by Ian Buruma
But there was something else, which is hard to express without being accused of racism. In fact, an erotic fixation on another ethnic group cannot be cleanly separated from thinking in racial stereotypes. I once knew an eminent Sinologist, whose knowledge of Chinese civilization matched his love for it. He lived for many years in Beijing. This learned man told me once that when he made love to a Chinese woman, he couldn’t suppress the thought that he was “fucking China.”
What he meant, I think, was something close to my fascination with Japanese theater or indeed the Human Pump, an enchantment with the Other, a desire to plumb its mysteries, not just mentally, but physically. The quest is hopeless, of course. You can wake up from an enchantment, but it is in the nature of such mysteries that they elude one’s grasp. Perhaps that is what Donald was trying to tell me in the coffee shop. This didn’t stop me from trying. There were a number of women; there were one or two men. And there was of course the woman I was living with. But I never did fuck Japan.
Arthur Koestler visited Japan in 1960, after spending some months in India, on a mission to find out whether Asian spirituality had anything to teach people in the West. He was not terribly impressed by what he found, especially in India. In Japan, disgust alternated with euphoria. But his initial impression still sounds right to me: “The first phase of sensuous and sensual delight is the tourist’s inevitable reaction to a culture with a surface polish of utterly refined pretty-prettiness, smiling ceremonial, kneeling waitresses, paper-screen houses, dolls, kimonos, and above all, an atmosphere with an erotic flicker like the crisp sparks from a comb drawn through a woman’s hair—a guilt-free eroticism which Europe has not known since antiquity.”*
In the end, Koestler finds the smiling ceremonial of “this country of stoic hedonists, of Spartan sybarites” irksome, even robotic. Again, there is the mention of dolls. But there is another way of looking at this. The artificiality of social decorum, the conformity to highly drilled forms of etiquette, can have the paradoxical effect of highlighting what is human and individual. The Kabuki theater, which started in the early seventeenth century as a wild erotic entertainment performed by outcasts, later refined artificiality into the most thrilling dramatic art. Actors actually imitate the movements of Bunraku theater puppets, for which many Kabuki plays were originally conceived. But they are not at all like robots. It is as though the more you press human passions into stylized conventions, the more dramatic they are when they burst into the open.
In the late 1970s, I made a documentary film for Dutch television about the training of young women operating elevators in a department store. There is nothing natural about the behavior of these so-called elevator girls, with their heavily made-up faces, neat uniforms of high-heeled shoes, white gloves, and prim little pillbox hats, their Kabuki-like falsetto voices, and perfectly executed bows at stops on every floor. They not only had many hours of training to distort their natural voices; they had machines to teach them the exact forty-five-degree bow. The effect was uncanny: human beings trimmed like bonsai trees, as mannered as courtiers at the palace of Louis XIV. The intention behind this artfully contrived image of bound femininity, one would like to think, was wholly innocent. But there was also something disturbingly erotic about it, as though the modern department store with its child-like jingles, marble floors, and tinkling elevator music were injected with a hot dash of sadomasochism.
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IN THE WINTER OF 1976, Sumie and I had decided to split up. My feeling that I was missing out on something in my safe haven no doubt had something to do with this. Erotic paradise beckoned. I wanted to find my way in. And so I moved into a ramshackle apartment on the second floor of an old building in Mejiro, a densely populated area of fine, walled mansions and modest little houses not far from Ikebukuro, one of the railway hubs of Tokyo. The apartment was in the traditional Japanese style, with two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The main room, which also functioned as a bedroom, had a slightly ratty tatami floor, sliding doors, and wood paneling. The window looked out on a small pond surrounded by bamboo and irises. In the bathroom was an old wooden tub, which tended to get slimy without regular scrubbings, and the toilet was the traditional kind, which meant squatting over a hole.
Such apartments were getting harder to find in Tokyo, where an increasing number of people lived in more modern places with plastic bathtubs, flush toilets, and no tatami mats. My place was a trifle shabby, but I loved it. On the floor below lived an anxious young couple with a small child. They never complained about the floating population that climbed the creaking wooden stairs up to my rooms, where noisy parties were a frequent occurrence.
One of my girlfriends was a jazz singer who belted out Peggy Lee numbers late at night for my benefit—why Peggy Lee, I don’t know. Another one was mad about Roxy Music and dressed in black leather trousers. Then there was the student of French literature who made extra money as a nude dancer in a revue, and talked endlessly about decadent poets in fin de siècle Paris. Another dancer accompanied me on a trip to the rocky Japan Sea coast in midwinter; we made love in tiny run-down wooden inns, while snowflakes tapped the windows like white moths. Of the boys whose acquaintance lasted more than a night, I chiefly remember an art student picked up in a disco, who was always dragging expensive copies of Italian Vogue around, which he wished me to translate. I asked him why he didn’t buy the American Vogue, which would have been a great deal easier. He said he had always dreamed of seeing Rome. I can remember their faces, but alas, most names have faded from my memory. All the while, I was still in touch with Sumie, who lived in our old apartment, unaware of the details of my life but waiting patiently in the serene confidence, as she put it, of Buddha contemplating the monkey dancing on his hand; she was the Buddha, and the monkey, of course, was me.
For several months I shared my apartment with a friend named Rob, who had studied Chinese with me in Leyden. Apart from being a scholar of Chinese literature, he was also a drummer. Soon after his arrival by boat from Taiwan, where he had studied early twentieth century literary chronicles of nightlife in Shanghai, Rob was asked to join a group of aspiring Japanese rock musicians. They were trying to stay afloat by accompanying striptease acts in a seedy entertainment area beyond the city limits. The cabarets in Funabashi had an especially raunchy reputation.
With his gaunt face and shoulder-length blond hair, Rob had a Viking-like air that appealed to Japanese girls whose taste for gaijin matched our own interest in Japanese girls. Rob did not have to ask about the next boat leaving for Shinagawa to attract attention. He did not really have to do anything but smile shyly with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and girls would come to him, asking whether they might practice their English. Given the right circumstances, the rules of propriety were abandoned with surprising speed. Or perhaps it was more often the case that the foreigner enabled Japanese to dispense with the formal rules. This was one of the perks of being an outsider.
Ethnic or cultural fetishism did not just go one way. One of Rob’s conquests, a pretty student named Keiko, was besotted with Eric Clapton. The wall of her tiny room was covered with pictures of Clapton, like a private shrine. She told Rob, on their first meeting in a coffee shop, how much he resembled her idol, which was very far from the truth. He wasn’t much bothered by her habit of playing Eric Clapton songs on her cassette tape recorder whenever they had sex. But when she couldn’t help herself one day and shouted “Eriku!” into his ear at a moment of supreme passion, even he thought this was carrying things a bit far.
When Rob told me about this encounter, I was reminded of all those specialized coffee shops that cater to musical monomaniacs, the ones where only opera was played, or free jazz, or rock golden oldies. “Mania” is the word Japanese use for these specialized enthusiasms. Max Tessier had a mania for Japanese cinema. My friend Vassilis had a mania for Mizoguchi’s films. Some Japanese girls had a mania for white men, and som
e for blacks. There was a disco named Mugen, where women trawled for blacks from the various U.S. military bases around Tokyo. Nearby was a pub named Cardinal, popular with young Japanese women looking for gaijin. A female novelist named Yamada Eimi made her name in Japan by writing fiction based on her sexual relations with black men, picked up around U.S. military installations or in discos like Mugen. Her descriptions of dark-skinned sex partners are weirdly similar to Loti’s account of his doll woman in Nagasaki, things to play with and then to be discarded.
Yamada’s fetish was probably a minority taste. Most Japanese had no interest in intimate relations with gaijin at all; indeed, the very idea might fill them with disgust. But there were clear benefits to being a white male in Japan in the 1970s. Gaijin got more attention than they would ever have received at home, and not just from girls with a Caucasian fetish. The privileges of the outsider were real. It was tempting to confuse rarity with being special, even superior. Already then some Westerners, mostly Americans, were making a good living by appearing on TV as so-called talento (talents) even though their only skill was the ability to speak some Japanese. They would pop up on talk shows or variety programs, like trained seals. The studio audience would squeal with delight whenever they opened their mouths. The most famous “gaijin talent,” or gaitare for short, in the seventies was an American woman who not only spoke Japanese, but did so with a thick Osaka accent.
All this attention could easily lead to undeserved pride. But it was equally tempting to resent one’s outsider status and Japanese resistance to the foreigner trying to blend in. I had lunch one day at a Chinese restaurant near the Ginza with an Australian friend, who went on to have a distinguished career as a playwright. Like me, he had been an early fan of Terayama Shuji’s theater. His Japanese was so fluent that he was able to learn the difficult art of Edo Period storytelling, a rare skill even among Japanese. One day he had been invited to show off his proficiency on a well-known television show. I could sense his anger rise as he recalled the occasion. There he was, in the studio, dressed in the traditional kimono worn by premodern storytellers. The television host, a specialist in popular culture, reassured him that he would be treated with great respect, befitting a master of his specialized art. The green light flashed. On he went. Then to his horror, the host roared “Hello!” in English, announced him as the miraculous Japanese-speaking gaijin, and the audience hooted with laughter.
Still flushed at the memory of his humiliation in the television studio, my friend gave our lunch orders to the young waiter standing by our table. The waiter answered in perfectly good English. My friend could no longer contain himself. “Damn it,” he said in his fluent Japanese, “why can’t you just speak to us in Japanese!” The waiter, a little alarmed by this outburst, confessed that his Japanese was not very good, since he had just arrived from Taiwan.
My own attitude fluctuated, sometimes on the same day, between acceptance, even enjoyment, of my gaijin status, and irritation at being expected to conform to an ethnic type. For most Japanese, a typical gaijin is always white. And not only white, but also American. Asians are never gaijin, and blacks are kokujin, meaning blacks. At first, to be asked by curious Japanese whether one could really stomach raw fish, or to be showered with astonished compliments on being able to eat with chopsticks, was OK, even charming. After all, in those days, few Japanese, especially outside the larger cities, had ever met a gaijin in the flesh. Even to be continuously mistaken for an American, and to be quizzed about life in California or New York, was not, on the grander scale of things, an extreme hardship. But after a while it began to grate. One of the few people I knew who had no problem with being a gaijin at all was Donald. He loved “sitting on [his] perch, unassailable, observing the world from a distance.”
What is sure is that many Japanese vastly preferred a foreigner to behave according to type than to act like a Japanese. Not long after I moved into my apartment in Mejiro, I was asked by an American photographer named Greg to go down to Kyoto with him, where he had arranged to take pictures in a venerable old geisha house. Greg, a large disheveled Vietnam vet, needed me to interpret, since he didn’t speak any Japanese.
Kyoto geisha houses are very traditional establishments, with their own strict rules of etiquette, as elaborate as those of a royal court. I was determined to be on my best Japanese behavior, bowing in the proper manner, and using the polite Japanese phrases expressing our relative status. I took off my shoes and entered the house, bowing low and voicing the customary apologies to the proprietress as she slid open the lovely paper doors (“We are so sorry to bother you at such a busy time,” and so on). She bowed back, but couldn’t quite conceal a look of bewilderment, as though I was slightly mad. I then heard Greg clatter onto the wooden floor, a wide grin on his face, shouting “Hey, mama-san!” A look of boundless relief lit up the face of the dainty-looking lady in her expensive kimono. “Hi, Greg-san. How are you?” she replied in Kyoto-accented English.
But, of course, television studios and geisha houses are not representative of Japanese society. One’s personal friends did not treat a foreigner as though he were a trained seal. Nogami-san, Kurosawa’s oldest assistant, and producer of the Suntory whiskey commercials, was such a friend, an elegant cosmopolitan woman at ease with people wherever they came from. After my appearance with Max Tessier in the commercial shoot at Kurosawa’s country house, she asked me once more to be in a Suntory ad, this time without the great director. I was to be an extra in a bar scene, drinking whiskey with a number of other gaijin. My flatmate Rob was included in the invitation.
Rob and I were told where to stand on the set inside the Toho studio, where so many of Kurosawa’s masterpieces had been made. There was a long American-style wooden bar, and a barman brandishing cocktail shakers like maracas. Our fellow extras were mostly recruited from a nearby U.S. military base. They included a number of black marines. The director, no longer intimidated by Kurosawa’s imperious presence, was strutting about like a maestro, giving loud instructions to his cameraman and sound crew. Lights were adjusted. And the director, a thin man with dark glasses and a white cotton hat, the requisite look of a Japanese moviemaker, called for action.
We chatted with the marines in what we thought was an animated fashion and sipped from our glasses filled with whiskey-colored barley tea. “Cut, cut!” shouted the director in a state of great agitation. We wondered what we had done wrong, but were perfectly willing to start again. “Action!” Once more we talked, a bit louder this time, and drank our tea. “Cut!” shouted the director. “No, no, no,” he said. “Let me show you.” He walked up to where the black marines were standing, and started waving his arms about wildly, like an angry gorilla. “Like this,” he explained, jabbing the air with his fists, “more like blacks!”
The marines began to laugh. “Oh, OK,” they said, “we get it.” And after the director had called for action once more, the black men started hopping around, yelling and high-fiving, like basketball players after a slam dunk. This time, the director made the thumbs-up sign. He was happy. The guys did not seem to be offended at all. They were old hands at this.
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THAT ETHNIC FANTASIES did not just run from East to West and vice versa became clear to me one memorable afternoon at the Film Center in Kyobashi. One movie that left a deeper impression on me than many great films I had seen was by no means a masterpiece. It was shown as part of a series of Japanese wartime pictures. Directed by a studio hack named Fushimizu Osamu, Shina no Yoru (China Nights) was shot in 1940 on location in Shanghai, then under Japanese military occupation, and at the very Toho studio where I had appeared as an extra in the whiskey commercial. The two main stars were Hasegawa Kazuo, a heartthrob whose famous profile was slashed with a razor by a gangster hired by his studio when the actor decided to move to a rival company, and a petite young actress named Li Xianglan from Manchukuo, then a Japanese puppet state in what used t
o be called Manchuria and is now northeastern China.
Hasegawa is an officer in the Japanese merchant navy. Walking along the waterfront in Shanghai one day, he sees several Japanese thugs accost a young Chinese woman (Li). He rescues the woman and puts her up in his hostel called the Yamato House (Yamato being an old patriotic name for Japan). Li, who lost both her parents in the war with Japan, fiercely resists the good-hearted attentions of her benefactor and his kind Japanese friends. Her obstinacy drives Hasegawa into such a rage that he slaps her face. Japanese audiences at the time interpreted this notorious slap as a sincere token of his passion for her. Chinese saw it as an affront and loathed Li for humiliating the entire nation by lending herself to this despicable scene. In the end, the merchant seaman manages to win her over. She falls in love with him and at last recognizes the benevolent intentions of the Japanese.
They decide to get married. But before the happy Sino-Japanese union can take place, Hasegawa’s ship is ambushed by Chinese “bandits,” as Japanese called all partisans. A gun battle ensues. Convinced that her lover is dead and frantic with grief, Li goes to the place of the ambush, a beautiful spot with a lovely pagoda overlooking an ancient canal. She sings a Japanese children’s song (one of the curiosities of China Nights is that the Chinese girl starts to speak in flawless Japanese about halfway through the movie), and wades into the picturesque canal fully intending to die. Then a miracle happens: the Japanese seaman turns out to be alive. He hears her song, lifts her out of the water, and the lovers embrace in silhouette, the moving symbol of Sino-Japanese solidarity in the war against Western imperialism.
