The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  In addition to his Tokyo journals, Richie also kept travel diaries. The first covers an extended 1954–55 visit to the Kansai beginning with a day-long trip that the bullet train now accomplishes in three hours. Following this there were trips to Sado and to Kyu­shu. As in his wartime journals, he was evolving a form that could accommodate both what he saw and how he felt. These culminated in his best-known work, The Inland Sea (1971).

  27 december 1954. I buy a pot of barley tea from my window, and as the train slides out of Tokyo Station I look down at the familiar scenes from above. This is where I have many times walked, but now I am riding. I sip my tea and quietly enjoy the thought of travel.

  From my moving window I watch a man climb a smokestack, both man and chimney black against the blue of this winter sky. Children play New Year’s games along the streets, and workers on the far tracks chant as their hammers simultaneously stop in midair, then crash down.

  Sunlight, and Tokyo’s winter colors: blue, white, black, gray. I look out at the passing city, so crossed with wires—telegraph, telephone, streetcar—that it looks like an etching.

  From Yokohama the country begins—abruptly. You leave the station and you are in the fields. Buildings change, too. The roofs become thatch, and under these architecture becomes visible.

  And with the farmhouses, hills and forests—forests one would not dream of in Tokyo—not a hill without its thick crest of trees. Not that the hand of man is invisible. These fields are decorated—there is neither a valley nor a hill without its advertisement. Everywhere, singers loud in the landscape. But for me, illiterate, they are welcome bits of color in the dun vocabulary of winter. Japan is particularly beautiful for those of us who cannot read.

  At Ofuna, to contrast with all the beauty, there is the concrete Kannon, molded by some prewar millionaire. Enormous as it is, however, it is not pretentious. There is indeed something winning about its colossal plainness. One can become fond of the tasteless as one can of bad manners. The Ofuna Kannon, like public urination, seems to speak of some natural state beyond good taste.

  Lots of people in the ugly station. People are my preferred scenery. Their presence for me informs the landscape. I know that under the thatched roof or the concrete ceiling is someone I would want to know. But we start—the platform is snatched away.

  The mountains are so near. The long black, snow-covered hills close about us. Then, from behind, sliding out suddenly, is Fuji, an apparition, an impossible white. This mountain never looks real because it never looks natural. The shape is so perfect it could not but be artificial. Easy to believe it was thought sacred, even now when it is thought not—except by foreigners.

  Suddenly, the sea—a blinding silver in the sun. The land drops, fields patched as in a quilt, roll down to the rocks. And, opposite, Fuji steps out like a tenor, flank forward, head in the clouds. Below, touches of color, mandarin oranges ripening on their trees. Semi-tropical, Izu at hand, the warm black current coursing along beside the tracks. Just an hour from Tokyo and I am buying from my window iced tangerines, five of them like orange snowballs.

  History begins outside this Kanto Plain I am leaving. There is still room for it here. Our train track parallels the old highway, the Tokaido. I can see it swaying, closer and further, as it wobbles around our straight track, always recognizable by the double rows of cryptomeria that border it. Suddenly it turns and we do not, and I see in instant perspective the twin lanes of trees, the white road in-between. From the window of my express I am seeing what Hiroshige saw.

  Odawara, a city hemmed between sea and mountain, a city trying to be as modern as Tokyo. But it cannot. History lies too heavily upon the land and Fuji rears above it like an ancestor. Odawara’s shiny new electrical plant hasn’t a chance.

  Atami, blinding in the sun, has more successfully escaped, perhaps because the Tokaido goes elsewhere. A pleasure resort, a toy city of terraced hotels, clinging to cliffs and marching down to the flat sea. Great favorite with honeymooners—hot springs, a few lonely looking palms, strangers in a strange land. It is a nowhere city, with frivolous strings of lanterns and flags decorating the empty daytime streets.

  Behind the mountains climb up and hide a stern Fuji, hanging high, invisible but felt. I look at the city below turning like a carousel as the train goes round the last curve before the tunnel, and I finish my final tangerine.

  Mishima, close to cloud-covered Fuji, which still hangs above the landscape, defining it. I look at the people from my window. They seem to feel the weight. The open look of Tokyo, the pragmatic set of the mouth, the inquiring eye—there is little of this. These are the faces of those who live on the Fuji plain. Pale, eyes wary, mouths cautious, as though expecting the mountain to fall upon them. Fuji, now invisible, hangs there above the lion-colored hills.

  Numazu, and we leave behind the mountains. I write this in the dining car, and at the next table are a group of Japanese ex-soldiers. One still has his cropped hair, after all these years. He also has the wary eyes of the district. He seems to know the country, covertly points out sights to the others as they pass. To me, too, it seems unfamiliar. I have not seen this land for seven years; saw it last from the window of the Allied Car in the occupied days.

  Above are the hills leading back to Atami and ocean. I remember best a view of Numazu, the bay, the sea, and Fuji, spread out before me like an illuminated map, a view I remember from near a decade ago now—seen from those very hills, through the windshield of an Army jeep.

  Just then the clouds shift and Fuji emerges, huge, dwarfing the towns and villages spread upward on its apron. As I write, the crown slowly parts the clouds. Now it is free, an impossibly perfect cone, floating upon the clouds, some great triangle escaped from geometry itself. At the top, snow in the crevasses, making it look old, wrinkled, the way that Hokusai shows it. But he only had a piece of paper and Fuji has an entire hemisphere. It is huge. The absurd perfection seen from a distance has vanished. Something this large can only be dangerous.

  The train turns and Fuji looms then drops behind. Ahead the black hills part and I see distant icy peaks, like a row of teeth: the Japan Alps, the spine of the island itself.

  At Shimizu, brilliant sun, the radishes hung to dry in the trees look like tropical fruit. Here are the real tropics. Atami is merely Florida—Shimizu is South America. The sea extends along one side, a curving bay. The water looks warm enough to swim in, and in Tokyo this morning it was freezing.

  Shizuoka, one tall building, Venetian rococo it seems, and right beside it a Shinto shrine, all ancient lacquer. In the station, electric clocks painted apple green and in front of them men sweeping the floors wearing twelfth-century hats. No one finds this novel or charming or incongruous except me.

  In the passing freight car, lumber from the mountains, great shaggy logs covered with thick bark and thin snow. A party boards, very drunk, and begins singing folk songs in steady voices while Fuji, now demoted to a hill, solemnly waves at us as we round a bend. In front of it a single red advertising balloon hangs like a long-stemmed cherry—all that is left of Shizuoka.

  Bentenjima, halfway to Kyoto. I stopped overnight many years ago but now recognize nothing, nor does the train, which rushes by without looking. But it is a pretty town—a country village by the sea or a seaside hamlet in the fields. The ocean has invaded the town on one side, and a mountain river presses against it on the other. Caught between the two, little Bentenjima makes the best of it.

  I go to the end of the car and stand hanging out of the doorway as the wind rushes past and the town dwindles. Even on the smallest railways where I came from in America, you can’t do this. You’re too well taken care of. You can’t even open the train windows any more. But not here. Life is cheap. Anyone who wishes may lean from the doorway of the moving train. Those who care to fall out may do so.

  Back in my seat I eat the grass-green caramels I bought at Hamamatsu, bought mainly to enjoy the illicit delights of buying through an open window. They taste
like the sickly waxen taffy I chewed when very young. Japan is the land where all penny-candy should come from.

  Much colder now as we leave the sea and turn to the mountains. No more citron, only piles of lemon-colored rice straw and the light green of the radish tops against the brown soil—these are country colors. And at Ozaki a country train boy in the platform house across the track is drinking tea, staring straight head, does not see me, and seems to be thinking. Absurdly, I want him to see me. The train jerks. He does not.

  Travel in Japan gives a sense of accomplishment. I have just looked at my map and discovered that if I had gone in a line straight west of Tokyo I would now be far out in the Japan Sea, having crossed the entire island.

  Yet Japan does not seem small. It is a full-sized country, larger than England. Its earlier reputation of being tiny, dainty, delicate, comes from imagination alone. Japan is a big country but one that does not lie down on you, like America or Australia. It is the right size for human habitation.

  Nagoya, more barley tea from the window, but the pot is different. No longer is it the squat Kanto shape but now, already, the graceful and impractical spouted pot from the Kansai. Even the embossed logos are different—here a little fan. Kanto and Kansai are much more different than just East and West. I look out of the window and see passing me the tiled roofs of the city—itself a pottery center. They are blacker and heavier-seeming than those of Tokyo. Here Osaka is already felt.

  Owari-Ichinomiya—late afternoon sun, the browns become reddish, the greens deepen into black, and the playing children in the passing shrine cast long shadows behind them like capes. The silhouette of the train and its smoke races along the bank, then suddenly rears and rolls—a terrible wreck—as the bank turns to a wall, a station, a crossing. In the distance, russet mountains, the houses all black, still too early for the supper lights.

  Gifu, a mountain of stained wood, black tiled roofs and barred windows. Directly beyond it are miniature mountains, arranged in the steep, impossible shapes of mountains in Chinese scrolls. The late afternoon sun turns the water red, then black. I look for cormorants on the oily evening river, but see none.

  Across the aisle a middle-aged pair are entertaining each other. From the window he has endlessly bought beer, chocolate, rice cakes, tangerines, gumdrops. These he feeds her. They laugh too much, are having too good a time to be married. When he gets up—the toilet doubtless—I glance up and she stares boldly back. They are enjoying themselves.

  Sekigahara—a plain where a barrier stands, you might translate it. Here is where Ieyasu fought—and won. It is much colder, the glass pane frosts, and the train is traveling more slowly, as though winded. We are on a high plateau with round, snow-covered mountains on either side. The dim sun still reaches the clouds and they turn a cold pink. But down here in the high valley it is dark and the houses are lighted.

  A fine, light snow is falling and the window is cold. I pass a small boy playing with his dog in the snow. Then we enter a short tunnel. Two minutes later I see another boy playing with his dog in the snow. The two boys will never meet, nor will the dogs—a whole mountain lies between them.

  It grows darker and the pines are black. The pink clouds have faded to gray, like dying embers. The smoke from the engine turns white as spume and catches in the limbs of the black pines. In the distance, lights. It is suppertime all over the land and families are gathering. As we chug by I try to look into the passing houses to glimpse the families illuminated, caught forever with ladle in the pot, spoon in the soup.

  Now it is dark, and yet, in the faint light from the dying sky I see one old man. He is still working in a snowy field, turning the soil. The work is finished but for this small corner. This is what the old man has done while I have been traveling from Tokyo.

  Then Maibara, now quite dark, the station lighted. There is a winter feeling to this early darkness, and I have the taste of cinders in my mouth and the air is chill. Somewhere before long, Lake Biwa, but we will not see it.

  Kyoto. Here it has been raining, and I sit in the Nara train waiting for it to leave. Kyoto is black and silent under the heavy sky. Few people about. I look at those who are. It is difficult to describe the Kansai face, but I think its difference lies in its shape. There is a fullness, a roundness which in Kyoto is called full-moon beauty in both men and women. In men too, perhaps a slightly lighter complexion, slightly thinner features, something in the curve of the cheek. The young man across the aisle from me, for example. Were this Tokyo I would still guess Kyoto.

  And behind him sit the couple from the Tokyo train. It is quiet enough now that I can overhear. She is saying that it is too bad it was so dark going through Hachiman for she was unable to make anything of it. She also is calling him sensei. This is an important clue but at the same time a confusing one. Is he really her teacher? Is she actually his student? Or is it simply being used in an honorary sense—in which case he can be anything at all. She raises her arm a bit coquettishly for a student and her kimono sleeve falls back. I gaze into her armpit but she doesn’t look back.

  Now a friend of the boy across the way has come and they are talking and I realize that I cannot understand one word of what is being said. A girl joins them and that makes things a bit more comprehensible. She is talking about her sueta [sweater], otherwise it is all thick, heavy Kansai accent. I wonder if I will be able to understand anything down here. They, thanks to radio and movies, will be able to understand me.

  In what other country, I wonder, could eight hours of travel make this much difference? If I traveled eight more I would reach Kyushu, where even a Japanese from somewhere else is linguistically lost?

  Nara—the mistress of the inn is busy making me feel at home. I can understand her, but then she is, as she tells me, from Shizuoka. We like to talk in Shizuoka, she says. Says she is happy she can understand me.

  She goes to see about the bath and I look around. A large celadon rabbit in the alcove, and the scroll is a Nara scene. The same thing is outside the window, the famous pond. No celluloid kewpie in the alcove, I am happy to see. And not only for aesthetic reasons. Celluloid kewpies mean a certain kind of half-baked, hopefully-Western way of thinking that repulses romantic me.

  In the bath more conversation, this about what I am going to have for supper. The real purpose of the talk is her perfectly natural desire to see a naked foreigner. This desire is divorced from any erotic intent. She is merely curious. Satisfied, we agree that I am to have sashimi and tempura. She says she is happy at the choice.

  Back in the room, there she is again. This time with a modest request. She wants to know how to say kutsu o nuide kudasai in English. I tell her: please take off your shoes. Says she is happy. This is to be used on foreigners who would otherwise walk her mats in their footwear. We are a troublesome lot, it is true. As I left the bath I noticed that the maid ran in at once to ascertain that I had not, indeed, used the soap in it.

  The mistress herself serves my supper and then sits to watch me eat it, talking the while. She assumes that I know more Japanese than I do and I consequently understand less and less. Fortunately, however, she knows little English—merely one phrase that, oddly, is: I am happy.

  28 december 1954. At a way station in the forests above Kasuga Shrine. From where I sit, the path, mossy even in winter, disappears around a bend, lost among the great trees of these park-like woods. The pines shut out the winter sun but the forest floor is dappled. It is yet early and, hanging in the higher branches, the morning mist still rises. It is cold and my breath too rises to the rafters of this deserted hut in which I sit.

  I have just left Kasuga Shrine itself, vermilion in the early morning sun, the priests moving, dim and white, through the dark and polished corridors. It is an open shrine, more like a pavilion in the woods, and its colors are red and white against the evergreen of the trees and the blue of the morning winter sky.

  Below, in the park, the deer wander through the groves. Their coats are shaggy because it
is winter and their horns are short because they are cut in the fall. They look at me with their Asiatic eyes and are not afraid. Then one turns, flicks his tail, and they bound over the frosted moss to disappear into the furthest fringe of the forest.

  An old woman with a tray came by offering cakes to feed the deer. They hear her and return, looking expectantly at me. Now, high in the forest, I can see them still, wandering below, but the old woman has gone. The sun shines but it is not warm. There is a silence broken only by the cry of a winter bird.

  By a pond near the Shosoin. The birds call and the deer bark, and the stagnant pond lies brown and mottled, reflecting the great roof of the Dai­bu­tsuden. The sun has gone and a cold wind ruffles the surface. The upside-down temple shudders.

  Kofukuji. Across a narrow reflecting pond is the five-storied pagoda. As I gaze up at it I hear two women behind me talking. One is saying that it is not really the best, not that old. I look it up in my guidebook and, sure enough, it is a reconstruction. But then what isn’t—the original was ninth century. Then I read more carefully. This recent copy was made about fifty years before America was discovered.

  Having descended into town, I drink coffee in a small shop made hideous with advertisements of something in CinemaScope. Nara the city is banal; Nara, the ancient capital, the park, is—well—sublime. And sitting here sipping my mocha, I suddenly understand why.

  Nature—nature roams the park, and the works of man have either vanished or exist but in fragments. Like the deer, nature does as it will, and the shrines above are where it rests. And this modern and stifling little coffee shop is only fifteen minutes by foot from the depths of the forest where I was this morning.