| Thursday, August 2, 2007 2:13AM | | | | The Whistling Deer of Hokkaido | Posted By: Tony Dsouza
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Well, I guess I could bore everyone with a play-by-play of my two week, 500 kilometer bicycle ride up the east coast of Hokkaido. Okay, I will.
I rode a 'mama-chari', that's a one speed bicycle that Japanese mama-sans ride to the grocery store. Not glamorous or fast, also not expensive ($80). It's not really the latest in long distance touring technology. But I figure that if a Japanese grandmother can ride it two blocks from the supermarket home with the basket loaded with fresh squid and radishes, I can ride it 100,000 blocks around Hokkaido. Also I'm cheap.
I left Nemuro with the back rack of the bike sort-of laden down with camping gear, but not really, again because I'm cheap, and food in the front basket, mostly cookies and chocolate. This was in keeping with my training regime of lite beer and evening cigarettes. That's the best way to get ready for a long distance bicycle ride, or anything really. I push the bike up any incline whatsoever anyway. Plus, it's good for the body, like plunging into near frozen lakes in January. Except I've never done that.
But I did ride a mama-chari loaded with gear out of Nemuro almost three weeks ago. I made it about 20 kilometers before A) I got a flat tire, and B) it started to rain. Lesser men would have called it quits and returned to the warm safety of the third story, sea-view 'manshon' I call home, but not this mensch, veteran of long rides in the sun and rain and snow (yes snow) all over the world.
So, flat tire. No big deal, I'll push the bike to the next town and get it fixed. I suppose I could have brought a patch kit. But I'm lazy. Just like I suppose I could have brought rain gear. But who needs rain gear when you have a bunch of plastic bags from the supermarket, right? I started pushing.
It's treeless and beautiful in a marshy sort of way where I live, I quickly saw a couple of red capped Japanese cranes feeding in a tidepool. I spent an hour looking at them. Then I pushed the bike on the highway while the trucks thundered past and everybody in the passenger cars looked out at the gaijin pushing a mama-chari with a flat tire and wearing a plastic bag against the rain. So I had to get off that highway. Soon I came to a road. Not being able to read the sign and not having a map with me, I took the road. After three hours of pushing through rolling cattle pastures and blue silos, I came to a fork in the road. So I took that, too.
Anyway, I spent the night camping in a drizzle in a beautiful field that had a attracted me because of its seclusion, and also for the 50 or so Sika deer grazing peacefully in it at dusk when I arrived. My appearance set them off in a Serengeti type pushing and leaping frenzy stampede for the trees that took my breath away. Did I really make them do that? Little old high-predator me?
Well, if 50 deer are grazing in a secluded pasture when you get there, you can sort of guess that the deer feel comfortable there and maybe that they think the place belongs to them. So I put up my tiny tent ($10 Wal-Mart special), which I have to bend my legs to sleep in because never having taken it out of the package before, I didn't realize it was for kids. Anyway, did you know that Sika deer emit a high decibel, brain piercing whistle as a warning call when they sense danger? I didn't either. But I do now. Because those 50 deer that ran away came back in the dark and on a half hour interval all night long, the first of them would smell me in my tent from what felt like inches away, emit that whistle. Tweeeeeeeeeet! Boy did that make me jump every time. But what was even better was how they then stampeded all around me, some leaping over the tent, so that it sounded exactly like the home stretch at the Kentucky Derby. Every half hour, mind, leaping over the tent. 150 pound herbivores.
The good thing about taking forks in the road in lightly populated Hokkaido is that you can spend a long time lost and wandering them when you have a flat tire and it's raining. Like two whole days. And with nothing to keep you dry but plastic bags from the grocery store because you are such a hard core camping he-man, grrrr, who doesn't give a lick about the weather, ugh.
It rained twelve of the 14 days that I rode. And not drizzle. Rain. Sometimes it wasn't even rain. It was 'spigoting'. Like what you do to--eek--spiders when you catch them in the sink. I wore the plastic bags over my socks in my shoes to keep my feet dry, I broke down in Betsukai and bought a five dollar rain jacket that looked grey to me in the package, but turned out to be pink (I am color blind). I did get the tire fixed after all, and had no more problems with the bike, except after my first crossing of the Shiretoko mountain range when I pushed the bike straight up for six hours and 17 kilometers, only to come down the other side in a luxurious 30 minute zip that burned out the bearings on the front wheel. The kids in the passing cars loved the sight of me: big gaijin riding across the mountain on a mama-chari wearing a pink rain jacket and plastic bags on his feet. Maybe the rain jacket was also the reason undercover police stopped me three times in two days to check my papers.
Japan seems to be very conflicted about foreigners. Sometimes I'd come back to the mama-chari from a hike and find the basked filled with donuts that someone had left for me. Sometimes all the guys would get out of an roadside hot spring as soon as I'd get in (yes I washed thoroughly first, yes with soap). Man, I really hope I'm not being extra touchy about race over here because of my arrest-introduction to Nemuro. But it's there, or rather here, race is a massive issue in Japan. I guess my confusion about it is that the Japan I experienced before coming here was Japan in arts and Japan through Japanese people who had left Japan and moved to the States. I'm going to make a bunch of clumsy and sweeping and probably offensive generalizations here, but here goes. Being Japanese is like being Jewish. It's not like being American. It's language, nation, race, land, history, yes religion (or communal lack of it). It's first and foremost tribal. To leave it and move away means something very big. So does marrying a gaijin. And for gaijins who move here, to join the tribe means a lifetime commitment to being more precisely Japanese in even very little things than most Japanese ever have to be. Being American is not like that at all. Being American is like being vaguely 'Christian', for example, while being Japanese is like being a practicing Mormon. I see a rigidity, a conformity, to the way things are done when I watch interactions between the Japanese. I think Japan would be a very hard place for someone like me to get along if I were born Japanese. Non-conformity, to me, doesn't seem to work at all here. Yes, the kids go crazy with their outfits and fads for a few years, but at some point I think that the Japanese reach a place where they have to make a decision to conform to the standards of the tribe, or live a difficult life of gentle shame and soft ostracism within it (At least on a small town level, like Nemuro). Well, Americans do that, too, so I'll shut up now.
Anyway, my ride was great, even if I did spend it all all wet. I'm suddenly speaking a bit of Japanese, and I met interesting people all over the place (that I haven't found room here to write about). Shiretoko National Park (a World Heritage site) was as grand and movingly pristine as our own Denali up in Alaska. I'm glad I didn't get eaten by a bear. A fox followed me around on one hike, and I was reminded of a Japanese legend told to me by the shakuhatchi player Yohmei in Tokyo, how the fox takes the shape of women to seduce men, that you can marry and have kids with one, and she won't reveal her true form for years, and then she does and kills you. It's how the fox race gets back at men for killing them. People in all the fishing villages on the coast are harvesting and drying kelp on the stoney beaches right now. I visited an area on the Po River inhabited by Ainu for thousands of years, and the guides took me through the hundreds of building sites and middens that have been uncovered there. They also spent a whole day teaching me about Ainu use of area plants: pharamacology, food usage, building and tool making, even the famous poison they made to paint on arrowheads to disable game. In Abishiri, I spent a day at the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples, an entralling place full of videos and material collections that expose the links in lifeways between the Ainu, Sami, Inuit, Haida, and other northern peoples who adapted to the cold. Many of the silent videos come from the 30's and capture some of the last days of these peoples' traditional lives. It was disturbing and beautiful to watch them silently kill whales, seals, walsruses, bear, deer, salmon; to tan hides and sew the clothes they need to survive in the climate, to teach their children to shoot, harpoon, etc, etc. It was like I was from Mars and learning about the violent life of man on Earth after Earth had been destroyed. It creeped me out. I'll say that Cormac McCarthy's The Road has creeped me out ever since I read it, too; that killing animals, as Brigitte Bardot (I know! I know!) and others have said, maybe really does get us ready to kill people; that the Nazi gas chambers were built on the model of the Chicago Stockyards for a reason. Who said 'Every day is an Auschwitz for the animals.'? What the heck am I on about? Forgive me. I rode 500 kilometers on a one-speed bicycle in the rain. I need to eat something, most likely some sort of animal. Ika, sake, maguro, unagi, saba, kani, tako. Know what I mean?? And those crazy whistling deer...like one of my guides at the Po River Ainu site smiled and said, “Deer is very delicious!”
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