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Men in head-bands appear bearing straw torches the size of apprentice sumo wrestlers, like blazing, smoking battering rams. Reeling down the narrow streets, they pass liter boxes of iced sake to shopkeepers and bystanders to sip from.
    Despite the sub-zero temperatures, 8,000 excited skiers and townsfolk jam the town square. From the press stands, where they have set aside a section for us, we look down to a floodlit, three-story tower of sticks and branches standing on a small, icy rise. Where it spreads out slightly at the top, dozens of the town’s 42-year-old men are jammed together as though on a front rowbalcony. Clad in hard hats and blue coveralls, they wave white Japanese-style paper lanterns, clap white-gloved hands and sing.
    Several dozen 25-year-olds, the defenders, circle the base of the tower, while the attackers gather round a giant bonfire several hundred feet away.
    When I try to slip away by myself, one of our guides, armed with his walkie-talkie, escorts me through the dense crowd to the public toilet where municipal workers squat on the ground swigging sake. Standing in the cubicle, I hear him hollering into his radio, “Ahhh, Marchant-o san …” The media gathered on the platform get a full report of my progress.
    The festival is a fierce mock battle with bands of young men charging the tower with flaming torches. The defenders beat them off with kicks, punches and shoves, throwing the attackers down the hill, and thrashing at the flames with pine branches. The men atop sing, and chant, wave the lanterns and taunt the attackers, throwing down long bundles of sticks to give them more firewood. From back here, it appears vicious, with the attackers shoving flaming torches in the defenders’ faces.
    The crowd roars whenever the tower catches fire. Huge billows of smoke, cinders and sparks rise into the black night, and flames lick up around the men on the tower who appear to chant even more vigorously. The battle wages for hours until, when it appears that the men on the tower will be grilled like human yakitori, they exit down a ladder out back.
    With the tower blazing like a steam locomotive’s boiler, flames and cinders rising hundreds of feet in the air, our guides abruptly announce, “Let’s go,” and we head back to the cars.
    Forty minutes later, we arrive back at our hotel in nearby Iiyama. The itinerary I got weeks ago in Vancouver said “22:40 Transfer to your accommodation. Arrive at 11:20.” Tumbling out of the car, I spot the clock on the front of the hotel. It says 11:22.
    Next morning, the foreign press all have lighter luggage, while Sarah’s duffel bag looks suspiciously like a ripe pod bearingthree peas. We bow our last good-byes to her and the relieved prefecture officials, who frantically light up Hope cigarettes as soon as we turn to board the Tokyo train. It has been an educational and useful trip, we all agree.
    At the brief Nagano stop, city emissaries meet us at the platform with more smiles, handshakes and bowing. And they graciously return my wayward Matsumoto ball.

SENDAI

The Poet’s North

June, 1994
    MATSUO Basho, Japan’s famous bard of the back roads, was delighted by Matsushima, a bay of hundreds of odd islets near the city of Sendai.
    â€œMuch praise had already been lavished upon the wonders of the islands of Matsushima,” the 16th-century itinerant poet wrote. “Yet if further praise is possible, I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan.”
    The early travel writer and master of the haiku form of poetry traveled to northern Honshu Island when it was considered a wild, unexplored territory, a “far province beyond the roads.” His famous book The Narrow Road to the Deep North describes his two-and-a-half year trip in prose and poetry.
    Sendai, 350 kilometers north of Tokyo, is now the hub of northern Japan. The Shinkansen bullet train reached it in