An Unexpected, Mid-air Rescue...
Against these many demons I had a secret weapon. It was so secret that even I had no idea that it existed. It was the Japanese. The few who took it upon themselves, at enormous cost in time and energy, to help me when they had no more reason to do so than to feed a stray dog on the street. And the many – an entire nation really, who made room for me – sometimes squirming a bit to accommodate my pointy elbows, but ultimately finding a way to fit in a square peg. They let me into their lives. They forgave me the many times when I broke the rules, just as one forgives a small child because she doesn’t really know any better and you can tell she’s trying as hard as she can.

I laugh when people compliment me on going out and making a documentary entirely on my own. I was never alone. I had 126 million people standing by to lend a hand…

Journal: February 16, 2000

I was most of the way through a 1300 kilometer pilgrimage around Shikoku, Japan’s fourth largest island. After a slew of sunny days, I packed up my winter jacket and sent it back to Osaka to lighten up my pack. A day later I got caught in a freak snowstorm on a mountaintop. Ten days after that I wobbled into a bank to change a traveler’s check, sat down on a bench, and passed out. I woke up in a hospital. Double pneumonia, the doctor said. He knew I was on the pilgrimage – I had been brought in wearing pilgrim white, with a Buddhist rosary and a Kobo Daishi staff. He had done the trek himself, twice. He knew I wasn’t a Buddhist but still, he was impressed.

They don’t normally feed you in a Japanese hospital – your friends and family are expected to bring you food and clothes and anything else that you might need. The nurses in that hospital arrived with platter after platter of homemade food - -enough to feed an entire sumo stable. I have never tasted such superb sushi in my life, and ate until I was too exhausted to chew. While I slept one of them took home my backpack, washed and folded and pressed all the clothes inside, put my toiletries in tiny silk bags and wrapped stray batteries in bits of colored string.

Despite the royal treatment, I was worried. Although I had health insurance back in the States, the overseas deductible was significant, and the Japanese healthcare system was even more expensive than in the U.S.A. For months I’d been stretching my budget like a rubber band, eating out of the day-old food bin at the local 7-Eleven and sleeping in bus stations and graveyards. A week in the hospital would take a bigger bite out of my budget than the entire trip to date.

After a day or two I asked the doctor how much longer I needed to stay. "Two weeks", he said.

Two weeks! I couldn’t possibly afford… I had to finish my pilgrimage… get back to Osaka… "How about three days?" I asked. He was taken aback -- he clearly wasn’t used to his patients bargaining with him. Rock, paper, scissors, I suggested quickly. It’s a common childhood game in Japan, and before he knew it he had unconsciously responded to my gesture and his hand was up. He was committed. Best out of three. I won.

When it came time to pay, the doctor just shook his head gently and said "osettai". It’s a Buddhist concept – a gift you give a pilgrim, like an orange or bowl of rice or even a place to stay for the night – because it increases your own good karma for the next life. I at least knew enough to follow the rules – you never turn down osettai. I nodded and smiled and put my hands together in thanks.

But this wasn’t osettai, and neither were the dozen tiny plates of homemade sushi and tempura that the nurses pressed upon me as I walked out the door. It was the purest generosity – the kind you offer to a stranger who you know you’ll never see again -- the core of kindness that is so fundamentally Japanese.

I only got a hundred meters that day. The doctor was right – I wasn’t ready. The rest of that pilgrimage was a hazy slog of bull-headed tenacity. I cheated a few times; caught a bus in the pouring rain to the next temple, and a ride to the one after that.

Finally I made it to the end.

It had been a long, hard year – of pearl diving and samurai archery and capsule hotels and yakuza and tea ceremonies and hitchhiking and cormorant fishing and bull sumo. Somehow, at that moment, I knew that it was over – though I was days from the nearest city and my ticket back to the States didn’t leave for another two weeks. I sat down and cried. I felt a loosening in my chest, like the metal hoops of a barrel springing open, and an immense rush of relief. I’d run the longest, hardest race of my life, and I had just crossed the finish line. The footage might be terrible – unusable -- but I’d given it my best shot, hadn’t quit, and I would never have to look back and wish that I’d stuck it out.

It was time to go home.