The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  Not so drunk as to ignore danger the man flees, and is pursued and stopped in the middle of the street, in front of a suddenly halted truck. There he is thrown to the ground, and the three cops pull his arms behind his back. But he seems the stronger, or at least the more assertive. He flings them off. By now a crowd has gathered—impassive citizens, jeering Iranians, and myself. The three police blow their whistles to summon help. Two patrol cars and ten policemen come. These struggle in the street, hats falling off, perspiring, trying to look authoritative, but unable to contain one smallish nude man. They produce a straight jacket, but do not know how to put it on while the man yells and lashes out. He hits one cop in the groin with his foot and the Iranians cheer while the cop rolls on the ground. Finally, however, force prevails. The culprit is trussed up, put into a body bag, the top (in this heat) is drawn shut, and he is lugged into the waiting patrol car. The Iranians ironically applaud. The Keystone Kops try to look fierce. And I wonder why they did this. The man was no menace. He was merely drunk and naked and going about his life. But he put up a good fight.

  3 july 1992. Dinner with Makiyo. As I drag out more reluctant information from him, I find things much worse than I had thought. From its affluent height of several years back, his Ace Corporation has fallen low indeed. The bubble has burst. Anyone in the development business is out of a job. I now learn that he and his wife are camping out in their former apartment, staying rent-free until it is bought by someone else, and have already sold off their belongings. They just have their bedding and their clothes. The fine office is gone too. He now rents a corner of someone else’s. We talk of his future. He is convinced he can make it, can get by, can return my money in another three months.

  5 july 1992. Several encounters. At the hospital, getting my angina medicine, I have coffee at the single non-smoking table in the cafeteria. I asked the waiter for coffee, iced, no sugar. This they cannot do because, he says, they put sugar in when they make it. “And what do your diabetic patients do?” I ask. “They order iced tea,” he says.

  An older Japanese woman looks at me, seated opposite, and asks, “Do you have diabetes?” I say no and she laughs. Then we talk about the singularity of sugar in the hospital cafeteria at all, and smoking allowed at all tables but ours. She says to stop it you would need only one person to take responsibility. Just one. But, she concludes, you won’t find this in Japan nowadays. I find that I remember Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” This I attempt to translate. Much taken with it, she writes it down on her paper napkin.

  Later, on the subway, there would be a seat if the man would only move over. He has half a seat on either side. I excuse myself politely but he does not budge. Then I see why. The seat is made of stripes of varied color. He is securely in one such. This he thinks is a seat. His seat. It is marked like a seat. If the others leave space and are sloppy that is their concern. Then when he is doing something properly, according to the rules, this foreigner comes in and asks him to move, threatening the symmetry of the universe.

  This evening in the park, high school kids are raising a rumpus, setting off fireworks right next to the Kenei Kiyomizudera temple, which has big no-smoking, no-bonfire, no-naked-flame signs next to it. A man in his pajamas emerges followed by a lady in a housecoat. “Make them go away,” she says. At first I think she means the idle, quiet Iranians lounging about, but she doesn’t. Looks at me and I say, “Those kids?” “Yes.” Then she says, “We called the patrol car half an hour ago. They never come.” The final rocket and the whooping kids leave. Ten minutes later the lazy patrol car pulls up. “What’s the commotion?” it wants to know. “What was the commotion,” she corrects and then lectures the sheepish patrolmen. After they tip their caps and leave she comes back. “That’s our tax money,” she says pleasantly.

  “Do you live in that house here, right here in the park?” I ask. “Yes, that’s us.” “I’m jealous,” I say, “It must be wonderful to live here in the park.” “No, it is not,” she says. “One good thing though. These Iranians usually keep the noisy kids out.”

  18 july 1992. Shibuya, never my favorite part of the city, has now, like Roppongi or Harajuku, become positively irritating. This is because it is fatuous. Filled with the chinless young in their finery, it is all about people shopping and being seen. The goods are junk but expensive, the customers are teenaged, rich, and bored. The mothers and fathers of the Japan to come. Cannot find what I want amid all the fashion. I want a sensible desk.

  29 august 1992. Tamasaburo invited me to his solo dance recital at the Saison Theater. Four dances, and an almost equal amount of time taken up by the three intermissions. Such waste of time is luxurious—like those glossy pages made up mainly of white margins, or those vacant nouvelle-cuisine plates containing one potato, seven peas, a bit of fish, and lots of porcelain.

  The longer number is a new one, The Princess Yang-Kuei-fei, which was very Parco-style—since Parco-Seibu-Saison [department store chain] owns the theater: lots of beige on beige, with pair after pair of tan chiffon curtains which grandly open one set after another, like the picture window in a model home, but with rivulets of dry ice surging across the parquet. Hidden behind the last, barely visible under the layers, stands the princess herself. When revealed, Tamasaburo is all Chinese, with a porcelain white face and hands, peach at the edges, pink around the eyes.

  I admire the way that he has incorporated Chinese dance into this Japanese syntax: the sudden stances, the accusing look, and the masculine turn of the neck that Chinese impersonators cultivate. He had observed this well: there was nothing simpering about this Yang-Kuei-fei.

  Afterward I went to the dressing room. He was still in make-up, and seen up close rather alarming, all whitewash and red paint. I was reminded of the ruffled Velasquez at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: From a distance that ruff is the finest tulle, one can even see the threads. Up close, it is Francis Bacon, all smeared whites, finger painting.

  He was busy smearing lotion on himself, but wiped his hands, smiled, and handed me a big package. I responded with a wrapped, framed canvas. He was giving me photos of his former boxer friend, and I was giving him a picture I painted some years ago called The Boxer and His Opponent. One champ for another.

  I left him scraping off the make-up and noticed that he wore his towel tight under his armpits, hiding his breasts, just as though he had any.

  4 september 1992. Big official party for the ASEAN Festival at the Hilton, paid for by the Tokyo City Government. At the Hilton because it is just next door to the city offices. Also because the food is good. A spread: smoked salmon, steak tartare, and beef Wellington.

  There, drinking rather than eating, was Edward G. Seidensticker. He had just arrived. “Why is it,” he wanted to know, “that when one is older the days seem to go by so much faster?” Then, to answer his own question, “It is because one is oneself so much slower.” He is then whisked off by three city officials, and in turn their deep talk is interrupted by the entrance of the Awa Odori dancers, who snake about the room deafening us all with drums and bells.

  When Ed returns, I lead him to the beef where, chewing, he asks, “Why is it that just when things get truly noisy, city officials always take one aside for deep discussions? This one was about whether Japan is a hand-society or a foot-society.”

  As the dancers cavorted among the tables, the pretty kimonoed girls in attendance produced tenugui and tried to place them around the guests’ necks. This was to indicate that one should join the rout. A number did. I saw ambassadors waving their hands and smiling foolishly. Not us, however. Ed simply refused.

  I took refuge with Robin Berrington, the American cultural attaché. “Foreigners like this,” he said with a smile. “That, at least, is the general assumption.” Then we remarked that everything had been especially Japanese this evening—including not one, but two Fuji Musume, and an exhibition of mochi pounding on top of that. It was perhaps a
n ethnic return for ethnic entertainment, since the other ASEAN people from Indonesia, Malaysia, etc., had brought all of their things over for the festival. But was it not also “something for our little brown brothers?” We remarked on the absence of little brown brothers at the festivity. Perhaps they were having another party, separate but equal. We are suspicious of governments digging into culture.

  Going home through the heat I remark upon the number of fans in hands. In the subway I read in the evening paper that sales for hand fans is over double what it was last year. A new ethnic interest, I wonder. Or just the heat.

  6 september 1992. In the subway I see a young couple in each other’s arms, willing victims to their glands. And I experience impatience with them. Then, realizing this, I begin to wonder why. I could just as logically experience pleasure at the sight. Why did I choose to condemn these two? Then, something in the position of his arm and her head made me realize that I was associating them with the use of cordless telephones in public places. My objections were not moralistic. They were ethical. They were based on the irritation that public flaunting and other ostentations always ought call forth and with me invariably do.

  7 september 1992. I am in the downstairs theater; the contortions I have already seen are continuing on the screen. The scene is where she, to taunt her husband, tangos with the other woman before beginning her short-term lesbian affair, a sequence I already know.

  The tango is over and the band is playing the final reprise. I remember the scene because in back of the accordion player, a door suddenly opens. Some accident, probably, and on low budget soft-core you don’t retake. I watched this door opening and wondered what was in the room next door, but it was too dark to see. Now I will watch the door opening again. But it does not. The accordionist smiles as always, fingers flying, and the door behind him remains shut. But I had seen it open. What has happened?

  A dream. It means what it means, but what else does it say? I know about the attractions of a safe danger, and I know about the pull of power—to buy from people something with which they might not otherwise willingly part. But what is in the other room?

  8 september 1992. In the evening Tamasaburo over, bringing sushi for our supper. [A shorter version of this meeting occurs in Public People, Private People.] Wants to talk and so I learn a lot about his early life, about his feelings for his adopted father, about the replacements he has discovered since, and about how awful Utaemon is to just everyone, not just him. He also wants to listen. And so we have a real discussion about love and about life.

  We talk about tastes. Since we share one, we wonder about this, what it means. He has accounted for it in his father feelings. Father-complex is the term he uses, there being such in Japanese. I say that being an onnagata anyway, it is not surprising that such masculinity is preferred. No, he says, the liking came first and being a female impersonator second.

  I mentioned that our preferences do, however, imply not only some distaste for oneself but also the need for a degree of power. This is a new idea to him. His eyes widen. Power? “Yes,” I say, “successfully seducing—all seduction is about power.”

  “But, I don’t like gays,” he says, considering, “not to sleep with certainly; they are too much like me.” “Precisely,” I say, “It is unnatural. Love is opposites, not similarities. Men and women are opposites, and in a way gays and straights are opposites too. But gays and gays . . . ?” “Unnatural,” he says with a laugh.

  18 september 1992. Just back from Fukuoka, I miss Richard Howard and Anne Hollander, both of whom I wanted to see in Tokyo. They went to Kyoto by train as I flew over them on my way back to the capital. Talked to Howard on the phone. He is enjoying Japan and is much taken by the kindness but (lowering his voice) confesses also to being taken aback in that the Japanese do not know how to comport themselves as intellectuals.

  This he discovered in his discourses here. Japanese on the panel did not discuss. They agreed and then, irrelevantly, gave their opinions. Nothing was built, nothing was concluded, and everything was at random. I agree, having noticed this often enough before, having heard Susan Sontag, another intellectual, complain of just this. How can I explain that there is another discourse other than the rational? How to tell them that logic is not the only structure. How to inform them that our dialectical narrative is not the sole one? So I do not attempt to. I merely say that they must not miss Ryoanji.

  21 september 1992. To Kodansha to supervise the translation of my long essay on Yokoo Tadanori. Again I see the difference between the two languages and the hopelessness of communicating. My best effects fall flat because they are conceived in English and I do not know enough about the connotations of Japanese to duplicate them.

  Precisely, I do not know the specific gravity of their words and they do not know those of mine. Particularly difficult are those ideas for which there are no words. So the Japanese use ours. Thus my “irony” becomes aironie, and “style” becomes sutairu. Do the Japanese readers understand this? I am assured they do. I doubt it. If anything they understand something not intended. Aironie will end up known, but only as something quite different from ‘irony.’

  Editor is also apologetic. It seems that Yoko, Mishima’s widow, is not going to allow two of Shinoyama’s pictures in the Yokoo Tadanori essay, and she wants me to take out the part where I say her famous husband had no sense of humor. Actually I did not say that. I said he had no sense of irony, rather, that he had a sense of intrigue. He had no appreciation for humor, but had a great, braying laugh that stood in for it. He did, however, have a pointed sense of ridicule. But I am not, please, to say so. I agree. Yoko will be mollified. She has taken further aversion to me because, among other reasons, I did not like that camped-up, window-dressed version of the Noh plays she did, though I think Yukio would have. Also, anyone who knew her sainted husband as a living, breathing, practicing homosexual is anathema.

  Working with the translator, I tell him that my reference to Issey Miyake and other dress designers is sarcastic. He understands. Suggests I call the celebrated couturier a yofukuya. I agree at once.

  22 september 1992. I notice a change in women’s fashion; for once it is not ordained by the syndicate, but by women themselves. The ones I see are developing a new style. It consists of more expensive materials arranged in more expensive ways. Silks and velvets tucked and pleated, a torso swathed and looped. These things cost money and are commensurate with new economic strength. I recall that when the West was consolidating its financial position at the end of the last century, women’s clothing turned into expensive upholstery, labor intensive.

  There is something else as well: The women are turning into royalty. There are lots of inset embroideries, tassels and cords, and crowns stitched onto the material. This makes the women a bit overdressed as they buy eggs and tofu in the neighborhood supermarket. There is also a smart turn to the military look—epaulets, aide-de-camp ribbon effects. I do not find this sinister. It is a part of the look of new money. All of this seen only in middle-class women, all of them now dressed in a particularly recognizable form of bad taste: the overtly ostentatious. (The covertly ostentatious forms a different kind of bad taste, that which is called good.)

  27 september 1992. Sunset over Shinobazu. The sky an autumn orange, clean, clear; the buildings on the far side, already black as ash with lighted windows like embers; and on the darkened pond, the late lotus toss their leaves in the night breeze, showing green above, white below, like poplar trees when the north wind blows.

  I think of passing time, of summer gone, but mostly I think of Magritte—that magical canvas of blue sky with nighttime buildings and a bright street light below. Art first, nature second. That is the natural order. Debussy did not look at waves; he looked at Hokusai.

  Elegiac, I stand at the verge and watch the sunset slide into night. Never again, never again, I banally opine, and then again wonder idly if there is no way ever to hold onto the beautifully transient. No—one must instead celebrat
e the evanescence. That is the only way.

  And I suddenly think of Roger Casement. That is what his diaries meant. With their lists of size, their correspondence of length and worth, he was in his way trying to stop time, to account for it, to turn these lads immortal. Of course, he never writes of they themselves, only mentions their single quality, but then that is the part he wished to preserve. And he did. There they stretch, anonymous, shadowed figures with floodlit groins. What I find unpleasant about Casement is that he also, with equal passion, put down how much he paid.

  Me, I also want to snatch beauty whole from the mud of time. I want beauty, grace, and good will, to be recorded. That, and my own small part in arranging it.

  1 october 1992. Frank and Chizuko take me out for what he describes as a “bite.” Ginza, back streets, elegant, restrained Kyoto-style façade. Inside all subdued colors, plain wood, the kind of place that even smells expensive.

  It being autumn we started with a small tray of hors d’oeuvres, which contained a single piece of grilled sea eel on rice, a chestnut, half open, a quail egg disguised as a baby persimmon, a small purple fall potato, glutinous wheat paste in a maple leaf pattern, and pine needles made of soba, all held by a real maple leaf already turned. This kind of thing is cuisine-kitsch, and is dignified only by its expense.

  Followed by fish, raw sole, yellowtail and bonito. After this, dobinmushi, an expensive Kyoto dish, a teapot filled with mushrooms—the excessively dear matsutake—shrimp, ginkgo nuts, white fish, and trefoil, all steeped. You pour out the soup into rustic sake cups and then dig into the pot.

  Next, my favorite, nasudengaku, a young eggplant baked, then spread with two kinds of miso, then re-baked. Followed by duck, succulent pink slices in a sauce. Then, a perfectly toasted slab of rice ball with red miso soup and baby clams, pickles, and tea. Sake, whiskey, and beer as well, and the bill must have been hundreds of dollars. But that is what the best kaiseki cuisine has always been about—ostentation and the expensive freshness of things.