Hokkaido Highway Blues

Then I told him about Amakusa. For my first two years in Japan I lived in the most beautiful place on earth: the islands of Amakusa, south of Nagasaki. I taught in fishing villages lost in time, in misty coves with weathered temples and unexpected church spires. Amakusa is where the Jesuits of Portugal first landed in Japan, and it was in Amakusa that I first discovered the Power of the Thumb.
    It was a discovery borne of necessity. My work involved commuting between fishing villages without a car in an area where the buses apparently ran only on odd-numbered vernal equinoxes. Buses in Amakusa were like UFOs; I heard a lot about them but I never actually saw one. So I began hitching rides from school to school across the islands, much to the consternation of my supervisor. What began as a necessity, soon became something else. It became a way inside. The car is an extension of the home, but without any of the prescribed formalities that plague Japan. The hitchhiker in Japan slips in under the defenses, as both guest and travel companion. Bumming rides became its own reward, the journey its own destination.
    In this spirit, I had set out for Hokkaido.
    Arduous solo travel has a long history in Japan, and I was following in a proud tradition. The mendicant poet Matsuo Bashō wandered the highways of the deep north in the late fifteenth century and wrote a classic travel narrative about it. Three hundred years later an Englishwoman named Lesley Downer retraced his footsteps, and in 1980, Alan Booth walked the entire length of Japan, north to south, and wrote a travel narrative of his own. But these are solitary ways to see the country I didn’t want to travel among the Japanese, I wanted to travel with them. I didn’t want to walk Japan, as Alan Booth had done, precisely because it is such a lonely, aloof way to travel. Also, it would have involved a lot of walking. Personally, I preferred zipping along in an air-conditioned car. Tromping down a highway all day often put Booth in a sour mood; but when you are constantly prevailing upon the kindness of strangers—as a hitchhiker must—it keeps you in a positive frame of mind. Call it Zen and the Art of Hitchhiking. The Way of the Lift. The Chrysanthemum and the Thumb. Heady on beer and the sound of my own voice, the aphorisms spilled out unchecked.
    Mr. Migita had nodded off. The beer glass was empty, and it was time for me to crawl into one of those enormous cumulus futons that are always on hand for unexpected guests and other such freeloaders.
     

6
     
    It WAS EARLY morning. The sun had not yet cleared the hills behind the Migitas’ apartment building, but the morning’s warmth was already coaxing earth aromas from the fields.
    Mr. Migita backed his car out of the driveway, and the children loaded me up with good-bye presents: cartoon stickers, unusually shaped rocks, origami frogs, a picture of Sailor Moon, and a tiny, folded card from Kayoko that read, in English, Have a fine day. Their mother gave me a boxed bentō lunch, and they waved and waved and waved as the distance between us grew and grew. And then they were gone.
    Mr. Migita and I were still sleepy and hungover, but the green fields of Kanoya soothed the pain. “I’ll take you east of the city on Highway two-twenty,” he said. “From there you can catch a ride down to the coast.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. He had to be at the office at 9 a.m. “We can just make it.”
    Kanoya City was still half asleep; we could have driven through most of the traffic lights without stopping. I tried to think of some cheerful early-morning topic to discuss. “Kanoya is fairly high,” I said. “Will the tidal wave reach it when Sakurajima explodes?”
    “There won’t be a tidal wave. That’s a common misconception. Kagoshima Bay is too shallow for tidal waves. It will be the explosion that will destroy Kanoya, not a tidal wave.”
    Oh, I thought, well that’s a relief.
    Kanoya City thinned out into open fields and the highway widened. Mr. Migita didn’t stop. He decided instead to get me through the next town and let me start hitching from there. The highway curved like a lazy river through the flatlands east of Kanoya and into the small town of Kushira. Then, before we knew it, we were already into the outskirts of Osaki, the next town. Mr. Migita glanced again at his watch, made some quick mental calculations, and said, “I’ll take you through Osaki. Highway two-twenty meets Highway