Biei Police Box

Day 40, July 2nd: Set out for Asahikawa via Patchwork Road. The weather was perfect, the odd farmer, the odd tractor, perfectly rolled bales of hay, and cows lying next to a mountain of manure. I decided to move on around three o’clock, but felt I’d forgotten something.

Early Morning, Patchwork Road

In all the excitement of seeing an idyllic field complete with hay bales, I lost my camera. Must’ve left it on the rear pannier, put in the earphones and cycled off. Two hours later I walked into Biei police box. Nobody there. I rang the bell round the side. A guy told me to go in, pick up the phone and I would be through to a policeman.
I did as I was told. Sat down behind the desk and picked up the phone.
“Moshi moshi.”
“Moshi moshi, sumimasen, eigo o hanashimasu ka (do you speak English?)”
“Chotto matte o kudasai (just a moment).”

I waited. A guy walked in holding some kind of fisherman’s anorak and saw me on the phone. That must have confused the hell out of him.
Then the local policeman appeared. I put the phone down and stood up like I was at a job interview. After explaining my situation, I was asked to sit down. I was then asked to show my passport. He photocopied it and tried to fax it somewhere. The phone rang. The policeman said it was for me.

“Ah hello. Sorry for your waiting. I am from Foreign Affairs. The policeman cannot understand your passport; he is faxing it to us. Please wait. Sorry.”

Foreign Affairs? The phone rang again five minutes later.

“Do you have your alien card?”
“Uhhh no—uhhh, I dunno—yes, I think so.”
“Please show to policeman. Sorry for your waiting; we are just seeing if you can stay in Japan. Sorry.”

I sat there watching the guy take a whole hour to figure out the fax machine. The phone rang again.

“Okay no problem Mr Norrie, you can stay in Japan.”
“And, uhhh, my camera?”
“Oh camera. Hai, we will call you if found, so what are you doing in Hokkaido?”
“Oh, just cycling around, it’s a project of mine, should be finished in Okinawa by January… uh July… yes July actually… next week in fact. Uh… Hokkaido! It’s lovely here, have you been?” Totally not enabling the filter function in my brain. Not having a job to go to, I should've spared the details.
“Yes I have. So, enjoy your time in Japan. Good luck.”
“Yeah, arigato… anata mo (you too).”

I snatched all my shit back from the highly technical police officer and went to eat. I slurped down the miso-based fuel at the ramen shop, asking for water every couple of minutes to have an excuse to talk to the girl.

It was dark. Sat outside 7 Eleven, people-watching until two o’clock: mostly dudes with dyed orange hair, and girls in come-fuck-me boots getting in and out of cars.

May 18th, What The Dickens, Ebisu

See you there. More info will be added before then.

Please keep coming back. Thank you for all your support.

It's grim up north

Day 54, July 15th: Picked myself up off the kerb outside SeicoMart in Shibetsu at around two thirty. It was a gloomy, cold start. I spent twenty minutes watching the occasional headlight zoom past, trying to summon up even a gnat’s worth of enthusiasm. It got light enough for me to see, so off I went with my nose dripping onto the handlebars. Stopped off at a lake. I could just make out what looked like giant bats flitting in and out of a wall of fog. The sound of the water licking up to the small stones by my feet, and the occasional caw resonating from the white air told me to move on. In this grey, Mordor atmosphere I saw a fox crossing the road. He looked at me inquisitively. I crossed the road and crouched down. We looked at each other for a couple of minutes, before it skipped along a path and under a gate.

The cloud lifted, and eighty miles later, I arrived at Nemuro—signs both in Japanese and Russian. Just imagining who lived in some of these run down apartments and shacks, kept the day surreal. As usual, huge pachinko parlours, tyre centres, convenience stores, shops, hotels, garages, and the coast crying for attention.

Farmhouse, Nemuro

In the warm mid-afternoon sunshine, I rode through a small neighbourhood. A middle-aged guy with an enormous, brown handlebar moustache was standing bolt upright in the garden wearing a beige shirt, brown waistcoat, and brown slacks—his Sunday best. He was standing with one arm across his chest while smoking a pipe with his other hand. It was though he’d been placed there to fuck with my head. I looked back very uncomfortably.
‘What the fuck does that guy do?’ I thought.

Welcome to Royston Vasey.

This city is a mix of Japanese and Russians all living together in this low-on-laughs part of Hokkaido. Tensions over the Russian occupation of the four islands just off Noshappu, added to this weird atmosphere. Went past a statue earlier in the day: three figures pointing and shouting in the direction of those islands.

Nosshapu Cape is where Mad Max meets Little House on The Prairie.

On the way to Japan’s most easterly point, went past pictures of Russian soldiers and flags painted on signboards. The fog and the distant toot of a ferryboat added to the momentous occasion.

On the way back—pylon after pylon. Got me thinking about how Japan doesn’t exactly go out of her way to please tourists. Malaysia, India, Thailand, Singapore, Bali—all have great commercials. Japan could and should make a kick-ass commercial.

Angelic music playing throughout. Camera glides over a snow-capped Mount Fuji. Cut to cranes skimming the marshes in Kushiro in December and then to the temples of Kyoto surrounded by shocking red autumn foliage. Camera pans away from dark-skinned Shibuya girls complete with over-sized white socks playfully pushing each other down the streets of Harajuku. Cut to a deep orange sunset with silhouettes of farmhouses in the Iya Valley, then to some people grinning in a hot spring with monkeys on the periphery and icicles hanging off the ancient burnished beams. Cut to them eating from an immaculately arranged spread of sashimi. Camera pans across dolphins leaping out among the glistening icebergs of the Okhotsu Sea. Then a beautiful Japanese girl parasailing over the beaches of Okinawa. Cut to a sweeping night shot of Tokyo with a spectacular firework display lighting up the sky. Camera pulls beautifully away from a geisha smiling under a red umbrella in Kyoto with ‘Choose Japan’ at the bottom of the screen.

Boom, and there you have it. Simple, but we will never see that commercial and I don’t know why. A more realistic commercial would be:

A pan-pipe version of ‘The Winds of Change’ playing throughout. Camera shakes over the rice paddies on an overcast afternoon on the outskirts of Tokyo with spots of rain on the lens. Cut to dams and stagnant water with a crane moving a plastic bottle around with its beak. Camera pans away from a group of elderly hikers slurping on oden at the base of Mt Fuji. Cut to thousands of people stuck to one another on the subway. Camera glides over the pylon-scattered hills and dales in Hokkaido, sweeping toward the tetrapod-lined coastline. Cut to a test card image of cherry blossoms flickering in the wind. Cut to a wide-angle shot of a shinkansen hurtling past Mt Fuji in the summer. Then a final cut to David and Victoria Beckham with their tattoos digitally removed sitting in an onsen holding a can of Suntory Malts with ‘Choose Japan’ at the bottom of the screen.
Boom, and there you have it.

❄ ❄ ❄

On the way out of Nemuro an old guy shouted “Nemuro?” out of his car window while pointing in the right direction.
“Hai, so desu.”
No reaction, he just struggled out of his car, faced me and took a piss at the side of the road right in front of me and his wife.

Stopped at a hostel in Attoko after a hundred and ten mile day. Crashed onto the futon.

It's a lonely planet

Day 15, June 17th: Woke at four—the sun was already blazing. Four o’clock in the morning! I thought I was in Alaska. Daylight savings anyone? Surely someone in the government liked the odd lie-in in the summer. Sunrise at three o’clock is great if you’re a butterfly. Two more hours of daylight in the summer evenings might just keep the suicide rate down.

Poking my head out into the moist, cold morning air gave me goose bumps and a wry smile. I grew up by the sea and never appreciated where I was, what I had, and what the rest of the world offered.

I thought everyone lived by the sea.

Early Morning, Okumatushima

I got dressed, walked up to the ocean, and gazed out for what felt like an hour. Went back to set up the camera in the beautiful dawn light. Silhouettes of people playing against the blinding white horizon struck me when I looked up to the shore.

Packed up the tent and went back to Matsushima. Took a walk up some steps and into an area of extraterrestrial forest: shrines and gravestones, alien trees and plants. If it’s all going to be like this—photogenic and easy on the legs—then it’ll surely be a breeze. I remember having the same optimism in Nikko.

Mooched around for an hour, before leaving for Ishinomaki. Stopped and started the whole time: an hour at a restaurant, an hour outside a convenience store, half an hour sitting on a wall somewhere…
Arrived at the city’s welcome sign around two o’clock.

Ishinomaki is the place Japan left behind. In this town, the economic miracle amounted to producing a shiny penny from behind a kid’s ear: tan-stained signs of blue chip stock companies and faded posters of yesteryear celebrities. Its main industries were fishing, scrap metal, and getting by. The overpowering smell of old, wrecked fishing boats added to this joyless atmosphere. This was a place that really needed a good night out.

Chose to head to Oshika town before dark. With the sun setting, I found myself on a sudden incline. Still with the image of Ishinomaki branded onto my brain, I pushed on through the dark. The full beams of a car’s headlights came from nowhere and caught me riding right up the middle of the road. I swerved, stopped, and put on the head torch.

An hour into this tedious evening, I started welling up. The road just kept going up with the teasing glimmer of the lights below chafing my optimism. Occasionally I was gifted with some freewheeling into microscopic fishing villages, but they all began to look exactly the same – and they all had nowhere to stay. This mind-bending experience went on for hours. I was miles from anywhere. I was going on a scowl-a-minute tour of this peninsula, for the sheer balls of it.

Where on earth am I? What am I doing on this pitch-dark road? Will the next village be the same? What is everyone else doing right now? In the morning, I was bursting with largesse at the whole project—but as I have come to realize in my life—nights like this are very important. We just don’t think so at the time.

Then up ahead—a red glow from a Hot Spar—a neon oasis in the middle of nowhere. I felt I’d won the lottery. Pulled in, bought a can of beer and sat down outside. It was still only eight thirty. I hunched over my beer with a face like a sixty-year old smack addict. Cars pulled in. Everybody locked the doors. This is not Moss Side by any stretch of the imagination. I sat there, quietly fascinated by this behaviour. This was the last thing I wanted to see. Would’ve taken me two days to hotwire a car, possibly two hours just to consider standing up.

After finishing off my drink and half a dozen Marlboros, I backtracked to look for a ryokan. These are lovely places if you’ve booked in advance and the owner didn’t know what the hell he was thinking when accepting the reservation. If you rock up to one of these snobby establishments unannounced, it’s a different story. It’s hard to love Japan at times. It really is.

Went in with a polite, quiet “sumimasen” so as not to wake everyone up at nine o’clock. This guy comes out, obviously been sleeping.
“Heya wa arimasu ka (do you have a room?)”
He sucked his teeth. I hate that.
“Yoyaku wa arimasu ka (do you have a reservation?)” Then he sniffed. I hate that even more. I sarcastically looked at my chest, then back at him and smiled with a ‘you twat’ look in my eyes.
“Gomenasai, yoyaku dake (reservation only),” he said, amazingly leaving out, “and the door is behind you”.
He sniffed and adjusted his glasses.
“Demo, samui desho (but it’s cold),” I feebly mentioned.

He just pointed over my shoulder. I shook my head leaving him and his three guests to get back to sleep. I thought about feigning a heart attack in the lobby, but didn’t want to put them out. Sighed and shuffled off to another hotel with another ‘inviting’ glow.

The lady should win an award for her fake sympathy. I had to have arrived there by five o’clock. These are the rules and somewhere in that place they are probably etched in stone.

Where next? How about the roller disco at the local social club with an all-you-can-eat buffet, or even the Annual Playmate’s Wine and Knickers Shagathon right next door. This stop-off to somewhere far less exciting was screwing me in other ways.

No choice but to get to Oshika town. Five miles and an hour later, I arrived. Stopped at the convenience store, bought a few cans of beer, some cigarettes and sat down outside. A fisherman sat next to me and handed me an onigiri from his bag. We grunted at each other for a while. He left after wolfing down his supper.

Another guy came out of the store and saw me sitting there.
“Hai. Daijobu.” I replied with all the conviction of an England penalty-taker.
He knew I was a bit upset: the incomprehensible muttering, the three empty beer cans and the immovable stare at the building across the street. He got out his phone and called a guesthouse.
“Aaah, gomenasai,” he said after hanging up.
Another one.
“Aaah, gomenasai.”
Another one.
“Aaah, gomenasai.”
“Daijobu. Daijobu. Arigato gozaimasu.”
“Ja, ki o tsukete.”
“Hai, anata mo (you too). Arigato.”

We shook hands, he got into his van and I got into my beer and cigarettes. Twenty minutes later the lights went out and down came the shutters. I had to find somewhere to sleep. There was nothing here: this unlit shop, these unlit houses, and the unlit port.

Left twenty minutes later and found myself on yet another steep hill with no lights. I took the occasional side street, looking for anywhere to lie down for the night. Cycled past a couple of houses and found some stairs leading to a temple. The light from a street lamp showed me the way. Walked up the concrete steps to the sound of metal cleats scratching the surface. Couldn’t see a thing. I shone a small torch at the surroundings to no effect. Would love to say I woke up next to a rotting carcass – it would make a killer story.
“Screw it,” I calmly said to myself and pushed Babe somewhere else.

The fear of being in a road accident convinced me to go back into town. Ten thirty and the whole town was in bed. Scouted out the dock, then back to the store. I found a patch of undergrowth next to a house. A neighbour’s dog heard me creeping through the thick dry grass and barked forever, waking up other dogs in the neighbourhood. I was the town leper. Never had a feeling like it. Got out the sleeping bag, nestled in to the weeds and started counting stars.

The noisy mutts eventually barked themselves to sleep.