Hokkaido Highway Blues

anything before they even had time to apply the thumbscrews.
    “Tell us!” screeched police officer Bone Head (I have changed their names to protect their identities). “Why were you hitchhiking on the Japanese National Freeway?” Bone Head was a highly-strung, wiry prepubescent in a police suit several times too big for him and a hat that stayed above his eyes only because his large, batlike ears were holding it up. His partner, Old Tired Guy, was stocky and taciturn. He had a crew cut, no visible neck, and knotted muscles in his forehead. Old Tired Guy dragged out a chair and motioned for me to sit upon it. The interrogation had begun.
    “Have some tea,” he said, as he offered me a cookie.
    The police station was a small trailer beside the highway, little more than a parking lot for highway patrol vehicles. They had never had a stir quite like this and were leaning across desks, piled high with folders and reports, to get a better look at the foreigner.
    I finished my tea. They poured me another. And so went the interrogation.
    The younger officer was champing at the bit. He had caught a real live American and a lifetime of Hollywood movies was bubbling in his brain. He had even wanted to frisk me, but the older officer had given him a look of barely concealed contempt and had brushed him aside. The young officer’s voice kept breaking whenever he tried to get tough with me, which tended to diminish his potency The old guy was much kinder. They weren’t so much Good Cop/Bad Cop as they were Good Cop/Really Annoying Cop.
    The older man took down my name and address and then, with a world-weary sigh, he pulled out a big book of rules and began laboriously to flip through it. You could tell that a couple of times his mind had wandered and he was thinking about something else, then he would remember with a jolt and begin studying the book with heightened concentration, only to drift away a few minutes later.
    “Ah, here we go,” he said finally. “Walking on a national highway. Obstructing traffic. That’s a thousand-dollar fine, a court appearance, and a revocation of work permit.”
    One hundred forty-one thousand yen. I almost gagged on my cookie.
    “We’ll need your Foreign Registration Card, your passport, two pieces of—”
    Right about then I went into Dumb Foreigner Mode. “I was lost,” I bleated. “I was trying to find a shortcut. I can’t speak Japanese. The sun was in my eyes.”
    “Do not speak!” squawked the young officer.
    The older man decided to give me one more chance. “Why were you on the freeway?”
    It was hard to deny I was hitchhiking. The police had driven right up to me while my thumb was out and, when they stopped, I moronically assumed that they were merely concerned about my well-being. They were about to arrest me and there I was, grinning away like the dumbest kid in daycare. “Don’t worry about me,” I had said just before they hustled me into their patrol car and drove me here: Highway Patrol Station 71.
    Outside the window, trucks and other traffic rolled by. The air conditioner in the station was one of those audible units, more rattle and hum than actual temperature modification. The room was muggy and hot. Maybe they were going to sweat it out of me. I drank my tea. They hadn’t even offered me a phone call like on TV Then it dawned on me: This wasn’t TV They were serious.
    My trip might be over. I might lose my work permit. I might have to leave Japan and say good-bye to my paycheck. What was it I had said? “Until they kick me out.” Never tempt the gods. My worst fear was staring me right in the face: I would have to go home and get a real job.
    So I confessed.
    My Lonely Planet guidebook had assured me that “the rules for hitchhiking are similar to anywhere else in the world.” It also advised expressway entrances. I had waited outside just such an entry, beside the automatic toll booth, as cars sped past, just meters away on the main road. Other than perhaps inside a tunnel, expressway entrances are just about the dumbest places to hitchhike. Memo to Lonely Planet: nobody stops at expressways, that’s why they are called expressways.
    People zipped up, punched in their tickets, and then zipped off; sometimes they didn’t even notice me standing there. During a lull in the traffic, I saw a single car coming down the freeway, so I ran out, through the toll entrance, and stuck out my thumb in a bold manner. The car stopped. It was the patrol