Shikoku Part II

I bought a big black felt pen marker from the convenience store, aka the konbini, and went out around back to grab some cardboard boxes ready for recycling. I ripped off one side, and wrote my destination on it. As I did this, a very brief flash of my subconscious surfaced and my eyes darted left and right wondering how strange and out of place I must look—a white guy rummaging through recycled boxes behind a convenience store, ripping them apart, writing on them. Even a trivial act such as this can make you feel leagues apart from the masses of Japanese people, who generally speaking adhere to a certain way of doing things, especially when in public. But, this moment of self-consciousness soon disappeared, and I sat down on the curb and began writing. A lady and her dog walked by. I felt their questioning eyes on me. I had to check my atlas for the correct kanji of my destination (as city names are dreadfully difficult, their readings seemingly decided by the cosmos around the same time that the ancient sun goddess and mother of Japan, Amaterasu, gave birth to this country). I then sat down and scanned my atlas for the best way to get onto the roads, the best launching off point into the grid of traffic ahead. Where would someone most likely stop for me, and where would there be enough space to stop, giving the driver enough time to debate as to what to do after seeing me? I quickly realized I was in a bad spot, caught in the crags of concrete urban sprawl, and would need to walk nearly an hour north and try to get onto the massive highway system, having to abandon the series of fuutsu michi—regular roads—I usually stick to.

A note on hitchhiking: Japan doesn't have a pastime of hitchhiking, and if you stick your thumb out on the road waving it wildly at the oncoming driver you're going to get various reactions. One of them comes in the form of a massive swerve away from you into the oncoming lane, the driver's eyes bulging. It would seem, after having this experience, that someone standing on the side of the road with their thumb does gets the synapses firing in the onlookers brain, but not in the "this guy needs a ride" kind of way. Indeed, in more of a confused and "What in the world is going on here? Has this man been stranded? Is in need of help?” This reaction is usually limited to the elderly man who drives with his wife sitting in the back seat. The younger drivers: well you get a mixed reaction from this lot. You often get a thumbs-up back at you from the youthful driver, as if the hitchhiker doesn't want a ride, but is simply passing on good vibes to the drivers coming his way.

All this being said, you are going to get picked up sooner or later. But, I do recommend making a sign and writing (if you can, in Kanji) your destination on it. It's almost like a right of passage: you got the sign, now you are a man of smarts, with a mission and speaking in a language the driver's can understand. Plus, you can write kanji, which is an element of relief for the Japanese driver whom may not have all the confidence in the world to strike up small talk in English within the confines of the privacy of their car. Furthermore, if you have the backpack slung around your shoulders, have a sign, and invoke the image of a proper “worldly traveler’ it’s going to help you all the more. Things are done here properly, not half-assed. If you want to go hiking, rain or shine you need to be “a hiker”, donning the gators, the bear bell, the vest, and flannel top, the energy bars and boots—no matter the weather, the hike, nor the climate. This transcends jogging, working, club-going, and anything else. It’s good to keep this in mind when hiking. If you simply look like the average bloke, disheveled, in need of the ride and hanging out on the side of the street you’re less likely to be picked up.

I've hitchhiked, like many other foreigners do in this country, all over the damn place and I've been picked up by the very first car, and although sometimes have had to wait for quite some time, but never longer than an hour and a bit. I'd say, generally speaking, out of the four years I've been hitchhiking here, I've been picked up on average within about twenty minutes.

Now, as I hung out behind this convenience store planning my route of attack, I realized I had to make it on the highway system in order to get onto the island of Shikoku. And for those of you who don't know, Japan has a two-tier highway system. The word "highway" here means the toll highway, akin to the expressway in The West. While the highway, which in Canada usually means the roads which connect one city to another, is simply a "city road" as it is rare to ever truly "leave" a city before arriving at another one; partly, this is due to massive urban sprawl, but also do to geography. 80% of Japan's mountains are undeveloped, volcanic spires which shoot into the air, undeveloped for city life (but at times still deforested and replanted and paved now in the most ridiculous manner, but I won't get into that). Which means, the 120,000,000 inhabitants of this country can only build in between these rocky folds (or must simply bulldoze them to the ground to create more livable space, which of course is not unheard of. eg, Tokyo, Osaka, et al). If you ever have the chance to look at Japan from a high altitude, you will see that the floor of the island--the land in between the mountains--is a spidery web of roads, lights, and buildings. That western road which leaves one city, brings you into a land of animals, nature and darkness is unheard of on the main routes of Honshu. On must go to Hokkaido, or head to the mountains to experience such a thing in Japan.

So it was the express way for me. It costs a high price to get on this network of roads. The highway system was made during the bubble years where yen was flowing freely on par with pork barrel politics, and was such an expensive and major undertaking the government still hasn't paid it off to this day (or so I hear). These expressways can be jaw-droppingly amazing sites at times: the bridges more than five stories high with shock absorbers for earthquakes and which rise above you, completely dwarfing the town underneath; the tunnels last more than twenty km long, blasted through dozens of km of mountain with massive fans bolted to the ceiling to recycle the air and get out the exhaust from its depths. To the eyes of a Canadian, it's a truly massive undertaking of a project that spans nearly the entire country.

All feats of engineering aside, it's harder to hitchhike on the expressway. First of all because it's illegal, and secondly because people are driving so fast it’s dangerous (not to mention shockingly strange) to see a person standing on the side of one of these roads. To get on to them you must pick up a ride before the toll gates, not in sight of the attendant (you'll get kicked off) and at a place where the car isn't going so fast. You then must leapfrog from rest area to rest area. If you do snag a ride on here, you can cover a vast amount of distance in one fell swoop, as the highways by pass cities and their gridlocks (although the scenery is not nearly as interesting on here as it is on the lower, usual roads).

I did make it onto the island, with the help of two cars and their drivers. The first helped me get to the highway itself. With old style clothes, disheveled hair and crooked teeth, he was young fellow buying canned coffee from a vending machine when I approached him. I didn’t ask him for a ride, but for directions. He then simply said it’d be faster for him to drive me to my destination than give directions. A stroke of good luck on this chilly March morning.

Out of the two people in the second, it was the girl in the passenger seat, half enthralled with and half scared for my well-being, who I had to thank. She got her boyfriend—someone twenty years or more her senior-to stop for me. I ran up to the window of the sleek, sports car, met the eyes of a cute girl in her twenties who didn’t say hop-in but rather, dai jyoubu?—are you okay? We exchanged formalities, I assured her I was traveling according to plan, and finally got on my way, bag on lap and eyes on me.

She kept peering back from the front seat, while her boyfriend looked at me through the review mirror. They were both kind, and beyond the innocent questions most people have in this country about foreigners, conversation was easy. The girl was indeed worried for my safety and took it upon herself as responsibility to be sure I go to where I was going, as if she didn’t, someone would have been along the way to hinder my further efforts. We stopped and looked at some flowers together on route.

That’s when I made it into the first city on Shikoku - and got stuck. One’s got to avoid cities at all costs when hitchhiking in Japan (probably anywhere for that matter), for stopping not only becomes a task, but stopping on a busy street, in front of dozens of other people, like anywhere else, reduces your chances of being picked up. I had but no choice, and decided to walk along the main city road with my sign wavering until I snagged a ride. It took about an hour or so, but I got one, the driver doing his bit for karma as he had hitchhiked throughout Europe as a teenager, “giving back to all those people who helped him then”, but he could only drop me off on the other side of town. So I found myself dancing, waving, and smiling at all cars on the main road again—the cars going so slow making eye contact was an easy task. Some shying away, others waving you away like an annoying fly, most bowing apologetically, others giggling and staring at you even as the cars passed, and others, stopping for you, and ordering you to get in the car in almost a lecturing manner, chuckling among themselves.

The latter happened to me, and I snagged the ride which would steer me too the doorstep of Mount. Tsurugi-san. Who did I have to thank? Two obasan. Obasan, meaning Grandma or old lady, also pertains to one of the many archetypes which make up the world of fashion and living of Japan. Like any country, archetypes can be seen, some adhered to by people, some completely blown out of the water by others. My two benefactors this time around, driving an ordinary family sedan of Japanese proportions, encompassed what image my students would conjure up in their minds of the word "obasan" when I did I class on stereotypes. Dyed blue hair, strong personalities; a full-deal package, cracking jokes they laugh at more themselves than their listerners do. Plump, direct, to the point. Their dialect thick, their questioning tone strong—not the meek, skinny and cute image most people have of Japanese women. Although these two picked me up, they grilled me the whole duration of the ride. I felt like I shrunk one foot in size and turned back into an adolescent boy during the span of this ride. Something out of a Alice in Wonderland tale, where the two women sitting in the front seats were giants, laughing, speaking in some indiscernible dialect, poking fun and sharing some secret I could not access.

They were not rude, but the series of questions they had, truly shed the light that they viewed whatever I was doing to not only be completely alien and ridiculous, but quite immature. “So you stand on the side of the rode and ask for rides? Do you expect people to pick you up? Do you often do this? Where do you sleep?” and so on. Of course, with their many years of experience on this earth, they said, they not only had the responsibility to pick me up, but to try to feed me along the way (handing me sweets, oranges, and the like). This was nothing new to me, and instead of causing a stink, after denying their offers I humbly accepted (although I had no where to store any of them).

An hour or so later I was bowing outside of the car, not only in thanks to my two benefactors, but also now to one of the woman's husbands who came out to see what all the commotion was about--a wolf in the chicken coop, too many feathers were being ruffled for the master of the house not to come out and see what was up. I was standing outside of the house, the driver of the car now gone, leaving me saying goodbye to the obasan with the husband. I peered into the house: it was a simple one, but one that told a story of families and tradition. You could tell kids had been raised here, and the house spoke of years of undisturbed domestic living--years of proper marriages, reared children, salaries, oranges on tables, five o'clock news, and tucked in sheets on nicely made beds awaiting for the return of the moved-on children.

I looked down the road the house was on, more of a paved mountain road then a city one. I had already began to leave the city areas of Shikoku and was on the outskirts of the valleys which lay ahead. This road was my next route ahead, the mountain folds of Shikoku becoming more enclosed the closer I made my way to the mountains. The river on the right which paralleled the road getting that much bigger, rugged. The houses becoming scarcer, and as it had been almost 8 hours since I first made my cardboard signs behind the convenience store, the skies had become darker.

The husband asked me exactly how I was planning on getting to the door step of Mt. Tsurugi, the second tallest mountain on Shikoku. A mountain which was still about two hours away, in an area where traffic was unlikely.

I looked at him, and replied, "Plan?"