Kyushu is divided into two peninsulas, and the quickest way to get to Cape Sata is to take a ferry from the western peninsula to the eastern and then travel south. Which is what I did. The ferry left with a sonorous, seagull-scattering blast of its horn, and I stood out in the wind on the upper deck and watched Sakurajima intently as it slipped by. (I was working on the “watched pot never boils” theory)
    An old man approached me. He was tiny and tidy and as wrinkled as my thumb after a bath. He seemed to be shrinking back into himself even as we spoke.
    “American,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
    “No.”
    “Where in America? Boston?”
    I sighed. “I’m not American.”
    “New York? Chicago? San Francisco? Detroit?” He was evidently going to list every city in the United States, so I grabbed the next one that went by and adopted it as my new home.
    “So,” he said, “is it cold in Baltimore?”
    “Very cold.”
    “In Japan,” he said, “we have four seasons.”
    “Congratulations.”
    “Thank you. Are you married?”
    “No.”
    “Can you eat Japanese food?“
    This was Conversation by Non Sequitur, and I was thoroughly familiar with it by now. The trick was to answer with equally arbitrary statements, until you sound like a couple of spies conversing in code.
    “Yes, I can eat Japanese food. Baltimore is very big.”
    “How long will you stay in Japan?”
    “Until tomorrow, forever. It is very cold in Baltimore.”
    He shook my hand. We smiled warmly at each other, clearly this was an International Moment. He then motioned to the mountain. “You are watching Sakurajima very closely,” he said. “It is beautiful, isn’t it? How do you feel about Sakurajima?”
    It’s a volcano. It’s named for cherry blossoms. It is mountain and sea and fire. “It is like Japan,” I said.
    He nodded thoughtfully. “You understand the true heart of my country.” Then—and I don’t mean to brag here—he assured me that when it came to speaking Japanese, I was pretty darned jōzu.
     
    * * *
     
    I had planned to take a bus down the peninsula to Cape Sata and begin hitchhiking from there, but there was no bus. At least, I don’t think there was. I examined the bus schedule posted by the highway, but no matter how hard I squinted, it remained completely inscrutable.
    The Japanese language is written in three separate alphabets, and I only know two and a half. The phonetic symbols (the kana) are easy enough, but the Chinese hieroglyphics (the kanji ) are about as accessible to me as, well, Chinese hieroglyphics. If God had wanted me to learn kanji, He would have given me a bigger brain. So instead of catching a bus, I started hitchhiking earlier than planned, on a nondescript stretch of road cluttered with gas stations and appliance stores. Cars were flicking past in a steady tempo, the sun was out, and I felt good. It was under way.
    Humming my own private theme music (“Mission Impossible”), I thrust out a thumb and smiled like an angel. I was trying to look innocent and nonviolent. Westerners are perceived as being aggressive and vaguely threatening, and I was working hard to counter this impression. I had shaved my beard off before I left and got my hair cut in that hip Mormon style that is all the rage in Japan. I was even wearing a necktie. In Japan, the Mormon Look is definitely in, and the young male missionaries that are sent to Japan—clean-cut and polite and oh so Aryan—are considered sexy and suave by the Japanese. This is true. Now, I’m not claiming I looked as sexy as a Mormon, but I did look mighty clean-cut, if I do say so myself. (I was going more for a Jehovah’s Witness effect.)
    Within minutes a car pulled over.
    When I say “within minutes” I mean of course, “fourteen minutes,” and when I say “car,” I mean of course, “white Honda Civic.” I got it into my head that I would keep track of the time I waited and the make of each car that stopped; I even carried a little notebook and a nerdy clip-pen so that I could record this information, which I assumed would make excellent small talk at future cocktail parties. “Say, did I ever mention that the average wait time for a hitchhiker in Japan is seventeen-point-two minutes?” Fortunately, I had a flash of common sense and