Encounter with a Hitchhiker
Loch Ness with Urquhart Castle in the foreground. Photo by Sam Fentress (Creative Commons License)
An unexpected encounter on the shores of Loch Ness leads to a lifetime interest…but not in the Loch Ness monster
Sunday morning, August 1, 1971. My parents, my sister, and I were on the A82 between Fort Augustus and Inverness, Scotland. We were in the middle of our big family vacation, the first time any of us had gone anywhere by jet, the first time Victoria and I had used a passport to go overseas, the first time we drove on the left-hand side of the road. I was 12 and Victoria was about to turn 10.
My parents had begged, borrowed – but probably not stolen – to pay for this trip. They had bought a 1971 Saab 99 and had it delivered to London. The new car smell on that warm summer day was intoxicating. We drove that car all summer through England, Wales, and Scotland. We then took the overnight ferry from Newcastle to Bergen, Norway, drive through the fjord country into Sweden, and have the car loaded onto a ship in Malmo, Sweden for delivery back to the U.S. Then we would fly home to New York from Amsterdam on a geriatric DC-8 operated by the long-defunct Saturn Airways.
Victoria and I sat in the back of the car. We squabbled often, but I think we'd declared a truce that morning. I’m sure we kept our eyes trained to our right: the A82 traces the west shore of Loch Ness, and we hoped to see Nessie rear its head from the waters of the loch. We looked forward to an encounter with a living fossil.
That morning, we had an encounter of a very different kind.
Our mother did all the driving. She was always a more confident, attentive driver than my father, and she actually liked to drive while he did not. She quickly got used to driving on the wrong side of the road. (The steering wheel was on the left side of the car, which had been built for the U.S. market.) My father navigated, although he was never adept at giving clear directions, often failing to distinguish between left and right. He would say, “Turn this way!” or “Turn that way!”
On this particularly morning, my parents argued about hitchhikers, of all things. My mother said she wanted to give a ride to a hitchhiker. On our travels we had seen many of them thumbing rides, and my mother thought it might be interesting to take one of them into the car. My father was adamant in his opposition. I think he saw them as long-haired, unwashed hippies and he had no use for such people. That morning on the A82, my mother brought up the subject again. My father again said no.
He was standing on the roadside, a smallish man in a dark suit. He had a raincoat draped over his arm and there was a valise and a camera bag on the ground next to him. A hitchhiker, but one who, even from a quarter mile away, was different.
“Saul: I’m going to pick him up,” said my mother.
“No!,” said my father
“I’m picking him up!” . I’m sure more words were exchanged. I don’t remember, but they were probably…colorful. And with that my mother braked the car to a stop beside the man. Victoria and I were agog: this had never happened before.
The hitchhiker was a very clean-cut Asian man in his late 20s. I scooched over to the middle of the back seat next to my sister, and the man got into the car. I think I was so surprised to have another passenger in the car that I do not remember anything specific about what happened next. I’m sure we introduced ourselves to each other. The man said his name was Kazu (which I later learned was short for “Hisakazu”). He must have said his last name, Katō. At some point, he explained that he had planned to take the bus, but the bus did not run on Sunday. Maybe no buses ran on Sundays in the Scotland of 1971. He was grateful for the ride.
Kazu was on holiday in Scotland from graduate school at the University of Sussex far to the south of England. He was studying international environmental law, a new specialty at the time. He had spent a year as an American Field Service high school exchange student in New Jersey. He did his undergraduate at the University of Tokyo, then at the zenith of its prestige. Kazu used the fluent English he’d acquired in the U.S. to serve in the corps of interpreters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games. He spoke English so naturally and seemingly effortlessly that I assumed all Japanese had Kazu’s mastery of the language. In 50 years of knowing Japanese people, I can count on one hand the native speakers of Japanese I have known who could speak English as well as Kazu.
Some days later, on August 11, Kazu joined us in Edinburgh to celebrate Victoria’s 10th birthday at the fancy Café Royal. He arrived after we’d started dinner - by far the fanciest dinner of our summer - and Victoria’s face lit up when she recognized our new friend.
During our short time together, I had admired Kazu’s folding umbrella. I’d never seen one before. Some weeks after we returned home, a folding umbrella of my own turned up in the mail: Kazu had had his family send one to me all the way from Japan. Amazing!
After that 1971 family trip to the U.K., we saw Kazu a few times when he came to the U.S. for work. He had taken a position at the recently-formed Ministry of the Environment. One time, he came with his new wife, Michiko, who seemed shy, and who spoke English quite well, but not nearly so well as Kazu.
That encounter on the road beside Loch Ness changed the course of my life. I had never met a Japanese person before. I am still not quite sure what it was about Hisakazu Katō that left such a deep impression on me. I did not know it at the time, but that chance meeting planted in my mind the notion that I should learn Japanese and go to Japan. I think I wanted to see the place that Kazu came from. I thought it must be a clean, calm, organized place, and that sort of place appealed to me.
My mother had never picked up a hitchhiker before she stopped for Kazu. To the best of my knowledge, she never picked up a hitchhiker again. Many years later, Kazu told me that before that Sunday in 1971, he had never thumbed a ride. And after that day, he never hitchhiked again.
