Free Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson Page B

understands my position. Why, just last year he drove from Osaka to Kitakyushu in nine hours flat. Not bad, eh? And another time he did a Tokyo-Aomori loop, solo. Straight through. Only stopped for gas and meals. No, no, it wasn’t for business. It was a holiday
    Kiminori, it turned out, wasn’t a professional truck driver. He worked for a pachinko parlor. When I caught a ride with him he was transporting a bunch of defective pachinko games (people kept winning on them) to a service center in Nobeoka City where they would be, ahem, “repaired.”
    “My family”—he used the affectionate term for company—“is Twenty-first Seiki Pachinko. Do you know it?”
    How could I not. They tore down a row of wonderfully dilapidated old shops in the middle of Minamata, the city where I lived, and they put up a sprawling Vegas-size monstrosity, with eye-socket aching fluorescent lights and polished chrome. Brash. Big. Loud. Soulless. I know Twenty-first Seiki very well. I kept waiting for social activists and placard-waving protesters to picket the construction site, but no one ever did, and the heart of my sad tumble-down little city had another large bite taken from it. The word seiki means “century” in Japanese, and in some ways I suppose these towering, sleek, soulless buildings are the harbingers of the new millenium.
    “Yes,” I said. “I know Twenty-first Seiki. There is one where I live.” He was pleased to hear it. His family was very big, they were everywhere.
     
    * * *
     
    Nobeoka City was to be my Waterloo. At least, that was how Kiminori saw it. He took me to the intersection nearest the Akadama Phoenix Pachinko. “You’ll never catch a ride,” he said with a cheery smile. I adjusted my backpack and tried not to snarl at him.
    The last ride of the day, and the one that would take me straight through to the ferry port at Saiki, was with an older gentleman named Hiro Koba. He sighed more often than is normal and when I asked him about his day he said, “What’s to tell?”
    He was returning from a long day on the road, and he seemed tired, bone weary. “It’s the work,” he said. “I’m having a bit of trouble adjusting to it. I don’t really belong down here. I’m from central Japan. Nagoya City. They have a castle there, with golden fish on top, do you know it? It’s a beautiful castle. A reconstruction, of course. The war—well, you understand.”
    The highway north of Nobeoka ran through steep forests of evergreen and cedar. The heat wave that had stalked me the previous few days had passed and the sky was a softer shade of blue. We passed a temple, a side road, and a fleeting glimpse of cherry blossoms, faint against the green.
    More than one hundred different strains of cherry tree grow in Japan. If you add the carefully crossbred substrains the number rises to three hundred. Some sakura are tufted like miniature chrysanthemums (yae-zakura ), others grow on thin branches, in tight clusters (Edohigan-zakura). Some weep like willows (shidare-zakura) . Some are tiny and delicate (chyoji-zakura), others are garish and red (kanhi-zakura). Some sprout wildflowers from their trunks, others move on the wind like curtains. Some foam over like champagne, some grow in a web of tendrils. Some tumble early, some tumble late. Some tower high and lean, others are short and squat. Their trunks range from finger widths to gnarled girths more than eleven meters around. Some grow beyond their own strength and have to be propped up with wooden crutches to stop the branches from cracking. Hundreds have been designated gods and encircled with shimenawa ropes and honored at shrines. Others have been designated Natural National Treasures. All are sakura.
    The standard sakura (somei yoshino) is not a natural blossom, but was crossbred from different strains to produce an artificially high number of blossoms per tree. This is why most Japanese insist that cherry blossoms in Japan are more beautiful than anywhere else