The Japan Journals
1947—2004
Donald RIchie
Edited by Leza Lowitz
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by
Stone Bridge Press
P.O. Box 8208
Berkeley, CA 94707
tel 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com
Portions of these journals were originally published in Orient/West; Newsweek; Where Are the Victors?; Public People, Private People; The Japan Times; Tokyo Journal; Prairie Schooner; Winds; Asian Film; The New Yorker; Tokyo: A View of the City; and the introduction to The Crimson Gang of Asakusa as well as The Donald Richie Reader.
The word order of Japanese names follows current usage, family name first.
All photographs supplied by the author.
Text © 2004 Donald Richie.
First paperback edition 2005.
Front-cover photograph by Holloway Brown.
Cover and text design by Linda Ronan.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richie, Donald, 1924–.
The Japan journals 1947–2004 / Donald Richie; edited by Leza Lowitz.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-880656-97-3 (978-1-880656-97-6).
1. Japan—Civilization—1945–. 2. Richie, Donald, 1924–. I. Lowitz, Leza. II. Title.
DS822.5.R515 2004
952.04’092--dc22
2004016239
Introduction
The Japan Journals is the chronicle of a person who has lived an extraordinary life. At the same time it is all that is left of a changing world seen from the chronicler’s oblique angle—Japan from 1947 until now, more than half a century of incredible transformation. The evolution of Japan was one of the great spectacles of the century, and Donald Richie was there to see and describe it.
What he recapitulates in his journals is both more and less than the large spectacle. Richie was more attracted to the private than to the public. He sometimes mentions big events but more often it is the detail he describes. His emphasis is usually upon his reactions rather than the events themselves. The great spectacle, the encounter between East and West, begun decades before and continuing even now, is thus revealed by someone intent upon describing both it and the effect that it had through its various particularities.
*
Donald Richie was born in Lima, Ohio, on April 17, 1924. In the opening chapter of his unfinished memoir, Watching Myself, he remembers that he early wanted to leave. “Looking past the catalpa tree, over the syringa bushes, beyond the corner where the street ran straight south, past the park and into the future, I wanted to leave behind what I knew. What I wanted was what I didn’t.”
He wrote this long after he had left, indeed long after he had become a confirmed expatriate. There may thus be an amount of accounting-for in his choosing to remember exploration as a conditioning factor of childhood. At the same time, however, he actually did leave as soon as he could—he had turned eighteen, and had graduated from Lima Central High School.
As he was later to write in The Inland Sea, a voyage is also something of a flight. It was Lima he wanted to leave: home, family, friends—or a lack of all these. At the same time he wanted a future. Early, in 1931, seven years old, he had asked the local fortune-teller at the Allen Country Fair, a Madame Olga, if he was ever going to get out. She, as he tells it in the memoir, “looked down at me, wiped her rimless glasses, glanced at her crystal ball, and said: ‘Yeah, you’ll go far.’ ”
“Far . . . it sounded like what it was: a fast start, a take-off, and then a soaring up and out. I did not wonder why and I still don’t. Even now when I know how it all turned out.” What the seven-year-old Richie was experiencing is what all seven-year-olds experience, but few of them continue to plan their escape and when the chance comes actually accomplish it. Ten years later he was on the road, hitch-hiking straight south.
Richie reached New Orleans, a city that was not his goal. He had intended San Antonio, where he had a school friend, but his grasp of geography was weak and in any case the hitch-hiker is often subjected to the vagaries of his drivers. Once there he managed to get a number of jobs (soda jerk at Walgreen’s lasted longest) and have a number of adventures (told in the unpublished sections of Watching Myself) and to savor all of the freedom of being somewhere completely different.
On his trip south he had seen how the “familiar Ohio ran into imagined Kentucky and spread into the unknown South, deep-dish black and opposite my pale North. Further off lay the blood-red Caribbean, so different from spit-colored Lake Erie.” And further yet, “the whole world . . . deserts and jungles, pyramids and pagodas.”
Richie was never to tire of travel. Greece, Morocco, Thailand were places he considered living. Though he eventually made his home in Tokyo (which still has several pagodas) he was always pleased to leave it. He became a permanent resident of Japan, but the road south continued all of his life.
His New Orleans summer over, Richie was saved from returning to Ohio by World War II, Pearl Harbor, and the draft. He was also spared the Army since he managed to enter the U.S. Maritime Service. There he got himself into the officer training program and by the end of 1942 was an ensign-purser/medical officer.
His various voyages—Algeria, Sicily, Italy, France, Scotland, China—are reflected in journals and in the unpublished “novels” he made of them: Fifth Voyage and Seventh Voyage. Once the war was over, in 1945, Richie continued to sail and it was not until 1946 that he once again—further resources gone—found himself threatened with a return to Lima.
By then, however, he had heard that the U.S. Civil Service was accepting applications for overseas appointments in the occupied countries of Germany and Japan. He applied and was accepted—as a typist, a skill acquired at Lima Central High. Though accomplished at the typewriter, Richie was not fond of his talent and shortly found himself more congenial employment at The Pacific Stars and Stripes. On January 1, 1947, he arrived in Tokyo.
*
This volume contains what remains of the journals that Donald Richie wrote in Japan. Much has been lost. Richie’s journal-keeping was not methodical—an occurrence would demand to be chronicled and the impulse would last for several weeks or months, but the rest of the year might go unrecorded. Also, once written, some journal entries were carelessly filed and over the years vanished. At the same time Richie often reworked journal entries into his various books and then threw away the originals. It was, for example, pages from his earliest Japan journals that he used when, nearly forty-five years later, he wrote an account intended as the opening chapter for a memoir (later published as an essay in The Donald Richie Reader).
The extant diary segments often begin with an occurrence that Richie wanted to save—perhaps for eventual further use, but often also for its own sake since otherwise it would have been lost. Indeed, such threatening loss is one of the themes of the journals. At the same time, this method of journal-keeping cannot be said to faithfully reflect the shape of the author’s life.
Yet it was Richie himself who decided that these pages were worth being published. As they piled up, he saw how, in an almost inadvertent manner, he had compiled an account of his time and his own position in it. He wanted his journals to be read and during the later years would make copies to send to his friends. I was one of these and found them so interesting that I wanted to read more. This led to his opening the files and sending me copies of what he found.
> As I read through Richie’s journals, that world of more than fifty years ago came alive for me, and I became convinced of the value of these pages. It was then that I asked for and received his permission to edit them, to present them as an entity. In so doing I have also provided when I could a context for them and included a number of them in the essay forms they sometimes took. I have also in this introduction sketched in some of the biographical details that Richie left out and have tried to draw some conclusions that Richie has not himself attempted.
Much of Richie’s work is about self (see, for example, his books The Inland Sea; Public People, Private People; The Honorable Visitors), and this autobiographical impulse is certainly present in these pages. As always, the author is candid in the presentation—the only question is how truthful he is. Richie apparently tells few lies, but he does excise. The pages that follow have all been several times edited by their author and each revision has seen more excisions. One may judge what was left in, but one can only guess at what was left out.
One thing left out was duplication. Richie, like his friend James Merrill, decided that if he had given information in one book he would not repeat it in the next. Thus Richie is not in the Merrill memoir because the poet had already written about him. Similarly, if one is going to follow any kind of Richie biography it will be necessary to read not only the Journals but also The Inland Sea, The Richie Reader, Public People, Private People, and a number of interviews.
In any event, none of the original texts of these journals exist. In 1990, when Richie decided to collate what remained, he had them all retyped. The originals (hand-written for the travel diaries, typed for the rest) were then destroyed. It was this typed manuscript that he reworked over the following years. He also removed material and put it into different categories. The full version of the Japan Journals (twice as long as this one) is now with the rest of Richie’s papers including all the other journals at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
*
What was Richie’s purpose in these journals? Certainly, like anyone who keeps a journal, he wanted to intervene, to make lasting the ordinary perishable, to save experience. Among the reasons for saving it was that he would be otherwise bereft of it. Typical is the beginning of the journal entry for 18 December 1996: “I walk the windy streets of Shibuya, a territory completely given over to the young. Here they come in their hordes, driven by fashion and their glands. Let me describe them lest this motley show be lost forever.”
There are other reasons for journal-keeping as well. Richie was, like any foreigner, restricted to the role of spectator. Even though he has lived most of his life in Japan he has never become a citizen, only a permanent resident. He pays full taxes but he cannot vote. And, given Japan’s peculiar attitude toward foreigners, he has been powerless in many other ways as well.
As he writes in one entry (5 December 1999): “I may have rejected the U.S.A. where I was born, but I did not decide to be Japanese. That is an impossible decision, since the Japanese prevent it. Rather, I decided to decorate Limbo and become a citizen of this most attractive, intensely democratic republic.” In any event, he says, quoting Rilke, “we are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.”
There are many other reasons for keeping a journal, some more personal than others. “How do you write after you know that what you are writing will be read after you are dead?” he asks (26 September 1998). “Since you can no longer defend yourself, you begin early by protecting against any and all possible allegations. It is like planning the perfect suicide. You must think of just everything. Also, the need to make a pattern, any pattern, since it is the unpatterned that is to be avoided. And the drive for vindication, as if you had to prove your right to have lived.”
The search for meaningful patterns in the chaos of raw life is certainly one of the themes of these journals. So is the hunt for absolution: proving one’s right to have lived is a plea for acquittal, a request for exoneration. Perhaps this is common—maybe this why journals so often turn into confessions.
With Richie, both his strong liking and his continued regard for Japan was partially based, as he himself acknowledges in these pages, upon his own emotional direction—one proscribed and indeed illegal in the United States of his early years. To be attracted mainly to other men in a culture that does not allow it is reason enough for leaving. In Japan he discovered much that was not permitted, but that this was.
*
Richie’s first fame came for his work on the Japanese cinema. With Joseph Anderson he wrote what is still regarded as the seminal study of Japanese film. Later he went on to write his well-regarded books on Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro, as well as further histories of Japanese film itself. In addition he has written numerous essays on cinema, taught film at various universities, served on many film festival juries, and so on.
Whatever its other qualities, film demands observation. You sit in the dark and regard. Though one is aware of this one is also in the passive position of doing nothing but regarding it. A sane person does not try to enter the screen.
In addition to his maintaining this position of observation, it is fitting that Richie’s life of looking should have been spent in places high up, from where the view is best. It began on the eighth floor of the “Hotel Continental” and is concluding on the eighth floor of his Ueno apartment over Shinobazu Pond. He is sitting looking out over Japan. And even when he descends, in 2004 as in 1947, and walks the land, he still retains this detachment.
Detachment is one of the qualities that makes Richie’s observations so valuable. He can stand apart from himself and observe not only the context of his life but also its sensitive center—himself. This is something he learned how to do. He begins his life in these journals in 1947, when he is already twenty-three years old. His disinclination to examine his origins, his tacit denial of all hard wiring, his refusal of the burden of his history—all of these are already there, and one of his favorite formulas is a paraphrase of Jean-Paul Sartre: It is not important what life has done to you—what is important is what you do with what life has done to you.
This valuable ability is not so evident in the early pages of his journals. It grows as he learns. And since the majority of the entries were written in his late maturity and early old age, they offer a perspective that youth cannot. For example, he writes (16 August 2002): “But now I can see that I am getting older because there are waves of memory, a tide that wants to sweep me back to where I came from. This will not occur but I must experience its effects. I, who have spent my time meditating on difference, am now presented with ‘similarity’—what I experienced then and what I remember now.” Life, he elsewhere writes, “is a palindrome—as we entered, so backward we depart.”
Richie has called himself a descriptive journalist and, in one sense, he is. In an entry for 27 September 1998 he writes: “I want to be the person who penned the best likeness. This is a possible ambition because for the last half century I have been in the best position to do so. Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatized, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity since my subjective self will not fit into the space I am allotted. [. . . So,] how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right—I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.”
Part of the fascination of these journals lies in just this, their rich immediacy, their passion for detail, and their impartiality. Each page is like a scene from the past, brought alive again and illuminated by the writer’s intelligence and by his concern. Not that the tableau is ever complete. We always seem to be examining a corner but in great detail. And with that we are aware of an attitude, a person, a style. We are being told something of g
reat interest, something the writer was moved enough to record for posterity. It is these small moments that make up the “great spectacle” of life itself.
Leza Lowitz
Tokyo, Japan
The Japan Journals
1947—2004
The Japan Journals begins with an evocation of early morning in Tokyo, 1947, not long after Richie‘s first arrival. It is based on early journal entries. Other sections of this early journal have appeared elsewhere, for example as the opening to Richie’s first novel, Where Are the Victors? (aka This Scorching Earth, 1955). The account of the destruction of Tokyo that follows this is taken from interviews and then given to one of the characters in the novel. For another memoir, In Between, Richie used pages about meeting a number of people. These are here reconstructed. There are also memoir reworkings of material that appears in different form in the Donald Richie Reader (2001).
winter 1947. Tokyo lies deep under a bank of clouds which move slowly out to sea as the sun climbs higher. Between the moving clouds are sections of the city: the raw gray of whole burned blocks spotted with the yellow of new-cut wood and the shining tile of recent roofs, the reds and browns of sections unburned, the dusty green of barely damaged parks, and the shallow blue of ornamental lakes. In the middle is the palace, moated and rectangular, gray outlined with green, the city stretching to the horizons all around it.
The smoke of early household hearths, of newly renovated factories, of the waiting, charcoal-burning taxis, rises and with it the freshness of late winter, the bitter yellow smoke of burning cedar shavings, the smell of breakfast: barley, sweet potato, roasted chestnuts. In the houses the bedding is folded into closets and tatami mats are swept.
Beneath the hanging pillars of the early rising smoke there is the morning rattling of night shutters thrust back into the narrow walls. Behind the banging of the shutters is the sound of wooden geta—the faint percussive sound of people walking—and the distant bronze boom of a temple bell. Jeeps explode into motion, and the tinny clang of the streetcars sound above the bleatings of the nearby fishing boats. Somewhere a phonograph is running down—Josephine Baker goes from contralto to baritone.
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