Excerpt from The “The Devil’s Washboard” Section, Chapter 2:

Japan is not a small country, no matter what the Japanese themselves may think. The main island of Honshu alone is larger than Great Britain. Were Japan in Europe, it would dominate the continent. Japan is larger than Italy, larger than Norway, larger than Germany, larger even than New Zealand. Japan covers four distinct climate zones, stretching from the tropics of Okinawa to the snow country of the far north. A journey from Cape Sata in the south to Cape Soya at the north covers three thousand kilometers. In North American this would be a journey from Miami to Montreal–and at roughly the same latitudes.

So why this persistent image that Japan is a tiny place? One reason is due to a cartographical optical illusion. On a map, Japan looks small because it is surrounded by the largest nations on Earth: China, Russia, Canada, the United States and Australia. But there is more involved than this. Japan is small because Japan prefers it that way. It supports the image Japan has of itself: the beleaguered underdog, small but mighty, the little engine that could. If you tell the average Japanese person that their country has a larger populations base and a far bigger land mass than all of Great Britain, they will either resent it or refuse to believe you.

Oddly enough, for all their convictions that they live in a small country, my Japanese friends also thought of northern Japan as being hopelessly remote. For them, the island of Hokkaido was a world away, and when we discussed my travel plans they were not terribly optimistic about my odds. “It is very far,” they warned, “Very far.”

To make matters worse, I decided to go by thumb. Striking a heroic stance, I declared my intention to become the first person ever to hitchhike the length of Japan, end-to-end, cape-to-cape, sea-to-sea. This did not impress my Japanese friends as much as I had hoped.

“Why would you want to do that?” they asked, genuinely puzzled. “There is no reason to hitchhike. That’s why we built the Bullet Train.”

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Excerpt from “The Devils Washboard” Section, Chapter 7:

You approach Shinto shrines through torii gates, and the entrances are usually guarded by a pair of stone lion-dogs. Like so many things Japanese, these lion-dogs came to Japan from China through a Korean intermediary. When they define themselves, the Japanese tend to skip Korea, the middle-man, and claim a connection to China that is direct and overemphasized. But here in the shrine grounds of the gods, the Korean connections is acknowledged: the guardians are called koma-inu, “Korean dogs.” That Korean icons should protect the repositories of all that is Japanese in spirit–the Emperor’s Church in a sense–that Koran dogs should be given such a high-ranking position is something rarely commented upon by the Japanese. These stones guardians provide a telling clue about the ancient Korean roots of the Japanese Imperial Family.

The lion-dogs were originally a lion and a dog, and were very different in appearance, but over the years stonecutters found it easier to carve them to the same proportions. The two figures grew more and more alike, until their features blended. One lion-dog has a mouth that is always open, the other has a mouth that is always closed. The open-mounted lion-dog is named “Ah,” the other is named “Un,” or more properly, mm. “Ah” is the first sound you make when you are born, “nn” the exhale of release, the breath that allows life to escape. Between the two lies all of existence, a universe that turns on a single breath. Ah is also the first symbol in the Japanese alphabet, Un the last. And so, between these two lions-dogs, you also have the A and the Z, the Alpha and Omega. In original Sanskrit, ah-un means, “the end and the beginning of the universe; infinity unleashed.”

In Japan, people are in perfect tune with each other, such as a pianist and a violinist playing in a duet, are called ah/un-no-kokyu. Kekyu means “breathing,” and the phrase has the nuance of perfect, exquisite harmony: ah/un-no-kokyu, two or more breathing as one. If self-actualization is the ideal to which the Western world aspires, then common breath is the ideal to which Japan—and indeed, much of Asia–aspires. The word harmony is Japan has all the cachet that the word freedom has in the West. In Japan, the word for freedom, jiyu, carries with it the nuance of selfish or irresponsible behavior. Group harmony is a higher value. This doesn’t make the Japanese a nicer people. There are thieves and cheats and nasty characters in Japan, as there are anywhere. But the values that Japanese society subscribes to are starkly different from those of the West. If you had to embody the ideals of the West it would be the Statue of Liberty, or The Goddess of Jiyu as she is known in Japan, standing defiantly, the torch raised up like a club, a singular powerful, one-of-a-kind presence. This is not the type of thing you would choose if you wished to give form to Japanese ideals. The ideals of Japanese are captured instead in a thousand small stone guardians, in a thousands shrines, big and small, across Japan. A dog and lion so near in spirit that they have blended into one. Ah/un-no-kokyu.