A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  I understood virtually nothing. But the effect was similar to what I had experienced at the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam. I was transported into a strange new place, as disturbing as it was seductive, which looked no less strange when the flaps of the red tent opened at the end to reveal the moonlit lotus pond in all its uncanny glory. The state of mystification during my first year in Japan, deciphering words, codes, and signs, and only half-understanding them, as I wandered through the maze of modern Tokyo, felt strangely akin to the spirit of Kara’s plays, with its lost characters trying to connect in a surreal world.

  I began my story by claiming that I felt no attraction to the exotic. And this was true, as far as Zen meditation or some of the finer arts were concerned. But I was fascinated by the outlandish aspects of Japanese culture, the ero, guro, nansensu. And the erotic, the grotesque, and the absurd continue to intrigue me, even though much of their physical manifestations are more hidden now under ever-slicker layers of Japanese modernity.

  My chief guide into the mysteries of Japanese culture, apart from Donald, my sensei, was a dropout student named Tsuda. A small man with a fringed Beatles haircut, Tsuda was one of those people whose intellectual brilliance took him everywhere and nowhere. Endlessly curious, always ready with an interesting theory, Tsuda was stimulating company. But in conventional terms he would have to be classified as a failure. He viewed a university education as a waste of time, and competing for a decent job to be beneath his dignity. With just enough family funds to keep him afloat, Tsuda was a flaneur, a dabbler, a dreamer, and above all, a talker. He could talk about anything: Oshima’s movies, traditional Japanese architecture, Nietzsche, nineteenth-century Romantic literature, or the decadence of Japanese aesthetics. An extra boon to me was the fact that he couldn’t speak a word of English.

  We first met while standing in line for tickets to see Suzuki Tadashi’s theater company perform a play that mixed Greek drama with a smattering of texts by the mid-nineteenth-century Kabuki playwright Tsuruya Namboku. We hit it off, Tsuda and I, because it soon became clear that we were both outsiders in different ways. He had made himself an outsider from the inside, as it were, whereas I was peering in from the outside. We were both voyeurs really, exploring the proletarian east of the city, hanging around the cheap cafés and bars in Shinjuku, and meeting up with his cronies from Tokyo University, who had not dropped out, who had found good jobs, and whom Tsuda regarded with a mixture of pride and disdain, except perhaps for one, named Nasu, whom he admired without reservation. After completing a law degree, Nasu had made a successful career at Nikkatsu making roman porno movies.

  I never succeeded in making a student film at Nichidai, even though I did acquire an 8mm camera, the standard tool for student productions. Instead I used the excellent darkroom facilities and concentrated on photography, the perfect art for a voyeur dancing around the fringes. Japan, especially then, was a photographer’s dream. Before photography entered the artistic mainstream elsewhere, photographers were celebrated figures in Japan whose shows at major galleries were mobbed by crowds of enthusiasts. Among the Japanese texts I was trying to decipher were the thick, glossy, deeply serious photography magazines, published by large newspaper companies. Moriyama Daido, who would become world famous decades later, gave evening classes in a tiny space in Shinjuku, which I sometimes attended, dipping in and out, hovering at the edges. Shinoyama Kishin was taking pictures of tattooed gangsters, fashion models, and a rising young Kabuki star, named Tamasaburo, who specialized in female roles. The seedy backstreets of U.S. base towns were recorded in grainy black and white by Tomatsu Shomei.

  And then there was Araki. He was everywhere in the 1970s, making the rounds of the tiny bars in Shinjuku, or the raunchiest cabarets, giggling and chattering nonstop, as he snapped away at anything that caught his fancy on the seamy side of Tokyo nightlife: cabaret hostesses cavorting in the nude amid drunken punters in suits, naked girls eating bananas or pissing into plastic umbrellas held up by grinning patrons, women tied up in ropes or being fucked in live sex shows.

  The wild seventies were sometimes called Showa Genroku, after the hedonistic Genroku Period at the end of the seventeenth century. (Showa was the name of Emperor Hirohito’s reign, which spanned much of the twentieth century.) Araki’s face, with the tiny round spectacles, the dirty old man’s moustache, and the intense little voyeur’s eyes, had become one of the icons of Showa Genroku. He was the Toulouse-Lautrec of contemporary ero, guro, nansensu.

  Photographers were doing what woodblock-print artists had done in premodern Japan, chronicling the floating world of fashion, theater, sex, and urban life. One facet of sixties culture that lingered in the seventies was a fascination for what Japanese call dorokusai, which means stinking of the earth, or nostalgie de la boue. The seedy, the obscene, the debauched, the bloody, the smelly, all that permeated the arts scene, not just in photography, but in theater, film, literature, manga, and even the graphic arts. It was, I think, a reaction to elite aesthetics, which, since the mid-nineteenth century, was either rigidly traditionalist or a prissy Japanese version of European high culture.

  Mishima once wrote, in an introduction to a book of photographs of frenzied young men at rowdy Shinto festivals taken by Tex Weatherby’s lover Yato Tamotsu, that late nineteenth century Japan had become ashamed of its popular culture, afraid that Westerners would be shocked by its earthiness. Japan, he wrote, “tried to deny her past completely, or at least to hide from Western eyes any of the old ways that might resist all efforts to eradicate them. The Japanese were like an anxious housewife preparing to receive guests, hiding away in closets common articles of daily use and laying aside comfortable everyday clothes, hoping to impress the guests with the immaculate, idealized life of her household, without so much as a speck of dust in view.”*

  The trend in the sixties, continuing into the seventies, went in the opposite direction. Even though many Japanese of the wartime and early postwar generations had deeply ambivalent feelings about Westerners, the idea was not to eradicate Western influence. That would have been impossible, indeed absurd. But artists like Terayama, Kara, Oshima, Araki, and indeed Mishima wanted to strip Japanese culture of that thick crust of gentility, formed over many decades of anxious Westernization.

  My own nostalgie de la boue had less to do with Japanese attitudes toward the West than with my protected background. My immersion in Japan was also partly a flight from bourgeois gentility, even if this flight was superficial, voyeuristic, semidetached. I photographed the backstreets of Shinjuku, in the style of Moriyama Daido, who got much of his inspiration from the American William Klein, and I roamed around the still raffish areas flanking the Sumida River in the eastern lowlands, the so-called shitamachi, or low city, as opposed to the high city in the more prosperous hilly areas of the west.

  My preferred part of Tokyo, to wander through and photograph, ran from Minami Senju, where a small neglected cemetery under the railway tracks marks the old Edo Period execution grounds, through Sanya, the skid row, where labor contractors picked up homeless men for cheap construction jobs every morning, thence on to Yoshiwara, once the elegant red-light district of high-class brothels and teahouses, and now a sordid warren of neon-lit massage parlors, and finally to the temple in Asakusa dedicated to Kannon, the goddess of mercy.

  My literary guide on these wanderings was one of my favorite Japanese writers, named Nagai Kafu, who died in 1959. His subject was Tokyo, his temperament elegiac. The vulgarity of the present disgusted him. Kafu (he was always known by this sobriquet) could only love in retrospect, and celebrate what had disappeared. The Westernized city of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Meiji Period moved him deeply only after it had been largely destroyed by the 1923 earthquake. The brassy modern Tokyo that emerged after that disaster filled him with delight, but only after it was wrecked by B-29 bombers in 1945. Kafu was a mournful archaeologist of the recent past: the tiled wall of a former 1930s
brothel in the midst of a crassly modernized postwar neighborhood could move him to tears.

  There was an old tumbledown theater in Minami Senju with luridly hand-painted pictures outside of sword-waving warriors and moonfaced geishas. This theater, smelling of fried squid and stale sweat, was home to one of the last troupes of traveling players, who performed crude versions of famous Kabuki plays about love suicides and noble outlaws. In between acts, the players, after quickly changing into bright Hawaiian shirts, would belt out popular songs through faltering microphones, while others twanged on badly tuned electric guitars. All the female roles were performed by men in the traditional style. One of the actors, a snub-nosed young man with rubbery, rather coarse features, managed, in his female guise, to look beautiful even in these squalid surroundings. Twenty years later he became a national celebrity, appearing on TV as the “low city Tamasaburo,” after the famous Kabuki actor.

  I spent many hours in the Minami Senju theater, taking pictures of the actors, and of the public whose average age must have been well over fifty: the local butcher and his stocky wife, a petty crook or two, roof builders, construction workers, and dumpling cooks. God only knows what they thought of the young foreigner snapping away at their feet. But they were always welcoming in a politely amused sort of way.

  One weekend, I followed the actors on one of their rural tours, with Graham, my friend from the Nichidai library. We stayed the night at a seedy hot spring resort, called a “Green Center,” where old folks would gather to drink and be entertained by the low city Tamasaburo and his fellow players. We sat at long wooden tables laden with rice balls, dried squid, pickles, and miso soup, dressed in thin summer kimonos provided by the Green Center, watching a blood-curdling scene of murder committed by a famous nineteenth-century brigand, followed by a famous love scene from a creaky samurai drama. All the while, I was creeping around taking pictures in the way I had seen Araki do. But the main entertainment was yet to come.

  When it was time for a soak in the large communal bath, men and women shed their summer wear, and beckoned Graham and me to come in too. The tiled bathroom had the sulphurous stench of rotten eggs. Mount Fuji on the wall was half obscured by steam coming off the scalding hot water. After a quick wash, Graham and I slid gingerly into the bath, with all eyes on us. We could not have been more immersed in deepest Japan, I thought, when all of a sudden a burst of cackling laughter creased the wrinkled country faces around us. “Look at those pricks!” one of the oldest ladies in the bath shrieked, “Look at those foreigners’ pricks!” “They’re bigger than yours, Granddad!” shouted a stout woman who must have been at least eighty. Several shriveled old men smiled sheepishly. “Ooh, aren’t gaijin white!” a third lady exclaimed, as though she had never seen anything so grotesque in her life, “just like tofu.”

  Not long after this excursion to the Green Center, I came across another group of entertainers, even lower down the social scale. Tsuda and I had set off on a cold November night, during the Tori-no-Ichi, or Day of the Rooster, the harvest festival when for twelve days street markets are laid out near temples and shrines, where people pray for a prosperous new year, buy talismanic bamboo rakes decorated with rice and flowers, and eat a special kind of sweet potato said to boost human fertility. This is where “the Human Pump” had set up his brown-and-green-striped carnival tent, featuring such curiosities as “the snake woman,” whose neck appeared to grow all the way to the top of the tent, the girl who bit off the heads of live chickens, and the hairy wolf man.

  Actor in the theater at Minami Senju

  The carnival tent was erected in the same spot where Kara Juro’s company often pitched their red tent, in front of Hanazono Shrine, dedicated to Inari, the androgynous fox deity of prosperity and worldly success. People craned their necks to see the shrieking young woman hold a chicken in her teeth, her shiny face smeared with blood and feathers and illuminated by a flaming torch. There was a strange ghostly sound of a whistle as the snake woman’s neck got longer and longer. And the wolf man barked at the crowd, which retreated in mock terror.

  But the main act was the leader of the troupe, the Human Pump himself. He was an albino male of about forty. The words “human pump” were written in Japanese phonetic script on his dark sweater. First he would swallow a number of shiny black and white buttons. The public was asked to call out “white” or “black,” whereupon the Human Pump would blink his tiny pale eyes and spit out a button of the requisite color. But his pièce de résistance was the goldfish act. He would swallow a live orange goldfish, then a yellow one, and shake his head a few times, like the fish-eating cormorants I had seen on a river in western Japan, to let them slide smoothly through his gullet. “Orange!” cried the crowd, and slowly with intense concentration, the right goldfish would come jetting out of his mouth.

  The Human Pump

  These were modest skills, perhaps. Seen from backstage, the trick with the elongated neck became apparent when I noticed the girl’s lower body made up of bamboo and papier-mâché. I’m still not sure how the Human Pump managed to regurgitate the different colored objects on demand. But there was something about the carnival show that mesmerized me, its rawness, its primitive appeal. Here, I thought, was performance reduced to the most basic elements. I realized that this had everything to do with my bourgeois romanticism, my nostalgie de la boue. It was nothing more than a peek into a strange world, a voyeur’s glimpse of the forbidden. But I couldn’t get enough of it. So I followed the Human Pump and his family around (the snake woman was his wife, the chicken girl their adopted daughter, and the wolf man was a brother-in-law, I think), taking pictures backstage, congratulating myself on my brush with the theatrical underworld, the absolute “Other,” as illusory no doubt as Donald Richie’s dreams of “innocence,” even if I did not realize that yet. Before they left Tokyo to tour other shrines in the provinces, the Human Pump handed me his name card. “Come and look us up sometime,” he said. The address was in a small town not far from Gifu, where the Tani family lived.

  Unfortunately I have no photographic record of the most remarkable performance I saw in the summer of 1976. This was not in Tokyo, which had stricter laws about permissible entertainments than other cities, possibly as a result of having to look respectable, like Mishima’s prim housewife, for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. The Toji Deluxe was in Kyoto, behind the main railway station, near the old designated area for outcasts, or burakumin, who did ritually unclean work connected with death, such as butchering, tanning, meat packing, or, in the olden days, executing prisoners. The Toji’s flashing neon lights were the only bright spot in an otherwise dark street.

  The girl who bit the chicken’s neck

  In the middle of a huge barn-like space was a round, slowly revolving stage, with men sitting in rows waiting for the action to start. Tsuda and I were in the second row. Precisely on time, the theater went dark and a soft pink light suffused the stage. A young man in a shiny electric-blue suit and purple bow tie appeared with a chrome microphone, and loudly welcomed us to the show, his words echoing spookily through the theater. The performers were introduced by name, as they shuffled onto the stage carrying plastic picnic hampers neatly covered in bits of cloth with pictures of various cartoon characters, Snoopy and the like. I saw one of them hand a baby to one of the stagehands, as she made her entrance. Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” issued forth from the scratchy sound system.

  The girls, dressed in negligees, made a bow and simpered in unison—what a pleasure it was to entertain us honorable guests tonight. They crouched down, removed the cloth from their baskets, and carefully laid out various props on the edge of the stage: vibrators of different sizes, in pink, yellow, and violet, as well as cucumbers, and condoms wrapped in colored cellophane packages. Everything was done with the utmost decorum, the props placed in neat little rows, “Strangers in the Night” still playing.

  They stood up and adopted a number
of suggestive poses, their faces as mask-like as Noh dancers or Bunraku puppets. The men in the audience were a mixture of old and young, some dressed in suits and ties, as though coming straight from the office, some dressed like students, a few of them with sports bags. Some of the older men wore the uniforms of Japanese workers, wide khaki trousers, thick woolen waistbands, black splay-toed canvas shoes.

  On the revolving stage, a few of the girls broke into friendly smiles and slowly made their way to the edge, where the condoms and other props were laid out. One or two picked up a dildo or a cucumber and entered several transparent square boxes that were cranked up a little noisily over our heads. An old-fashioned Japanese ballad began to play on the sound system, something about a lonely mother waiting for her son to come back from abroad. Tsuda whispered in my ear that it was a wartime song.

  “Now watch closely,” said Tsuda, who was an old hand at these things. One by one, the girls onstage moved to the edge and beckoned men in the audience to come forward and join them. Meanwhile, above us, in the transparent buckets, girls were busy inserting cucumbers and dildos into their vaginas. The men giggled and dared one another to climb up. A thin man in a business suit was pushed forward by his friends, but he refused to go, blushing furiously, and scratching the back of his neck, the common Japanese gesture for embarrassment. Finally, one of the students, in sneakers and training pants, went up. He stood up straight, like a soldier on parade, staring blankly ahead, while a girl, smiling sweetly, took off all his clothes except for a pair of white sports socks. She expertly slipped on a condom and lay down invitingly. “The doors of paradise are about to open, gentlemen,” said the emcee in the purple bow tie. Shouts of encouragement came from the audience. The young man, without looking at the girl, began to make vigorous movements with his hips.