A giant lion from Kobe: The head fifteen feet high, the cloth body manipulated by one hundred fifty men inside with long poles, pulled by a hundred more outside—a lion circus tent.
The Nebuta from Aomori: First a phalanx of dozens of drums, held in threes and pounded at the same time. Then a group of dancers, all girls. Then the big drums, on wheels, each hammered by five strong men. Then young men in loincloths, leaping and capering. Then the mighty illuminated float, fifty feet high, a hundred across, illuminated from the inside—a giant samurai, sword aloft. And following this, the people from Aomori all dancing and leaping. All of this began at five-thirty as the sun was setting, and ended at nine-thirty as the full moon was rising. A marvelous spectacle, and the last. It now simply costs too much. The committee has had to give it up.
13 august 1984. Thinking of visual spectacles today, the great ones I have seen. To be sure the Grand Canyon and Ryoanji are both visual spectacles and I have seen them both, but that is not what I mean. I mean man-made ones. Let me see:
When the curtain opened on the first night of Tudor’s Romeo and Juliet and the Met audience saw the Berman set against that great blue cyclorama, that gasp of surprise and pleasure. Then Sir Thomas Beecham raised his baton and the Delius began.
In the Kabuki Ibaraki, a charming little dance for the page, all nautical references (pulling the oars, riding the waves) with the precision of nineteenth-century clockwork. Then, three comic dancers in the interlude—Edo street trash in the middle of fifteenth-century Kyoto. In the coda a wonderfully dance-like turn on the samisen, and the gliding exit of the three, legs up high, feet slapping, real high-stepping in a perfect parody of charm.
When the curtain of the second part of the first visit of the Beijing Circus to Tokyo (in the early sixties) went up and revealed a second curtain made entirely of jugglers standing on shoulders, filling the proscenium—all the hands and some of the legs juggling something.
A performance of the Nomura family of the Kyogen Utsubozaru (The Monkey-Skin Quiver), in which the monkey was played by a small child and the ensemble was of a perfection to draw tears.
The Great Black Current Tank at the Okinawa Exposition, where on either side, towering glass walls held the entire black current, simulated, with all of the fish, real, that are in it: shoals of tuna, fleets of dolphin, and armadas of whales, all circling, the ocean towering above.
A performance of Hagoromo in Kanazawa, home of Noh, where the heavenly princess was a masked ninety-year-old man, whose every movement, every gesture, was that of a young, virginal, heavenly creature.
In the movies, lots: like the flight of the arrows in Henry V and its inspiration, the battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky; the close-ups of the animals in Au hazard, Balthazar; Falconetti’s face in Jeanne; the first glimpse backward over the length of Skull Island where we can see the distant great gate in King Kong.
Again a gap in the journals, this one four years—apparently no journals were compiled during this time. Much else, however, was written: Viewing Film, A Taste of Japan, Tokyo Nights, Introducing Tokyo, and Public People, Private People.
16 may 1988. Met Shulamith [Rubinfein] and Ed [Seidensticker] in front of the statue of Saigo at Ueno, and we went and ate blanched chicken toriwasa and pheasant donburi—though this was probably chicken as well. We are three legs of our four-legged Jane Austen Society (the fourth leg, Sheelagh [Cluny] is always now in London or Canada). After, we walked down Ameyokocho and Shulemith innocently asks what this place name means.
“It means ‘Sweet American,’ that’s what it means,” said Ed. “Ame is the contraction and it is homonymous with ame, the candy. The idea is that the Americans gave candy away after the war.” “Oh, how sweet,” said Shulamith with that girlish giggle she sometimes has. “Not at all,” said Ed. “It is not a proper term. It is derogatory. It is like our calling them Jap for them to call us Ame.”
This leads to other things and at the end of the meal we have not talked much about Jane. Later, over coffee, I wonder (to myself) just which of the characters we have come to resemble: Ed is Mr. Woodhouse with teeth; I fancy myself the witty and heartless Mr. Bennett; Shulamith, well, someone very nice—maybe Elizabeth, grown older and minus Darcy; Sheelagh is Fanny’s brother—hardly ever here.
23 may 1988. Reading Raymond Carver. Never had before. Liking him but suspicious of this. The stories are so laconic that I suspect formula. Have not, however, actually detected any. Certainly, I admire the brevity. As always, successful art inspires. I too want to write such stories, and think of a theme.
A man has a happy relationship based, on his part, on a natural passivity, and this continues on until another person starts a relationship with him. Passivity continues to the exclusion of the first person. Am obviously thinking of me and the sergeant [Kiyota Kazuaki]. A naturally boyish youngest son’s passivity allowed for a relationship that was not natural to him. Yet he drew from it things that sustained him—regard and knowledge. But then he was married, something his passivity also allowed—an arranged marriage that others wanted. And she is perfectly good, his wife. And his passivity extends. He neglects me. Despite knowledge missing, he takes the easy path, stays home. So what I had congratulated myself on discovering, his passivity, becomes at the end something unwelcome. Told this way it doesn’t seem much of a story, but the shape is nice. I turn it this way and that, admiring its symmetry. I think, however, I will have the story told by a woman. Will make the homo into non-marriage, make the non-homo into marriage. Can allow myself a bit of sentiment that way. [It became the short story “Arrangements.”]
25 may 1988. Itami Juzo, famous director son of a famous director father. “Cut!” shouts Itami into his lapel mike, after the eighth take of the final scene of the second part of A Taxing Woman [Marusa no Onna]. He is wearing his black Chinese shirt, his slippers, his red scarf, his black fedora—emblems as necessary to image as is the constant cigarette, the continual cups of coffee, the hard candy he nibbles during shooting.
The script assistant confirms that this final scene consisted of six rehearsals and eight takes. “The first,” says Itami, “was probably all right but I wanted to take one more to make sure and ended up doing eight. But that last one was all right too, I think.” She agrees.
“Wasn’t very economical though, was it?” he asks. Then, to me, “Money, money. So I work fast. This picture only took me fifty-four days. You save a lot of money that way.”
Making money, that’s one reason for making films. And saving money. “That’s the reason I star my wife in all my films. Want all the profits to stay in the family.”
With Itami Juzo (in hat), 1988. newsweek
Making money is important. After all, Itami had had to mortgage everything he owned to make his first picture, The Funeral. He said, “I read that I would even have mortgaged my wife, had the banks wanted her.”
The picture was successful, however, made money, and so he decided to become a full-time director. He hadn’t always wanted to, however. He’d been an industrial illustrator, an essayist, a translator, a talk-show host, and an actor. It was only when he turned fifty that he became a director—like his father.
Itami Mansaku was one of Japan’s most respected prewar directors, an innovative man who helped turn the Japanese period film into the humanistic expression that it for a short period became. In this he inspired an entire generation of postwar directors—Kurosawa Akira, Kobayashi Masaki, Uchida Tomu. He universalized the specifically Japanese, and in doing so he created films that were art.
He died when his son, Juzo, was thirteen. Left fatherless, raised by a mother of whom he later said “had no ability to bring up children,” he moved from one profession to another. “I think I am about twenty years behind my generation,” he somewhere wrote.
Becoming a director like his father brought him up to date. Though well known as an essayist and an actor, he was suddenly the film maker who had revived the movies in Japan. One of the first things h
e did with his newly earned money was to restore one of his father’s films, the 1936 Kakita Akanashi.
Then he began consolidating his profession—making plans, making money. You had to make the audience want to come to the theater if you were going to show a profit. Making gentle fun of them, as in The Funeral and Tampopo, was one way.
This is because, as he explained, the viewer needs a surrogate; just as a child needs someone from outside the family to fully mature. What it needs is someone to dispute the family view and show another opinion.
He crunches a piece of hard candy. And this time, he says, in reference to the film he is now completing, the tax people don’t get the money. This is because the hero, the wily leader of one of Japan’s many new religions, has had all his illegal gold cast into Buddhist altar implements. The final scene shows him in his crypt, taunting the impotent tax officials.
“And all in just fifty-four days,” he says. He can work so fast because of his system. While other directors are roaming the set and peering through the viewfinder, Itami sits quietly in the director’s chair and looks into a television monitor, giving instructions through his lapel mike. This way, he says, he stays out of everyone’s way and still, since the television camera looks directly through the camera’s lens, can see everything the cameraman can. Handy, too, on a small set.
I peer inside. The gold-filled crypt is very small. The camera hung inside can be rotated. Inside too were the two actors—the hero and his pregnant girlfriend, and the cameraman—outside was the director. The scene on the small monitor was properly claustrophobic as the same actions were performed eight times.
Mikuni Rentaro, the head of the cult, had gleefully whipped off the covers, laughing maniacally, and displayed the gold. The pregnant girlfriend had reacted. Four times he flubbed his lines and once the camera ran out of film.
Itami did not lose his temper, nor even raise his voice. He crunched more candy. Smiling he turned me and said, “Stress.” The reference was to when we had worked together on the English subtitles for The Funeral and he had first learned the meaning of the word—from me.
He had questioned every line of my work. And though he knows English, I know it better. “Now here you wrote ‘for,’ ” he said, “but that is a preposition and prepositions are tricky. Wouldn’t it be better if you had written ‘to’? That’s another preposition.” All of this was in Japanese since, no matter how well he might think he knows English, he never uses it with a foreigner. The reference to stress was my outraged reaction to this.
The scripter shook her head. She thought he was referring to himself, and Itami was never stressed. Not at all like Kurosawa, or that monument to impatience, Mizoguchi Kenji. Nor much like his father.
26 september 1988. Rain, more, again. This month has had one day of sunshine. The rest range from sprinkles to downpours. The Japanese, always prone to speak of the weather, usually with approval, are perturbed—and suspicious. Did we do this? We, with our exhausts, our chemicals, our hair spray? This, coupled with the discomfort. Walls sweating in the subway, niter in the passages, hot wet winds. We perspire under our umbrellas, and moths fly out of the closet. I find cockroaches in my sitting room. Usually only a few in the kitchen. A lady on the subway begins to complain even to me, “. . . and the backs fell, positively fell, right off my books.” “And my piano is coming unglued,” said a wet lady across the way. It is sure catastrophe when strangers start speaking to each other.
28 september 1988. I always work on my own things in the morning, labor at making a living in the afternoon, and meet people or play in the evening. Day after day after day. Never get tired of it because each day is different, though the timings are about the same. Awake at seven, coffee, newspaper. Then shower and at work at desk by nine or before: right now it is the Oxford book on Japanese film. By noon, tired of this and lunch, in or out. Then making a living. Go to International House or go to Sogetsu, or go see films to do subtitles for, or go to the library to research an article. This can go on to six. Then I meet my friends, or go about looking for new ones. Usually home by eleven. Always in bed by twelve. Today was no different from other days.
29 september 1988. Party. I am recognized. “Oh, aren’t you . . . ?” “Yes, I am and who are you?” “Oh, no . . .” and then, “I just heard your lecture . . .” or, “I saw your picture in the paper . . .” or, “I saw your photo on the book jacket . . .” Why do none of these encounters ever turn into anything? I am ready. If people know who I am and come up and talk, they already know something about me. I like fame if this is what it is.
But, I would not like it if it got as large and dangerous as I saw it with poor Mishima, who used to have to cross streets to avoid crowds, or Kuroyanagi [Tetsuko], who gets quite nervous as people surround her on the street, smiling, well intentioned, but big, surrounding bodies nonetheless. I would not like that. But a few people here and there. . . .
Yet, they always leave me. I never leave them. I suppose they do not want to presume. I wish they would. We would have lots to talk about. Me.
1 october 1988. No, Japan has changed. What I thought never would—one of the reasons for spending my old age here—is gone, never to return. This is the possibility of meeting a stranger and making a friend. Right there, right then. Forever. Oh, meeting strangers is possible enough. Indeed all friends are initially strangers. But it is no longer possible to enter into that sudden intimacy that was once so much a part of the charm. The reason is that the attitude toward me, toward any foreigner, has changed.
It is because we are not needed any more. No one has any use for us. They do not see trips abroad in our eyes. These trips are something they can themselves afford. And there are so many of us. We have become common. And since Japan is rich now and the other countries are not, they need not imitate us.
I am speaking of my regretting imperialism, I know. I ought to rejoice that Japan is no longer subject to it, but I do not want to. It was too much fun being treated as someone quite special. And one no longer is. A foreign friend in speaking of this says, “Why, we might as well be living at home.” I smile because it is amusing. Not he, he takes it seriously. Then looks for reasons. It is because he is getting old. Or it is because of fear of AIDS, which, of course, comes from foreign lands. But, it is not that. It is that the Japanese have outgrown us.
2 october 1988. Sunday, a soft rain, but cooler now. Shinjuku, the streets shining, reflected umbrellas: pink, mauve, chartreuse—people in for the day. Country Japanese are fond of untoward colors. I see a boy with geranium-colored trousers. Day-tripping workmen often wear purple cummerbunds. Against the gray rainy cityscape these subtle colors shine and shimmer.
At Isetan I watch the quiet crowds. How well dressed everyone is now. More, how stylish. Not just the spikes and slashes of the young. Everyone else displays a kind of good taste—solid materials, well cut—the kind of taste you see in the Edo street scenes of Hokusai. Solid, plain, well-cut kimonos. Splashes of color here and there. And, I notice, as in the Hokusai, no faces. Is this because Japanese in crowds have never have had any? No, it is because in crowds we all have a kind of “faceless” expression. The face is there but it is not expressed. This is something Hokusai knew. One sees Japanese faces only when people are alone or where they are somewhere where they know each other.
3 october 1988. A good long time now. He lies there in the center of the city, dying. Very old, very strong. Whoever would have thought that that skinny old man would be such a laster? And last he does, day after day—his doctors pumping blood into him as fast as it leaks out.
Hirohito has not a secret left. We not only know all about the rectal discharges, we even know their temperatures. An avid audience of about one hundred million people take in the enormous amount of information the media churns out—important TV broadcasts are interrupted to give us the latest non-news.
There are in addition hundreds who kneel in the drizzle in front of the gates of the Imperial Palace. They will probabl
y catch their deaths themselves. And thousands who line up with umbrellas to sign the condolence books. I look at the line of colored umbrellas, which I see from the Press Club twenty floors high: a distant rainbow-tinted caterpillar in the drizzle.
There is some criticism of all this coverage. No private citizen, no other person, would be given it. And does this not mean some suspicious reversion to prewar thoughts? The Emperor is not a god. Why is he now treated as one? Right-wing militarism on its way back? Some think so. Leftist students are giving speeches at Ochanomizu Station. They warn of this. They do not want the right to overcome. They want the left to overcome.
I think the reason for this distasteful and massive public display of a single death is that for anyone over forty, the Emperor’s life is bound up with their own. One mourns for lost youth as well. Another is that many Japanese always do the same thing at the same time, and it is an unusual person who will stand out against one of these mass movements.
Yet there are many such unusual people now. Not one person to whom I talk about the dying Emperor thinks proper the massive attention paid. Nor is anyone, including many of my contemporaries, upset by the coming death. Many make jokes. However, my friends are not arch-traditionalists or else they would not be my friends, so this probably proves little.
It suits many purposes, this crisis. The Diet uses it as excuse not to work. Major companies use it as excuse to avoid doing things they do not want to. Chiyonofuji, traditional sumo star, cancels a party out of deference. Itsuki Hiroshi, singer, cancels a wedding—but he is of Korean ancestry and so probably thought it safer to. Lots of cancellations. No fireworks here, no garden party there. I talked with someone on the phone who wanted me to write an article, and I said yes, but then she said, “Well, we haven’t quite decided, there is this unfortunate Emperor thing.” So even magazines are thinking what to print. Nothing too inflammatory, nothing too frivolous, nothing too foreign.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 27
