"On the Michi" Part One

Part One
What's funny is that after you've lived in a place--namely, a foreign country (or any country for that matter)--for an extended period of time, your definition of travel typically excludes running around the place in which you live. Your ignorance always looks beyond your immediate parameters, and often you fail to see the infinte travel opporuntines under your nose because you think you already know it all, have seen it all. Having lived in Japan for almost two and a half years now, I seemingly forgot that any travel around Japan, for me, was still, essentially, international travel, and when I decided to make my fourth, week-long run into Japan's northern island--Hokkaido--I thought that I was compromising the adventure-er's spirit by staying too close to home. My first year in Japan I traveled to New Zealand, my second year was to Thailand, and this year...Japan. I thought it was kinda like saying you're "traveling" to California when you live in Washington, but really it's, like, a jaunt at best.

But, what I soon realized was that the definition of "travel" has no exclusions in the way of place, time, experience, or people. My revised defintiton of travel says that it is any movement into an unknown territory, a left-turn down a street you've never been on, traveling with someone that you already know but, now, because you're on the move, your relationship exists under different circumstances. It's anything that opens your senses to something new, thereby changing everything you've thought about everything up until this point in time. In short, travel is...well, I don't think I can do the short-summaric definiton thing today, but I'll relate an experience and then you can judge whether it's "traveling-proper" or not.

God, I can't believe I'm about to do this, but I'm sure I'm not the first writer to compare his journey to Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." But, seriously, is there a traveler in the world whom has read that book that doesn't draw occasional parallel's between his or her own journey and Jack's, however cliche it might be? The fact is that there is a Sal Paradise, a Dean Moriarity, and a whole cast of eccentric charcters in every damn country in the world, regardless of the era and culture, who are ready to have the rock under which they are turned over.

In this case, my travel partner, my own personal Dean Moriarity, was a Japanese friend named Sunao (Sue-now). At 28-years-old, Sunao is a hefty, portly fellow, standing about six feet tall, and has dark skin even for a Japanese person. He is currently working at a company in the heart of Tokyo that sells jet-fighter parts. He's also a surfer, complete with every image that comes with that label, and speaks American slang amazingly well. Oh, and he's pretty good at regular english, too. After spending some time with Sunao, I have come to fear the world simply because there is a person like him selling missiles, rockets, and all sorts of crazy hi-tech machinery which a person like him, as you will come to see, should have no responsibiltiy selling. A fan of beer, cigarrettes, and spitting game at anyone who will listen, Sunao has a vast repertoire of slogans, both in japanese and english, all of which he employs with impeccable consistency. They have inevitably rubbed off on me. Among them:

"Machigaine!" ("Make no mistake about that!")
"Sotou yabai!" ("That was beyond fucking yikes!")
"Cho daiski sore wa!" ("I can dig that!")

and my favorite:

"Jitsu wa..."
The direct translation of "jitsu wa" is "to be honest" and Sunao typically starts every sentence with this transition. For example, "Jitsu wa sore wa sotou yabai! Machigaine, John!"
This roughly translates to: " To be honest, that was fucking sweet! Make no fucking mistake about that, John.")

When we talk, it's always in an interesting hybrid of english and japanese, with slang and random vocabulary inserted into the dialogue where we feel it is most appropriate. Another example:

Me to Sunao: "Dude, check out this yuki! This is way yabai, NE?"
Sunao to Me: "Jitsu wa...machigaine, dude. Totally. Kore wa chou awesome da yo!"

Half the time I don't realize that we're speaking in this idiosyncratic dialect until I see the faces of the surounding train passengers or people in the restaurant squinting their eye-brows and crunching their foreheads, trying to figure out just what the hell we're saying, which language we are speaking in.

So, it was Sunao--the slang-spitting-jet-fighter-part-selling-Japanese-surfer-dude--with whom I set out for Hokkaido. Wanting to travel both economically and romatically (in the Kerouacian sense, NOT as in the two-gay-dudes traveling together sense, not that I have anything against gay people but I wanted to be clear that we are a.) not gay and b.) romaticists...in the Kerouacian sense) we decided to take a twenty-hour ferry ride from Ibaraki Prefecture to Hokkaido, the Alaska of Japan. Our ferry was to leave at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, so Sunao and I decided to meet in Tokyo at 6 p.m. and take the two-hour train ride together to Ibaraki, figuring this would be playing it safe in terms of time. I show up in the busiest inter-section of the world, Shibuya, at 6 p.m., toting my giant orange backpack, negotiating the slew of Japanese people rushing home on the last day of work before winter-break, looking for Sunao. He shows up at our meeting place at 6:30 still in his work suit, no backpack, and immediately suggests that we go get dinner and some beers.

"Sure, but are we gonna be on time for the train to Ibaraki? And what about the ferry, and where's your backpac--."

"Dude. We'll be on time. Machigaine."

So, we head out and grab a few beers and a bite to eat, and then he says we have to go to his office to get more beers and his backpack. We show up at his place of work around 7 and the lingering workers curiously ask about where we're going, what time. etc. When we tell them, they sternly inform us that there is no way we'll make it on time, are we crazy? Sunao just smiles, sips his beer, and says it all be alright...machigaine.

We barely make the train and feast on rice balls and chocolate covered pretzels, giggling and bullshiting loudly for the duration of the train ride. We arrive in Ibaraki, a more rural region of Japan, and it is as though the pressure of the city is immediately lifted, and we can know potential once again. We barely catch the next train--this one is only two cars long, as opposed to the standard 12-car trains in Tokyo--and it takes us to the ferry terminal. We dash, we weave in and out of other people, we accidently hit them with our big backpacks, and we make the last boarding call for the ship. Sunao looks at me, and expresses one of those I-told you-we'd-be-alright-machigaine looks that I will see a thousand times before the trip is over. And it is right then and there that I decide that I will leave everything to Sunao, trust him unconditonally, on this trip.