Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"I can read anything, even Shakespeare, but my spoken English is getting worse," she said.

Mr. Miyamoto was from Sapporo. I told him I had been here long ago.

"I was in elementary school then," he said. "Sapporo was a city of about a million. Now we have two million."

"But it's still a good city," I said.

He made a face. He struggled a bit to speak, then asked Miss Ishii to translate. "He says, No, it's worse now by far. We had more trees then, more birds, more space. Now Sapporo is big and busy—and for what? Just more shopping. We've lost a lot."

"But you have all this snow."

"No. That's another difference. There's less snow. One third the amount we used to have. It's the weather. Back then, minus-fifteen was normal. Now it's always much warmer than that. We get to minus-ten maybe three times a month."

"Global warming," Miss Ishii said parenthetically. She was still translating.

"Global warming is a real thing in Japan. I've seen it, growing up here. It's easy for us to see it because of the seasons and the snow. Before, the weather was colder in the winter. The snow was deeper."

I said, "I remember deep snow, over at the place where they had the winter Olympics."

"It's like this. We used to have four distinct seasons, but now they're confused. We have warm winters and cold summers. Sometimes just a little snow in the winter and a lot in the spring. It's really strange. You were here in 1973. It was different weather then."

We skied together for a while as the day grew darker. I was also thinking: Back then I would not have found two friendly Japanese to ski with. Mr. Miyamoto had a camera around his neck. He boasted that it was old-fashioned—"Not digital!" Miss Ishii said that in 1986 she had spent an academic year teaching in Tanzania, at Morogoro. She could still say jambo and habari gani and mzuri sana. She was in her early forties, tall and rather angular, with the long, egg-like face of the elegant women in Utamaro prints.

Back at the ski lodge, I asked them about the Japanese who returned after living for generations in Brazil (São Paulo has the largest Japanese community outside Japan). I once read that they found it hard to fit in. One of the Japanese Brazilians, quoted in a newspaper, said, "We don't work and we make noise. People here don't like that."

Miss Ishii said, "In the nineteenth century we were a poor country. The emperor told people to go and find work elsewhere. They went to Peru, to Brazil, to the United States. And some came back."

"And what happened?"

"Nothing good."

***

MY LAST VISIT IN Sapporo was to a bronze bust on a plinth on the grounds of Hokkaido University. It depicted William S. Clark, an American who had helped found the agricultural college that later became the university. A Japanese student had brought me here long ago to tell me that this American had taught the Japanese modern farming methods— techniques that were successful because Hokkaido and his native Massachusetts had similar climates.

"Look, Mister Crack!" the student had said.

Clark had stayed for less than a year, from July 1876 to April 1877, but he was still remembered, and the rousing speech he delivered to students on his departure was part of the university's mission statement.

"Boys, be ambitious!" he'd said. "Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man ought to be."

I had mocked that a little, but the man deserved credit. In less than a year he had helped create the first modern academic institution in Japan, and after a number of name changes, from Sapporo Agricultural College through Tohoku Imperial University, it became Hokkaido U. A hundred and twenty years after Clark's arrival, Japanese tourists still posed for pictures in front of his bust. I asked some of them why.

"He was a great man. He helped us."

Now I looked closer at the bust. It was respectful and dignified, but it did not seem very old. I found a university pamphlet that explained its newness: "The present statue erected in 1948 was modeled on the original which was melted down during World War Two."

So the old bronze bust of the inspirational ("Boys, be ambitious!") American William Clark had been turned by the Japanese into a projectile that had thundered down on U.S. soldiers. I recalled an E. E. Cummings war poem, how a man, though he was repeatedly told so, would not believe that war is hell. Then the Japanese bought scrap iron from the New York elevated railway, which they used for bombs, and

...it took

a nipponized bit of

the old sixth

avenue

el; in the top of his head: to tell

him

THE LIMITED EXPRESS

SAROBETSU TO WAKKANAI