Free Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson Page A

And then he whinnied and imitated the sound of a galloping horse by slapping his hands against his lap. “Horse,” he said again. But of course by that time I was already in the toilet with a finger down my throat attempting to redeem my meal ticket, so to speak.
    Where the other regions of Japan specialize in gourmet dishes such as horsemeat or rolled seaweed, only Miyazaki has claimed Chicken Namban, the Big Mac of Japanese food. Poor Miyazaki. Even its cuisine is second-rate.
    Not that Chicken Namban isn’t tasty. It is. It is a popular dish across Japan, and every take-out shop and box-lunch emporium has Chicken Namban on the menu. It is almost a staple of family restaurant chains such as Sunny-Land and Joy-Full. The name namban is from the characters for “south” and “barbarian,” and it refers to the Jesuit missionaries who landed in southern Japan in the sixteenth century. Apparently these Portuguese missionaries, and the traders that followed them in, were fond of fried chicken. Later, Dutch merchants introduced the concept of mayonnaise. Together, this gives us Chicken Namban—or more properly, “Barbarian-style Chicken.” That’s right, barbarian.
    You may want to pause a moment and wonder what sort of reaction you might get in the West if you opened a restaurant offering “Jap Noodles” or “Yellow Menace Sushi.” The fact that restaurant chains in Japan don’t think twice about labeling a dish “Barbarian-style,” says a lot about Japanese sensitivity to outsiders—or their lack thereof. Mind you, I suppose it could have been worse. They might have named it Big-Nosed, Round-Eye, Butter-Smelling, Couldn’t-Make-a-Car-to-Save-Their-Life Chicken.
    Mayumi, Akemi, and I finished our meal and said good-bye on the walking mall outside the restaurant. The concert was starting soon, though neither of them seemed thrilled about seeing any band named “Blue Hearts.”
     

15
     
    HIGHWAY 10 NORTH of Miyazaki City is one long extended aggravation of traffic lights and intersections. I walked forever. My tongue was thick with the taste of oil, diesel, and dust, and the traffic rattled by with bone-jarring persistence. At one point, above the haze of exhaust and cat’s cradles of telephone wires I saw the Statue of Liberty advertising a muffler shop or a pachinko parlor. Or maybe it was the Statue of Liberty. Maybe I was hallucinating. Carbon monoxide will do that to you. To make matters worse, I was using a backpack apparently designed by astronauts. It had hooks and pulleys and compartments, and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t sit straight. I began pulling straps at random, and it lurched on my back like a drunken sailor.
    Rush hour came and went like a slow swell of ocean, but eventually I caught a ride. It was with a wiry young man named Kiminori Maruyama, who was impossibly thin and so grinningly young that he reminded me of my high-school students, even though he was several years out of school. Kiminori was driving a battered old box of a truck. I wasn’t sure what the cargo was, but I thought what the hell, a gun runner or drug carrier might make a nice change of pace, so I climbed up and in.
    He creaked open the door of his truck and shoved aside the take-out coffee cups, work gloves, and dust-bedeviled newspapers without so much as an arched eyebrow.
    “Traveling, are you?” and he told me about his own long-distance hauls. Why, just last year he drove five thousand kilometers in one week, a solo trip from Tokyo to Nagasaki and back again.
    “For business?” I asked.
    “No, no,” he assured me. “Strictly for pleasure.”
    He was completely discouraging about my own travel plans. There will, he assured me, be absolutely no rides once I got past Nobeoka, the next town up the road. It is empty up there. Just forests and hills. Nope, he didn’t like my odds. Japanese simply do not pick up hitchhikers. Sure, he stopped, but that is just because he is a traveler himself and he