Japanese cowboys
April 7th, 2006
(This story was first published in the August, 2005 issue of All Nippon’s inflight magazine. It was also published in the travel sections of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Next month, I think, it’s going to be published in GU Magazine.)
Dinner is surreal, as we might have expected – we are, after all, dining at a dude ranch in Japan.
The ranch, in the town Takamori around three hours from Fukuoka, is called Blue Grass. And Blue Grass’s dining room looks like a log cabin that’s Old West – west of the Mississippi, that is – by way of Tokyo.
On the walls are photos of rodeos; on the floor are low Japanese-style tables. The shop next to the dining room sells cowboy boots, but you take off your own shoes to look at them. I read horse magazines while eating udon, tempura, pickles. My boyfriend Brian eats steak with chopsticks.
Yuki, who is serving food, says in 1991 her father started Blue Grass as a Western ranch because he likes America and horses – they come together in the fall when Blue Grass hosts a country music festival headlined by the Japanese country musician Charlie Nagatani, who “brings some American musician friends.”
Yuki’s father has never been to America, but Yuki’s sister married an American and lives in Wisconsin. Yuki’s father’s name is Bear: “It’s his Western name,” an American-sounding name he uses at Blue Grass. All the staff have Western names except Yuki. Yuki doesn’t like horses and would have moved to the city but couldn’t because her sister left home for America. Yuki seems surprisingly sanguine, considering.
Brian and I go outside to play with Budd, Blue Grass’s American sheep dog. Then we go to bed – a futon mattress that rests atop an elevated bed frame. My head on a buckwheat pillow, I ponder the nature of Blue Grass – is it Western or “Western” or what? – before falling asleep.
The next morning Brian and I drink coffee and eat eggs and wear slovenly clothes; we are very western but not at all Western. Into the breakfast room walk eight or so Japanese people who are spectacularly Western. They wear fringed suede vests and neat denim shirts and leather belts with belt buckles the size of Texas. They eat miso soup and fermented fish and drink green tea.
“They’re guests from Toyko,” Yuki says. “We are taking them riding in the mountains.” And their clothes? “They bought some from our shop. The rest they got maybe in America.”
It’s riding time.
I meet Cassie, my horse guide. She is an easy-going woman wearing jeans and a windbreaker and worn motorcycle boots. We get on our horses. Cassie’s horse is Peter Pan – ironically, Peter Pan is 20 years old and getting crabby, Cassie says. Montana, my horse, is suitably enormous, like the state.
Cassie takes us away from Blue Grass. All around are incredible views of big green volcanic mountains and farms and rice paddies and picturesque houses.
“Can we run?” Cassie asks.
“Hai,” I say – ‘Yes’ in Japanese – more appropriate than “Hi Ho,” which is how the Lone Ranger would have put it.
We run through rice paddies and mountains for a while and it is exhilarating, beautiful, fun, though Montana seems bouncier than I remember horses being.
“Where did you learn to ride?” I ask when Cassie turns around to see if I am ok (I am).
“Australia.” Cassie spent a year in Australia and discovered horses. She came home to Japan and got a job at Blue Grass, where Bear gave her the Western name Cassie. Cassie says Blue Grass’s staff call each other by their Western names all the time: “I used to be called Toshie and now I’m Cassie.”
Is Western riding big in Japan?, I ask. Cassie says there are around fifty ranches in Japan, mostly in Hokkaido, up north, where there’s more space.
I look around and see endless huge mountains, countless rice paddies, green tea farms and cows a-plenty, one temple in the hills, an enormous hot-baths complex where miniature horses roam (the complex is called ‘Pony,’ Cassie says). I do not see lack of space.
But Cassie wants to go somewhere more remote to start her own ranch: “Maybe Okinawa. I have a friend there with a hotel. He says I can open my ranch next to his hotel.”
“What will you call it,” I ask. “Cassie’s?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe Toshie’s.”
Back at Blue Grass I walk – painfully – past the riding ring where an American flag flies next to a Wisconsin flag and a Japanese cowboy wrangles a stallion. Blue Grass might be Western or “Western.” It mainly seems authentic and sweet, as if Bear took the things he loves best – horses, his vision of America, his daughters – and brought them all together in this lovely town in the south of Japan.