The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  Then more of his entourage come in—the Toei gangster contingent. That surly little man so popular now as a yakuza comedian, I forget his name. All smiles and hard little eyes. And Hagiwara Kenichi, the young heartthrob, not looking very well—jeans and T-shirt, the ugly look having hit Japan ten years late.

  Slowly the party polarizes. Oshima, quite used to being made much of, sits at one side of the table, and Katsu and his crowd at the other. These two know each other (everyone knows each other in the Japanese entertainment world) but, as becomes increasingly clear, do not really like each other. Nor is there any reason they should. I cannot imagine two men further apart. Katsu with his Osaka ways, his rightist thug buddies and his smarmy bonhomie; Oshima with his cultured Kyoto background, his liberal political views, his shyness, and his effeminacy—the latter strongly outlined now against Katsu’s macho posing.

  Oshima holds his own very well in a situation like this. Always attacks. Soon the air is blue. Francis, oblivious of everything, had his arm about a somewhat apprehensive Kawakita Kazuko. Bested, Katsu turns into a lonely little boy and talks to his pals. And to me, since I am on his side of the table. I know he hates John Nathan’s film about him, and I try to tell him why it is good. This is difficult because the reason it is good is that it shows him to be a lonely little boy.

  Katsu sulks. No one is paying attention to him. The Toei contingent is bored. There are no fights. Hagiwara is bored too, but then that is his state. So they decide to leave. Katsu very consciously gracious. Comes and shakes each hand, including Oshima’s, held limp in front of him. Nothing remains from the polarization. Gap is closed in very Japanese style, by being ignored.

  All of us, all old friends now that the intruders have left, go down to Francis’s room—the party was in the banquet room—and get more smashed. Francis puts on old favorites and Takemitsu does exquisite ocarina improvisations on “Don’t Get Around Much Any More” etc. Oshima gets the giggles. Francis tries to hug Kazuko some more. I have my arms around Non-chan [Nogami Teruyo]. We try to get into the kotatsu and, failing this, try to guess whose feet are whose. I get a large foot in my lap. Turns out to be Francis’s who takes it away when he finds out into whose lap he has fallen.

  I remember some scraps of conversation. I tell Takemitsu what Robert Craft told me, what Igor Stravinsky said about Olivier Messiaen’s being “an enormous crucifix made of sugar.” Francis talks about his new movie and Brando being something called “The Talking Head.” Kazuko remembers when we first met—at Cannes, and she was seventeen. I suddenly remember too—a very pretty, very shy girl against the blue bay. Everyone is remembering. Toru remembers that we met in front of Wako in 1948, which I had forgotten. Francis now on floor, arms around Kazuko. I tell him about her husband. “Why is everyone always taken? Isn’t there anyone who is not already taken? This is the story of my life.”

  Somehow I get home, alone, at two in the morning. Successful party.

  10 january 1979. Strange about the feeling of concern—seems made mainly of worry. Like today. Fumio said he would come by in the early morning after the bar was closed. He didn’t, but then sometimes he does not do what he says he will. Still, ten years of leaning on him has resulted in his only rarely not doing what he says he will, so I wondered when he did not appear, to wake me up and climb into bed just as I climbed out to begin my day. In the evening I phoned the bar. At seven, just when it is supposed to open. No answer. What had happened? And worry pounced.

  Bar had never not opened before. Once they forgot to take the money out of the pay phone, which meant it got too heavy and incoming calls could not come in. But that wouldn’t have happened again. Then, let’s see, he had been having trouble with this snotty helper, Akira, and was going to fire him. Maybe dangerous Akira had done something dreadful. Or maybe it was the gangsters. They dropped in from time to time, and Fumio had kept them in line. Until now. Or, maybe, January being a very dry month, there had been a great fire which had swept through the place and Fumio’s mother was trying unsuccessfully to reach me to let me know that her poor child, terribly scarred by flames, at this very moment lay dead in some temple awaiting the further fire of cremation.

  And I was off. Terrible worry. I, who resist the terrors of possession and jealousy, am easy prey to common concern. When I face the unknown, my only thought is to get to know it. Otherwise it gnaws and I am unable to think of anything else. So off I went to Shinjuku, to the bar, imagining the worst all the time.

  Now what kind of self-indulgence is this? Is fear a wish? Am I frightening myself for fun? Anyway the bar was open, just. And Fumio was there. He had been late because he had fired Akira. Reason for his not coming in the morning was that he was exhausted, had fallen asleep after the bar closed. Had called me when he woke up but I was already out. Very simple. And over this I had had my crisis, my mad rushing through the subway passages, my pounding heart, my flight to Shinjuku. I let him know none of this, just said I had wondered a little, thought I would drop in, had been passing by.

  No wonder the ancients called love a fever.

  11 january 1979. Took Francis to dinner and then to the Zakone. He talked about a film he wants to make here. Part of the idea comes from Goethe—people are like chemicals: elective affinities. Part of it comes from the pattern of his own life, which will determine the pattern of the film. Part of it is a metaphor suggested by both Goethe and his life—one person and another, one country and another, one civilization and another. He wants to stretch the film across time and across space—the two countries, the various generations. Right now he is living here, and experiencing what he will later create.

  Big and bearded, large gentle eyes, full mouth. Francis does not give the impression of hiding behind his beard as so many bearded men do—as though they are in camouflage, peering through hedges. The beard seems as much a part of him as his big hands and feet. Very gentle, like many large men. Particularly here, where everyone acts small.

  Mizushima Fumio’s wedding. With Mizushima’s mother (front row, 3rd from left) and Mizushima’s father (2nd row, 4th from left), 1980.

  Decides he really likes small women best. All of his women—there have been numbers—have been small. He likes narrow waists and large hips and sound legs. Breasts are not so interesting. The waist is that part where, if women were insects, he would pick them up. Fairly compulsive about women. Not, he says, about sex, but certainly, he says, about women.

  Has a life full of complications, beginning with his wife and all the other women he attracts. I can see the attraction. Not handsome, and this reassures women; very gentle, also reassuring. Very (apparently) sincere and straightforward. This too is found appealing. He must be irresistible.

  Then we go on to the Cradle, the new literary bar, where he has already captivated the woman who runs it. We talk about Kurosawa. The thing that surprises Francis is that it became obvious at once that Kurosawa does not know what he has done, does not know what he is doing, nor what he will do—and does not know how he does it. Very true—Kurosawa, the un-self-examined person. Francis, on the other hand, is very much aware of himself—painfully so. He knows that too much knowledge paralyzes. He knows one must go on despite knowing. All of this would not be understandable to Kurosawa.

  At the beginning of the following year, 1980, Mizushima Fumio married Shibuya Yasuko. Richie traveled in Europe and North Africa, and in the autumn moved to the old section of Tokyo, the quarter of Yanaka. Here he wrote the short pieces that would become Zen Inklings (1982) and also began a study of contemporary Japanese culture that resulted in a number of essays, many of them included in the collections A Lateral View (1987), Partial Views (1995), and The Image Factory (2003). He neglected his journals. There is only one entry for 1980, and he did not again begin until the fall of 1981. From then until 1988 the journals were kept only sporadically.

  15 january 1980. Fumio formal, Yasuko in lace and veil, their respective mothers in kimono, we all stood in line waiting to enter the chape
l. At the head stood a small man in a black suit. Fumio’s eldest brother found me back in the line, brought me forward, and put me in the small man’s place. The man stared at me, then looked away and left the line. We marched into the chapel and I was put in the first pew, next to Fumio’s mother. After the ceremony pictures were taken and I was again seated next to her. This is the traditional seat for the father, and when I was called upon to give the first speech the master of these ceremonies said that I had been as close to the groom as a true parent. Heads were turned, gazes curious—a foreigner in the place of honor. Later during the reception I was once more placed next to Fumio’s mother and acted as her husband. While we were sitting there the small man again appeared again, stood in front of me, made a deep bow, introduced himself as Fumio’s father, said that he had long heard of me, had known of how I had helped his son, was most grateful, and that I must give his regards and congratulations to the happy couple. I stood up, responded, but his wife looked straight ahead, giving him not even a glance.

  I offered him a drink and then we stood there. This was the famous missing father. He who had left wife and family and disappeared. Alone and poor, the mother had raised her children herself. Ten years before, when I met Fumio, and shortly his family, there had been no talk of the father. And now, having somehow gotten word, here he was. Fumio had not seen him since he was three years old.

  The father, after all still a husband, began paying attention to his wife—offering her a drink, or some food. She only inclined her head, did not answer or look at him. Then, reception over, the wedding party had to line up while the mothers received flowers from their new son and their new daughter and Fumio made a speech.

  He told how he had known Yasuko for over twenty years, how poor his family had been, how he had had no father, that is, until he had met me. But he was fortunate because his real father was dead. And as he said this he looked straight at him and heads turned to follow his gaze, because there, in the corner, alone, stood his real father.

  Then the reception line was again formed, me once more by Fumio’s mother, once more the husband, and the departing guests were thanked. The real father was not among them; perhaps he had stayed behind. When the guests left I too went home. I had been father for the ceremony but I was not a member of the family. Later I heard the father had been seen crying by the service exit.

  15 march 1980. We meet at the Imperial. Joseph Losey is standing there, very tall, very battered looking. “Someplace where I can sit down,” he says in his soft voice. He is just in, just off the plane. As we walk across the lobby of the hotel he looks about and says, “Everything looks like an airport now.” We go to the bar, which looks like a VIP lounge.

  This is his first time in Japan. “Not that I am going to see much of it. Casting is going to take most of the time. Shooting, the rest. And we must hurry, because,” he adds mysteriously, “the trout spawning season is almost over.” Then, “No, no, I don’t travel for pleasure, not any more. Just for work. And every place is an airport lobby.”

  I ask about the Proust, not having seen him since it fell through. “I really don’t know. We were coming along and suddenly the money was no longer there. Been pulled out.” He shook his head at the gravity of it all. “Vodka,” he said, very carefully to the kimonoed waitress who, like an airline hostess, hovered beside us.

  Thinks maybe it was just as well. He had wanted an all French cast (“It is really the only way—one of the reasons the Visconti would have been so bad . . . Helmut Berger?”), and the moneyman hadn’t. Sipping his vodka he remembers trouble he has had with actors.

  “No, Laughton was no trouble. He was too eager for the role. But he was terrified. Why? Working with me, of course. Oh, he would certainly have testified against me, if he had had to. He wasn’t an American citizen. He was truly frightened of McCarthy and his committee. So he was frightened of me and my friends.” He motioned toward us the kimonoed stewardess. “Another vodka,” he said, very distinctly.

  Losey shows what he has been through. He looks like a Roman statue left out in the rain. His features seem to have run into one another. His nose is now rounded in a way such suggests that it was not always. His ears are long. And the corrosion has been interior as well. He seems frail, large as he is. He handles himself carefully.

  Promising stage and screen director, catastrophe, and exile. A new career, equally brilliant, perhaps. But now something tired. Legacy, perhaps, of years of worry, frustration, anger. Has, in consequence, made himself soft, gentle. He sits there in the Imperial, and I sense a quality. It is patience.

  “How I would like to just travel, sometime,” he said. “As a boy I always wanted to see Japan. Now I am in Japan but I am not seeing it. I would like to give myself to it. You could guide me. Nara, Kyoto, people, adventures. But, no,” he smiled his agreeably crooked smile, “I am here for the trout spawning season. I will see only Japanese trout. What? Oh, it is called La Truite, something by Boris Vian. It’s been on the books for years now. We finally just got funding, as we call it.”

  He looked at the lobby. “What interests, and appalls me is how much the world has now come to look the same. The death of diversity—that ought to be a major theme. We could be sitting anywhere. Los Angeles.”

  “But Tokyo doesn’t act like Los Angeles,” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said, and then, turning to the girl in what was no longer her national dress, he said very slowly and carefully, “One more vodka, please.”

  19 september 1981. To Iwasaki Akira’s funeral, a cloudy day that turned to rain. Held at a Nichiren temple way out in Ikegami. Very high church. Chanting, bells, gongs, lots of incense, and most of the two hours the congregation seiza, sitting on their feet.

  Iwasaki was a political figure; his work was almost entirely in film. Considered radical, perhaps communist, in prewar and wartime Japan. This resulted in his being imprisoned and tortured by the Japanese kenpeitai. They beat his face badly, and he carried these scars for the rest of his life. After the war, of course, these became scars of honor—he was one of the very few Japanese who had stood, for whatever reason, against the militarists. Active in leftist film (along with Yamamoto Satsuo, Kamei Fumio, the younger Shindo Kaneto, and Imai Tadashi) he probably kept up communist affiliations in some form to the end.

  In some form, because Iwasaki was not doctrinaire and was probably too liberal for the Japanese Communist Party. He, for example, was the first Japanese critic to find reason in Rashomon when everyone else was finding horrid nihilism. He was, if a communist, a very old-fashioned one, the kind that now embarrasses Moscow, the sort of communist who believes in the rights of the little people and making a new and better world.

  Iwasaki managed to be kind and helpful without ever compromising himself. He never, unlike almost everyone else, aligned himself with power or postwar big business. And there he lies today, his photograph showing a smiling, scarred, eternally optimistic man.

  He helped me as few others did. Though I shared none of his political views, this seemed to make no difference to him. He knew I did not like the so-called socially conscious films of Imai and the rest, and that made no difference either.

  At the funeral, however, no Imai, no Kamei, no Shindo. I sat with Sato Tadao and his wife, Hisako (she helped by telling me during which sections of the ceremony I could get off my numbed feet). Yamamoto was there, however, and was the first to pay respects—in a touching speech addressed directly to the deceased. Called him kimi, remembered their work together, and at the end gave sayonara its original connotation of permanent parting. Outside, offering incense (I was inside), were members of the orthodox film community, all the company representatives, and Oshima Nagisa, a dissident like Iwasaki.

  The assembled company was highly respectable, rather rightish, and I wondered at the vagaries of life that this political man should be buried in such non-political company. But that was fitting. Life was always more important than politics and he never thought them to be i
dentical.

  Incense, flowers, the hearse, and it was over in the rain.

  28 september 1981. At the round bar of the Zakone, Robert Wilson looks at the girls opposite him. His regard, serious behind glasses, is heavy. It assesses.

  He is tall, thin, an appearance as ordinary as his name, made more so by carefully unexceptional suit and tie. Eyes set close together as though always focused on something just in front of him. He is also silent. There is no talk, no attempt at presentation. He is there like the bar stool is there. Silence is pronounced. But one can break it with a question.

  “Japan? It is very new. New to me. Though I know the Noh. That sounds like a joke.” Then, “Japanese movement. I like Japanese movement.” Measured speech, the talk of a man who is slowly describing what he is seeing, accurately. The accuracy is important. A man who is trying to tell what he sees.

  He talks about Delphine Seyrig and the way she walks in the new Duras film. She walks in a way he finds seductively beautiful. He attempts to explain, then to show. His large hand is her body and two massive fingers her legs. The fingers walk slowly across the surface of the bar. Then they crumble. No, that is not it.

  Silence. He suddenly stops and it is as though a door has closed. He looks straight ahead, self-absorbed.

  Occasionally, a question of his own suddenly appears. How did I come to Japan? I tell him. Interest appears. A certain kind. Here is something he might be able to use. After I had concluded the account there was no response. He now has the information.

  But mention of the Noh started a thought. It now appeared like a bubble rising on the surface. Parsifal. All underwater, a lake, then an iceberg floats to the center of the stage, and from it Amphortas takes an Egyptian box, and from that an ivory cask, and there is Parsifal sitting with his back to the audience, because he is us, you see, because he does not understand, and when he says he does not, then the audience knows just what he means.