Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

ON LITTLE TRAINS, as in the simplest noodle shop, a greeting similar to the most formal one in the culture, called kangei-kai, was performed for every traveler, no matter how lowly: a deep bow, multiple thank-yous, the ceremonial welcome of irassahi mase. Such pacifying rituals of politeness and gratitude, so profuse an awarding of honorifics, seemed archaic in the overfamiliar and insistently casual world of today. But highly structured manners have held Japan together, allowed the mass of Japanese to live at close quarters; in this culture of anonymity and order, they were an acknowledgment that you existed. Such politeness had helped prevent them from killing each other.

So it was on the Sarobetsu Express, shuttling to the far northern coast on tracks that ran at the frozen edge of the immense Sarobetsu Marsh of Hokkaido. It was like a commuter train, only four cars, no locomotive, just an upright driver in a uniform and peaked cap, visible at the front in his glass booth; and the conductor, the guard, and the ticket punchers all troubled themselves to utter the formulas of welcome and to make low bows to the passengers.

Honjitsu wa gojosha itadaki arigatou gozaimasu. "Thank you for boarding the train today," Murakami had translated for me.

Wakkanai was boring, Murakami had said, and even the guidebook warned that there was nothing to see there. I imagined a windswept little port town on a snowy coast. It was that, and more, the landscape of my dreams, the true hinterland of Japan. And the trip through the snowstorm in this modest train was one of the most pleasant I'd ever taken. Halfway to Wakkanai the train was almost empty—only four of us in this first car. And we few continued into the great snow-covered emptiness of northern Hokkaido, following the course of a dark narrow river for most of the way.

We went by small snowbound stations, like Takikawa, where village streets were filled with packed-down snow, forests and farmland blurred with snowdrifts, icicles hung from house eaves. Some bungalows were up to their roofs in snow.

People lived better here, it seemed. They had more space, with gardens and yards, even in the small city of Asahikawa, which was about a third of the way to Wakkanai. The train wound slowly through the forest, where snowy pine boughs drooped, and at the village of Shibetsu there were farmhouses and barns and silos. What roads I could see were narrow and looked unplowed, no cars on them. On this windless winter day the falling snow built up and bandaged the trees, the pine forests, and the birch groves. When the clouds parted and the storm briefly abated, the drifted snow went pink as the sun caught the clouds and slipped into the river valley.

In the miniature towns and villages of rural Hokkaido the people lived in dollhouses, as in Otoineppu, where the late afternoon gloom seemed to bring the snowstorm back. And Teshio-Nakagama, about an hour south of Wakkanai, was the snowiest place I'd seen in the whole of Japan, the dollhouses buried amid rounded drifts, the streets like culverts of snow and some of them snowy tunnels of the sort you'd see in a dumped-on village in northern Maine.

It all seemed blissful until I struck up a conversation with the man sitting a few seats in front of me in the almost empty car. His name was Ohashi. He was born near here. He said that this part of Hokkaido was losing population, going gray—aging faster than the rest of Japan—and that there was no industry anymore and even the farms were failing.

"My family has sixty cows. That's not enough," he explained. "We had too bad competition from the big dairies."

Ohashi had found a personal solution. He had faced the fact that he was nearer Russia than Tokyo. He had decided to go to Sakhalin, a short ferry ride from Wakkanai, to learn Russian, and later he studied economics at a college in Kamchatka. The remotest parts of Russia—the farthest from Moscow—were easily accessible from Japan.

"I wanted to leave my family's farm," he said, "to live on my own. After my studies, I saw there was no work in Hokkaido for me."

He got a job in Tokyo with a Russo-Japanese company. Half the workers were Russian, but from the far eastern part of Russia, those same places, Sakhalin and Kamchatka.

"I'm going home for a few days to visit my family," he said. "Then back to Tokyo."

So once again I was reduced to being a romantic voyeur. Where I saw pines and snowdrifts and ski trails and dollhouses, Ohashi saw only failure, a declining rural economy, and old people.