by Ian Buruma
3
OUR UNIVERSITY WAS like many others in the capital, a campus of shit-colored brick buildings from the 1930s, dull and rather forbidding—functional fascism, I call it—and a hideous library built sometime in the 1950s. The original campus was badly damaged by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, and some of the later buildings hadn’t survived the bombings. The entrance to the reading room was sealed. Students had occupied it during the protests in 1960 against the U.S. Security Treaty. Getting a book out was a cumbersome process, involving an endless trail of stamped and sealed permits. Only foreign exchange students were allowed in the library. There were two. I think they were Americans. Only in Japan would foreigners be accorded such special privileges. Why do we have to grovel as soon as a pale face hovers into sight?
I slept through a few classes on law, and after a couple more months of tedium, without telling my mother, I took up philosophy instead. I don’t really know why I chose philosophy. Perhaps it was just that, like many young men, I wanted to find a key to unlock the mysteries of life. During the war, the philosophy department had been a nest of fascism. All that rubbish about uniting Asia under the benevolent rule of our Emperor—Japan was propagated from this same place. Our university founded a sister institution in Manchuria, no doubt to indoctrinate the natives with the blessings of our fine Imperial System. After the war, as though to make up for its past mistakes, the university established a reputation for radicalism, especially in the 1950s, when it became known as the “Red Fort.”
By the time I arrived, however, the defeat of 1960 lingered on our campus like a permanent hangover. Even the professors spoke bitterly about Kishi and the other war criminals who cynically undermined the constitution to please our American masters. The older students who had taken part in the demonstrations were like soldiers in a vanquished army. They had lost all hope of change. Others got entangled in doctrinal battles between this faction and that. Disputes over the correct line on democratic socialism, or anarcho-syndicalism, or whatnot, raged between the Revolutionary Communist Faction and the Revolutionary Marxist Faction and the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League and the Central Committee for Mao Zedong Thought. These disputes sometimes resulted in murders. A fellow I knew slightly was killed one night on his way back home. His skull was cracked open with a lead pipe.
But I didn’t care about these political fights. I was still a rebel without a cause. Too late for the 1960 revolt and not interested in democratic socialism or anarcho-syndicalism, politics seemed pointless. On the wall of my dorm was a slogan painted about ten years before: World Revolution! Attempts had been made to scrub this graffiti off the wall, but it always came back, no matter how many times they tried to wipe it out. The slogan had an almost antiquarian feel to me, like something from a lost age.
So I fell in with the theatrical crowd instead. The undisputed leader was a baby-faced student from a rough Tokyo neighborhood. His real name was Yoshimura Tadayuki, but he changed it to Okuni Tojiro, which had the raffish sound of an old-time Kabuki actor, when Kabuki was still a theater of outcasts and prostitutes. I immediately recognized a kindred soul in Okuni. Like James Dean, he was touched by a spirit of rebellion, but like me was turned off by the factional squabbles of organized revolt. His eyes were his most striking feature, burning with passion, quick to shed tears or flare up in anger. His fiery temperament suggested that he might be Korean. There was something of the gangster in him, and something of the poet. I had never encountered someone like Okuni in my hometown. He was my first real friend. Like me, Okuni lost his father in the war, killed somewhere in the Philippines, I believe, just before the Japanese surrender.
Okuni was amused by my passion for Tokyo. I really felt as if I had landed in a circus that never stopped: the movie theaters, the bars, the cabarets, the streetgirls, the hawkers around the Shinto shrines, the markets under the railway tracks, the old soldiers playing melancholy wartime ballads in the subway stations. I had no money, but I was all eyes, taking everything in like a child at a fairground. Who needed theater? The streets were my theater. Okuni and I would roam around the city, from the backstreets of Asakusa, where he grew up, to the cheap bars in Shinjuku, where we got drunk and argued about theater and movies and Jean-Paul Sartre. Okuni was crazy about Sartre. “The situation,” he would shout, his eyes bulging like shining black marbles, “that’s what it’s all about. Nothing is determined. We change by reacting to new situations.” He was always dressed in black sweaters, of course. And when he started his theater troupe in his last year at university, he called it the Existential Theater.
But Okuni’s theories, or rather the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, interested me less than his endless supply of stories of growing up in the ruins of Asakusa. I had never seen a ruined city. Where I grew up was too remote for bombing raids, except for the air base, which had been hit a few times. There was something extraordinarily romantic about a ruined metropolis. You could still see the scars in some parts of Tokyo, but much of the wartime damage had already been cleaned up for the Olympic Games in 1964. We Japanese were like a nervous housewife , terrified that the esteemed foreign guests would notice even a speck of dust in our parlor. Okuni felt a deep nostalgia for the city of ruins. Tokyo used to be a fantastic playground, he said. Since everything was wrecked, the city had infinite possibilities. He remembered how you could see all the way from Asakusa to Mount Fuji. He told me stories about characters I couldn’t even have imagined: the transvestite prostitute who made his home in a public toilet; the kamikaze survivor who became a dancer in a burlesque theater; the gang of young pick-pockets led by a Buddhist priest.
“You know,” Okuni said, as we sat in a Shinjuku bar drinking beer one steamy night in August, “I envy you.” A half smile played around his lips as he stared into my eyes, as though challenging me to be the first one to look away. To say I was astonished is to put it mildly. Okuni envious of me? Surely, it had to be the other way round. He explained: “Growing up in Tokyo is like being in a great stew with everything thrown in, Western, Asian, Japanese. We have nothing really local, of the soil, reeking of mud. While you, who grew up in the country, have something much richer running through your veins. You may not be aware of it, but it’s in your subconscious.”
This was way too deep for me. How could he know what was in my subconscious? So I protested: “But it’s a culture without interest, narrow-minded, provincial . . .”
He shook his head: “Provincial is good.”
“. . . But why be a frog in a narrow well? I came to Tokyo to escape from that. I can always go back to my country. First I want to see the world.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Okuni, pouring the last drop of beer into my glass. “Once you leave, there is no way of going back. It’ll be too late. Hold on to your native soil and guard it like a precious jewel. You want to know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think an artist should never leave home.”
I must confess that his words struck me like arrows, me who had been doing my very best to drop my slurred north country accent and talk crisply like a true-born Tokyoite. I felt that Okuni was patronizing me, pressing me into the role of the country bumpkin for his amusement. “What about Sartre?” I said.
“What about him?” said Okuni.
A certain edginess had entered the conversation. Raw nerves were being exposed. “Sartre says that a human being is never determined by situations,” I urged. “You make your own choices. People who live in good faith transform themselves all the time. You yourself are always saying that. How can you now claim that creativity is determined by the place we happen to be born in?”
“Who said determined? I said you have to cherish it. That is the opposite of being a frog in a well. Only by expressing what is local, specific, personal, can you express something of value to other people. Call it universal, if you like. All good artists understand this instinctively. Traveling around the world, learning other languages, that’s
for people who lack the talent to express themselves in their own. I hate those show-offs who jabber away in foreign languages, as though that makes them so superior. They’re just mimics, phonies with no talent. Perhaps you’re not an artist after all, but just a tourist.”
I felt cornered. My stammer got worse. I should have just left it at that. But I couldn’t resist arguing, raising my voice: “If it hadn’t been for Japanese learning French, you wouldn’t have been able to read Sartre.”
“So become a translator. That’s not the same as being an artist. Maybe that’s what you should do, be a translator of other people’s ideas.”
I stammered that he was full of shit. The next thing I knew, I was sprawled out on the wooden floor with a salty taste in my mouth. I tried to get up, but he was stronger. Strange hands attempted to separate us. After a few more blows to my face, Okuni stomped out of the bar. I lay there cursing him. But he was not the real object of my rage. It was my own sense of impotence. Okuni had his theater. What did I have? I needed to do something, make my mark, leave a dent in the world, so people would know I’d been around. But what?
4
EVER SINCE THE whore beckoned men to Babylon, great cities have been marketplaces of human flesh, cornucopias of erotic possibilities, promising every imaginable sexual pleasure known to man. Tokyo was no exception. What really attracted me to the metropolis, like a fly to a Venus flytrap, was not discussions about Jean-Paul Sartre, or libraries full of books, but girls, girls, girls. Tokyo was like a great juicy carrot tempting the hungry man at every street corner: the billboards of girls licking creamy ice creams; the pink cabaret girls tempting customers with a menu of perversions; the department store girls in their pillbox hats and high-heeled shoes bowing low as you sampled the goods; the girls in miniskirts hovering round the Fugetsudo waiting to be picked up by a foreigner; the pictures plastered outside the porno cinemas of girls tied up in ropes, voracious divorcées and demure office ladies pressed into orgies, beautiful housewives pleasuring gangsters; the short-time hotels offering spankings administered to naughty maids, air hostesses begging to be taken, sex in suits of armor, sex in cowboy gear, sex in military uniforms, sex in swings, baths, massage beds, railway carriages, long-haul trucks, subway cars, French castles, ocean liners, Chinese palaces, Japanese tea ceremony rooms, American saloons, Arabian tents. All that, and much much more. And I wasn’t getting any of it.
Apart from my stammer, I blamed our culture. We Japanese prize hypocrisy in girls. No, we demand it. We love them to be so damned coy. Girls want sex as much as men do. So why do we want them to resist, or at least pretend to put up a fight, as though they can only give in to superior force? In fact, resistance breaks down quite quickly in the face of power and money, which comes down to the same thing of course. Japanese love to submit to power. Only when they can claim to be overwhelmed do they feel free to do as they like. That is why girls can never say no to a foreigner. Foreigners, in stupid Japanese eyes, are too powerful to resist.
Okuni never seemed to have trouble with girls. He radiated such confidence that women melted in his presence. It was all too easy for him. That is why he usually treated them with contempt; but the more he abused them, the more they would come back for more, like addicts. Myself, I turned into a stammering wreck as soon as I tried, in my polite, tactful, diffident, roundabout way, to signal my intentions to a girl. Yet it was me, not Okuni, who provoked outrage and disgust, as though I had offended their dignity with my disgusting intentions.
This may come as a surprise, but it’s actually easier here in Beirut, as long as you stay out of prison, that is (although even in Roumieh pretty much anything imaginable to man does go on, for a price). The Arab mind is less hypocritical about these matters. Girls who want it are Christians and make no bones about their desires, if they like you. And most of them like Japanese men. Muslims are different. You know they are not available to anyone but their husbands. But they are never coy. The juicy carrot isn’t dangled in front of your face, only to be withdrawn the moment you reach out to have a nibble.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of introducing the next stage of my career: assistant director in pink movies. I should explain something about the pink movies. Though they were churned out cheaply at a fast rate to titillate a lot of sad old bastards in backstreet cinemas, some of them were actually pretty good. Because the old movie studios were like sclerotic old men grimly holding on to life by regurgitating the same old shit over and over again, the pink industry attracted some of the brightest talents around. There were rules to be observed, to be sure: one sex scene every six minutes (not five, not seven, always six; I never figured out why, but the industry was full of such arcane practices). In between the sex scenes, however, we could insert all sorts of ideas. The sex itself, by the way, was also bound by certain unalterable conventions: most sex acts, including rape, torture, even murder (strangulation with a kimono sash was popular for a time), were permissible, but the sight of even a single pubic hair was strictly forbidden. Genitals, male or female, were absolutely banned from the screen.
The director I had the immense good fortune to assist, a tall bear-like figure named Sugihara Banteki, but known to everyone as Banchan, was also known as “the King of Rape.” He cut his teeth on all the different genres, from schoolgirl pictures to housewives-molested-by-gangster vehicles, but his specialty was Yankee base movies, a popular subgenre of pink movies at the time. His greatest successes were: Red Light Zone Okinawa, Violated Angels of Atsugi Air Base, GI Rape, and Rape Camp Zama. The last movie, especially, was a big hit among Japanese students. The heroine, acted by the late great Takano Fujiko, a former stripper from Osaka, is infected with syphilis after being gang-raped by five American GIs. Her vengeance, plotted with her Japanese lover (Osano Toru in an early role), is to have sex with as many Yankees as she can, so they will all die of the disease.
Ban-chan’s most personal movies were all political like that. Politics was his lifeblood. A proud native of Osaka (unlike me, he never disguised his accent; on the contrary, he cultivated it), Ban-chan first made his name as a student leader in 1960. He was a natural leader, broad shoulders, long hair, booming voice, a big drinker. There is a famous Dutch painting called The Laughing Cavalier. That’s what he was like, always laughing, always the center of attention in any crowd. Like Okuni, he never had trouble attracting girls, who would do anything to please him. So did the men around Ban-chan. Everyone just adored the King of Rape.
I should confess that the reason he took me into his group had nothing to do with my artistic talent, such as it is, and everything with my birth. He even called me Misawa, after my hometown. My real name, Sato Kenkichi, never passed his lips; not even Ken-chan, as my friends called me. The fact that I grew up around a U.S. military base was my most attractive asset, as far as he was concerned. “Misawa,” he would say, “you had the most precious education imaginable. You saw the imperialist oppression with your own eyes. You lived in it. Now the important thing is to turn that experience into praxis.”
I had read my Marcuse, of course. But I wasn’t quite sure what sort of “praxis” he had in mind. Ban-chan was a little vague on this score. He never told you directly what to do, but liked to lead by example and let you draw your own conclusions. After a day’s shooting, in or around Tokyo, he would take a bunch of us assistants to his favorite bar in Shinjuku, named Pepé Le Moko, after the French movie with Jean Gabin. He was like a father to us, or an elder brother, always paying for our beers and food, teaching us how to think. He drank whiskey himself, White Horse, neat, without water or ice. And he would talk, talk, talk, the words flowing like a river, about life, and art, and politics. Once he talked for two hours and a half without stopping, except to sip from his glass, after holding it up for one of us to replenish with whiskey.
Once, after a particularly long drinking session, he did something that struck me as humiliating at first, but turned out to be of great significance to my life. “Misawa,”
he boomed, as he peered at me intently through eyes that the drink had reduced to tiny slits, “are you angry?” Angry at what, Ban-chan? “Angry!” Yes, but at what? “That is the question, isn’t it?” he said, and struck me hard in the face. I felt a stinging pain in my cheek. But worse than that, I didn’t know how to react. I was too stunned. The other guys were staring at Ban-chan too, waiting to see what he would do next. I could only stammer: “What, what, why did you do that?”
“React!” he screamed. “React! I’ve slapped you! Hit back!”
“But why?”
“Are you angry at the American oppressors?”
“Yes.”
“Are you angry with them for destroying our freedom, for corrupting our boys and raping our girls? Angry with capitalist society for turning our people into soulless slaves of consumerism? Angry with our bourgeois morality that stifles our natural desires?”
“Yes,” I said, as tears welled up in my eyes, “yes! yes! yes!”
His voice suddenly grew softer, soothing me, like a mother comforting her baby: “Then cherish that anger and channel it into action. Find a way to change the world. Value your desire for vengeance, put it in a drawer, and use it constructively one day for the sake of justice, freedom, and peace. We tried to change Japan in 1960. We failed. I blame myself as much as Kishi and his gang. Now I can only try to change the false consciousness of the masses through my films. I still think this is worth doing, but it’ll be a very slow process. You, on the other hand, you are still young. You still have a chance to really make a difference. Wait for that chance. Be patient. And when it comes, you will know. Don’t think. Just act.”
