Hokkaido Highway Blues

steep side lane that plunged toward the water. We swerved into a driveway at the last possible moment and came to a skidding stop in front of a barnlike building tucked into a cove. It looked like some sort of clandestine shipyard.
    We were met by Mr. Mukai, a tanned older man dressed in white coveralls. He had a golden smile—literally. His bridgework was extensive.
    “Mr. Mukai owns a Honda dealership,” said Akihira. “But that is not why we are here, as you shall see.”
    Akihira turned to Mr. Mukai and explained that I was an important journalist from America here to do a feature story on Shōdo, and Mr. Mukai slid open the doors of the building and there in the dusty dark, as inexplicable as coming across the Ark of the Covenant, was a high-winged seaplane.
    Mr. Mukai was one of the few private pilots in Japan and practically the only one south of Hokkaido. (In a land as long and narrow as Japan, and with air lanes as crowded as they are, very few private air licenses are handed out. It is almost the equivalent of getting your own space rocket permit.)
    Akihira smiled with the pride that comes from having a friend such as Mr. Mukai. “This is Mr. Mukai’s third seaplane, which he built by hand and of his own design. It is the only hand-built seaplane in all of Japan. Surely it is a remarkable work. The motor is that of a Volkswagen car. There is space for a passenger. Every Sunday, Mr. Mukai takes his plane out and flies high above Shōdo Island.” There was a meaningful pause. “Today is Sunday.”
    Hot damn! An airplane ride! Hitchhiking a ride through the air was even more impressive than on a bicycle. If I could pull this one off, I would go down in the Freeloader’s Hall of Fame. But it wasn’t to be. Mr. Mukai was working on the motor and the plane was grounded. I asked him if he might be able to patch it up for just one flight, you know, for the sake of international journalism, but he declined.
    Not coincidentally, perhaps, on a hill behind a temple not far from Mr. Mukai’s airplane hangar was a monument to the kamikaze pilots, who trained on Shōdo during the war. Maybe it was better that I missed the thrill of riding in a homemade seaplane with a VW bug for a motor, but I doubt it.
     
    * * *
     
    Everything after a lost airplane ride is bound to be anticlimactic, but Akihira did his best. He drove back up the road, popping in and out of gear like someone with double-jointed knuckles, lurching and bouncing until we reached a small, secluded village named Tanoura.
    Tanoura was the site of one of Japan’s most touching novels, Nijūshi no hitomi, “Twenty-Four Eyes.“ Written in the 1920s by Ms. Sakae Tsuboi, “Twenty-Four Eyes” is the semiautobiographical novel that tells the story of a young woman who comes to distant Tanoura to teach at a small rural school.
    “Twenty-Four Eyes“ was turned into a film using the original Tanoura schoolyard as a set, and it was here that Akihira now took me. We marched in, waving aside the 350-yen entrance fee—“He is a journalist from America, here to do a story on Tanoura.“ Although the day was humid, the interior of the three-room schoolhouse was shaded and the old wood beams and weathered floors exuded a quiet coolness. Akihira stood before the school shrine and recited the Opening Proclamation of Fealty to the Emperor , which he had learned as a boy.
    “During the war, mines were dropped in the harbor,” said Akihira. ‘After the war, the minesweepers came through, exploding the mines one by one. I was just twelve or thirteen and I remember, very vivid, the windows shaking. Boom. Boom. Boom. One man died, I believe.”
    In Tanoura School an old textbook showed students precisely how far to bow to their superiors (forty-five degrees) and the proper way for women and girls to kneel.
    “One of the first phrases a child learned to write,” said Akihira, “was sakura ga saita, ‘the cherry blossoms have bloomed. ‘ ”
    Tanoura was a melancholy place. For all its sudden and enduring fame, the village was slowly dissolving. A modern highway now joined this tiny village with the rest of Shōdo. It spared the villagers the long mountain walk to the next town, but it also siphoned off the young people.
    “Twenty-Four Eyes” has become little more than nostalgia. There is no longer a school in Tanoura. The teachers and their dwindling number of pupils were moved from the village in the 1970s and now all that remains are museums and movie