 |
My disheartening introduction to Japan comes early, in the Korean port city of Pusan. Maybe I still carry the afterglow of Dong Hwa Sa; more likely, this middle-aged Japanese Zen monk now introducing himself has noticed the semitic shape of my nose. At the mouth of the train station, where a local band called the Slam is grinding out Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door, the monk takes a seat beside me and immediately demands to know my opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Do you think it's O.K. for him to send troops into the West Bank?" No, I sure don't, I say, and I think Sharon's a terrible person who did his best to destroy what was left of the peace process. For another five minutes, he excoriates Israel, then launches into a diatribe about how Jewish money controls President George W. Bush, going so far as to rub imaginary bills greedily between his fingers. Finally, the unhearing Zen master turns again to me with an accusatory smile. "So then, why do you think it's O.K. for Ariel Sharon to invade the West Bank?"
A droning hydrofoil called the Beetle Boat ferries me across the Sea of Japan to the southern island of Kyushu. Then a plane takes me as far south as the city of Kagoshima. But I want to begin at the very bottom of the Japanese rail system, so I board a two-car train, a glorified trolley really, bound for Kyushu's Satsuma peninsula. The clothes, purses and rucksacks of these southern passengers are unspeakably bland by Tokyo standards. The sole exception is a teenage girl in a pink terry cloth hat, whose T shirt proclaims her a member of the "Super Try Hard Generation." Aside from touching up her eyes in a hand mirror, she's trying awfully hard to make no exertion whatsoever.
A few hours later, as evening droops over the Ibusuki Iwasaki Hotel, I meet Shinichi Sameshima. You couldn't ask for a more convivial gravedigger than Sameshima, who carries on the famed Ibusuki tradition of burying tourists in the hot, black sand for their well-being. His face wizened by years in this tired resort town, he invites me to lie down while he shovels a steaming heap high upon my yukata-robed form. Under the heat and weight of the sand, my ankles throb as loudly as my heart. Atolls and cargo ships burble in the flattened expanse of the Sea of Japan; the lights of lesser hotels down the coast string dimly into darkness.
Buried up to the neck, I contemplate the Ibusuki Iwasaki Hotel—a pink-washed, half-empty relic. Completed in 1972, the hotel was conceived as a Waikiki substitute for Japanese honeymooners; the hotel even hosted Jungle Jungle—a mildly scandalous, faux-forest, co-ed bathhouse extravaganza. However, the builders underestimated the wanderlust of the Japanese tourist. Within a few years, thousands of newlyweds were jetting to Oahu. Jungle Jungle wilted as Japan embraced the real Hawaii and remade much of it to its own liking. But there is some fresh hope for the hotel, though hope is born out of horror. The desk clerk tells me that after Sept. 11, many Japanese who might have flown to Honolulu have rediscovered Ibusuki.
The samurai town of Chiran, not far from Ibusuki, has a particularly harrowing past. It was the training ground and launchpad for suicide bombers in the waning days of World War II. In the June swelter, elderly Chiran villagers are waging a languid game of croquet next to the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots. The museum seems unsure of what to make of itself. On display are the airmen's drawings and keepsakes, along with an actual bomber piloted by a cast-bronze kamikaze with a beatific expression. Thousands of photos show the cumulative insanity of wasted Japanese youth, but nowhere do we see the carnage they inflicted or the militarists who sent them to their deaths. Wandering through the displays with the English narrative in my ears, I hear only ennobled thoughts of a man about to die—"When I wait for my orders, the birds are singing. Next time, I'll be a bird ... " Perhaps this pilot was allowed to visit Chiran's 18th century samurai gardens before he flew out. I linger a half hour in these exquisite gardens, which depict the town and its environs in miniature. The hedges mimic the surrounding mountains, waterfalls of moss spill into rivers of sand. For two centuries, the swarms of dragonflies buzzing around the garden had no larger symbolic significance, but in 1944 they did. They were tiny kamikaze planes alighting from a tiny Chiran.
|
|
