Vending Machine Porn, Curry and the Kindness of Strangers

Journal of a Hokkaido Bike Ride

June 2005

After school let out last Friday I stuffed a sleeping bag and extra socks into my pack, strapped it to the back of my bike, locked the door and pedaled hard with the sinking sun on my shoulders, towards the high mountains and clear rivers of Eastern Hokkaido.

Many things about Japan seem backwards to Americans. Backwards not in the uncivilized sense of the word (although a visitor to the New Year Naked Man festival might disagree), but in the sense that reality in Japan often runs contrary to the ingrained beliefs and expectations of the American mind. In Japanese, "I will go to Sapporo tomorrow" becomes "I tomorrow Sapporo to go will." Traffic is on the left. It's rude to wash in the bath, and polite to eat noodles with hearty slurping sounds.  Even the geography of Hokkaido itself is backwards. The vast majority of people live west of the central Daisetuzan mountains, and daydream about the open range of the Wild East when stuck in traffic during the Monday morning commute.

So East I went that afternoon, racing up main street, through the New Utashinai tunnel and down, down, down to the banks of the Sorachi river. The sky was hazy, the air thick. Behind me, the sun was visible only as a pale yellow smudge struggling to penetrate countless gray layers of haze. Cicadas screeched constantly in the underbrush by the roadside.

My legs and lungs felt strong, so I stood up and pumped through the uphills instead of switching out of third gear. In less than 45 minutes I coasted into central Ashibetsu and stopped for a Snickers Bar, the first 20 km of the trip under my belt.

Ashibetsu is yet another former coal mining city struggling to reinvigorate its economy in the face of steady population decline. While my town’s strategy of transforming itself into a idyllic Swiss village to attract tourism is a little unrealistic, the Ashibetsu city planners must have had something strange in their sushi when they gave the city a makeover for the 21st century.  The grand strategy focused on three projects, which were intended to attract tourists from the far corners of Japan to this gritty mining town in the hills of Central Hokkaido.

The three projects selected by the city planners involved constructing a massive Chinese pavillion with an adjacent bathhouse decorated in classical Roman style, erecting the largest statue of Buddha in the world and recreating an entire Canadian village in an isolated mountain valley on the far edge of town, even going so far as to hire real Canadians to live there, modeling Canadian culture for the hundreds of thousands of tourists expected to flock to these attractions. Ten years later the pavillion still stands, but the Buddha isn't the tallest in the world anymore, the Roman baths are moldy and the Canadians have all gone home.

Faded billboards with chipped paint still advertise Canadian World across central Hokkaido, and there is no one to stop the curious traveler from poking around the general store, chapel and green gabled houses, but the place is falling apart from neglect, and frankly, I find it too creepy to visit.

 I left Ashibetsu behind and followed the river into the green hills that lay between me and Furano, where I hoped to find a meal and a place to sleep. Apart from a few workers stringing up netting to control rockslides, I had the hills to myself.

Rounding a corner, I was surprised to see a small shed on the edge of an empty dirt parking lot, decorated with large, bright ideograms that I couldn't read. Needing a rest anyway, I pulled into the lot and poked my head into the shed. Three vending machines stood against the back wall. Vending machines are ubiquitous in Japan, selling everything from jars of whiskey to eggs. There are even vending machines on top of Mt. Fuji.

Seeing vending machines in the shed was not a shock. The shock came from the photograph of a peeing schoolgirl next to a button marked 3000 yen. The peeing schoolgirl was accompanied by tentacled space aliens attacking animated schoolgirls, dildos, cock rings, bottles of lube and hundreds of other photos of tits, asses, dicks and ubiquitous schoolgirls. Magazines went for about $7, dildos for $30 and videos ranged from about $25 all the way up to $100 for a title that advertised itself in English as hardcore, uncensored and underground.

No doubt hundreds of junior high school boys have made the long bike trip up this mountain road over the years, saving their allowances for the illicit thrills the machines dispensed.  I could also picture their fathers, too embarrassed to frequent the porn section of the local video shops, making hurried pit stops on solitary drives back from Furano.  Shaking my head and sending visions of tentacle porn, giant Buddhas and Canadian flags caroming around my skull, I pulled back onto the deserted road and pedaled off into the fading light of a Hokkaido summer day.

……

It’s a lonely feeling to arrive tired, hungry and sweat-stained in a strange town after dark, with no place to go and no idea where to sleep. The last few kilometers of the ride felt just as long as the first twenty, and probably took as long too, because even in first gear my legs could barely propel me to the crest of gentle hills. The sun twilight glow was quickly fading by the time I rounded the last corner and saw the lights of Furano laid out in a bright line beneath the dark mountain shadows. 

 Furano straddles the geographical center of Hokkaido, beneath the steaming volcanic peaks of Daisetuzan National Park.  Walk into any Tokyo travel agency, and chances are good that the poster advertising Hokkaido package tours is of a Furano landscape.  Boasting an excellent ski area, clean rivers, stunning mountain views and fields and fields of lavender, Furano is well positioned to outlive the sad coal mining towns on the other side of the hills.

 I'd stopped for dinner in Furano twice before. Last November, after struggling all day through chest-deep snow on Mt. Ashibetsu, two friends and I arrived in Furano desperate for a hot bath and good meal. We stopped at a hotel near the ski hill with a sign advertising its hot spring, and were promptly ripped off to the tune of $12 each for an uninspiring, badly lit bath and a cramped sauna. After receiving glowing recommendations for a local curry restaurant, we drove back downtown, hoping to make up for the disappointment with a memorable dinner.

 The smell of curry filled the air as we piled out of the car, hair wet from the bath and bellies empty after a day in the mountains. Stomachs rumbling, we walked around the corner to where the curry restaurant must be...but there was nothing - only a wooden shack at the edge of a vacant lot. We continued up the street...and the smell evaporated. Circumnavigating the block, we found ourselves back at the car, where the scent was as overpowering as before - an array of spices, sizzling vegetables and seasoned meat.  It had to be right here! Setting off in the opposite direction, we didn't get ten feet from the car when the smell vanished for a second time.

 We took another turn around the block, and once again found ourselves standing in front of the vacant lot. I was on the verge of tears. Just then, a couple emerged from the ramshackle shed, patting their stomachs and smiling. The three of us looked at each other, laughed and went inside.

 It's no wonder that we didn't recognize the curry place as a restaurant. There's no sign, no parking lot and the whole place really does look like it could topple over in a strong breeze. There are two stories, with the second floor build in and around the branches of a big pine tree and the first hanging over the concrete bank of a small stream. An old, ratty sofa marks the entrance, where people can sit while they wait for a table.

 Inside, the owner, a thick man with a silver beard, and his assistant, a massive, quiet guy with long hair like Chief in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," dish out huge portions of homemade sausage or mushroom curry with rice and golden potato chunks on the side, served in big white bowls and eaten with one of the workmanlike steel spoons kept in coffee cans on the tables. Menus are scrawled in black marker on pieces of cardboard and thousands of business cards cover the flimsy wooden walls, propped up at the corners with birch trunks. An old fashioned stereo system blasts the master's favorite records - Dylan, Merle Haggard, Alabama, Aerosmith and the Chieftans. If you're lucky, there will be some homemade beer available - dark and flavorful, with only a hint of carbonation.

These thoughts were all that kept me from laying out my bag under a bridge 10 km back, and the lonely feeling vanished as soon as I caught the first smell of curry. The place was packed, but the master cleared me a space at the heavy wooden bar and without asking slid an overflowing bowl of sausage curry in front of me.

 "Where from?" he asked, in English.

 "Utashinai," I replied between mouthfuls. "I biked here for the curry."

He laughed, showing silver teeth. "Where you stay tonight?"

"Camp, I guess," I said. "I have a sleeping bag."

"You'll stay at my place," he said, switching to Japanese. "My name's Toshi."

 The Japanese word "uchi" has no equivalent in the English language. It can refer to one's home, family, self or office - any space or institution with which the speaker identifies. In a society divided among "in-groups" and "out-groups," ‘uchi’ marks the boundary between public and private, between the face one presents to the world and the personal life maintained behind closed doors. When Toshi casually invited me to stay at his home, he wasn't just giving me a place to crash; he was extending the purest form of hospitality in Japanese culture.  He was inviting me inside.

 "I'm sorry," I said, accepting his offer. "Thank you."

 Toshi topped off my curry bowl and gave me a big plate of fresh salad greens. "From my garden," he said, smiling, and went back to work.

 Toshi refilled my bowl twice more that night, teaching me Hokkaido dialect and telling stories about growing up in Furano, telemark ski trips deep in Daisetuzan, a high-school rugby team he coaches and the curry restaurant, where he'd been dishing out extra helpings for over 30 years. As the crowds thinned, he beckoned me behind the counter, where I ineptly peeled potatoes for tomorrow’s fries and added my voice to the welcoming chorus of "Irrashaimase!" when late-comers peeked into the entranceway. When the last traveler was fed and his assistant began cashing out, Toshi asked me why I came to Hokkaido instead of Tokyo.

 "I was placed here," I said. "I didn't decide." "It worked out for the best though - I love the mountains, and the fresh air. People are more friendly in the countryside."

"Sore wa soo da nee," he said. "That's the truth. Why do we have these cities? Why do people want to live there? They work all day, go out drinking and screwing. There are always wires overhead, cars going by. If they look up at night they don't see stars. When they go to sleep there is no sound of river, or wind. Neighbors are strangers. And yet the kids on my rugby team can't wait to graduate and move to Sapporo. I don't understand it. Never have."

 We left the restaurant in Toshi's old pick-up. The road took us out of town and into the foothills of the mountains, where it turned to dirt and began following a small stream. "Trout," he said, pointing at the creek and grinning.

 The road dead-ended in the front yard of a wooden building with soft yellow light pouring from the windows. "Aiiii," Toshi exclaimed. "My grandkids left the lights on again."

 As soon as he cut the engine, a pack of dogs surrounded the truck, barking first happily, then warily when they caught the strange scent. "It's OK, It's OK," Toshi told them. "I've brought a friend."

 The house was a large post and beam design Toshi had built himself, with a heavy wood burning stove at its center. The front rooms were done in the Japanese style, with rice paper screens and fresh straw tatami mats. One of the mats pulled away to reveal a space for heating water during the tea ceremony.  Toshi opened one screen and pointed upwards.  The moon was warm and white against the perfect blackness of the sky.

 Toshi showed me to the bath, a steaming wooden tub big enough for three, with windows looking out to the forest. After soaking, I found him in the kitchen, taking a brown jug from the refrigerator.

 "Can you stay up a little longer?" he asked. "I keep some beer at home."

 He poured us each a glass and we sat at his broad kitchen table.

 "Tsukareta," he sighed. “I’m beat.  You know, I'm on the Board of Selectmen here in Furano. We had meetings all morning. I think the library should be open past 5 in the summer, don't you? So many meetings..."

He drained the last of his beer.

 "Come upstairs," he said. "No need for the sleeping bag, but be quiet, because my son and his wife and kids are sleeping."

 Toshi showed me the bathroom, featuring an industrial sized metal sink with six taps. The house was built to hold any number of grandchildren. I brushed my teeth, and let him usher me into a bedroom, where I collapsed under clean white sheets and a heavy wool blanket, too tired and full to lie awake listening to the sound of the stream outside, or the wind blowing through the trees.

Like this story and want to learn more about Hokkaido?

Read 'The Last Festival'