Hokkaido Highway Blues

busy so that the manager wouldn’t notice he had fourteen people to open two doors and empty three ashtrays. Then again, this hotel probably had fourteen managers as well. Heck, it even had escalator girls. That’s right, escalator girls. They stand beside the hotel escalators all day long and bow to every honorable guest that passes by.
    I went up to the front desk where a man in a blazer had the comical idea that I would be willing to pay two hundred dollars for a single room. “I don’t want the President’s Suite. A single room will suffice.” But the man at the desk persisted in his humor and I left. On the way out, I counted the number of bows I triggered: seven. Seven different people bowed and thanked me, and I hadn’t spent dime one in the place. Had I actually rented a room, would they have prostrated themselves before me and offered to shine my shoes with their neckties? Japanese service can be so overbearing.
    I wandered away from the bright lights and big city atmosphere of downtown Kanazawa—a city the Japanese routinely refer to as “quaint” and “traditional”—and found a room a few blocks back in a charming concrete-and-concrete arrangement. It was called a business hotel, but the sign out front didn’t say what kind of business. My guess would be cockroach exterminators. A steal at sixty dollars a night. And boy, didn’t I get my money’s worth. Every room in the hotel was provided with the following: a bed.
    When I asked for a wake-up call the man handed me one of those big wind-up alarm clocks that no one has used since the forties. When I asked him for a towel, he charged me extra. I was going to ask for the time, but I wasn’t sure I could afford it.
    Once I got up to my room on the fourteenth floor—and I wasn’t at all worried about being caught in a firetrap, no sir—I realized that I didn’t really need the alarm clock. I had asked for it out of habit. My plan was to spend a couple of days in Kanazawa; for the first time in almost a week, I wouldn’t be hitting the road at dawn. I could sleep in. In fact, I could go out all night and not have to worry. So off I went, having wrung out my jeans and dried my hair and splashed myself generously with aftershave, to prowl the mean streets of Kanazawa. Hours later, I crawled back into bed, reeking of cigarette smoke and stale beer, just before sunrise—only to be woken from my pre-REM slumber not half an hour later by someone pounding on my door. It was the night clerk; he had noticed that I hadn’t come down and was worried I had overslept. I couldn’t even tell him to piss off and get lost. I had to get up and thank this man for disturbing me. He was just being concerned. “Thank you,” I croaked.
    At least I was in Japan, so I didn’t have to tip him. All I had to do was leave large satchels full of cash with the hotel management when I checked out. This is to save us the embarrassment of evaluating service with anything as crass as money. Instead of something as vulgar and unbecoming as a tip, Japanese businesses prefer to slip in an automatic service charge of, oh, about seven hundred percent I would imagine, which is a small price to pay for such a face-saving device.
     

8
     
    KANAZAWA IS AN old castle town renowned for its old streets, old buildings, old pleasure quarters, an old villa, an old garden, and an old theater. It is a very old city, except for the parts that aren’t. All that was missing was the actual castle. Only the rear gate remained, imposing even in its quixotic lack of mission, for the fortress it once guarded had long been lost to time and city planning.
    I was disappointed with Kanazawa. I’m not sure why. It was a prosperous city, and I didn’t begrudge the town its success, yet Kanazawa is quaint only if you are approaching it from Tokyo or Osaka. After the side roads of Shikoku and the fishing villages of Kyushu, Kanazawa felt too big, too congested and—more importantly—too expensive. It was also the halfway mark of my journey and I had expected to enter the city triumphantly, amid cheering crowds and confetti. Instead I had staggered in, exhausted and whimpering, and racked with a persistent cough and a lingering guilt. I hadn’t been this tired or numb since my visit to the Uwajima sex shrine.
    Beyond the generic Japanese-city look of its downtown (also known as “Really Big White Boxes Arranged in Confusing Patterns”) much of Kanazawa is surprisingly well-preserved, with