I decided to ask something I had been curious about. “Do they know? Your customers?” “About half and half,” was the candid reply. “Those that don’t always get excited and feel my tits. Those that know half the time want to suck my cock or get fucked. You’d be surprised. Last week the straightest, butchest, gang-boy type you ever saw. Muscles, tattoos. And we get in the bushes and he drops his pants and bends over. Wanted it up the ass.” “Did you oblige?” “Sure—he couldn’t help it, probably got used to it in prison.”
“Do you ever mix the two and try to fuck the one that thinks you’re a lady?” Laughter, then, “All the time, all the time. It’s a problem.” Seeing I was ready for further details, “I don’t get fucked you know, too dangerous, and I don’t suck cock either.” “What do you do then?” I wondered, thinking this a singularly untalented male prostitute.
In answer he swung his handbag and said, “Want to see my cunt?” I said I did, and he produced an object made of rubber. Then he demonstrated, hiked up his skirt, put it between his panty-hosed legs. “Feels just like a cunt,” he said. “And I’m quick about it, have it right down there in no time. They never know.” “It doesn’t look much like a cunt,” I said. “Not supposed to. No one ever sees it. No, no don’t touch it, it’s still full of cum from those two guys.” “Don’t you wash it out?” I asked. “No, that would ruin it. They would know it was rubber. But with all the cum squashing round inside it feels like cunt. They think they got me all wet, think they got me excited, big ego trip.” “Big trip to the hospital,” I say, “What if the first guy is sick, then the second dips his cock in all that gunk and he gets sick, too?”
“No, no,” he said, “I am OK, I never get sick.” “I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about your customers.” “AIDS, huh?” “Yes, something like that.” “Well, I just don’t know,” he said. “If I wash it they’ll catch on. But once it is nice and squishy. . . .” “I just mentioned it,” I said, “as a matter of possible interest to the health department.”
Laughter, then, seriously, “In Japan, it’s only the rich people who have AIDS; they never come down here to Ueno. You got to have money to go abroad and catch it.” We talked for a bit more, and then he saw a likely businessman, portly, interested. Eventually they walked into the darkness, she with her dirty cunt secure in her handbag.
5 june 1990. To dinner with Louis Harris of polling fame. Taking my advice in New York, he came and talked with Tsutsumi Seiji of department store fame, hoping to get funding for Jimmy Merrill’s movie. It was at Jimmy’s place in New York that I first thought of this avenue. And Lou, with his customary directness, picked up the idea at once and came brandishing it. Seiji had meant to give him twenty minutes and, probably, the time of day. Instead, he sat, stunned in his own office, while Lou outlined.
Harris is extraordinary. I have never met anyone so completely certain. There is none of that doubt of self that one so finds, particularly, in Americans, especially in New York. And even those gestures in that direction (“at least, that is what I think” etc.) are merely social.
His wife sits by, stunned not by him, but by jet lag. “I’m sleepy all the time.” Not him. I cannot imagine him sleepy. Right now he only sips Chinese dumpling soup. “They have ruined my digestion,” he says, speaking of the Japanese and the schedule arranged for him. But one does not believe it. Nothing will ever ruin any single part of him.
Napoleon must have been like this. So utterly sure, so completely certain, that he carried all before him. Seiji must have been overcome. It is not the charm, which is considerable, but the certainty. So rare, so valuable, so irresistible in our rationalized times.
6 june 1990. Evening, explaining Ueno and low life in general to a foreign film producer who has asked for a few lessons. Having told him where to go and watched him enter, I fell into the hands of a hentai fufu. The male half moved into the dark near the pond, then, making sure I was looking, lifted his companion’s skirt like a stage curtain, to show me she had no panties, nor had she shaved. Then he dragged out his equipment and she descended upon him, looking me straight in the eye the while. I do not know what I was supposed to make of this, but realized that I was an object, a third party, a witness. So I smiled and she smiled back, difficult though that was. Then I stretched forth a hand to assist her. Instantly he was buckled up again, and with a “time to move on, time to move on,” he shepherded her around the shores of the pond, she looking back (longingly I thought) from time to time. This is what they do, pairs like this—inflame innocents like myself, then “move on” when things look promising. That is why they are called hentai fufu, “a perverted pair.”
8 june 1990. Spent the morning writing about the burakumin (reviewing Hashi ga Nai Kawa), the proscribed caste, even now in this bigoted land; its creation yet another ploy to control the lives of the citizenry that continues to this day. Perhaps continues now even stronger, in that the citizenry has been persuaded to surrender itself, to exercise self-criticism, to implant the watchful eye within the bosom.
Lunch with Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, anthropologist and also something of an expert on the burakumin, since her book, Monkey as Mirror, connects all these strands of historical Japan. She tells me that the publisher of the proposed translation said he would love to do it but with all these burakumin references he really couldn’t. Now if she could just take them all out. . . . I tell her that when my Inland Sea was translated the publishers (TBS-Brittanica) cut out all references not only to burakumin, but also to lepers.
She left Japan early, opened her eyes, and has never again shut them. “And you?” she asks. “You are me in reverse. How does it come about? How does it continue?” It continues, of course, because I am not Japanese and hence not subject to any of these insular customs. I am not expected to conform, indeed am encouraged not to. “I would not stay here, not even for five minutes, if I were Japanese,” I tell her. “But I am not. And that is all the difference. Plus, that I am a chronic non-joiner and early burst into tears at the prospect of the Boy Scouts.” She nods. She understands.
9 june 1990. With Jonathan Rauch, whom I take out to an Edo dinner and then to assorted glimpses of Ueno low life. He says, and I agree, that revisionism (let alone “Japan-bashing”) is not the proper term for what is occurring. It is simply that a group of journalistic scholars are describing Japan for the first time. And, I say, doing so for the first time without reference to the Japanese model.
It is amazing that for so many years, so many scholars (Reischauer among them) have accepted the Japanese Version. I never have, and I have always tried to accurately describe the place. But I simply did (and do) not know enough—as much, for example, as Karel van Wolferen knows.
Jonathan, so young, so bright, says that he has yet to meet a Japanese any different from anyone where he came from—Phoenix. The institutions are peculiar, but then all institutions are peculiar. The explorer finding Japan “different” is, in a way, merely discovering the last standing wall of the once-imposing Nihonjinron edifice.
30 june 1990. A Beethoven quartet a day. First I read d’Indy, and then Kerman. Then I listen to the quartet, with the score. Then I read Kerman again. So far I am most interested in Opus 95. In particular those two breathless chords, like some deathbed statement reconsidered.
Out at night enjoying the national mix. All sorts of different people. Homogeneous Japan—those who think they are homogeneous—feels threatened. On the bus coming back home there was a feisty little man with a toothpick and a domineering way with his wife. She was ordered to sit down, and then, himself standing, he looked around the bus. There was me and a Pakistani (probably), and two Filipinas, and perhaps a Chinese. And he turned to her and said in a loud voice, secure in his presumed insularity, “Nothing but damn foreigners these days.” (Saikin ya na, gaijin bakkashi da.) I looked up from my Kerman and transfixed him with my alien and basilisk eye. He understood at once that he had been understood. He looked away. Then when the bus went around a cor
ner, stole a glance. Horrors, the gaijin was still regarding him with a mute but ominous stare. He shifted his position, turned his back, snapped at his wife. When I got off the bus, I was pleased to see that he had chewed his toothpick into a pulp. Stress.
1 july 1990. Reading the short short stories of Colette, those that are all bunched together in the middle of the collected volume. I much admire this short-short form. These little netsuke are hard to carve, but worth it. Good for Colette too. When she gets long she often becomes winsome or jocular. She is best (as is everyone) when she is all bone and sinew. This short-short form saves the author from that authorial pose which, as I get older and older, makes me more and more sick. That ghastly attitude of looking on genially, smiling at a suffering world, the master puppeteer. Thackeray has it, James has it, even my worldly and discreet Colette at times. But not in these glorious stories. They make me want to write some myself.
2 july 1990. Busy day. Noon lecture, two hours, on Japanese culture for a group of adult academics from U.S.A.; proofing Kenneth Pyle’s new article for the International House of Japan Bulletin; rewriting the library notes; then moderating Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s talk on Tampopo.
Then I came home and found in my mailbox “The Best Radio Plays of Paul Rhymer,” that is, the best of Vic and Sade, the radio program that so delighted my childhood, which so formed me.
One of the joys of Vic and Sade was to stand to one side and learn to observe. Not criticize, observe. And to understand, and to accept. All of this was painless, of course. I thought they were “funny.” And so they are, but they had the transcendental humor shared by Jane Austen and Ozu.
Made of very little, a handful of characters (usually three) in themselves a unit (family), in one setting (house), and this minimal means permitted the depths of fellow feeling which this series occasioned. I never wanted to meet Vic or Sade or Rush. At the same time they were not “examples.” Rather, it was through them that great truths were viewed—beauty became truth.
In bed I read and read. Rhymer’s dialogue is as crisp today as it was fifty years ago. His ability to reveal without stating is marvelous. He is pre-Pinter Pinter. I cannot think of anyone else writing this well on stage and screen, radio being dead.
But as I laughed my eyes filled with tears. It was not nostalgia. I remembered none of these scripts. It was delight, certainly, at the rightness, the sureness of the performance. But it was more. Then I recognized it.
It was love. That infantile, all encompassing love that as a child I gave to Laurel and Hardy. It was fellow feeling extended until I loved them for being so human, so much like me. I love Vic and Sade as I love the people in Ozu’s Tokyo Story because I understand them. I do not want to leave them, and last night could not close the book. I awoke this morning, book still open, light still on.
4 july 1990. In the late morning I go to the American Embassy for the Fourth of July Reception. Great, joyous crush with, oddly, Chinese food. One woman in a red-white-and-blue straw hat. Otherwise, decent attire.
And there was Edward G. Seidensticker. “First time I am invited in years. Why, why, why?” “I think they wanted to look cultural this year,” I said. “Oh, you are such a cynic,” said Ed. Then, “What I really don’t know is why they invited you. Me, I can understand. I, sir, am a patriot. You are No Such Thing.”
Then I circulated through that great cool house, and outside in the garden saxophones were straining and people came up and said, “I bet you don’t remember me,” and they were absolutely right. Lots of military. So many chest decorations one could not tell the American officers from the Soviet.
Hours later, about eleven that night, I was walking home around Shinobazu Pond and there I beheld a familiar figure shuffling toward me. Yes, Edward G. Seidensticker. “All is well with the world,” I said. “We meet on familiar ground.” He stood, swaying, before me. “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” I told him I knew where he had been—to Asakusa. “Right again, sir.” And drinking. “A man may drink,” he said in the flat tones of Dr. Johnson.
Then, “Why do you suppose I was invited? I cannot imagine it. Oh, I was once on the list. Then I was removed. And now, lo, I am back on it again. Who does these things? Who makes up his mind about my destiny in this fashion?” “God?” I suggested. “Less levity,” he said severely, then, “Yours is even more of a mystery. Why would they invite you? Me, yes, for I must admit that I find the Fourth still Glorious. Yes, you may smile in that superior fashion of yours. But I am not ashamed. Glorious!” And tears actually appeared in his eyes. Then, “But you wouldn’t know about this, you old cynic, you. Well, off to home, which is probably not where you are going. I am. To write up my diary, sir.”
5 july 1990. Though America yammers and Japan stealthily buys up the world, there is very little visible of this new war. Perhaps because war is made by governments and not by people. Very visible it is in Washington—I read Ian [Buruma] on this. Another new book names names: the Japan lobbyists—visible even in Tokyo as Japan tries to slam shut the door to protect itself while at the same time menacing everyone else. Oddly no one has said the obvious. America does not have to buy Japanese. No one is forcing it to.
7 july 1990. Eric, required to listen to yet one more of my tales of conquest, said, “But you seem to have deserted Japan in favor of the Third World.” I thought about that and have now decided that it was not that I deserted Japan, but that Japan deserted the Third World.
Me, I have been faithful to that locality. It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the U.S.A., the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator.
8 july 1990. There are no articles in the Japanese language, and the lack of a definite article truly circumscribes. One cannot say “the dog,” one must say “this dog” or “that dog” or “that dog over there.” But the genus dog, that which makes something of a symbol of itself (“the dog is the most widespread of canines”) is not possible. Symbolic thought (man’s triumph it is said) is not triumphant in Japan. I cannot imagine Plato thriving here, with all his absolutes (“Truth,” “Beauty”), but Aristotle thrives because he describes. Maybe this is why Japan is so backward (by comparison) in some areas: philosophy, and diagnosis. And perhaps why it is so forward in others. After all, symbolic thought, logical progression, abstract ideas—these are not all of life, either.
9 july 1990. A cultural collision—Japan versus U.S.—escalates. And yet the antagonists so resemble each other. Japan is an unguided missile. No one is in the control room. When you get the people all pointed in the same direction there is no stopping them. Where is the brake? It is not included in this model. And the U.S.—it cannot even get everyone going in the same direction. People in the control booth, but no one minding the store. Minding the till, however. Both problems are colossal. The U.S., ailing, unable to stop its violent and criminal twitching, unable to care for itself, drooling and weeping. And Japan, locked inside of itself, nose at the windows, gasping for breath, unable to stop its violent impetus, and unable to get out.
Today a taxi driver turned around and said, “Well, I hope you people keep bashing us. That is the only way we are ever going to get any reform in this country.”
A pronounced lack of fellow feeling (except for this sole taxi driver)—that is the harshest and truest thing one can say about the Japanese. In the West too a great lack of that quality, but it nevertheless exists. Here, all too often, the different is seen as inhuman. And even if some feel otherwise they are too cowardly to show it. But how the Americans respond to a show of fellow feeling. They open like flowers turning toward the sun, warming their cold and brittle petals.
25 july 1990. Continuing hot weather. And since no rainy season has occurred, continued fears of water shortage. Tokyo not at its best in such emergencies. Discomfort turns people in upon themselves. They close all the doors and windows, as it were. A train or subw
ay car is filled with complete blanks. This fragile city breaks down upon any provocation. A light snowfall and traffic snarls; a small earthquake and all the trains halt; a typhoon warning and the buses stop running. This is a city designed to work only under optimum conditions, just like the country, and, in a way, just like the people.
In the evening I stroll around Shinobazu. The summer festival is going on. Stalls with plants, and stones, and whole trees. Lots of water. Caged insects, pottery you can paint and bake. This is usually when the city turns “Japanese” again—fans and yukata and geta, and an amount of flesh. Not this year. Just a few young girls, self-conscious (and uncomfortable) in summer kimono. There is less and less of this kind of tradition every year.
With Jim Jarmusch, 1990. unifrance film
17 august 1990. In any event, all other concerns eclipsed in the press by Iraq. What timing. Just when the U.S.A. had lost its evil empire, the USSR, and badly needed a new one. Had tried Japan on for size but something was lacking. This one has everything: military threat, innocent hostages, rape of stewardesses, looting, a lone ten-year-old-girl at peril, and behind it all greed, greed, greed. And, of course, the Threat is Real.
Of a consequence Japan is backed off the front page; carping is forgotten. As another consequence President Bush is off the domestic hook and balancing on the foreign one. The biggest relief for him must be the new and “vital” role for the military establishment, which must have thought it was going to lose a lot of money due to the collapse of the USSR. Now they will get more money than ever and Bully Boy can meet Bully Boy. Just like in a real war.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 32
