Free Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson

highest per capita number of gambling casinos in Japan. The game of choice is pachinko, a form of self-hypnosis, wherein people sit in loud, smoky, painfully lit parlors and feed silvery ball bearings into a spring-loaded trigger. The trigger sends the balls up, into the board—a kind of vertical pinball machine, but without the interactive quality that redeems pinball. The players watch, slack-jawed, cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips, as the ball bearings cascade down the board. The name is derived from the pa-ching! noise the balls make, a racket that echoes constantly through the parlors. It is the passion of prostitutes. There is exaggerated excitement, loud bells and lights, and in the end a faintly dissatisfied feeling. You can almost hear the pachinko boards cooing, “Oh, yes, do it to me, baby. Gimme more.”
    Pachinko parlors are the scourge of the modern Japanese landscape. They are also the mirages of the city nightlife. You see their eyecatching Las Vegas signs a mile away, and they draw you in. They look exciting from afar, but as you approach you realize, Damn! It’s just another pachinko parlor. The doors open, the place is deafening. The “Imperial Navy March” rouses the air, and the sound of balls bouncing down the boards has a stock-market frenzy about it—until you see the people, numb, transfixed. It’s like walking into a bad zombie movie.
    Miyazaki City is Pachinko Central. Akemi shrugs. What else is there to do in Miyazaki? I assume it is a rhetorical question. There is nothing else to do in Miyazaki, save the occasional Blue Hearts concert or overpriced disco.
    Still, you have to love Miyazaki. It is like your favorite aunt, the one with the raspy voice and vodka breath, the one who has been divorced four times, the one who dates younger men. Jaded, slouch-shouldered, rough around the edges, but still able to turn heads. I liked Miyazaki in the same way some people like taverns and smoky pool halls.
    The palm trees and wide boulevards, the scent of distant sea, and the faint taste of salt water and whiskey sours: Miyazaki reminds me of Miami, but without the handguns or shiploads of narcotics or Cuban exiles or ethnic tensions or—on second thought, Miyazaki is nothing like Miami. But both cities do share that same sun-bleached feel, where the colors fade into pastel shades of neglect and where the people are grateful for a breeze.
    It was a muggy day in downtown Miyazaki, which is to say, things were normal. Once again, I was doing my impression of the Amazing Melting Man, the sweat as slick as oil on my skin. Mayumi and Akemi dabbed at their foreheads with handkerchiefs. They agreed that it was very hot out today. The cherry trees in Miyazaki seemed wilted, the flowers hung down like beads of perspiration, and when Mayumi and Akemi offered to take me to the park for cherry blossom viewing, I opted for draft beer and air-conditioning instead.
    Mayumi found a shop specializing in Chicken Namban, Miyazaki’s local dish. Chicken Namban was, the shopowner told us with a certain amount of misplaced pride, invented right here in Miyazaki, though how much work went into thinking up fried chicken with mayonnaise is debatable. Every area of Japan boasts its local specialty. In northern Shimokita, it is wild boar meat. In Morioka, it is small mouthfuls of noodles, tossed back in what becomes more of a contest than a meal. In my own home prefecture of Kumamoto, the main dish is basashi , which is—this is true—raw horsemeat. As Paul Berger noted, the only problem Westerners have with eating raw horsemeat is that (a) it is horsemeat, and (b) it is raw. The first time I had basashi was at my welcome party, when I had just arrived in Kumamoto. I asked one of the teachers what it was I was eating and he struggled for a moment, and then said, in careful English, “This is a horse.” I gently corrected him. “No, Mr. Suzuki, in English it is called cow. “ He frowned and said, “No, horse.”