Hokkaido Highway Blues

car, sheer crumbling walls and stone arches moved by.
    The cable car didn’t go right to the peak. When I disembarked, I was greeted—if sullen silence can be called a greeting—by a few loitering monkeys, castaways from a larger group farther inland. They were better behaved than the monkeys of Kojima; continual contact with humans had made them almost tame. Several were sunning their fur, eyes half shut, in the warmth of the early evening. Below them, Shōdo Island was spread out like an estate before a lord. I had no doubt that the monkeys of Shōdo, looking down on their realm, felt a certain proprietary pride. Humans were merely endured. The heights belonged, in a lazy way, to them.
    I hiked up a sweeping grassland hill and then into a forest of pine trees. It was a long, thigh-straining walk, but well worth it. When I reached the summit, a break in the forest offered a panorama of Shōdo even grander than that admired by the primate potentates below, though it did bother me—as I arrived panting and sweaty and out of breath—that there were no monkeys up here. Hey, they seemed to be saying by their absence, we may be lower-order primates, but we aren’t stupid.
    I was all alone at the top with the ego-inflating vertigo that comes whenever you find yourself at the very highest point of land available. It enlarges you to stand atop a mountain; you feel like a giant tottering on the peak and you hold out your arms, instinctually, trying to maintain balance. I leaned into the wind and almost glided away over the Inland Sea, a sea the color of hammered gold.
    From these deluded Olympian heights, I followed an obscurely labeled footpath down the other side. The path had the alarming habit of forking every few feet, and I ended up in a tangled thicket, from which I finally burst out of the woods and onto a highway, much in the manner of the Monty Python hermit.
    There was only one road up here—a forestry road tarted up as a “Scenic Skyline Highway”—which greatly limited my choices. I walked south, through the unnatural silence of replanted forests. There was no traffic.
    This did not bother me in the least because I knew, on a road as remote as this, that the first ride by would stop. And so it did. A surprised-looking forestry worker took me farther down the mountain to the site of Shōdo Island’s Greek Shrine.
    This shrine, this “Greek” shrine, is routinely scoffed at in most guidebooks and is consistently misunderstood by most Western travelers. The important thing to remember is that Shōdo’s incongruous Greek structure, complete with columns and stark rectangular lines is, nonetheless, a working, consecrated Shinto shrine. It isn’t simply a tourist attraction. Classic Greek architecture is starkly beautiful, as elegant and stately as Japanese architecture is fluid. Combining the two is a feat that should be applauded, not sniffed at, and Shōdo’s Greek Shrine is a deft example of syncretic architecture. In this it has much in common with the historic homes in Nagasaki and Kobe, where Japanese and Western styles blended.
    I walked through the shrine and over to the Greek-Buddhist Bell where the 108 sins of mankind are tolled out on auspicious occasions. Greek paganism meets Buddhist theology meets Shinto animism.
    There is no point debating whether such structures are examples of synthesis or kitsch. It depends entirely on how you focus your attention.
     
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    I would have stayed for hours on the olive-green heights of Shōdo, but the sun had dipped behind the horizon and the lightscape had shifted from gold to dark blue. In film, they call this the Magic Hour, the moment just after the sun has disappeared and just before night falls, when the light is still reflected across the upper atmosphere. It is diffused, a time without shadows, when the landscape itself seems to be emitting its own illumination.
    The lady who was closing up the shrine gave me a ride down the mountain to where my bicycle was parked. She wanted to wedge it in the back of her Mini-Car hatchback but it was a lost cause and, reluctantly, she abandoned me. No matter. I coasted down the hairpin turns of the mountain highway into a faceful of wind. The road was steep and my brakes were halfhearted at best, so what began as a pleasant ride became something of a suicide run. As I turned a corner in the descending forest, a temple suddenly came into view. An excuse to stop. I skidded to a halt off the highway, and