Up Among the Roadside Gods

Touring the earth on which paths cross

William Least Heat Moon is the author of Blue Highways (Atlantic-Little, Brown), a presentation of a journey on the back roads of America. TIME asked him to describe a brief journey to the back country of Japan.

We had come out of Tokyo, Tadashi and I, come out of the chaos of bodies and things; come out northward by the bullet train, which gave 100-m.p.h. passage through rice fields hard by small industries and then up through mountain valleys. We had left a city of rooftop birds--pigeons, crows, sparrows--and we hoped

to see a different life in these mountains, among the

greatest in Japan, the ones called the Alps even in Japanese. Here was the Hida range.

Instead of dingy city birds, now, in Nagano prefecture of central Japan, we saw turtledoves with feathers tipped gold like scales of the carp, and swallows dipping low, and skylarks singing from their hovers. "I know birds," Tadashi said. "There's big ones and small ones."

A city fellow all the way, he works in Tokyo as a translator, after having served 16 years in the Self-Defense Forces. Although raised in Fukuoka, he was born in 1942 in Nagasaki because his mother, following custom, returned to her natal city for the birth. Because of that, as well as to escape air raids near Fukuoka, she and Tadashi returned again to Nagasaki in August of 1945 for the birth of his brother.

He does not remember the explosion. But he remembers his anger when, a few years later, classmates began dying from radiation-induced leukemia. He has worked to put the bitter memory behind him. As a survivor of the nuclear fire, Tadashi receives free lifetime medical care, and he reports twice annually for a physical examination. Perhaps because one of the high hills of Nagasaki stood between him and the epicenter, his health is good.

As for me, born in 1939, I too grew up on the war. The tales of my childhood were more often stories from the front than Grimm or Mother Goose. A disabled Marine told me that the Japanese had green blood--that's why they craved red American blood. And one time I saw snapshots of Japanese atrocities in a P.O.W. camp. For a while thereafter I did not doubt that blood came in different colors.

Tadashi and I had left the bullet train, on which we got to know each other, at Niigata and had taken a limited southwest down along the blue Sea of Japan. At the coastal city of Itoigawa we caught a primitive local that followed the Fossa Magna, that grand cleft dividing interior Japan, up into the Hida range. The train chugged upcountry, passing through hot-spring villages where station names were no longer in Roman letters, passing the jade mines at Kotaki. The railroad paralleled the Himekawa, a river that seemed to flow granite, so stony and gray it was.

The dark, snowy Hida peaks had gone into another weather, but in the valley the day was warm, and a butterfly winged wobbly through an open window of the slow coach, turned a circle and flew on out the other side. Many things--insects, machines, workers--chugged slowly.

At last the incline leveled to a high flatness split by the Azusa River and surrounded by the mountains called the roof of Japan. Even at this elevation, rice fields lay in all directions. Planting was finished but for a paddyfield here and about, and seedlings grew green, ready for the "plum rain," the showers of June.

At Misato, a farm village with no lane running straight, we left the railroad and headed west up into the foothills, where we took a room at a mountain inn called Muroyamaso. We were the last to sit down at the long tables already laid with the meal: stewed seaweed with onions, white radishes sliced into threads ("for digestion," Tadashi said), raw octopus and tuna. For dessert, fresh strawberries and kanten, a transparent gelatin made from seaweed and here served with a cherry blossom buried in the center.

We drank Kirin beer, but the farmers, still rosy after the hot bath, drank sake from bottles the size of a short boy. They drew the corks with their teeth and looked down the slopes onto their fields with satisfaction. But they speculated, too, about weather and the harvest. Bound tightly around their temples were hachi-maki, small towels to absorb sweat and aid concentration.

Also present were members of an elder citizens' club--each man matched to a woman, everyone wearing a starched, post-bath yukata. No longer having to concentrate on the fields, they did not wear hachimaki. One man, youthful but for the old field worker's curving spine, sat down beside me. His name was Michisada. He talked and talked. Tadashi translated.

"I was in the war, you see. The navy. All here fought. To live was our fate, not our glory." He took my hand and shook it repeatedly, between shakes continuing to hold it. "Guess my age." He was 67, but I chose to say 60. He cackled, shook my hand, then stroked my face. To Tadashi he said, "You and the American come to visit my mushrooms. I'm a farmer of mushrooms. We're a foolish people, and we believe mushrooms keep away cancer."

He offered a cigarette, but I thanked him no. He said, "Tobacco's not for you?" Leaning close, he inserted his thumb between two fingers. "For you, only the sex?" He carefully shielded the gesture from the women, some of whom were humming along with I Never Promised You a Rose Garden on the radio.

Michisada-san was laughing again, shaking my hand. "Tobacco or sex, your coffin will be waiting."

He pulled me to my feet, stood alongside, an arm linked with mine, and called upon a friend--who had been a naval officer of high rank but was now only wondrously long-headed and bearded like Jurojin, god of wisdom and longevity--to take our picture. "This photo will go to you in America," Michisada-san said. "A souvenir."

From our room, Tadashi and I watched dusk come down the valley to conceal smoke from burning rice straw of last year and only then to reveal the orange fires. In the dark they were points of brilliance like the clear bowl of night turned topsy-turvy.

After we had set out on the tatami our quilts and pillows of buckwheat chaff and were lying and listening, there started up in the near pines an unearthly sound. Out it went, then from farther away returned a call and, from farther yet, still another, until the slopes rang with cries. I asked what bird it was that made that noise. "Can it be a real bird?" Tadashi said. "Wild monkeys also live in these mountains." The last thing he said was, "Who sleeps with such a bird going?"

All night long the birds struck their calls against the dark. Toward dawn the cuckoos got into it with their ceaseless two notes, then a rooster, and finally the chirping small ones--buntings and white-eyes--until the morning was a racketing.

Michisada-san was waiting in the big hot communal bath, and we soaked together with a grower of mulberry leaves and watched through a somewhat steamy window the fertile plain. "Eat all your food this morning," Michisada-san said. "Especially the egg. It makes for sexual energy in the middle of man." He pointed to his middle parts and laughed.

Instead of the road, Tadashi and I followed the short cut under the big pines into the valley orchards and vineyards. The rocky soil was fertile once it got water, so, although too far above the river here for paddyfields, it produced fruit, melons and chestnuts through a computer-controlled sprinkler system. Down the dusty road until we reached a farmhouse. Tadashi knew the son and his bride.

The Misawa family had lived in Nagano, which means long field, for a thousand years, most of the time as rice growers. After the war, in which he lost both brothers, Daimaru Misawa bought land inexpensively on the dry slope. He cleared mountain pine and, with other villagers, put in a cooperative irrigation system. In the '50s he built a home, then a larger one ten years ago. His 4.4-acre farm is about twice the average acreage here, and his grapes, apples, peaches and melons have done well. The eldest son, Isamu, had just installed a new, promising method for improving grape production with vinyl tents.

Now Daimaru, at 72, had time to build a traditional garden with a small fishpond, and he could watch television documentaries and foreign movies late into the night. I asked about the strange bird cries of last evening. "I know them," he said. "They come only with darkness. It's the bird nobody knows."

To welcome us, the women, Michiko and Fuyuko, served barley tea, buns stuffed with pigweed, pickles, garden strawberries and grape juice from the vineyards. We sat on the earth in the orchard under an old peach tree. I pulled a dandelion and told how Americans eat the spring leaves. There was much giggling, so much that the women covered their mouths. "We eat everything," Daimaru said. "But this, is this not a weed?" When I pulled a plantain leaf and said it also was a good spring green, they were beside themselves with laughter. After things calmed, Daimaru said, "Next April I will try them."

The family returned to stripping fruit. From a branch carrying six olive-size young peaches, the women plucked all but the largest so that it might grow to its maximum. This attention to each fruit gave them a good living.

Tadashi and I hiked down lanes lined with mugwort smelling like sage, through a bamboo thicket, into a blossoming locust grove, on past rice fields and small houses. The oldest houses had thatched roofs caked with moss, while the newer had synthetic tiles and solar panels. "Japan," Tadashi said, "is always a mixture."

By each home was a garden of leeks, bottle gourds, eggplants, cucumbers, cabbages, tomatoes. Along the lanes ran yew hedges and irrigation troughs rushing a swift, cold water, which sometimes carried clover blossoms that children had tossed in a mile away. Shadows from the wings of circling black kites sent pigs squealing, and wind from a dark mountain storm set scarecrows to flapping.

Often out of a paddyfield, muddy prints from bare feet walked bodiless up the road to the next plot; stepping along in the tracks gave me the sense of moving in another time. Occasionally, unexpected, dark ricefield birds rose screeching into the air like so much winged mud flung upward. In one small plot, full of starlings, it was as if the field itself thought to take flight.

Walking, I began to notice carved stones along the lanes. Dozens of them there were: at crossroads, above fields, at boundaries.

Although each white granite rock was unique, every one showed two relief figures cut into a naturally smoothed stone about three feet high. "Dosojin," Tadashi said. "Shinto roadside god."

Sojin means ancestor deity, but do, a word of philosophic significance, with a slight variation in the vowel, can mean both road and earth. While somewhat akin to the Tyrolean wayside crucifixes carved by peasants, these artless yet evocative Japanese workers' carvings conveyed not a Christus in agony but a field hand's vitality in the face of difficult life. The Dosojin pair dance and kiss, smile and scowl, they drink, sometimes they copulate, and frequently here in Nagano, they stand simply in quietude, holding hands, their bodies often scarcely distinguishable one from the other. Always it is man beside woman, because Dosojin is both male and female, singular and plural, one and its other. Dosojin is a Unking god.

This is no stripped Saviour long in dying; rather it is a god, garbed in a field hand's wrinkled trousers or a courtier's robes, whose turn of eyelid or curl of lip reveals a countryman's untutored chisel responding to existence. The vigorous Dosojin may thrust a bold face at the world, and a huge hand may grope within the companion's jacket or reach clumsily for a groin.

In these divinities, layers of meaning are ancient and many, and they express an ambiguous fluidity of intuitive thought that the directness of art conveys well but language does not. The Westerner must abandon exclusive definitions. But this much is clear: 17th century stonecutters, freed from building fortifications during the ruinous civil wars, returned home to carve deities that confer peace as well as protection against disease and destruction. What emerges is a godhead made in the image of peasant reality, where one sees not the human in the god but rather the capacity for deity--the power of realizing life--in the human. The carvers combined the ordinary with the sublime.

Dosojin began as a primitive fertility symbol, an expression of a people of the land who saw the highest affirmation of life in its potential for creation. So if these deities expose an organ of increase to a passerby, it is not to sling an obscenity but to bless him with the healthful prosperity of generation. That is why, at New Year's, the Nagano Dosojin festivals are children's celebrations, where new life honors the continuance of life. If the rest of the year children throw mud at the deity, or whip it with sticks, or urinate on it, the long-suffering peasant Dosojin will still be cleansed by the festival night fires and will re-emerge to quicken and transform and again unify men's souls.

To see these Dosojin is to see past the bewildering life of contemporary urban Japan into an older structure, where change was evolutionary and thereby significant.

On the route back to the farm, Tadashi and I came to a crossroads Dosojin carved with compass directions.

Most potently of all Japanese symbols, these wayside stones reveal how life is a journey wherein the traveler sees that it is the earth itself on which paths cross and from which journeys proceed toward union with otherness. "Dosojin shows us the way," Tadashi said. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.