The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  As Baigyoku made his way along the hanamichi, dead white tabi gliding, white showing at the sleeves and hem of the black kimono, hands and face as white as the socks, I saw merely an old male dressed as a female.

  Then, as he continued, the shuffle became a delicate walk, the hands were not those of an old man clamped together but those of a young woman modestly folded, and by the time the actor had reached the stage proper, Baigyoku had become that young woman—all alone, frightened, brave.

  Where I had come from such a spectacle would have been an impossibility. In Ohio old men do not turn into young girls. Yet I had seen this and, despite the moral imbecility of the plot, I believed it.

  After the audience had left, after all the green military sedans and jeeps had moved off, after the big army bus filled with lower-rated civilians had gone, after the theater was dark, I loitered on, standing under the willows which then stood there, and looked at the lights of Higashi-Ginza reflected in the broad canal that then flowed there.

  It is, I suppose, typical that I should remember all this and yet not recall that during this same summer a general strike had been planned, one that would have indicated a real protest—one further that was patterned upon those in the homeland, the U.S.A. Japanese were uniting to strike against abuses that were continuing from the war years. One might have thought that SCAP, so eager to root out feudal remnants, would have supported such a movement, but in fact MacArthur banned the strike before it had even begun.

  Nor did I realize that this marked the beginning of a change in the aims of SCAP itself. Earlier the objective was not merely to get rid of Imperial Japan, nor to make certain that the Japanese never again waged war. A major ambition also was to rebuild Japan in the American image—Little America was seriously envisioned. Already a year and a half into the Occupation many Japanese had begun to believe in what they were being taught: individualism, group effort, unionized fronts, and democracy.

  Yet now when these were for the first time attempted it was SCAP itself that prevented them—first by order and later by the threat of troops. Consequently many Japanese felt betrayed and Allied efforts began to be regarded with skepticism. Maybe the new model was not really any better than the old one.

  I felt nothing because I noticed nothing, had no idea that the Occupation had changed direction, that its reforms were now seen as leftist, that the New Deal now read “Red.” Japan was no longer the latest convert to American-style democracy—it had become a part of the Western defense system, a “bastion of freedom.”

  Mishima Yukio, 1953.

  I must have read 1947 U.S. headlines: “Has the Job Been Bungled?”—meaning that the Occupying attitude had not until now noticed the Russian menace. I ought, being a part of it, to have heard about the Occupation taking a “reverse course” against the “excesses of democracy”; should have seen that by 1948 industrial complexes were being unofficially built up; but it was not until the 1949 purgings (now of communists rather than fascists) that I finally caught on.

  In the spring of 1949 Richie left Japan and went to New York to go to Columbia University. There he continued his journal; a number of pages are extant. Among them is his account, written up after the event, of the first time he met the novelist Mishima Yukio.

  early winter 1952. Meredith [Weatherby], now at Harvard, called to ask me to look after a young Japanese author who had just arrived in New York and one of whose books he was translating. The book was Confessions of a Mask, and the author was Mishima Yukio.

  Specifically, I was asked to show Mishima the city so that he could write about it for the Asahi Shinbun, whose “special correspondent” he had become, a position that allowed him to travel—otherwise difficult because the Allied Occupation forces were still occupying his country and Japanese could leave it only if accredited.

  His accounts of life abroad (“The Far-Sighted Traveler,” “On Not Falling in Love with Paris”) were published and later collected, but he saw much more than he wrote about. Indeed, his earliest use for me was to show him something other than the usual tourist sites.

  I knew no Japanese then and his English was not yet as idiomatic as it later became. Nonetheless, we managed to communicate well enough for me to understand his wishes. He wanted to visit every Saint Sebastian hanging in New York, to see the Strauss Salome at the Met, and to experience a real gay bar. He gave as reason for this last that he was halfway through his next novel, Forbidden Colors, which contained scenes in several such locales, and he wished to compare, evaluate, and capture local color.

  There were several such in Greenwich Village, I had heard, and so we set out and eventually located one called Mary’s. There we sat over our drinks and watched middle-aged men talk like women. This was something neither of us had expected and it was not very interesting.

  Nonetheless he gravely thanked me and on our next outing we hunted down Saint Sebastian. Though we did not find him, Mishima remained convinced that his saint was somehow hiding in the Metropolitan Museum, and so we searched wing after wing. In the bookstore he finally found a reproduction of the one by Guido Reni, a portrait he already knew intimately. This he purchased.

  I remember the search, disappointing though it had been, because during it I was impressed both by Mishima’s invariable courtesy—he had the finest social manners of anyone I had ever met—and by his conviction of the importance of what we were doing.

  With Mishima one became objective, saw oneself dispassionately. It was he who created this heightened atmosphere because of an inner consistency upon which he insisted. To be with Mishima was to take part in a drama.

  Perhaps consequently there was little spontaneity, a quality that he seemed both to distrust and to dislike, perhaps because it was inconsistent. And there was also little humor, for Mishima’s mirth was always serious. But, as though in compensation, there was a sense of high intelligence, a feeling that one was engaged in something important—in short, a sense of theater.

  A result of all this theater was a kind of formality. One always tried to be at one’s best with Mishima—up to his level, as it were, attempt to emulate that ideal, which he himself represented, of being true to one’s own self. This is difficult if, like myself, you do not know who you are, and have to settle for some daily invention. Mishima, however, seemed to have no such doubts.

  Next time we met I mentioned our fruitless Greenwich Village quest, ready to smile at the memory, but I discovered that he had already rendered it epic, me as Virgil to his Dante, both dangerously descending into the maelstrom of Sodom. It was no longer a simple single excursion into the pathetic Mary’s, but a perilous quest somehow successfully accomplished. And, indeed, details would be, he told me, incorporated into the continuation of that serious and responsible study, Forbidden Colors.

  A Saint Sebastian postcard, this depicting one by Il Sodoma, later arrived from Rome, and on the back Mishima wrote that Greece had filled him with “classical aspirations.” I later learned that he had read Longus at the Parthenon and been given the idea of writing his own Daphnis and Chloe. This became The Sound of Waves, a novella he began once back in Japan, a country he would shortly return to, several years before me to be sure, but we would certainly often meet again. Most sincerely yours, Yukio.

  In early 1954 Richie returned to Japan, began studying the language, and supported himself by teaching at Waseda University, correcting correspondence for the newly formed Japan Air Lines and becoming film critic for the Japan Times.

  26 april 1954. I was hoping to get to review Seven Samurai—but the senior critic, the otherwise supportive Saisho Fumi, wanted it. I got, however, to go to the premiere today.

  It was at the big Nichigeki, Toho’s best house. Kurosawa had so gone over the budget that the company decided it must exploit the picture and this included a big star-filled gala premiere, but later someone told me the company would cut the picture for other local screenings. I was thus a member of that favored audience who got to see the complete picture
—a single showing.

  It is probably just as well that I was prevented from reviewing it. My Japanese is not nearly good enough to handle period language. I went to one of Daiei Studio’s samurai films and was baffled by the many stately injunctions to go to the toilet. The toilet? asked the queried publicity person, incredulous. Yes, I quoted—Benjo e mairo. No, no, no, he said: Not benjo but (an old term for the palace court) denjo.

  Meredith Weatherby’s home, 1954. japan architect

  Even though I could not follow the language of Seven Samurai, it made little difference to my appreciation (as separate from my understanding) of the film. I have seen Alexander Dovzhenko now, and John Ford, and I was able to understand the accomplishment of Kurosawa and to recognize in that final reel one of the great feats of editing, and to see in the final scene one of cinema’s great moral statements.

  And there, as though in long shot on the Nichigeki stage, was Kurosawa, without the floppy hat, and my friend Hayasaka, ill I hear, standing solemn in his round horn-rimmed glasses, but still shyly smiling.

  In Tokyo Richie was living in the home of Meredith Weatherby. This was a large farmhouse, a minka, that had been moved from the mountains of Okutama and re-erected in what was then the quiet residential district of Roppongi. The extant entries are largely about Mishima Yukio. This is because any others were used elsewhere, but these were collected for a projected book about the author, one never written.

  5 may 1954. Meredith and I drive out to Jiyugaoka to watch Mishima take part in a local festival. He is already beside the portable shrine that he, with the others, will carry aloft, jostling the happy deity presumed inside. He is also already in costume, like the rest of the neighborhood youths—a short coat, a headband, straw sandals, no pants, just a tight loin cloth that hides the sex and cleaves the butt. Already the drums have begun their thumping and soon the neighborhood procession will begin. Yukio is only a year younger than I am—that makes him twenty-nine, but he looks nine at the most. Frail, with a narrow childish chest, he is right now grinning with excitement.

  With Meredith Weatherby, 1953.

  What so excites him, I wonder. If I had to run around naked in straw sandals bearing those beams until my shoulders ran blood, I would not be grinning with excitement. Then I see that all the boys are being matey with each other, that there is much good-natured joshing, and that there will be lots of touching when they push aloft the shrine. But it is not, I think, the tactile, that excites these groups; it is that what they are doing they are doing together.

  Mishima, so solitary, so alone, so isolated—and this is what he always writes about—can for an hour or two be a part of society in which there are no individuals, only sets of arms and pairs of legs. What freedom he must feel. No wonder he grins.

  The boys all squat down, take the great beams gratefully onto their shoulders, then stand, staggering, as the drums pound and the flute purls and this strange creature, part man, part god, begins its unsteady way down the road and Yukio grins and shouts as he passes.

  1 june 1954. Mishima came over this afternoon. Meredith is translating The Sound of Waves and Yukio’s English has gotten so good that he can help. Later he often comes upstairs to where the silkworms were kept when this was a farmhouse, which is where I live.

  As always, so polite that he is at the beginning distant, and yet always determined. This is because he has uses for us all. Yukio is not only a dramatist but also a practicing stage director. For the drama of his life, he has cast us in our various roles, those demanded by the rigor of the script. Each of us has his or her purpose—or else we would not have seen him at all.

  Meredith is an important translator and so his relationship with Mishima is literary and concerned with the translations. I, however, am of no literary use and my role is more indeterminate. I am cast as a kind of confidante, and after he had studied the translation with Meredith downstairs he often relaxes upstairs.

  Today he wanted to know more about Suetonius—was captivated by those suspicious accounts of Tiberius and Nero. I told him about Dio Cassius and together we looked into Heliogabalus, an emperor whose excesses interested him. Mishima today said that he felt separated from the things he really liked. He said he thought that some time in Rome under Tiberius would have been interesting—or maybe Diocletian—he was thinking of Sebastian. He toyed with the idea of reincarnation—not seriously, but as a kind of hopeful possibility, wondered if he hadn’t been a Persian slave boy in an earlier life, or an indulgent emperor.

  We also talked about Sanya, the working-class district of Japan where I sometimes go; about the bar run by Abe Sada, the woman who, having accidentally killed her lover, cut off his penis and carried it around with her until she was apprehended. Mishima has often told me how much he would like to go to the place—Hoshikikusui, Star Chrysanthemum Water is its name—and how he regrets he cannot.

  Here the barrier is spatial, not temporal. He cannot go because of who he has already become. Thanks to the publicity he so courts, he would have been recognized. His reaction to fame is to both desire it and to deplore it. When we are out together and people recognize him he is uncomfortable. Though they do not directly approach—this is not the Japanese way—people do move closer, and keep glancing, if not staring. He will then hail a taxi. Yet, at the same time he keeps on doing things—acting, singing, carrying on—that ensure just this troublesome kind of renown.

  undated, 1955. Today as we sat on my sofa and the late afternoon sun lay great horizontal rays across us, I again noticed Yukio’s strong resemblance to the young André Gide: the same narrow temples, against which authors put a finger when having their pictures taken, the flat and virginal temples of the thinker, the face held like a book between those pale, flat bookends.

  Also Gide-like the jaw line, long, lean, pushing the chin into an aggressive angle that seems to lead the face. These two create a strain, pull against each other—the jawbone, strong as that of a horse, leading against the restraint of the cloistered temples.

  And the dichotomy continues: above, the eyes dark, even in mirth, the gaze of a divinity student; beneath, the mouth full, struggling to hold itself in. In Gide the mouth makes me think of a pomegranate; in Mishima, a flower. Not so much a rose as something more exotic—a hibiscus, perhaps.

  This is a mouth that has tasted good things, but has learned not to smack its lips. It is an abstemious mouth, the kind that learns to nibble. Still, Mishima is not a French Protestant, but a Japanese with leanings toward folk-festival Shinto. The dichotomy is there, but different.

  When I first met him again last year I was rereading Gide’s Journals and had just finished the part where he, reading Stendhal’s Journals, had come upon Napoleon’s smile, “. . . in which the teeth are shown but the eyes do not smile.” Mishima and Napoleon—not a bad comparison.

  undated, 1955. Yukio is a dandy, in the sense that Gide, like Baudelaire, was a dandy. There is nothing openly ostentatious about, say, his clothes. But if you look closely you will see that the cut is superior, that the material is the best. He’s like those Tokugawa merchants who wore sober kimonos, the linings of which cost much more. For them it was governmental authority that denied display. For Mishima it is an even stricter self-denial.

  A man is a dandy as a man is an epicure. With self so precious, dandyism becomes (the words are Baudelaire’s) “. . . nothing but a form of gymnastics designed to fortify the will and discipline the spirit.” But one may dandify the body as well as the wardrobe. Mishima tries to form himself into the image he desires, all fat, all excess melted away: spirit and body become one—a lean, hard mind in a lean, hard body.

  A dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often thought to be, is really a strict conformist. He is beating the world at its own game. If the world says be neat, then he will astonish it by being immaculate. This is not because he himself thinks neatness a virtue. It is because the world thinks so, or says it does. To beat the world at its own game is to purposel
y display through excess.

  But the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is so tolerant of dandies. They are not dangerous, since they too, in their own way, conform. This is because the dandy is not really concerned with the outside world. He is concerned only with the image he projects and—in turn—receives. Sometimes he creates a multiplicity of images through which he confounds, but only in order to dazzle himself.

  There are, to be sure, intellectual dandies who push conventional ideas to extremes. This Mishima does not, cannot do. He reminds us of the dandies of an earlier time because he is so concerned with his mirror-like image of himself—stern with puritan eyes, and a full, rich mouth, often used for laughing since the eyes don’t, can’t laugh.

  undated, 1955. Mishima takes us out to a new restaurant he has discovered—French. Over the terrine he tells me that he is going to change his style, that he now admires Mori Ogai and is writing an essay on him. Mori’s style is strong, sound, heavy, and will be quite different from the decorative style which Meredith assures me is Yukio’s.

  Meredith thinks he knows the reason for the change of style and later tells me. It is that Ishihara Shintaro and his brand new bestseller Taiyo no Kisetsu [Season of the Sun] have captured the attention of the young all over Japan—something that Yukio thought he had.

  During dinner he talks about a topical novel—something to appeal to a wider audience—he is writing about the monk who burned down the Golden Pavilion. It will presumably be in the strong, sound, heavy style. It is now almost finished, he says, and adds that and he is going to celebrate by doing something about his body. He says he is determined to begin boxing lessons at the Nihon University Boxing Club.

  During this dinner I realize that I am witnessing part of an ongoing process—the continual transformation of Yukio’s life, his constant redoing of himself. And behind the still-frail framework I see the bulky inspiration It is still Omi, the early beloved, the older classmate in Confessions of a Mask. When I come back home I look up the passage, in Meredith’s translation: “Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect.”