The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  The foreigners are all models. Pale eyes, disdainful lips. Forever chattering with each other. Both sexes fashionably androgynous. Cow-like, they wander around in designer finery and get together and have bread fights in respectable restaurants. The cops are very heavy on the place (nascent drug scene). I remember when Roppongi was a crossing for streetcars and that was about it.

  31 may 1989. International House lecture by Don Hardy. Lots of people including a tattoo sensei from Yokohama. (No disclosure after the talk: both were ready, but it did not work out that way, such things taking calculated spontaneity.) Lots of women. But then women are much more at ease with their bodies than men are. Men drive theirs like reluctant beasts. Women lie down with theirs.

  Good talk, lots of slides. Later, private room at the Chinese restaurant where Frank [Korn] had taken us. Chizuko [Korn] had seen nothing like this, was frankly curious. Don stood by the remains of beef and oyster sauce with his shirt off, shorts pulled down, hand over privates, while we gazed at his Benten and Kannon. Both women (the other was Chris [Blasdel]’s wife, Mika) plainly wanted to touch, but did not. The call of the flesh is strong. That of painted flesh doubly so, because it is a double vision: the picture and the skin on which it lies. The eye is not enough for the tattoo.

  5 june 1989. Met with Ed Seidensticker at the foot (feet?) of Saigo in Ueno. He was unwell and looked it. Bright red. It was the climb he said. Must sit down. After a while turned dead white. Then, slowly, he regained a more human coloring. I, always the busybody, began diagnosing—told him he was too fat, which is true but no one wants to hear that. I suggested exercise or less eating or (pause) drinking. This doubly unwished since he has such problems staying on the wagon. So we were, thanks to both of us, ready for a squabble.

  He began on the Japanese, “these people,” guessing that I would not like him to do so. And so, feeling outspoken, I told him that he really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing. This initially drew silence—as it would. Then he turned to me and solemnly said, “We must never again speak of this if we are to remain friends.”

  The expected attack came later when he had gotten over the jolt. “Actually, you know, Donald, you are the deluded one. You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.” By this time, however, the hurt was mastered and he was smiling. “Oh, dear,” he complained merrily, “we have nothing more to talk about.”

  After the meal he wanted to go right home and did so. “But you know,” he said upon parting. “We do not really disagree. Not really really.” I at once agreed. And as we walked along he, encouraged, even had a few things to say about “these people” before we parted.

  6 june 1989. Big JAL party at the Imperial. How old everyone looks. I see a man there every year, and each year he has so aged that this string of parties seems in retrospect Jaques’s ages of mankind—soon sans teeth, sans everything. Me too I suppose. I dress “young” however. My blue summer coat, navy Countess Mara shirt, pale blue spotted Hermes tie—a natty sight. Tom Chapman said, “My god, Donald, you look like something out of a fifties road company of Guys and Dolls.” This pleased me more than not.

  Ed there. He turned to our acquaintances and said, “Oh, Donald says the most awful things about one. We are quarreling.” Then gave me a big smile.

  25 june 1989. Dinner at the Korns’. [Marian Korn had died, 24 February 1987, and Frank had remarried.] Talk turns to underwear and the playboy from Hokkaido opposite me informs that in kendo neither underwear nor support of any sort is ever used. The swordsmen are nude and hanging under their indigo trappings. At further questions from Chizuko [Korn] it transpires that the kendoka achieves erection during the moment before strike. Playboy demonstrates (to a point) by raising his hands as though a sword, frowning, puffing out his cheeks. “Does this not get in the way of the match?” someone wonders. “No, not at all. The point of the sword and the point of the penis are in alignment.” “What happens then?” asked Tami, a very pretty girl whose profession I have not as yet ascertained. “Why,” says our informant, “at the moment of striking, the metaphorical blood streams from the enemy and the literal blood retreats from the engorged organ.” The men at table are inclined to take this as literally true and to find it somehow complimentary. The women on the other hand find it unlikely and scoff. Observes one, “With no underwear, it is liable to come right out of the kendo gear altogether.” “Yes, so it does, so it does,” the Hokkaido playboy cries. Bursts of merriment.

  26 june 1989. Dinner with Zushiden. He is forty-nine now—and it has been nearly thirty years since he and I were together in Otsuka. He’s still a big, good-looking boy from Kagoshima.

  He married early and then had various problems. He, handsome, widely admired, married a woman who would have nothing to do with him. She kept putting him off. Said he was too big. She could never, etc. Finally he went to a doctor who, in the Japanese manner, advised determination. Determination is nothing that the good-natured Zushi could easily summon, but he tried. And tried again and again.

  Three children were the result. But now another problem. The first one has turned out bad. Like a cuckoo chick in the swallow’s nest. Where could she have come from? Wild, glue-sniffing, promiscuous, insubordinate—still living at home, now twenty and not speaking to her parents.

  However, just recently something nice happened to him. A long time ago when in high school he had this girlfriend he really liked. He was her first, and she his. Then he came to Tokyo, to university, and she married and went to LA and had kids, got divorced, got married again, became a widow, got married again—and looked up Zushi in the current high school graduate directory (Japan keeps these things up to date) and called him.

  With Teshigahara Hiroshi on the set of Rikyu, 1989. teshigahara productions

  Then she came to see him. “And it was as though all those years had never existed,” he said, as though in awe. “I didn’t recognize her but she somehow recognized me. And we had dinner and it was just like always, and so we went to a hotel.” Pause. “And guess what hotel we went to—the Urashima!”

  And that great boyish laugh of his. [The hotel was named after Urashima Taro, a folk figure who, like Rip Van Winkle, came back from a period of enchantment and found himself old and everything changed.] Day after tomorrow he is going to Kagoshima and will again meet her. They will walk where they walked hand in hand three decades ago. I said it was like an English movie. “No,” he said, “it’s like a Japanese movie.”

  29 june 1989. I go to see the Teshi­gahara Rikyu, the rough-cut version, no music yet. Very pretty—but on this viewing my major interest was myself. There I am in my surplice, my hat, my mustache—the head of the Portuguese mission. Astonishing resemblance to my paternal grandfather. Paternal grandfather in drag. How old I look, how awful—all the usual reactions to self suddenly revealed.

  But what else I notice is that the editing has resulted in a credible performance. I am a stupid church father, but well intentioned. Just what the director wanted, I guess. Certainly my idea of playing a cynical worldly Jesuit is not apparent. Instead, an old child, silly but pleasant. A nice, understated comic performance that I did not know I was giving. [The entire scene is given in the “Hitomu Yamazaki” section of Public People, Private People.] And again, how strange the gulf between what you feel and what you are—what you show and what others see.

  30 june 1989. Showed The Izu Dancer at the International House, the Gosho 1933 silent version. Weak film, contrived, stupid added plot about a gold mine, travesty of the Kawabata novel. But in back of all of this—how astonishingly beautiful the Izu peninsula was half a century ago. Something then rarely noticed. I took it for granted in the forties and fifties, when it was still beautiful. It certainly isn’t now. And so I gazed at this scratched, faded, black and white image and saw Eden.

  4 july 1989. Murray Sayles called. Wanted permission to give my number to the London Tatler. Wha
t on earth for? “Well, they are doing a series on people who know everyone, in each city as it were, you know.” No, I did not know. “Oh, you know. Like Harold Acton in Florence. And so I told them that you are their man in Tokyo.”

  Me? The Harold Acton of Tokyo? The way one must appear from the outside! Murray sees me as this. I look like this. Maybe I am this. But I never thought so before. And I never felt so until now, this very moment. The Harold Acton of Tokyo. Not a bad ring to it.

  12 july 1989. Dentist. He took out the root, stump and all (prying, with something like a can opener), and it hurt. Home, aching, took a nap, then woke up and did not want to stay in. Pain better, and I felt I needed some recompense. Hunting around would have taken energy better spent in convalescing, and finding something would have been, given the great bloody hole in my lower jaw, both unhygienic and unaesthetic. So I decided on a cheap, dumb movie.

  With unerring taste I chose Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is energetic to no end, active to no result, and divertingly brainless. What with novelty all long gone, it is tired replay. Now no reference (the Comics, the Movies) seems real any longer. It is a walk-through, a staged rerun. Watching it is like being locked in with an over-active kid. The picture starts with Boy Scouts and never ages. It can’t, for it is the creation of the two richest adolescents in the world: Lucas and Spielberg. They are very active in acting out their concerns. Again, a thing about fathers. That is where the love story is, too. Women, we cannot trust, any of ’em, ever. And sure enough the blonde is lost down a crack in the earth. But done with no knowing irony. One feels that Steve/George truly believe. The Power is With Them.

  Not here so much. The film has just opened and the theater is half empty. It is not that young Japanese (all on dates) are above this. It is perhaps not brainless enough to draw. At any rate, not new enough. After all, their mothers probably went (on a date) to see the first of them, the mighty Jaws.

  For me, just the thing. I was anesthetized for two hours, deafened by the Richard Strauss score that fits the Nazi antics so well and makes me wonder if they are still villains. One wonders further when Harrison Ford is forced to say: “Oh, Nazis, I just hate those guys.” Formerly this statement of dislike would not have been necessary. It could have been taken for granted. But now the Nazi are like the Comanche. You say you hate them, but you love to watch the scalping. Much set up by the viewing, came home, slept like a child.

  18 august 1989. Chizuko Korn’s birthday. Very lively, with everyone working quite hard, in the manner of successful Japanese parties. Much badinage about the centerpiece, a structure of chestnuts. From talk of these (kuri) to talk of squirrels (risu) and then the putting of them together—kuri to risu, which is, of course, Japanese for clitoris.

  Wordplay is always popular at parties, and this was an enormous hit. The language is so proper that any hint of impropriety (even a medical term, Latin strained through English) is welcome. Also, most of the women had been in the mizushobai or are else emancipated enough to imitate it. Biggest hit was the stout Lio, hair slicked back, in a pin-stripe suit with white shirt and necktie. She threw back her head and chortled while her friend, older but more frilly, tittered at the other end of table.

  Later Mr. Soda, the playboy from Hokkaido, kept telling us how sumo wrestlers force their testicles back into their bodies before their bouts. Then he insisted upon standing up and (through his trousers) demonstrating their probable route.

  On June 4, 1988, Richie met Choi Dae-Yung in Seoul. It was a friendship that has remained to this day.

  21 august 1989. I am here at my desk typing away when I get an early morning phone call from [Choi] Dae-Yung in Korea. Sounds in the same room. He actually was until last week, having spent two weeks with me here. Full of his plans—one more year as soccer coach, then a sports store. Is near thirty now, must be thinking of the future. His English is better, a year ago there was none.

  But I wish it were much better still. His ghost is in the room with me, and all we have is words. I think of Proust’s muses of the switchboard. We no longer have switchboard girls; we have microchips. But still there is this medium, this curtain of ether. Communicating with the dead must be something like the telephone.

  Also striking is the coincidence of the call. I was just now writing about him, writing Earle Ernest, who is curious about someone who has come to mean so much to me. “You asked about Dae-Yung,” I write:

  What he did before me and besides soccer? Well, he was born twenty-nine years ago in Pusan and had an ordinary childhood until he was ten, when his mother died. His father remarried and in three years was dead himself. He had married unwisely, because the new wife took everything and turned the orphaned Dae-Yung out on the streets. There he made a kind of living—paperboy, milk-boy, and ice-boy—until an uncle took pity and brought him into his home and sent him to school.

  Dae-Yung worked hard in school, particularly at sports for which he had an aptitude, one so strong that by the time he was sixteen he was school soccer star, and by eighteen was voted best high school player in all South Korea. After his military training he went to university and was star of the team. He was on TV; his picture was on sports magazine covers.

  Then another setback. Playing a game with Australia, he was hit in the back by a ball and injured. This led to a series of operations. He spent his twenty-second and twenty-third years on his back in a cast looking at the ceiling. His stepmother visited him once, to ask for money. Finally recovered, he was too old to be a soccer star, and though exercise brought back his strength, it could not bring back time lost. When he was twenty-six he was offered a coaching post in a small mountainside high school. This he took, and this is where he is now. During all of this time he, in the manner of sportsmen, devoted himself to his sport and nothing else. He had had a girlfriend for a time, and he had had sex with her when he was eighteen or so. Also like most Korean young men, he went to the whorehouses, where he found that his staying power made him popular.

  Choi Dae-Yung, 1989. donald richie

  He was also popular with his teammates and with older men, several of whom made passes. These he rejected, but some persevered. This had the result of making Dae-Yung secretive about his private life, his real address, his telephone number, etc. Then came me.

  Due to the several mistimed and misinformed occurrences that marked our meeting, I accidentally overwhelmed him. I also demonstrated that someone could like him, could even love him, and yet not threaten him. This was, apparently, the first time for him to experience this. So he found a place for me. I filled a need. I became the long-missing parent, and he has begun to address me as though I indeed were. It has been over two years since we first met.

  Dae-Yung now shakes his head and says he has the kind of looks that women do not like and that men do. This is probably true. He says we fit well, a good combination. And so we do. He also says he wants us to always be together. And so we may. And all of his history is merely what I have been told. I have no proof of any of it. I write an address said to be his uncle’s and the mail is given him; I have no phone number; I have never met one friend of his; I have no reason for believing him other than his word, his character, and the complete consistency of his history in all of its varied tellings to me. I complained once. And he nodded and looked sad and said he knew, but I must believe him, because it is true. So I will believe him. I keep remembering Psyche and Eros, and how it ended.

  22 august 1989. Invitational premiere at Sogetsu Kaikan of Rikyu. [Teshigahara] Hiroshi made a speech about cultural history; Mikuni [Rentaro], now all hirsute (head, mustache, beard) after months of shave-pated Rikyu, talked about cultural history; Yamazaki [Tsutomu], granny glasses, all crooked from a recent bout with Richard III, talked about cultural history.

  Audience was tout Tokyo. This meant a spattering of royalty—one prince, one princess, the cultural ones—and lots of “media personalities.” No government people—these are never out unless the event is in a communist capital,
or Washington, D.C.

  Issey Miyake looking cast in copper, all red-brown skin and wire-stiff hair. Has not aged a wrinkle in twenty years. Asakura Setsu talking about the new production of Tosca she is doing, and about Ninagawa Yukio with whom she had a fight and out on whom she walked. Is pleased he has lost much luster. So he has, without her sets. Takemitsu Toru told me how he got that grand endless chord to accompany Rikyu in the boat: synthesizers, organs, and lots of celli. Akiyama Kuniharu and his wife, [Takahashi] Aki—who has now done the complete piano Satie. I remember him as a pale, slim youth. Now he is mustached, fattish, red. He has kept his enthusiasm, however. Inside of him sits the youngster who thirty years ago, on this very ground, pushed and pulled the Sogetsu film program into shape.

  Many people I do not know. Women in modish hats with brilliant eyeliner smiles. Lots of men in Issey shirts and unruly hair. Rather strange buffet: sake in bamboo containers and little things on bamboo skewers. But then bamboo is Hiroshi’s material. He has made it his own—as in the last scene of this movie.

  With Eric Klestadt in Matsue.

  Invested head of the Sogetsu school, starting from the shadow of his father, Hiroshi not only stepped out, he also has made it even stronger than his father did. He heads that enormous school, which must be something like heading the Pentagon, makes sure it makes money, and makes certain it does not look silly.

  And for his premiere he can command the fashionable world of this capital. I remember ten years ago when he was very unhappy, having to give up film, pottery, himself. Now he is secure—no, serene. He can leave the bureaucracy long enough to make a film, and that is something.