Japan – March 2025
My final destination after hiking along the Nakasendo trail from Magome to Tsumago is the castle town Matsumoto. After an udon lunch in Tsumago, I continue my walk on the ancient road to Nagiso. Here, I leave the old route connecting Kyoto and Edo behind and plan to hop on a train to northern Nagano. However, the next one departing from this sleepy town in the countryside won’t be stopping for quite some time. The train would get me to Matsumoto in four hours (including the waiting time), but if I caught a car, I could arrive in a little more than 90 minutes. So off I go to National Route 19, where I wait under the sign pointing to Matsumoto. The mid-March air is still quite cold and I pull the hood of my puffer jacket over my head, and the sleeves over my hands. Covered up like that, it is no surprise that it takes about 60 minutes until a car finally stops a little ahead of me. I’m not even sure if the driver is considering giving me a ride, looking for directions or simply taking a rest.
Suddenly, I see the person waving at me and I realize that they did in fact stop for me. Walking up to the car, I make out the face of a Japanese woman in her late thirties. She smiles at me, rolls down the window and asks me in Japanese where I’m going. I respond in Japanese, saying I’m headed to Matsumoto. With a still slightly uncertain look on her face, she double checks if I know Japanese, explaining that she can’t speak English. Once I confirm, she opens the trunk of her car for me to put my backpack. I ask her how far she’s going, and she tells me that she’s also headed to Matsumoto. Delighted by the coincidence, I ask for the reason for the trip and where she comes from today. As we’re getting into the car, the woman explains that she’s travelling for work and has left her home in Gifu this morning. A good 200 km drive for work. I’m intrigued to ask what her profession is, but the woman interrupts my thought by warning me about the “Yankii” in southern Matsumoto. I’ve heard of Japan’s stereotypical rebellious youth, known for their bold fashion, dyed hair and rough image, but I’ve never really crossed paths with any of them till now. (Little did I know I’d be taking a bath at a Sento next to one of them soon).
I reassure her that my main interest in Matsumoto is the black crow castle in the center of the city. Relieved, the woman changes the topic and admits that she wasn’t sure about picking me up in the beginning. She only decided to stop once she realized I am a woman and a foreigner. I again sense some kind of distrust towards her fellow countrymen, guessing that it might be because hitchhiking doesn’t really fit with the expected path of life in Japan. Keeping the conversation light, I continue our chat about Switzerland, my stay in Japan and the world in general while driving through the winter landscapes of the Kiso Valley. So far, I’m quite satisfied with the flow of my Japanese today. Then, I finally ask the driver about her job. Without even trying to explain in her mother tounge, she opens Google Translate on her phone, types something and proceeds to show me the screen. Below the Kanji characters reads only one word: “Prostitution”. Fair enough, that was not a word I had expected to encounter in my Japanese vocabulary. Unsure how far I can go with the follow-up questions that immediately pop up in my head, I wait for a moment before speaking again.
The woman is the first to fill the silence with the explanation that she’s a single mom who struggles to make ends meet. With only a high school degree, her options are limited. She has tried part-time jobs at convenience stores and similar before but soon realized those weren’t going to work for her. She now frequently travels between the central prefectures Gifu, Nagano and Toyama to meet her clients. We don’t go into details about her actual job. For that conversation, my language skills are not nuanced enough to ask the right questions in the right way. What she does tell me though, is to always be careful around men, that most of them are up to no good and the only good thing we can get from them is money. The woman highly recommends not to get married, nor having a child with a man. From her own experience, either only results in violence and exploitation. I listen carefully, taking mental notes.
As we drive higher up into the alps, suddenly the weather changes and snow begins to fall. The woman closes the window (she was smoking) and switches on the car’s heater. Within minutes, the inside of the vehicle is toasty warm, and the driver rolls up the sleeves of her pullover. Glancing over to the right, I notice different scars on her arms. Horizontal lines across the inside of the wrist and round burn marks on both sides hint at stories we won’t be covering today. Instead, I try to find out more about her upbringing. I’m told that she was born and raised in the countryside of Gifu prefecture. Her family home was located at the top of a hill, and she took the bicycle to school down the hill and back up every day. About 30 minutes to reach the school and 1 hour to return home. There wasn’t any money for her and the siblings to take the school bus. When she asks about my school time, I explain that in Switzerland too, it is common for kids to commute independently on foot or by bicycle and that in most cases there wouldn’t even be the option of taking a school bus. Nevertheless, I can only imagine that our upbringing was quite different.
As we slowly approach Matsumoto city, the woman asks me for my address here. I tell her that I just booked a room at a small guesthouse near the center and she offers to drop me there, even though her own destination is in (you probably guessed it) the southern part of the city. With a final reminder to steer clear from dangerous men, she passes me a note with her name and phone number. Just in case I’d ever need something while I’m living in central Japan. I get out of the car at the station and am once more surprised by how little I know about what’s really happening in people’s lives in Japan. As much as many foreigners and Japanese people alike want to believe, it’s not only Hello Kitty, sushi and Shinkansen. The reality is that in Japan too, like in all places around the world, people struggle and suffer. It’s just that in Japan, generational poverty, abuse and organized crime exist in a kind of parallel universe that remains hidden even to people who live there for years. In most cases, you would really have to step outside the mainstream paths to meet people who have lived through these realities themselves.
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