EAST OF THE TOWN of Abashiri, the long shallow curve of northern Hokkaido, northernmost of the Japanese islands, turns abruptly northeast to form the high, uninhabited coast of the Shiretoko Peninsula. A heavy surf breaks on light gray sand here on a fall afternoon, where I stand looking out across waters most Western eyes are innocent of—the Sea of Okhotsk. Russian waters.
Behind me, to the south, stretch maritime meadows and nearly unbroken tracts of pine and spruce forest in which volcanoes stand dormant. Brown bears walk in the wooded hills rising to the east, beyond a trim pattern of small farms. Red foxes run these beaches. I can see their prints and, beyond, the upright figure of my friend Naoki, now leaning over to pick up something.
This half-wild, bucolic landscape is not what one arrives in highly industrialized Japan expecting to experience. I’d been told that the people of northeastern Hokkaido, the side of the island opposite Sapporo, had a different bearing, that they were not so distant with strangers and that they were less formal in their day-to-day affairs than Japanese in cities on Honshu to the south—Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, from whose hectic precincts Naoki and I had just come. I could easily see for myself upon arriving here that there is no headlong development in this region of Japan, no impetuous commerce. The people are proving to be as I have been told, shifting from acquaintance to something like camaraderie almost as quickly as some North Americans.
I had thought about the far reaches of Japan for years. The kind invitation of a Japanese novelist enabled me to travel to Tokyo and when I revealed a curiosity about Hokkaido he sent me north immediately with Naoki Nishibe, a friend of his and a native of that region.
Naoki’s father, Kazumi Nishibe, met us at the airport at Memambetsu, south of Abashiri, and drove us north to the coast. Naoki, twenty-seven, is an intense, short, powerfully built man. His father is much more reserved. His hands and face are creased and seasoned by forty years of outdoor work. He wears a light gray suit and tie.
What Naoki has found is a perfect scallop shell, its delicate, unchipped edge like the crenulated rim of a Belleek porcelain dish.
We drive on along the wave-crashed shore to Lake Notoro, an embayment, actually, of the Sea of Okhotsk. Mr. Nishibe bargains with fishermen at a small dock for fresh salmon, scallops, and snails. (I’d asked Naoki to keep an eye out for an intact scallop shell on our beach walk, a gift for someone back home. Mr. Nishibe, though he speaks no English, quickly caught the drift of that conversation—it precipitated his parley with the fishermen for fresh scallops.)
With the shellfish and salmon secure in the trunk of the Honda, the three of us head down the coast to the Nishibe farm where Naoki grew up, a few miles outside the town of Koshimizu. As we drive I can only stare in enchantment. I am reminded of the sparsely settled, agrarian countrysides of western North America, the coast plains of Washington State and lush green riverine valleys in the Coast Ranges.
I ask Naoki if many tourists ever come to this part of Hokkaido. My Japanese is rudimentary, his English halting. Very few gaijin, he says, very few foreigners, but a fair number of Japanese, especially in the spring, when wildflowers are in brilliant profusion; also in the summer, when warm weather makes a boat ride on one of the area’s pristine mountain lakes or a walk in the evergreen forests very pleasant.
“Many honeymooners,” says Naoki after a long pause, looking up from his Japanese-English dictionary with a smile.
When the road draws close to the beach I ask if we might stop again. I am astounded—the Sea of Okhotsk, I keep saying to myself. Siberia fronts these same waters. This ponderous storm surf, I reflect, will soon lie frozen on the sand in buckled plates of sea ice. Snow will fly, and the bears of Hokkaido will go into hibernation. It seemed as obdurate a coast as I imagined that of the Atacama Desert in Chile to be. Down the beach from where I stand, fifteen or twenty gray herons, birds that would come to my shoulder, strut all angular in the churning surf. What do they seek there?
The Nishibe house, set amid fields inland from the sea, is foursquare and plain. I offer Naoki’s mother two small presents from home when I enter, a jar of my wife’s pear marmalade, a jar of my neighbor’s fireweed honey. I was made to understand before I departed for Japan that to be a guest in someone’s home here would give me a completely new understanding of what welcome and cordiality meant. I was intent on reciprocity in these matters, however, and out of habit carry many small presents to convey my sense of pleasure at being brought in out of the indifferent world.
Mrs. Nishibe—a glance at the hand-polished surfaces of her kitchen tools and I can hope her judgment will be informed, not merely polite—samples both marmalade and honey immediately and pronounces each exquisite. And nothing will do now but that she must prepare a few presents for me to take home, just as soon as she prepares tea and a light meal for all of us. Her guileless courtesy is disarming. A well-mannered people, I conclude, watching Mrs. Nishibe later ironing furoshiki, the traditional wrapping cloths used with presents.
That evening Mr. Nishibe takes his son and me and a friend of his to a Japanese resort inn, a ryokan, where guests can soak in the steaming mineral waters of a hot spring. Before we do, the four of us enter a shoji-screened private dining room, for the evening meal. We sit cross-legged on tatami mats, Naoki and I side by side with our dictionaries between us and facing his father and his father’s friend, Minoru Taketazu, across small black lacquered tables. The meticulously prepared food placed before me is so carefully arranged—the half dozen dishes on the first of four trays, and the food itself, arranged on each dish according to line, color, and texture—that I am hesitant to disrupt the symmetry. I enjoy traditional Japanese food, but am hard-pressed here to distinguish among many varieties of raw fish and sea vegetables. I am also apprehensive that I might embarrass my host with failures of etiquette, but Mr. Nishibe only nods reassuringly at my adventurous appetite, and even compliments me on my use of the chopsticks. Speaking through Naoki and shaking his head in disappointment, Mr. Nishibe adds that the youth of Japan are sadly deficient in these skills. Too many forks, he says.
Mr. Taketazu, sitting directly across from me, full of gesture, loquacious and affable, seems oddly familiar. It’s something in the drift of our conversation, which is turning on the habits of wild animals. He speaks very little English but, again with Naoki’s help, we manage to exchange a startling amount of information. He is about the same age as Mr. Nishibe, and the two of them exchange the beaming looks of proud parents when, at several points during dinner, using my dictionary, I try to state my affection for the landscape of Hokkaido.
I knew before I came, I tell them, that it is possible to witness the elaborate courtship displays of the Japanese crane here and to see other large birds unknown to most North Americans—Blakiston’s fish owl and Steller’s sea eagle. The Kurile seals, I continue, the brown bears, red foxes racing over the frozen sea—such animals, encountered in the undisturbed wilds of Shiretoko and Akan National Parks, could pull a disaffected visitor up out of himself very quickly. Was it really true that few foreigners ever came? The three men looked at one another. Mr. Nishibe made a summary comment to Naoki.
“No Holiday Inn,” said Naoki.
After supper Mr. Taketazu asks me to sign a book of mine, a translation, and offers me a book of his in English, Fox Family: Four Seasons of Animal Life. I try to compose words appropriate to the moment, words that in the future may recall the memory of the meal, our enthusiastic conversation, and the generosity of our host.
Something hangs unresolved in my mind about this modest Mr. Taketazu. When he hands me the fox book, I decide his name must be familiar from a scientific paper I might have once read in translation.
We return to our separate rooms, change into light cotton kimonos, the summer yukata, and meet again outside the men’s ofuro (communal hot tub). Naoki explains the etiquette—a small towel held over the genitals, a thorough scrubbing and shampoo at one of the washing stations along the wall before entering a large tiled tub sunk in the floor. The chasteness, cleanliness, and orderliness of this ritual (my clothing rests folded in its own small wicker basket, perfectly aligned with dozens of other identical baskets on a white shelf in an adjoining room) are in keeping with principles of behavior long observed throughout Japan.
The steaming, sulphurous water is intensely calming. It encourages gentle and desultory conversation, not serious talk. Nevertheless, Naoki successfully communicates something quite abstract, that, traditionally, these circumstances did away with the façades from behind which people might be inclined to speak falsely. No one, he says, tells lies here.
A wall at the end of the room separates our ofuro from the women’s, but it does not reach the vaulted ceiling of the building. From behind it come bursts of evocative, high-pitched laughter.
We retire an hour later. Before stretching out on my sleeping mat, or futon, an inviting envelope of ironed white sheets and cotton quilts, I glance through Mr. Taketazu’s book. Staring at the many stunning photographs of foxes, I finally recall the connection. Several years before this Mr. Taketazu had made a film about the red fox, or Ezo fox, of Hokkaido. It virtually changed the attitudes of Japanese people toward this animal. I’d seen an edited version of the film in the States and been very impressed by the compassionate way Mr. Taketazu had suggested making provisions for wild animals within a settled but still rural land.
Tomorrow, I thought, I will have to pay my respects to Mr. Taketazu. I quickly make some notes about the day’s events and get into bed. I am exhausted by the effort to understand and to be understood, and I know no moment so blissful at the end of such a daylong effort than repose between fresh sheets, one’s skin bare and still puckered and tingling from a hot, soaking bath.
IN THE MORNING the four of us drive up to Mount Iō, a barren, jagged volcano on the periphery of a taiga plain. The wail of the ground vents, that violent escape of steaming air, and the pall of sulphurous fumes end our conversation along the footpath and send each of us off into private thought. The surface of the ground near the larger vents is coated bright yellow with sulphur deposits. Apart from these brilliant fumaroles, the volcano has a stern, prehistoric visage. It’s a dark shoulder set against the melancholy taiga and denser forests to the west. The Hokkaido bear, the same species as the North American brown bear, lives out there in good numbers, but it is rarely seen by the automobile traveler. If you want that encounter you must hike up into the mountains. Standing on the volcano’s steaming flanks, staring up into the moss-hung limbs of the pines and spruces, I could easily imagine bears watching the handful of visitors strolling here. Perhaps the bears have their own version of the ofuro rituals, and are waiting for nightfall, when all of us will have moved on.
Our next stop—the two-lane roads we are traveling all look as if they’d just been paved, and Mr. Nishibe contends that these sleek, new roads simply encourage visitors to Hokkaido to drive too fast, that they actually cause more accidents than the old roads—is at a caldera (the basinlike depression left after the collapse or detonation of a volcano), which Mr. Taketazu tells me holds the clearest water in the world and is called Lake Mashu. He also adds that we are most fortunate: the lake is almost always blanketed with fog, but today it glitters under a cloudless sky. The reflection of sunlight on the water is too dazzling for us to see anything beyond its surface from our vantage point on the rim. Mr. Taketazu assures me, however, that from the right angle it’s possible to see the bottom contour at about 130 feet.
I’ve been trying all day to put my finger on an essential difference between Hokkaido and similar landscapes in western Oregon and maritime Washington. From the rim of this caldera I sense part of the answer. It’s more domestic here. In the distance are family farms, herds of Holstein dairy cattle, and rows of windbreak poplars. The maples and beeches in the woods are beginning to turn. In all this the landscape more resembles the Berkshires or the Adirondacks: the individual setting of each farm, the pursuit of small-scale agriculture hard by the haunts of wild bears, and autumn spreading like fire across the forest.
Mr. Taketazu must leave—he’s a veterinarian and has to attend to some animals at a nearby farm. But we’ll all meet later for dinner. Naoki, Mr. Nishibe, and I continue the trip over a high pass, driving beneath the shelter of extended snowsheds along a sinuous road that clings to the mountainside to my left and affords a view to the right of great stretches of evergreen forest and steep-pitched mountains standing alone, a scene reminiscent of views in the American Cascade Range. We descend after little more than an hour to Akan-kohan, a tourist town at the edge of Lake Akan. The shop windows are filled with Japanese kitsch. A variety of watercraft stand ready to take visitors out on the lake.
But Mr. Nishibe has other ideas.
I should know by now that a thought offered only in passing might as well be a formal request as far as my host is concerned. I’d mentioned earlier that I was not eager to seek out remnants of the aboriginal culture of Hokkaido, that of the Ainu. I find their modern predicament painful to consider and believed witnessing the roadside scenes here—a few Ainu dressed in traditional costumes performing faux rituals for tourists—would be depressing. (The southwestern peninsula of Hokkaido, south of Sapporo, has been occupied by the Japanese for four hundred years. It was not until after the Meiji restoration in 1868, and with American help, that the Japanese settled the rest of Hokkaido, virtually destroying Ainu culture in the process. This extirpation of a native culture, for some attempt at conveying a sense of Hokkaido’s atmosphere, prompts a comparison with the nineteenth-century American frontier. The presence of great bears in the mountains, unruly public celebrations in some of Hokkaido’s small logging and fishing towns, and the freshly settled appearance of much of the countryside enhance the image.)
Mr. Nishibe parks the car and we begin walking through the streets of Akan-kohan. He asks for directions frequently and is finally able to locate the small curio shop he is looking for. The local carver who works there is out. We eat lunch and return an hour later. A man named Kazuo Sunazawa, burly and accommodating, has returned. What is arranged in the ensuing conversation I cannot guess. All Naoki says, rather cryptically, is “Ainu eskashi” (Ainu elder).
The three of us follow Mr. Sunazawa’s car north out of town. Lush, nearly junglelike growth around Lake Akan gives way to evergreen forests as we climb the flank of Mount Oakan. In little more than an hour and a half we arrive at a small town at the edge of Lake Kussharo, where we are ushered into a small, unpretentious home. The only person present is an elderly man sitting on the floor in the central room, smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. He wears white socks (the Japanese tabi with soles and sewn so as to separate the big toe from the others), black cotton pants, and a gray sweater with a black-and-white diamond pattern on the chest. His house coat is also black, with scrolled yellow threadwork designs, suggesting the ornate floral patterns done in beadwork that distinguish North American Indian clothing from around the Great Lakes. He has a long, narrow beard, bushy eyebrows that flare winglike above his eyes, and thin, gray hair. His eyes are blue. A cataract is prominent in the left one.
For once I am without any sort of present, but Naoki, seemingly always prepared, offers our host a box of delicacies and graciously indicates that it is from both of us.
Zenjiro Hikawa is seventy-six, an Ainu, the eldest of eight children. A long conversation follows, to which I mostly listen. Occasionally I am able to introduce a simple question, through Naoki, about Ainu home life or about the bear ceremony, the central religious celebration among the Ainu, or about the actual hunting of that animal. With hand gestures and pencil drawings I am able to participate somewhat more in the conversation, which is managed by Mr. Sunazawa, the only one present fluent in both Ainu and Japanese. It is Mr. Sunazawa who begins to make the first drawings in a notebook that moves around the wood-plank floor among us, part of his effort, it seems to me, to draw out a reluctant Mr. Hikawa. Some of the drawings show the placement of poisoned arrows used in bear hunts (the poison is derived from a species of Aconitum, a plant related to wolfsbane and monkshood). Other drawings depict the traditional arrangement of guests around an Ainu hearth and the patterns of facial and hand tattoos among Ainu women.
As the afternoon progresses, Mr. Hikawa takes up again the work we have interrupted, the carving of dry willow sticks about ten inches long and a half inch in diameter. The rhythm of his stroke gradually terminates our conversation. With the draw of his knife he creates thick bundles of thin shavings which remain attached to the stick at different points. He either gathers them in bunches like tresses and cinches them with one of the shavings or leaves them flared, a rampant array. He stops once or twice during his work to explain the two figures he’s carving, one a hearth god, the other a house god. Beyond the supple movements of his long fingers, at his feet, is a birdcage in which two redpolls perch, watching him. They haven’t made a sound.
Later, Mr. Hikawa brings out an aboriginal longbow, a present from someone who purchased it from Indians in the interior of Brazil. I am able, solely because of the coincidence of some of my own reading at the time, to say a few words about two of those tribes, the Kréen-Akaróre and the Yanomami; and to describe the great cedar logs carved into totem poles which still stand on British Columbia beaches before the abandoned villages of Tlingit and Kwakiutl people. But, to my obvious distress, true conversation is not possible. I must be satisfied with what I can see in the room, and with a few words and drawings. I feel I have offered nothing of substance to the conversation. As we are departing, Mr. Hikawa, with a hand at my shoulder, gently turns me around. He meets my eyes, smiling, and hands me the two figures he has carved.
On the road back to Naoki’s farm I watch dusk descend over the countryside. A nearly full moon rises yellow-orange in a deep blue sky. Stout-legged horses graze in fields along the road and herds of Holstein cattle drift toward the milking barns before sharp-voiced dogs. Over long distances I am relieved of the urgent sense of time. So much of northeastern Hokkaido seems to stand quiet at the edge of human endeavor. Nowhere here is the scale of human enterprise large. It meshes easily with the land.
Time accelerates very suddenly as we turn into the driveway at the Nishibe farm. Mr. Taketazu is waiting there to take me to his home for dinner. (Though we know few words in common this strikes neither of us as a problem. He has also asked a translator to join us later.) It’s a short drive. Raccoon dogs, Japanese hares, and red foxes reside in pens outside the two-story, log-frame house. Inside and upstairs in Mr. Taketazu’s study we settle down across from each other at a low table, a kotatsu, that has a heating element underneath. We draw its quilted cover over our legs and around our waists and then open out a dozen or so large books in front of us, filled with pictures. For the next hour they serve as guides and references as we mimic the movements and sounds of various animals in order to frame our conversation.
Initially our two worlds are drawn together in a discussion of birds. At Lake Notoro, I ask, were those ravens or Japanese fish crows scavenging so artfully in the fishermen’s nets? “Ravens,” he says, smiling in an amused but disapproving way at the thought of them. The level of communication in our conversation is good; it occurs to me to try to convey something subtle. In Japanese folklore the fox, with which Mr. Taketazu is so familiar, plays a role similar to the one the coyote plays in Western American folklore—a trickster. I often think of ravens, also trickster figures in North America, as “flying coyotes.” I wonder if it’s possible to draw on Mr. Taketazu’s understanding of the similarity between fox (kitsune) and raven (watarigarasu), and then to introduce the idea of air coyotes, of airborne kitsune, and make the joke carry. I page quickly through my English-Japanese dictionary. Tondeiru seems to do it for “flying” and I try, tentatively, tondeiru kitsune. For a moment there is nothing but consternation in his attentive face. Then a broad smile of recognition.
The translator eventually joins us, but Mr. Taketazu—he is very voluble, very passionate for a Japanese—and I are getting on well. To be sure, the translator allows us to be more precise. I ask the translator to inquire which bird, of all the ones he knows, Mr. Taketazu most looks forward to encountering. “The fish owl,” he answers solemnly. I’m puzzled. In North America the owl has a contradictory image. It’s seen as both a wise creature and a sinister animal, a night hunter. Among native peoples in North America the owl is generally associated with death. Mr. Taketazu elaborates when he notices my knitted brows. The fish owl, which once guarded the entrances to Ainu villages, has godlike qualities, he emphasizes. To meet it in the woods today, he says, is to rekindle the ancient relationship of interdependence between man and animal. The bird’s aura is still imposing, he tells me, an encounter with it electrifying.
Ten of us—Mr. Taketazu, his wife, two of their children, two of his eldest son’s friends, myself, the translator, and, later, Naoki and his father—all have supper in Mr. Taketazu’s study on tables set up for the purpose. I fall out of the conversation. Early the next morning Naoki and I are to travel south across the Konsen uplands and along the Kushiro River past Lake Toro to a great marsh. On the northern fringes of that marsh we might see Japanese cranes, tsuru, in their first mating rituals of this season. That night we’ll fly back to Tokyo from the city of Kushiro.
As I brought the pieces of fresh fish to my mouth, the crisp vegetables, I recalled the storm surf pounding in from the Sea of Okhotsk, the twirling descent of bright fall leaves along the road, the soles of my feet burning on Mount Iō. I imagined kuma, the brown bear, moving through forests on a path indicated by an older Ainu’s expressive hand.
At the door where we stand to say good-bye, I try to make my gratitude to Mr. Taketazu clear, not simply for his hospitality but for his bearing as a human being, his compassionate attitude toward animals. When I finish speaking, Mr. Taketazu holds up a gift in the half-light of the hallway—a fish owl’s speckled primary feather. I extend my hand toward the perfect form.
I follow Naoki and his father through the darkness to where the car is parked. The smells of farmed earth in the damp, cool air are familiar and comforting. I try to imagine the books I will send to Mr. Taketazu, ones with the wildlife drawings of Olaus Murie, or with stone lithographs of the polar bear and bearded seal from the Inuit at Cape Dorset, or the portraits Karl Bodmer made of Blackfeet men with the white fur of the ermine wound up in their hair. I imagine him finding all this in his mailbox one day, like a flock of birds.
I put my hand to the cold chrome of the door handle. For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles. One travels as far for this as one does to stand before a wild brown bear, or to put hands on the enduring monuments of a vanished culture. Here, in an owl’s long flight feather, is the illiterate voice of the heart. Arigatō, I say, quiet gratitude to the heavy night air of Hokkaido.