If You Follow Me (34 page)

Malena Watrous Alien Encounters of the Closest Kind

T
HE DAY
I
RECEIVED
my placement letter from the Japanese Ministry of Education, I looked up Shika in a guidebook. I was twenty-two years old, at loose ends working a string of odd jobs in New York, so I'd decided to apply to the JET program, which sends five thousand foreigners per year to teach English in every corner of Japan. Unfortunately, Shika was unlisted, and my guidebook dismissed the Noto Peninsula as one of the most remote regions of mainland Japan, a place with no sights of real interest and not worth visiting by tourists.

This did not turn out to be true. There is a lot to see and do in the area, especially for those with a taste for unusual entertainment. Sure you can go to Kyoto and do the textbook temple tour, followed by a prepackaged performance of Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku theater, all condensed to an hour to fit the Western attention span. But if you want to see something different, but equally Japanese, here is my list of the best, you've-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it tourist destinations in and around the Noto Peninsula, none of which made my guidebook's cut.

It's generally accepted that truth is stranger than fiction, and in rural Japan this is certainly the case. Japan, a nation known for its uniformity, is also a mecca of weirdness, proof that the pressure to conform breeds eccentrics. Some like to contain their eccentricities within museums. Lucky for you, this means that for a nominal fee, you can gawk at your leisure. And since Japan is the size of California, you can get to the Noto Peninsula from Tokyo on an overnight bus, waking up by the Sea of Japan as an attendant hands you a moist towelette.

Arisu-kan

When I asked my new supervisor about the music that kept waking me up every morning,
he told me that it was broadcast from Town Hall to test the emergency evacuation system at the power plant. The privilege of choosing the morning tune rotated among the bureaucrats, whose taste ranged from baroque classical to saccharine Japanese pop music. After a few months teaching weekly adult English classes at Town Hall, I could usually guess who had chosen that morning's tune. Shika's treasurer was a big fan of The Carpenters' “Top of the World.”

I arrived in Japan in July. The high school was technically on summer break, but teachers had to come to work every day in case students dropped by. None did. I was told that I was very lucky because I only had to sit at my desk from eight to two (instead of four) every day. The other teachers spent their time in the sweltering faculty room smoking cigarettes, playing a board game called Go, and commenting on how hot it was. I'd brought a stack of novels with me from the States, which I finished all too quickly. One day, the history teacher who sat beside me observed, “You are like International Man of Mystery, Austin Powers,” he explained, “because you read so much.” Apparently reading was mysterious. Then he informed me that Shika's library had an excellent selection of English classics.

I saved my trip to the library for the last Friday before the new semester, looking forward to sinking into a fat classic. Unfortunately, the “excellent selection” consisted of three slim volumes:
Breakfast at Tiffany's
,
The Bridges of Madison County
, and
Alice in Wonderland
. I was standing there, crestfallen, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. A silver-haired man in a business suit and rubber sandals introduced himself as
Kamono-sensei
. He told me that he was a retired teacher and offered to give me a tour of Shika. In New York, I would never have gotten into a car with some strange guy who picked me up at the public library. But this was rural Japan and he seemed harmless enough.

He drove me to
Arisu-kan
, Shika's
Alice in Wonderland
–themed museum of nuclear power. A 1/25 scale model of the plant functioned as a playground for toddlers, who could crawl around in a cross-section of the reactor pressure vessel. In the Garden of Radiation, kids learned “what happens to the uranium in the case of an earthquake.” An English sign read, “Furthermore, don't miss the exhibitions on nuclear power station simulations, ECCS, reactor scrimmages, and others.” On a map of Shika, blinking Cheshire cats showed local radiation measuring points. I had no idea what was normal or dangerously high. My guide seemed uneasy when I asked whether there had been any problems at the plant. “A few,” he admitted. After we left the museum, he took me out for
kare raisu
—white rice drowned in silky yellow curry, topped with thin cutlets of breaded pork. He insisted on treating. Then he drove me home and I never saw him again, just like the white rabbit who vanished down the hole.

Cosmo Isle

In the summer months, the Noto Peninsula was blisteringly hot. I spent most of my free time at the beach, swimming in the sea and dozing on the second-longest bench in the world, where there was always plenty of space. One day at school, my supervisor took me aside and told me to be sure not to fall asleep while sunbathing, lest I get abducted by aliens. He was a savvy, cosmopolitan guy, a pillar of the community. This was my first indication that he might also be nuts. “North Koreans,” he specified, voice dropping as if there might be some in the vicinity, just waiting to chloroform us and smuggle us back to their desolate motherland, which he swore was how they did it.

The line between fact, fiction, and science fiction turns out to be blurry.

North Korea is on the other side of the Sea of Japan, and there have been reports of
Japanese people abducted from the Noto and brainwashed by their North Korean captors. In addition, the Noto's shores have been used as a dumping ground by human traffickers from China. So the possibility of bumping into an “alien” on those wind-battered beaches was indeed real, even before a woman from Hakui swore under oath that a UFO had beamed up her two missing children one summer afternoon while the family swam in the sea. Most of the people I spoke with expressed doubt over her testimony, followed by, “But you never know…it
is
Hakui.”

Hakui, a town ten miles south of Shika, has a reputation as UFO central—Japan's own Roswell, New Mexico—and local businesses capitalize upon the town's reputation. It boasts a love hotel with pods in lieu of beds, a bathhouse with UFO-shaped tubs, a ramen restaurant where each object in the bowl of noodle soup is supposed to replicate part of the alien abduction experience, and a museum called Cosmo Isle, complete with a landing strip for alien spacecrafts.

Cosmo Isle contains a few legitimate exhibits on outer space. NASA provided a lunar module and a real spacesuit. Also displayed is the spacesuit that Tom Hanks wore in
Apollo 13
. But most people come to see documentation of human encounters with extraterrestrials. “Photographs” of almond-eyed aliens cover the walls, as well as shots of mysteriously dented crops, and of the survivors of alien abductions—the folks left behind after their loved ones were beamed up by UFOs.

I never ran into any aliens on the beaches of the Noto—not the spectral variety in any case. But I made a trip to Hakui's annual sand castle competition (the towering medieval edifices would have been more impressive had cement not been allowed in their construction), that also featured a beauty contest, where another foreign English teacher—a big-breasted blonde
in a bikini—was crowned that year's queen, her satin banner decorated with UFOs.

Hanibe Gankutsuin

The title for weirdest museum in the prefecture has got to go to
Hanibe Gankutsuin
, the Museum of Hell, located outside Komatsu, at the foot of the peninsula. A sculptor-turned-priest (and leader of a sect that suggests there might be such a thing as a “fundamentalist Buddhist”) molded the exhibits from the local red clay, beginning with the giant Buddha head that towers over the parking lot. Apparently the body will follow, though the priest hasn't made much progress since he started filling the caves with dioramas of demons tormenting sinners, the statues built slightly larger-than-life but otherwise as realistic as mannequins.

I was first brought to
Hanibe Gankutsuin
by my friend Chikako, a junior high school secretary who would shout, “Huge size!” whenever I entered the faculty room. This might have been offensive, but she always followed it with, “Same size!” She was probably five-ten at the most, about the same height as me, but when we walked down the hall side by side, both students and teachers would stop and exclaim, “
Takai!
” or “So big!” in awed tones, as if witnessing a real-life freak show. Chikako brought me to a store that carried “our size” clothes, baggy pastel tracksuits and voluminous T-shirts that said “blackface” and “bling-a-ling.” After our shopping expedition, she made a surprise stop at the Museum of Hell. “You won't believe,” she said as we climbed down a flight of stairs into the flickering caves.

Taking in the hellacious exhibits, I often couldn't tell what the sinner's crime was, or how the punishment fit it. A man with a penis as big as a log sat with his tiny hands pressed to either side of it, looking dopey. Was he guilty of excessive masturbation? Was his huge cock a punishment? A gray-haired
sarariiman
(salaryman) chased a girl in a junior high school sailor uniform, his tongue dangling halfway down his necktie. I assumed he was the pervert, only to find her featured in the next cave, stuffed into a giant mortar, a demon pulverizing her tantalizing (and now bloody) legs.

Some of the dioramas featured statues of real people—people still alive but obviously destined for hell—like tabloid queen Masami Hayashi, the infamous
kare onna
, or “curry lady,” who poisoned the curry she brought to a neighborhood potluck and killed a half-dozen people. Hayashi enraged the nation when she refused to explain why she did it, but everyone knew that her neighbors picked on her for not doing her share of chores, and for breaking
gomi
rules. Her actions were truly monstrous. Still, I understand how the
gomi
police could push a woman to extremes.

In Shika, the list of
gomi
separation rules was truly epic. Electronic goods were especially hard to dispose of, even though many people took pride in having the newest models and replaced them often. It cost a lot of money to get rid of a car. I should know, since I crashed three, proving that temporary people probably shouldn't drive in Japan. I wouldn't have been astonished to find a statue of myself, perhaps crammed into a garbage can, at the Museum of Hell. I said so to Chikako, who laughed, having heard of my
gomi
infractions. She told me to stand next to the statue of the “curry lady” for a photo. As I did, I noticed that we were exactly the same height.

Mawaki Onsen
(and others)

Being naked in public felt weird the first few times. But I quickly became addicted to the Japanese baths, especially the
onsens
, or natural hotsprings, and shed my inhibitions along with my clothes. There are baths all over Japan, from the dazzling facilities at luxury hotels like the one where the entire faculty of Shika High School
spent the night (attendance mandatory) over New Year's, to the humble establishments in every neighborhood with signs depicting three plumes of steam. While I tried to sample as many as I could, as often as possible, my favorite bathhouse was undoubtedly
Mawaki Onsen
, located near the town of Wajima at the tip of the peninsula.

While the entrance fee at that time was just 300 yen, less than a convenience store sandwich, the natural setting rivaled the luxury of any hotel. Crown Princess Masako visited Mawaki Onsen on a trip to the Noto, and even though her fertility was the subject of endless media speculation at the time, she looks almost relaxed in the picture framed on the lobby wall.

Perched on the cliffs over the sea, dozens of
rotemburo
, or outdoor tubs, overflow down the jagged rocks, trickling into the raging surf below. On one side of the facility, divided by a high bamboo wall, are tubs made of a velvety cedar that leaves a lingering perfume on your skin. On the other side, the tubs are lined with smooth river rocks. The sides flip weekly between the sexes, and I could never decide which was my favorite. The bathhouse stays open until late at night, which is by far the best time to go, especially when it's snowing. Nothing beats being naked in a blizzard, your body scalding while snow catches in your lashes and melts on your tongue.

The Noto Peninsula borders “Snow Country,” and it snows almost continuously from November through May. My friend Chikako taught me how to snowboard at a small resort where they blasted hip-hop onto the slopes, which I attempted to translate through crude gestures. Despite our linguistic limitations, Chikako and I soon recognized that we shared an irreverent sense of humor and that we both liked taking risks. When she informed me that on Wednesdays lift tickets at the ski resort were free for women, I introduced her to the concept of
the “sick day.” I'll never forget picking up the phone one Wednesday morning to hear Chikako say, “I don't feel so good, and you?”