Pre-olympic Swing Through The Soy Sauce And Coca-cola Signs

Winter on Hokkaido is not a frivolous season. Blizzards arrive continuously on the shrieking winds that blow over the Sea of Japan, rising fully finished from the Siberian wastes across the way, where storms are produced on an assembly line and shipped to Hokkaido like a million gross of flying razor blades. Drive at night along the coastal highway when such a shipment is due from Russia and you will hear the Sea of Japan booming in thunderclap detonations. You will see the black water leaping and thrashing about, gnashing at floating cakes of ice as if it were grinding up the bones of dead beasts. The wind screams. The scene is a wild midwinter nightmare. And this is the island of the 1972 Winter Olympics.

The snow on Hokkaido rises many feet high, above the door tops at times. It lies in massive mattresses over the roofs. Soon after it settles, the snow turns gritty and gray in Sapporo and the towns of Hokkaido. Nearly every building on the island burns wood or coal in its stoves and there is an interminable rain of soot falling all around. As dusk approaches on each winter afternoon, the back streets of most towns and the corridors of the ryokan, Japanese inns, are filled with a dry, patient staccato sound. Clak-clak, clak-clak. It is a mimawari, a volunteer fireman, making his rounds, tapping wooden sticks together as a warning to all citizens that they must remember to bank their fires or turn down their heaters. It is a precaution against fire in the night. Most of the houses are made of lumber dry as tinder, much of it unpainted. Despite the faithful efforts of the mimawari, there are dozens of deaths each winter, people killed because they did not heed that gentle alarm. Clak-clak, clak-clak.

To an Olympic traveler, one more accustomed to the sophisticated chrome and fur comforts of, say, France in the 1968 Games, Hokkaido looks like a hard and unforgiving land. Not much more than 100 years ago this northmost island of Japan was wilderness. It was as untouched as Idaho during the reign of King Tut or Alaska in the days of Confucius. The citizens of the milder, more worldly southern islands of Japan shun Hokkaido in the winter as if it were still some sort of Paleozoic tundra. But they are wrong.

They are not wrong because the coming Winter Games will change anything. Next February's Sapporo remains essentially the same. An Olympic Village has been built on the outskirts of town, last stop on a shiny new subway line. There is a concrete ski jump on a nearby hill, there is a starkly modern, mushroom shaped arena and there are other venues hidden all over the place. There will be more bunting and flags, more foreigners. But the profile of Sapporo and Hokkaido won't change all that much. One must look beneath the Olympics to find Sapporo's charm and maybe learn to love the place. The International Olympic Committee has sent the Winter Games off to a strange corner of the world. It is almost impossible to get there from here. But the IOC has not made a mistake. Not at all.

Despite the hard climate, there are civilized charm and nature's beauty beneath Hokkaido's frozen crust. It was so during last winter when a band of pre-Olympians toured there. They rode the back roads and skied the volcanic mountains, slept on the futon beds of ski-village ryokan and dined in the roadside caf�s on such delicacies as the leafy harusame (which means spring rain), the chewy shungiku (spring chrysanthemum); such stuff as shogatogohan (ginger and rice) and tara (dried fish) and ika (squid). I for one salute the pleasantries of Hokkaido in winter. And so do my two traveling companions.

There was pleasant company for the trip. There was The Interlocutor, a congenial Japanese friend and winter sports fan from Tokyo who spoke impeccable English. The citizens of Hokkaido are all smiles, eager to serve, but they rarely speak any language but Japanese and become quite morose and moody when they are unable to communicate their goodwill. So The Interlocutor was indispensable. The other companion was a short, plump and bumptious, red-haired and freckled fellow, an American who spoke the English of New York City's Lower East Side. He came to be known as The Graduate because of his years in such worldly institutions of higher learning as P.S. 147 on Henry Street, the elite delivery-boy corps of the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue and the innermost circles (where elbows are sharpest) of Yankee Stadium sports photography. The Graduate spoke no Japanese at all. However, he eventually mastered such basic terms as konnichi wa (good day), ohayo (good morning), domo (thank you), plus a couple of other valuable words—sukotchi uota (Scotch and water), biiru (beer), pokku choppu (pork chop) and d�zo no sashimi (please, no raw fish). The Graduate, it turned out, could not abide any form of fish, raw or otherwise. Since the Japanese diet is rich with such items as blowfish, octopus, shark fin and cod roe, The Graduate spent a great deal of time in the old pokku choppu feed bag.

We rented a Golden Star taxicab in Sapporo, which is the capital of Hokkaido. We strapped our skis to the roof rack. We bought some tangerines in a red net bag for munching. The Interlocutor and I nibbled tarn (dried fish) and nori (dried seaweed), which came in small plastic bags like salted peanuts. The Graduate nibbled real salted peanuts. We all sipped at a bottle of Tokachi wine, a pleasant Beaujolais-like red which is produced in vineyards on the southern tip of Hokkaido.

We set out at night through slippery snow on the streets of Sapporo for Niseko-Shakotan-Otaru Park, a lovely mountainous area about 45 miles away that reputedly offers the best skiing in the north Pacific. The Aspen of north Japan. Maybe even Alta-East. As we skidded through Sapporo it began to snow. This softened the city sights, which was a blessing. However primeval Hokkaido may have been a century ago, its cities have now become as cluttered and massive as the worst of our American gasoline society settlements. Eying the passing Sapporo scene, The Graduate grumbled softly, "Awright. So when do we get outta Bridgeport?"

As in most of Japan, there is a cascading waterfall of neon signs in Hokkaido cities. In Sapporo this becomes a shimmering, exploding kind of electric galaxy at night (unless, of course, one can read Japanese, and then it is all nothing but the shimmering, exploding burst of commercialism—EAT AT KIKIBUSHI'S DINER, BUY YOUR BARGAIN RICE BOWLS AT SATO'S.) But the gaijin, foreigner, sees star bursts and symphonies and moon shots and entire libraries of psychedelic poetry going on above the city in those bubbling arrays of Japanese characters in yellow, blue and amber neon tubing. It is an esthetic delight, a work of art—particularly when viewed through the gauzy screen of falling snow. The Graduate fell silent in his corner of the cab. Then he said, "Y'know, this must be where all the neon signs in the world go when they die."

Hokkaido also is the place where all the Coca-Cola signs go to die. There are millions of them. Millions. Always in English. That famed bright red circle with the thick script message glares out everywhere—stuck on shops in the remotest village, stamped on chopstick holders in rural inns, even on the back of every chair on the ski lift at Niseko. The Interlocutor said the Japanese like the omnipresent Coke signs because they remind them of rising suns.