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Authors: Ian McDonald
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at the tip of the Muroto Peninsula whisper that he could have been a Nobel laureate in his chosen field of mathematics, but he renounced worldly fame and the praises of men to devote his life to what he called “subversion through education”: kebabing the Japanese sacred cow of exam-cram-4-job-4-life-in-the-Company on the thin, dangerous skewer of learning for learning’s sake. School governors, PTAs, local politicians, villified him. His students deified him. Bertrand Russell’s quotable: “How good it is to know things!” had been painted above his chalkboard. It followed him to Temple Twenty-four with only one change: the addition of the prefix “un” to the penultimate word of the motto.
“One third of your life to learn things, and the rest of it to unlearn all the rubbish they cram into you,” he says as he shows us to our neat, scrupulously clean room, scented with sandalwood, lavender, and the sea. “Quality: to know what is good, what is not good, and why: that was what I was trying to teach. If even a handful learned that, I can pass from this world content.”
Cape Muroto is a sixty-mile sharks-tooth hooked into the skin of the Western Pacific Basin. Its northern face is a forbidding scarp of sheer black cliff, its southern a grand sweep of sandy bays and headlands terminating in Cape Ashizuri two hundred kilometers to the south. Enola Gay used Moroto as a landmark en route from Tinian Island to her two minutes of fame over Hiroshima. To the henro, it marked in no uncertain terms the arrival of the hardships of Tosa Prefecture.
Tosa is the Devil’s country,
No hospitality there, you may be sure.
complained a sixteenth-century henro. The names may have changed—it’s Kōchi Prefecture now—but the song remains the same.
We were ten kilometers out on the main road east out of Hiyasa—not a route we would have chosen but the rough coastal terrain made beach riding impossible—when we hit the checkpoint. We came on it unawares, blindsided by a line of trucks. Glimpsing uniforms and flashing blue lights between the walls of traffic, we imagined an RTA. Only at the head of the queue did we see our mistake. Two armored personnel carriers—ex-military—were parked across the highway; on their flanks, on the helmets and shoulders of the armored men checking the vehicles through one by one was a symbol of an eagle clutching crossed lightning bolts in its talons and the name: Tosa Securities Incorporated.
They were the ones who had caused Mr. Morikawa’s death at Temple Twelve. We were entering the heart of their empire.
“Purging undesirable elements, they tell you,” the driver of a pickup told us. He was transporting a load of young trees with their roots wrapped in wet sacking. “My ass. It’s good old medieval transit tax.”
A white-helmeted, white-gloved private policeman beckoned us forward, polite, but eternally a policeman. Our security transit passes—supposedly good for all the private forces on the pilgrimage route—henro albums, and my European passport were examined minutely, then taken for further examination by an unseen officer inside one of the troop transports. I found it a thoroughly disagreeable sensation, to have one’s identity, one’s right to move and be, taken away, to be so vulnerable. After ten minutes our papers were returned stamped with transit permits and thirty-day policy cover-notes for which we were required to part with thirty thousand yen each.
At least you could tell Long John Silver by the parrot on his shoulder. I could not rid myself of the impression that my documents had been digitally scanned. They smelled vaguely… electronic, like fresh photocopies, or faxes. Everything in order, the policeman welcomed us to Kōchi Prefecture, advised us to stick wherever possible to the signposted Approved Tourist Route as “Antisocial Elements” were still active and he could not guarantee that our policy would fully cover us if we wandered off the
“One third of your life to learn things, and the rest of it to unlearn all the rubbish they cram into you,” he says as he shows us to our neat, scrupulously clean room, scented with sandalwood, lavender, and the sea. “Quality: to know what is good, what is not good, and why: that was what I was trying to teach. If even a handful learned that, I can pass from this world content.”
Cape Muroto is a sixty-mile sharks-tooth hooked into the skin of the Western Pacific Basin. Its northern face is a forbidding scarp of sheer black cliff, its southern a grand sweep of sandy bays and headlands terminating in Cape Ashizuri two hundred kilometers to the south. Enola Gay used Moroto as a landmark en route from Tinian Island to her two minutes of fame over Hiroshima. To the henro, it marked in no uncertain terms the arrival of the hardships of Tosa Prefecture.
Tosa is the Devil’s country,
No hospitality there, you may be sure.
complained a sixteenth-century henro. The names may have changed—it’s Kōchi Prefecture now—but the song remains the same.
We were ten kilometers out on the main road east out of Hiyasa—not a route we would have chosen but the rough coastal terrain made beach riding impossible—when we hit the checkpoint. We came on it unawares, blindsided by a line of trucks. Glimpsing uniforms and flashing blue lights between the walls of traffic, we imagined an RTA. Only at the head of the queue did we see our mistake. Two armored personnel carriers—ex-military—were parked across the highway; on their flanks, on the helmets and shoulders of the armored men checking the vehicles through one by one was a symbol of an eagle clutching crossed lightning bolts in its talons and the name: Tosa Securities Incorporated.
They were the ones who had caused Mr. Morikawa’s death at Temple Twelve. We were entering the heart of their empire.
“Purging undesirable elements, they tell you,” the driver of a pickup told us. He was transporting a load of young trees with their roots wrapped in wet sacking. “My ass. It’s good old medieval transit tax.”
A white-helmeted, white-gloved private policeman beckoned us forward, polite, but eternally a policeman. Our security transit passes—supposedly good for all the private forces on the pilgrimage route—henro albums, and my European passport were examined minutely, then taken for further examination by an unseen officer inside one of the troop transports. I found it a thoroughly disagreeable sensation, to have one’s identity, one’s right to move and be, taken away, to be so vulnerable. After ten minutes our papers were returned stamped with transit permits and thirty-day policy cover-notes for which we were required to part with thirty thousand yen each.
At least you could tell Long John Silver by the parrot on his shoulder. I could not rid myself of the impression that my documents had been digitally scanned. They smelled vaguely… electronic, like fresh photocopies, or faxes. Everything in order, the policeman welcomed us to Kōchi Prefecture, advised us to stick wherever possible to the signposted Approved Tourist Route as “Antisocial Elements” were still active and he could not guarantee that our policy would fully cover us if we wandered off the
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