A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  I’m not sure I knew exactly what he meant by this. Much later, he would explain his allegiance to Sartre’s existential views on the need to create your own life as an act of will to be authentic. But the image of Donald that night, standing on the opposite station platform, with his pink cheeks and big black shoes, unassailable in the midst of crowds of Japanese, has stayed with me. Perhaps I felt liberated too. What to make of myself was the question.

  THREE

  I never thought I could be Japanese, nor did I wish to be. But I suppose I was a romantic in Richie’s sense of the word. I was open to change. This meant, in the early stages of my life in Japan, almost total immersion. The fact that I was living with a Japanese woman in a middle-class suburb on the Seibu Shinjuku commuter line, surrounded by noodle shops, Shinto shrines, public bathhouses, and old wooden houses with bonsai gardens helped.

  You could still hear some of the traditional sounds of urban Japanese life then: the plaintive cry, a bit like a muezzin calling Muslims to prayer, of the sweet potato vendors, the dry crack of wooden clappers struck at night by the neighborhood fire watchmen, the foghorn sounds of the tofu sellers, the haunting drone of a bronze bell from a local temple. Less traditional were the jingles and recorded messages from political candidates, waving their white-gloved hands from passing cars, even if the streets were empty, and there was no one to wave back. Then there were the scurrying feet of the “family health” merchants after they had deposited a basket filled with condoms at the door, to be returned if not required.

  Visiting Sumie’s family home in Gifu, a provincial town about 160 miles to the west of Tokyo, meant an even deeper immersion into traditional Japanese life. Tani-san, her father, a war veteran who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army in China, was a sign painter. As a member of the artisan class, he took pride in his independence and his artistic skill. His way of life was more old-fashioned and relaxed than that of most so-called salarymen, the white-collar army of gray-suited straphangers commuting every day to their offices from tiny apartments in the outer suburbs. More often than not, salarymen in the 1970s had left the traditional duties of communal living with extended families behind. The modern nuclear family was seen as a kind of liberation, even if it resulted in lonely isolation, especially for the wives waiting up at night for their husbands to stagger home from social functions imposed on the lower-ranking office workers.

  Independent craftsmen were different. Three generations of Tanis lived in a cozy two-story wooden house in an old part of town, smelling of fresh tatami mats, incense from the local temple, and dodgy drains. Japan is now famous for its luxurious toilets, with electric heated seats, automatic flush, different varieties of spray, and tinkling music. But in his masterful essay, In Praise of Shadows, the novelist Tanizaki Junichiro extolled the virtues of the traditional “dimly lit” wooden Japanese toilet, where one contemplated the beauties of nature while squatting over a hole in the ground with boughs of cedar at the bottom to sweeten the smell. Such toilets barely exist anymore. The Tanis still had one, even though the beauties of nature were not in sight. “Night soil” collectors would come to the house every so often to pick up the waste to fertilize the fields outside town.

  The family also shared a communal bathtub of fragrant hinoki wood. Seniority dictated the order of bathing. As soap was used only outside the tub, the water remained relatively clean, even for the last one to use it. If one happened upon a person emerging from the bathroom without any clothes on, Grandmother, say, one pretended not to have seen her. Sometimes, for sheer pleasure, we would go to the local public bathhouse, the sento, with its tiled walls decorated with vistas of Mount Fuji, where we gossiped with the neighbors while politely splashing one another’s backs from small bamboo buckets.

  I don’t wish to idealize the life of the Tanis. Their extended family was as prone to bitter rows and irreconcilable feuds as any other. And the way the family was bossed around by the authoritarian grandfather, a former railway official, before he died not long after my arrival, made the decision of salarymen’s wives to plump for splendid isolation in high-rise apartments more understandable. But there was a generosity of spirit in the Tani household, a broad-mindedness that was often lacking in more prosperous families, where social face had to be more carefully guarded.

  One generational clash that would later explode in permanent estrangement between father and eldest son concerned the different attitudes toward their advertising business. The son, named Kazuo, regarded his father’s artisanal pride in hand-painted shop signs or movie billboards, carefully copied from film stills, as so much waste of time. He preferred to use plastic models, or other technological shortcuts, which he regarded, not without reason, as cheaper and more with the times. He saw himself not as a craftsman but as a modern businessman.

  But this rift had not yet erupted when I first stayed with the Tanis. The workshop was built as an extension of the main family room, where the television was permanently switched on, and we ate our meals. The parents and grandmother slept there too, in bedding rolled out on the tatami floor at night. The rest of us slept on the first floor near the Buddhist altar, where Grandmother prayed every morning to the black-and-white photograph of her late husband placed in the midst of offerings of fruit and rice cakes. The workshop was filled with cans of paint, slabs of hardboard, and movie posters. Since the main commercial fare in the mid-1970s consisted of a heavy diet of soft-porn films, produced by the Nikkatsu movie studio, the family took its simple dinners of fish, rice, and miso soup surrounded by lurid images of helpless young housewives trussed up in ropes by gangsters in leather jackets and sunglasses.

  After dinner, before I had my bath, Kazuo would often take me to the local Nikkatsu movie theater, where he enjoyed free access, to see some of these films. They were much more interesting than the student movies I had seen, which were clearly modeled after them. Indeed, they were more interesting than any porn film I had ever seen in the West, which were mostly coarse, leering, and unimaginative.

  A discussion of seventies culture in Japan would be incomplete without reference to roman porno, or porno romance, the official name of this specific genre, which attracted some of the most talented young directors. Forget about Ozu and Kurosawa, I was frequently told by fellow students at the Nichidai film school, go and see Kumashiro Tatsumi’s movies, featuring Ichijo Sayuri, the most popular roman porno star at the time. Ichijo had had a distinguished career as a stripper in Osaka. Many of the pictures she starred in had inventive plots and were technically accomplished, even innovative. This was not just because it was getting harder for young talent to break into the fast crumbling studio system. Porno was now the favored genre of leftists who were disillusioned by the failure of political activism in the sixties. Japan had effectively been a one-party state for several decades, ruled by the conservative Liberal Democrats, overseen by an entrenched bureaucracy, and manipulated by industrial combines, agricultural lobbies, and American security interests. After more than ten years of student protest, the militant left had come apart in ultraviolent factions like the Japanese Red Army, exploding in spectacular and often suicidal acts of terrorism. Red Army fighters ended up dead, or in places like Pyongyang and Beirut, while some of their cinematic fellow travelers drifted into porno. Thwarted political subversion had morphed into socioerotic rebellion. This resulted in at least one genuine masterpiece.

  Oshima Nagisa released his hard-core sex film, In the Realm of the Senses, in 1976. His earlier movies had been highly political: about discrimination against Koreans, student activism, crime as a form of social protest, or oppression in the slums of Osaka. Now he would see how far he could push freedom of expression by making a pornographic art film. In the Realm of the Senses was a huge succès de scandale, based on a true story, set in the 1920s. The film depicted a passionate love affair between a former prostitute, named Abe Sada, and a restaurant owner, named Kichizo, which ended in his violent death after a b
out of rough sex. The rough sex included Sada’s attempts to heighten her lover’s ecstasy by almost strangling him with the sash of her kimono, a game that became less and less playful as time went on, until it proved to be fatal. In a fit of madness, Sada cut off the main object of her desire, including the testicles, and stuffed it into her purse.

  No filmmaker had ever pulled off anything like this before. The movie was both hard core and tender, a cinematic blow for sexual freedom, especially for women. Sada, the prostitute, played by Matsuda Eiko, a former actress in Terayama Shuji’s Tenjo Sajiki, is not a helpless object of male lust but an equal partner in an erotic obsession (which did not prevent Matsuda’s career from sinking into oblivion, even opprobrium, while her male counterpart, Fuji Tatsuya, became a star).*

  After the film was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival, I went to see Terayama Shuji at the Tenjo Sajiki headquarters in Shibuya, a fizzy area in the west of Tokyo, where he lived in a small apartment, allegedly with his mother—the theatrical wizard’s own sexuality was a bit of a mystery; he had a history of being reprimanded by the local police for peeping into people’s bedrooms. Terayama had seen Oshima’s movie at Cannes. His mouth tightened when I asked him about it: “Not very interesting at all,” he said. “Most roman porno films are much better.” I suspected that envy had affected his usually sound judgment.

  Oshima’s movie provoked a notorious obscenity trial in Japan—not against the film itself, which couldn’t be released in its original form, but against the publication of the script illustrated by photographic stills. Oshima’s wonderful defense was: “So what’s wrong with obscenity?” He was acquitted.

  Alas, most Japanese never had the chance to judge for themselves. By the time the movie came to Tokyo, the print had been so badly mutilated by the censors, who were obliged to eliminate every sign of human genitals with razor blades and Vaseline, that Oshima’s masterpiece was unwatchable. Quite why people were not allowed to see genitals on the screen, even though mixed bathing in public hot springs was still relatively common in rural areas, is a bit of a mystery. Probably this had something to do with a tug-of-war that went back centuries between the authorities, insisting on public order and social control, and unruly artists, insisting on subverting it.

  Certainly puritanism, of the Christian kind, is not a part of Japanese tradition. Kazuo had no doubt that taking me to the porno theater after dinner was a fitting entertainment. There was no shame attached to it, any more than that anyone felt embarrassed about sharing a family bath. But again, Sumie’s was an old-fashioned household. Perhaps censorious attitudes were more prevalent among the higher, more Westernized classes.

  I believe this is what Donald Richie was getting at when he stressed what he called the “innocence” of the Japanese. “The Japanese” was still a phrase that was used readily by men of Richie’s generation. Soon after meeting him for dinner with John Roderick, Donald became my mentor on things concerning “the Japanese.” He was the sensei. I would be his disciple, or deshi. We had regular lunches near a publisher’s office in Roppongi, where he did editing work in the afternoons, and talked about the Japanese.

  By innocence I think Donald meant the lack of any consciousness of original sin, in the Christian sense. Sexual behavior was kept in check by propriety, not by religious proscriptions, or threats of metaphysical doom. And propriety was something that concerned the guardians of social order, hence their reaction to Oshima’s film. Roman porno, whose clever directors found ever more ingenious ways to avoid the censor’s razor blades, was far less radical than Oshima’s film, but breathed the same imaginative spirit of freedom.

  Fuji Tatsuya on the set of Oshima Nagisa’s movie Empire of Passion (1978)

  Since the privileged gaijin was exempted from many Japanese proprieties, Japan in the 1940s must have seemed like paradise to a young American raised in small-town Ohio. Donald never built a private Arcadia in the way others, like John Roderick, had done: no beautiful old house filled with antique screens. He did, for a while, live in such a house, belonging to another sexual exile, an American art book publisher named Meredith “Tex” Weatherby, whose late boyfriend had taken a famous photograph of Mishima posing in nothing but a loincloth in the snow-covered garden and brandishing a samurai sword. There were many stories of wild times back in the day. I only remember Tex in his later years, a large shambling man peering over his bifocals while he was doing needlepoint.

  Despite living in Weatherby’s house for some time, Donald did not much like the company of gay men. John Roderick irritated him with his habit of calling men “she” and pretending that everyone from George Washington to John Wayne was a screaming queen.

  Donald’s Arcadia was his ideal of innocence. One of his prize possessions, which he kept with him wherever he lived, and would show proudly to his friends, was a collection of photo albums, neatly lined up on his bookshelves, that contained, like so many pinned-up butterflies, photographs of his sexual conquests, going back to the late 1940s. They were of a type, these wide-eyed, handsome country boys, grinning in some steaming hot spring bath, relaxing on the tatami floor of a country inn, playfully flexing muscles in a white T-shirt, or leaning against a truck. Nobuo was a bus driver, Shinichi a builder, Yasuo a baseball coach, and so on. They were all straight. Or so Donald liked to believe.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY OWN JAPANESE IMMERSION did not involve a quest for innocence. I did not grow up in Ohio, haunted by original sin. The pleasure I took in hearing of Donald’s escapades was vicarious. Instead, I was knocking on the doors of prominent figures in theater and film, which often sprang open with surprising ease. Famous directors would come and meet me for coffee, even though they probably had a hard time understanding my faulty Japanese. I still wince a little at the thought of Suzuki Tadashi, one of the grandest people in the modern Japanese theater, patiently hearing me gush on about performances I had seen of his group, the Waseda Shogekijo, at the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, and listening to my callow questions about the influence of the Kabuki on contemporary drama. Suzuki, the son of a Noh actor, was an intellectual. He answered in rapid sentences that I could barely follow.

  Being able to meet such grandees at short notice was part of the gaijin’s privilege. There were so few Westerners in Tokyo at that time with an interest in modern Japanese drama or film, that one had the advantage of rarity. People like me piqued the curiosity of people who otherwise wouldn’t have given us the time of day. Donald Richie was a pioneer in this field; indeed, he had played an important role himself in the Tokyo culture of the sixties, when he made a number of experimental films with music scores by the great Takemitsu Toru. But in this he was pretty much alone.

  Years later—sometime in the 1980s—I was at a screening in Tokyo of Donald’s short films. The event was organized for the benefit of his friend the American poet James Merrill. Next to me sat Edward Seidensticker, looking professorial in jacket and tie. He had brought a family friend from the States, a very proper-looking young lady in a beige woolen twinset. One of the films was entitled Boy with Cat. A handsome young Japanese boy in white jeans is seen in the moody shadows of a traditional Japanese room with summer noises in the background: the rasp of cicadas, a child practicing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. While the boy is leafing through a set of (heterosexual) pornographic pictures, he sticks his hand into his jeans and masturbates. A black cat jumps onto his thigh. The music abruptly stops, signaling the end of the movie. When the lights went on, there was a moment of silence in the screening room. Professor Seidensticker then slowly turned to the young lady on his right, and drawled, “That was a very nice cat.”

  Boy with Cat was by no means a great film, but it was a noble experiment, the work of a foreign romantic who had found his corner of paradise. Donald had none of Oshima’s political radicalism; he was too detached for that. Nor did he especially admire Oshima’s films, which I think he found
didactic. Donald much preferred the movies of Ozu Yasujiro, whose quiet, humanistic fatalism was everything that Oshima’s generation rebelled against. And yet, in a profound sense, Richie and Oshima were on the same side.

  Far from producing anything of my own, I was still at the stage of deciphering what I heard and saw. I spent hours trying to make sense of essays by Terayama Shuji with the help of a dictionary, imagining that my guesswork somehow added something to the mystique of what I was reading. His most famous essay encouraged young people to leave home, move to the city, and love freely. But Terayama himself lived the wild life mostly in his imagination. The same was true for me.

  Theater performances were especially hard to crack. One summer night I saw Kara Juro’s Jokyo Gekijo (Situation Theater) perform in a crimson tent pitched on the edge of a large pond in Ueno, the water surface covered in pink lotus flowers. Kara’s troupe was another legend of the sixties. Like traveling players in premodern Japan, Kara and his actors put up their tent all over Japan, at Shinto shrines, between railway tracks, in abandoned car parks, on fairgrounds, and on riverbanks. His plays were surreal collages drawn from Japanese as well as Western sources, sometimes melodramatic, always raucous, and full of wild humor, acted in a loud, exaggerated, stylized manner that owed something to the bawdy origins of Kabuki, and something to the rough-and-ready style of cross-talking comedians. They were as deliberately grotesque as Terayama’s spectacles, but earthier, more physical. Actors would suddenly appear drenched from a tank of water, or from a pond behind the tent. A spectacular entrance by one of the main stars would be greeted by wild cheers from the audience pressed together on straw mats.

  The play I saw on that humid night in 1975, entitled Kaze no Matasaburo, was based on a Japanese fairy tale about a wind sprite appearing from nowhere as a student at a small village school in the rural northeast. Kara combined this with a variation of the Orpheus myth: a mother searching for her long-lost son in the underworld. Songs, or zany references to popular movies, manga characters, TV commercials, political scandals, and even snatches of French existentialism alternated with scenes of pure slapstick.