Hokkaido Highway Blues

like a fog bank, beyond its islands’ edge. It is their obsession, their neurosis, their fantasy If Westerners have an ambivalent attitude toward Japan, then the reverse is doubly true. To the Japanese, we are legion: we are conquerors, barbarians, superiors, inferiors, dreams projected, lives unlived, icons, buffoons, the purveyors of greater ideas and nobler arts, taller, louder, faster, less refined, more sophisticated. We are all this and more, compressed into a ball the size of a fist that sits in the stomach of the Japanese.
    Arrogance is always an overreaction. So is self-loathing. The Japanese have been overreacting to the West since the day the American commodore, Matthew Perry, sailed his Black Ships into Tokyo Bay in 1854 and forced Japan to open up its ports for trade. Until then, Japan had been cloaked in a world of shōguns and clan lords, the longest totalitarian rule in human history. Japan’s much-vaulted insularity ended with Perry’s crusade. It was date rape and it set the tone, back and forth, between Japan and the West that has continued right through to the present. If the West loves and hates Japan, Japan LOVES and HATES the West. Japan can do everything but forget us, we who exist out there.
    The Japanese attitude to the rest of Asia is even more problematic. On the surface, they treat the rest of the continent like embarrassing country bumpkins, related only distantly to themselves. They are proud to be Japanese; they are ashamed to be Asian. This conflict runs right down the center of their soul. India, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Korea: they lie like a stone beside the heart.
    Travelers and commentators rarely place Japan in an international context because it is in their interest to make Japan seem more exotic and otherworldly than it is. We all want to be mystic explorers, but Japan is not otherworldly. Neither is it near at hand. It lies somewhere in between. Chiemi was right; Japan is caught in a permanent midstep, one foot in Asia, one in the West.
    It wasn’t until much later that I recognized the convergence of the worlds inhabited by old Nakamura, Chiemi, and Hitoshi. Three people and three places. Saipan. Arabia. Calcutta. Japan as a prisoner of war, as a young woman dreaming, as an artist in motion. The world from three views: the inescapable, the unattainable, and finally, the authentic.
    Japan may yet become a nation of travelers; we may yet meet her, walking the same road, hitching the same rides. Calcutta is as much a part of Hitoshi’s landscape as Ecuador and the Amakusa Islands are a part of mine: the places that make and unmake us. The places that define us.
    Hitoshi pulled over at an intersection. To the left, in the distance, was the angular mass of Toyama City. To the right, fields. Beyond that, mountains. I climbed out and strapped myself into my backpack. We shook hands through the car window.
    “I have one question,” he said. “Why do you hitchhike? It’s not the sakura, is it?”
    “No. It’s not the sakura.”
    “What is it then?”
    “I wanted to find something. Something more.”
    “About Japan?” he said.
    “Among other things.”
    “Then I am sorry for you.” He smiled. “I didn’t tell you anything about Japan.”
    We lingered for a moment at the contact point of hitchhiker and driver— the roadside—like people in a doorway at the end of a party.
    “Any last questions?” he asked me, half in jest. “You know, Japanese ancient secrets. Such things. It’s your chance.”
    “Yes, actually. Answer me this, it’s a question that has always bothered me. Inside, in the deepest point, under all the layers, are the Japanese arrogant or insecure? I mean the kernel. The hard center.”
    He gave me a shrug. “Insecure, of course.”
    “Did you hear that?” I said.
    “What?”
    “The way you said of course, it was very arrogant.”
    “Was it? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
    “Now you sound insecure.”
    He laughed. “American humor,” he said, but I wasn’t joking.
    “It’s too bad you didn’t get a chance to paint anything,” I said.
    “That’s okay.” He looked at the landscape that fanned out before us. “It’s not so interesting.”
    “I thought you liked open spaces, the emptiness, wabi-sabi, all of that.”
    He shrugged. “Hard to paint.”
     

13
     
    HITOSHI DROVE AWAY and was soon lost among the gridwork of Toyama City. The road pointed north like a compass needle. I turned my face into the wind and