The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  21 january 1992. New Year’s Day. I wander around. Look at the new buildings. The architecture now is the “kindergarten look”—buildings made of blocks, the cute made collossal. Is this, I wonder, the new rococo? Frivolity embodied by materials tortured into miracles of ingenuity.

  With Leza Lowitz, 2002.

  22 january 1992. I behave in the Japanese manner. I refuse something, have to be urged, I say I am wrong when I am not. This brings smiles and nods. But I am not seen as behaving “like a Japanese.” I am seen as behaving properly.

  23 january 1992. A blond workman, long yellow strands straying from under the hard hat. Face that of elderly Japanese. The fashion last year was yellow streaks in the coiffeurs of the young. Now, in the manner of fashions, it has descended the social ladder. The proletariat has taken it up. It is the latest item in workman chic. Pierced ears are next.

  26 january 1992. At the porno. Villain foiled in the middle, true love over somewhat later, and still the film has several reels to go. A divertissement-like coda consisting of pure fucking, no plot. Porno is constructed like the nineteenth-century ballet, like Casse-noisette. Story over at the end of the second act, the third is all dancing—Candyland.

  28 january 1992. Dinner with Paul McCarthy. He tells me of being in Thailand and meeting an older professor at university there. Talk turned to Japanese literature and then to film, then to me. “Oh, yes,” said the professor. “Donald Richie. Isn’t she Donald Keene’s wife?” Paul, surprised, said, that no, he was not. “But surely Rizzi is a woman’s name, isn’t it, and they have the same family name; I had always thought that they were related.” Paul explained, but the professor was not convinced.

  30 january 1992. Out with Leza [Lowitz] who now teaches at Disney. Told me a curious story about Mickey Mouse. Elsewhere he has four fingers. Apparently easier to draw that way. In Japan, however, four fingers is the common pejorative gesture for the burakumin, the proscribed class. Four fingers shown in derision refers to the four legs of a beast. With the Burakumin League now so litigious, they are taking no chances. In Japan the Mickey and Minnie logos are redrawn.

  On the way back in the subway, I suddenly realized that being Japanese must be like being a teenager in an unusually repressive high school. Adolescents are always at the mercy of every fad—the sudden difference rendered identical in that everyone must at once evidence it; the single difference at once branding the person as hopelessly different. The truly different here in Japan are subject to all of the petty molestations common to high schools everywhere: banished, punished, and bullied.

  Many Japanese are like high school students: unsure of self, settling for the group every time. And knowledge becomes knowing how to order the proper cherry coke at the single drugstore that is in fashion.

  31 january 1992. The Donald Richie Commemorative Collection of Stringed Chamber Music continues to grow—now nine shelves of CDs, lots of LPs, and as many scores of the music as I can find. The catalogue is a dozen pages long now. I would never allow myself anything this expensive. Therefore it is going to a worthy cause, Tokushima University. Thus, I can enjoy it and not feel bad. It is really for someone else, all those anonymous, impoverished chamber music lovers I envision. It also means that I have to buy music I don’t like—the Henze Quartets for example—since I have to be complete.

  Today, however, I get something I do like: a Schnittke Trio. Got it in a small and specialized shop in Shibuya, where I had gone to practice the piano at the Kawaii showroom for my performance next week, accompanying He Who Gets Slapped. I have decided on a Schnittke-like score, dissident mazurkas interspersed with inane waltzes and galops, and lots of padding when Lon Chaney is working up his grand theory. But like everything else in Tokyo, the enormous Kawaii practice room complex is full. I can hear Für Elise tinkling in canon, and the “Moonlight” peddling away into the distance. Will return later.

  1 february 1992. Woke up at six to a strange light. Usually still gray outside. Now it was white, a pure whiteness as though all my windows had shoji paper. I got up and looked out. All white. It had snowed during the night and now Tokyo was covered. I might have known it was snow as I lay in my warm futon and listened to the quiet. Snow blankets all sounds. I could have been in the distant mountains.

  2 february 1992. There was a strong earthquake this morning at four. The jolts woke me and I scampered to the door to prop it open, for it is a metal door that would jam, and then would come the fire.

  As I opened the door, there was the peaceful starry night scene, all the snow before me and then, another large jolt. As I watched, all the snow fell—off the roofs, off the trees, off the overhead wires—pulled down in a second by the shuddering ground.

  It was like the transformation in the danmari in the Kabuki. Only there the dark curtain drops to reveal the light. Here the white dropped to reveal the black. I savored this wonderful spectacle and was glad to have been awakened to see it. Then back to bed, asleep in five minutes, not at all frightened—too entranced by the extraordinary sight.

  3 february 1992. Letter from Darrell Davis, who writes that he finds me “. . . decidedly literary . . . drawn to subtlety and completeness of characterization—of people, places, atmosphere—which seems to me a primarily literary pursuit. Is your continuing fascination with things Japanese a function of the incorrigible textuality of Japanese culture?” If so, this would explain, he thinks, “. . . the metaphorical direction your thinking about the culture seems to have taken—closer now to Barthes and to Burch.”

  Maybe. “Literature,” I replied, “has been for me the screen through which I view the world. It began very young when I discovered the public library and realized that I could control my world though the word. Reading was one way. Writing was even better. But,” I continued, “in Japan I never learned to read or write. Hence all signifiers and no signified, just like Barthes.” And this means “control without being controlled.”

  I still believe this. When you learn kanji you enter into a great mind-set: Things have only one meaning from then on—the assigned one. My spoken Japanese is all right, but since I can’t really read, it is still fluid, has not been defined by reading and writing, so I do not have to believe in it. My control is there, but only in English.

  Darrell also says that he cannot imagine my feeling “at home” in Japan because, “. . . it is hard to imagine sustaining the kind of detachment necessary to write, the kind of reflective commentary you do when you’re at home.” Maybe, but then I find anyone who is “at home” in this universe a person seriously deluded. I would hate to be at home. But I do sometimes now think of myself as a bridge. But what kind? Suspension? Single span? Draw? Arch?

  4 february 1992. Am snappy with the service. At Wendy’s the waitress is not paying attention to me, stares at the ceiling, looks around, peers into the kitchen. But, I am her customer, he to whom she owes her very job. I am cold as ice when I finally capture her attention. My eyes speak stern volumes. My tone could freeze. She stares. Does not comprehend, but is hurt. I am mollified, having caused deserved pain. But I do not relent. I keep it up until my hamburger is in hand, change grabbed. Only then do I permit myself a moué and turn away.

  Turn away to look at myself. Why did I do that? How could I behave that way? And then, there swims before me another pair of eyes, light blue, cold, outraged. My mother! When she is with the help or on the telephone talking to a reluctant tradesperson. My mother, ordering the service about. That was whom I turned into. I bite into my Wendy, pensive. I begin to believe in genes.

  The anima. Am I still carrying her around with me? It is undignified for a man going on sixty-eight to still act like the worst in his mother. It is unnatural. Or is it? Maybe everyone does this and either does not notice or is too ashamed to admit it.

  6 february 1992. Invective accelerating. The U.S. and Japan cannot say bad enough things about each other. Bad blood in the family of nations. Battling siblings. Easy enough to understand, though nonetheless deplora
ble. The U.S. slipping, lost its great supporting enemy in the collapse of the U.S.S.R. It needs another one, quick. Japan, slithering out of control, all cool heads hot in this drive to greed, displays an enormous insensitivity to others, and its own real concern for itself. America, angry, finds Japan an ingrate after all we did for it, and Japan, tired of being the idiot younger brother, makes remarks about the American lack of work ethic. All of this is easy to understand. What is not remarked upon is that the bickering is good for the economy of both countries. Just as wartime makes money, so do unfriendly relations. I don’t think anyone really believes in this animosity except the stupid. But there are so many.

  12 february 1992. A Ginza gentleman’s club, the last one. It is immaculately prewar. The paneling is light oak and the floor is parquet. The style is late art deco, with Aztec lines and a Grand Rapids finish. The small windows are leaded in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner, lozenges of gray and yellow. I look at walls, and there it is—a reproduction of Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak, one androgynous ephebe leaning over another, against sun struck mountains out of The Arabian Nights—the same as that which hung over our Ohio piano and over which wandered my infant eyes, wondering at the immensity and beauty of the world.

  13 february 1992. The sound of a temple bell. One does not hear the strike. Rather, the sound starts small and then rapidly builds, a soft explosion. The note is like some animal opening its mouth wide, the brazen roar afterward emerging.

  14 february 1992. At the game center. Boy and girl playing Cop Killer, shooting electrical impulses at uniformed cartoon figures, who splatter or not. Two controls. He is shooting most of the cops, but she pulls her trigger now and again and remembers to smile when he turns to look at her. I see he has a package of chocolate on his lap. It is St. Valentine’s Day. She has given him the chocolate, as is customary, and he has taken her to the only entertainment he knows anything about—video games. She stifles a yawn when he is not looking. But he rarely looks at her. He is interested in the game. Pow! Wow! Zap!

  19 february 1992. Japan-bashing by America has begun to make slight ripples here. I find myself regarded on the train platform or in the subway car. Just regarded, assessed. I try to look European.

  As this schism grows I am aware of other cracks. Ones I have myself climbed into. Smoking, for example. Since stopping I have become militant, a born-againer. I cannot “stand” to see people smoking where they “ought not.” And so I march right up and tell them. And what a full, warm feeling I experience when I identify myself as a member of the “right” side. I feel for a moment almost a hate. It is warming, like a flame. This is what bashers must feel all the time—on either side. And they get hooked on their highs. Prejudice is addiction.

  24 february 1992. The shinchoge is blooming in the cold. Spiked little blossoms of lavender and mauve, and giving the scent of summer right in the middle of winter. A lush, strong, tropical perfume—fleshy, like gardenia or magnolia—wafting from the small flowers, smelling of hot nights on these cold days.

  Not a popular plant in Japan, however. The reason is that it was planted around latrines to temper the stench. The reputation lingers no matter how nice the smell. I had a plant in the house once. My cleaning lady’s eyebrows arched. This was not done.

  25 february 1992. Dinner with [Numata] Makiyo. Back here for dessert and coffee, he asked to see the pictures I had taken of him on our various trips—in Europe, in America, and him at university in Hawaii. He is now thirty and had, I thought, done well. He has his own company, has branches abroad, is married, and is taking care of his ailing parents. Success.

  Recently, to be sure, with the collapse of Japan’s inflated land prices I thought that as a developer he might be experiencing a slight recession. But I was not prepared for his suddenly telling me, in that earnest and schoolboy fashion of his, about a property in the desert outside Los Angeles that he has bought and is now making payments on.

  Finally I understood that, in the oblique manner that has always been his, he was offering it as collateral. Collateral for what, and to whom? Well, to me. He needed a million yen before the end of the week.

  This was surprising. I had not known things were so bad for him because he had never told me. I did not want the collateral, I said, but I would transfer the amount to his account tomorrow morning. One millon yen is a lot of money—eight thousand dollars. He promised to pay it all back by the end of June. Then I told him how surprised I was, and gently chided him for not letting me know the true state of his affairs. Gentle though I was, this push was enough.

  He suddenly broke into tears—the first in the eight years of our friendship. The strong Makiyo cried like a man, choking back the sobs, face awash. Finally he said, “I wanted so much to succeed.” I knew that was so. For as long as I have known him, it has been winning the marathon, and believing that if you throw yourself into it you will get it, whatever it is. “My Way” is his favorite song. And now, in front of me, the person who knows him best, he must admit failure. I told him what one tells people—the truth: One failure is not for a lifetime; everyone fails at something.

  After a time the sobs stopped. He wiped his face and smiled ruefully at himself as though he were his own little brother. I gave him more Kleenex. He understood me, and my reasons. I could no longer continue to embarrass him by witnessing his tears—so in the most open and friendly fashion I told him to get out. Tomorrow I will go to the bank, and at the same time will now see my friend as an allegorical figure. Makiyo—Financially Over-Extended Japan.

  26 february 1992. Coming back from visiting Eric in the hospital I pass again the small house atop an embankment: low tile roof, paper windows behind which a lamp is shining, bamboo fence, and a plum tree in blossom. The simplicity, the beauty, the comfort. When all houses looked like this, I did not notice. Now this is one of the few left.

  In the neighborhood, two like it are already gone. In their places, correct concrete boxes with metal roofs and double-paned windows, and that Tinker­toy look called postmodern. I know why too. Back then, tile and bamboo and paper were least expensive and came in standardized units. Now concrete and plastic do.

  In the subway coming home I observe the young. Eyes deep in manga, ears surrendered to Walkman. They try to insulate themselves. I see them making their bulky hamburger-fed bodies small, the girls particularly conscious of their size, trying to forget it by banding conspicuously together and talking “boy” language.

  Boys are solitary, wear black, hide in the corners. Neither sex has any use for the elderly staring foreigner. Nor should they. He can do nothing for them. They need nothing from him. And I remember when just such a look of mine could bring a smile. Back then they were happy to have foreigners talk to them. Now the foreigners are happy if they can talk to the youngsters.

  21 march 1992. Reading Cyril Connolly. He says: “It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates, for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.” For him expatriation is all about escape. “It gives them a breathing space in which to free themselves from commercialism, family ties, racial ties.” OK, but expatriation is more than that. It is an embracing, a reaching out, a moving into as well as a moving away from. He seems to think so too—eventually.

  Henry James, his example, “. . . was not an expatriate in so far as he repatriated himself as an Englishman.” Yes, but there seems to be another position, which Connolly ignores. Mine. I am at home in Japan precisely because I am an alien body. I am no longer a member over there, and cannot become a member over here—this defines my perfectly satisfactory position. One does not have to be a member of something.

  23 march 1992. Fumio and Masudo come to Eric’s long-empty house to help me. They move his books, some three thousand of them, from upstairs to down, so he can stagger in from the hospital and pick out those he wants to take with him to Melbourne. I will catalogue the pictures; we have already selected his clothes. And everything else must somehow to be gotten rid of. It is li
ke the last reel of Citizen Kane—all of those belongings. But Kane was dead and Eric is not. He must sit here and look at the ruins himself.

  He cannot but think of better times—of the day he bought that book, or the week he read it. Things still have voices. They will speak to him. I can see him struggling not to feel. Through the partial paralysis pain still reaches. I cannot bear to look.

  24 march 1992. The Kawakita Memorial Film Institute prize is given to [cinematographer] Miyagawa Kazuo, standing there on the podium, hands folded, smiling, eighty-four. I know his age because Madame Kawakita, sounding slightly scandalized, said, “Why he’s just as old as I am.” Mifune Toshiro, looking severe and sage, told me that he was seventy-two. Said it with an air of surprise and that kind of ironic seriousness that is so much a part of him and that has never appeared on the screen. Polite as always, he then remembered that some years ago he had promised to come to something or other I was organizing and then couldn’t. I had forgotten all about it, but he hadn’t.

  Kurosawa, now eighty-one, told me about his new film. Does not have a proper title. “First time that ever happened.” Doesn’t like the working title, Madadayo, nor do I. I remind him that the phrase was used by Ozu in a film. He nods. One more count against it. Wanted to call it Hide and Seek, but Daiei doesn’t like that. Shakes his head, smiles.

  25 march 1992. Perhaps more than an American high school, Japan is like an English public school. You are supposed to learn, excel, and win athletic distinctions—not for yourself, but for the house and for the country, for being Japanese. First on the field, all for the sake of your school. And then, the emptiness when you graduate.