Into The Heartland

By Pico Iyer

For many of us, Japan has come to mean crowded trains, high-tech gadgets, efficient systems, cool reserve--a neon blur, in the imagination, of pencil-thin high-rises in which traders in dark suits mutter into cell phones. Or, if not the hard realism of Tokyo's office blocks, then the gossamer romance of Kyoto's teahouses, all exquisite restraint and antique silence. Though both these sides are suddenly in evidence in Olympic Nagano, for most of its life the city and the village venues all around it have offered a down-home, uncrowded, friendly Japan where some of the hard hats along Kencho-dori (Prefectural Office Street) are women and are wearing lipstick. The "Games from the Heart" the organizers promise are Games from the Heartland of a slow-paced, half-forgotten countryside that could almost be called Japan's New England.

To many Americans who've never before set foot in Japan, Nagano may at first look like Atlanta with jet lag--an "industrial and technology-intensive city," as its brochures boast, larger than Newark, N.J., and lined along its broad boulevards with a cacophony of gas stations (called Apple), coffee shops (called Apple Grimm) and supermarkets (called Apple Land). There are seven Kentucky Fried Chicken parlors in Nagano, its literature attests, two Mister Donuts and a Denny's.

But to Japanese city dwellers, used to even snazzier Vuitton and Panasonic pleasures, Nagano has the charm of a big city's drawling country cousin, an apple-cheeked, wood-burning relative still known to eat raw horsemeat and pond snails and crickets. In a chestnut-filled village just 30 min. from central Nagano, a ruddy-faced high school boy gets off his bike to walk a visitor to his destination. An old woman at a country bus station counts out change with an abacus. The driver of a Highland Express cab (working 24-hr. shifts) is a robust woman with a basket of huge apples by her side. Nagano is a world of deep, ancestral sounds: the traditional melody of a potato seller audible downtown; the mournful strains of an enka ballad (often known as Japanese country-and-western) in a tiny noodle shop; the martial tunes that reverberate around the old battlefield near the Olympic Village.

Nagano, though only 120 miles northwest of Tokyo, has long been the provincial capital farthest in time from the center of Japan since unlike the cities on the outlying islands of Hokkaido and Okinawa, it has never had an airport. Even now, with a million Olympic visitors expected, the nearest airport to the Main Press Center consists of a modest, two-story box appointed with exactly four check-in counters and one baggage carousel, 75 min. away by (very occasional) bus. As your plane takes off from Matsumoto, the technicians all line up on the tarmac to wave goodbye.

Throughout its history, Nagano has been renowned as a temple town, home to one of Japan's most ecumenical Buddhist centers, Zenkoji, a 40-structure complex set against the mountains. The cypress-roofed temple is the city's center of gravity, marked on all the highway signs. Zenkoji announces itself with the shock of pounding drums, the smell of burning incense, the flutter of white-paper prayers. Somewhere inside its main hall is what is said to be the first Buddha image ever to arrive in Japan, so precious that only a replica is displayed once every seven years.

At dawn the grave walls shake with the sound of gongs and bells and clappers, and priests huddled in green robes, or all in black, gather around a brazier, drinking tea. A high priest in orange robes, followed by an attendant carrying a red umbrella, delivers blessings on the heads of rows of crouching petitioners. Underneath the main hall is the temple's most charged metaphorical space, an underground passageway, black as the womb, in which the visitor, sightless, is invited to fumble through the cold and dark in search of a "Key to Paradise."

A traditional magnet for Buddhist pilgrims, Zenkoji is approached past a long line of shops selling religious artifacts (though, this being Japan, they also offer pink bunnies and nudie telephone cards). Sidewalks brim with tables full of dried apricots and pumpkin seeds and sachets of apple tea. For all its modern accessories, Nagano remains a farmers' town sought out for its pickles, its horseradishes and its homemade buckwheat noodles. Next to the feminine grace notes of a Kyoto, say, the northern city feels a decidedly masculine place. Its colors are brown and black, its aesthetic one of straw and stone. On its southern edge is Matsushiro, a castle town of old samurai houses and the remains of a military academy; to the north is Togakushi, a sacred, templed mountain favored by ascetics and home to a ninja museum.

And everywhere the 7,000-ft. mountains and the apple and peach and apricot orchards give a bell-like vigor to the air. Nagano is actually on almost the same latitude as Rome and San Francisco--the southernmost city ever to be host of a Winter Games--but its nearby mountains are famous for their clear, rushing streams and sharp blue skies. "This is the most beautiful place in Japan," says an American professor at a local university. "I'll be happy if I never see Tokyo in my life again."

If Nagano is the unpretentious town you learn to like, Hakuba, an hour away by bus (and site of many of the snowy events) is the practiced charmer that grabs you instantly. This is in part, no doubt, because Nagano is a city with 360,000 people--more populous than Iceland--while Hakuba is a village of just 9,400 residents, a picture-perfect poster site for the Japan Alps with its Chalet Heidihof pensions and white birch forests encircled by snowcaps reflected in the Princess River.

Like many Japanese resorts, Hakuba is essentially a world of foreign fantasy and at times has the air of stage sets from 15 different movies all collected in the same small block. Roughly 800 rococo hotels, inns and pensions crowd the village (one for every 12 residents), and at night the timbered buildings are full of trendy young couples sipping wine over gourmet French food after a long day of snowboarding wearing the latest gurobu and goguru. "This is Youngtown," marvels a Kyoto woman as she surveys a corner of the Echoland area where the Shop Jah Jah shares space with the Natchez "American pub," where the Magic Mushroom surf shop and Tijuana Cafe are next door and the Groovy Art Space hair salon is across the street. Thus the ultimate Japanese dream: to live in a Swiss chalet in Montana (with a 7-Eleven around the corner).

Nonetheless, when the thick flakes begin to fall, Hakuba can feel enchantingly like a toy town inside a shaken-up glass bubble, with the rest of the world another universe hidden behind walls of snow. Lights shine from the slopes in the blue-gray dusk, and the new Olympic ski-jumping tracks are lit up against the mountain like bold strokes of calligraphy. One reason nearly 4 million people descend on the village every year (most days there are more out-of-towners here than locals) is simply that Hakuba remains a holiday Sunday to Nagano's workaday Wednesday. By the same token, a posh new five-star hotel room in Nagano goes for $65 a night; in Hakuba an indifferent, mock-European room may set you back $250.

For locals, however, the rash of new developments exacts a deeper cost. Until recently Nagano had a modest train station specially designed to look like a Buddhist temple--to usher pilgrims to Zenkoji down the street; now it boasts a splashy, escalator-filled arcade with a McDonald's at the south exit and a McDonald's at the north exit. Much of the downtown skyline is dominated by a Holiday Inn Express, and a new 150-m.p.h. bullet train puts Tokyo only 79 min. away. The heart of local concern has been the future of the long-pristine environment. The venue for the biathlon event was designed to protect goshawks, and organizers have taken pains to plant azaleas along the ski-jump tracks and to respect the mating habits of butterflies. During the Games, meals are served on paper plates made of apple pulp, and every one of the fully recyclable uniforms worn by 36,000 volunteers has an environmental message stitched into it.

Nonetheless, something has been lost. "I don't like the Olympics," a local university professor says outright. "The revenues are limited, so that means a deficit. That means we have to pay more taxes. I, as a citizen of the city and the prefecture, have to pay $30,000. And for what? Sure, the infrastructure has got better--the bullet train, the new expressway. But now we have four ice arenas. Maybe we need one, but four? And we have a $100 million bobsled and luge course. Do you know how many people in Japan participate in bobsled and luge? Fewer than 200. They've changed Nagano, and they can't change it back." In Hakuba a month before the Games, students were handing out flyers describing how Olympic promises had been broken, trees cut down and personal savings looted.

Yet for the outsider, Nagano offers an echo of an older, purer world, and a journey there suggests a trip in time as much as space, back to a place where children skip rope in front of small straw huts and country stations offer old-fashioned heaters for passengers awaiting trains. On a Bird Line rural bus, the driver chats with his lone passenger throughout an hourlong drive (almost unheard of in Japan), and even in the crowded city streets, taxi drivers open their doors at red lights to shout out greetings to one another.

In his classic novel Snow Country, the Nobel prizewinning writer Yasunari Kawabata depicted the mountains of Japan's far north as the place where jaded urbanites could come to bathe in a forgotten innocence--symbolized by the cool Tokyo dilettante who takes up with a local geisha. At the book's haunting end, the man is returning to his wife in Tokyo, suitably refreshed, and the country girl, heartbroken, is left with only memories. Therein lies the promise, and the danger, of what promise to be splendid Games.