The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  27 july 1994. Ed [Seidensticker] had been having computer trouble and Patrick [Lovell] fixed it, so he has asked him out to dinner and me as well, since I was the go-between and since they really do not know each other except over the console.

  Ed also is having hip trouble. He comes around the corner, walking slowly with a cane, his foot turned inward in that typical way. He still insists it is just a charley horse, and that it will go away, all he has to do is use it. I must tell him this is not so, but I will pick my time.

  He takes us to the Ueno Indian place where we are waited on by lively Nepalese boys, and during mouthfuls speak of various things. I decide to tell him about his hip. But he has already come to the same conclusion: “I know, I know. A replacement.” Then, “But not here, not here.”

  I looked, mystified, around the restaurant. “No, not here, silly,” he said, “I meant Japan. Japanese doctors are just too, well, too virtuoso. They will reach in and hit a high C with the scalpel.”

  Then wiping up his masala with the last of his nan, he began wondering why his machine caused him so much trouble and Patrick, always thoughtful, was able to explain to both of us something of the mysterious nature of these word processors to which we have lent ourselves.

  When time came to pay, Ed made some pleasantries about our sharing the bill but I managed to have it delivered to him and, since it was his invitation, he paid with good will.

  28 july 1994. The twelfth Kawakita Award ceremony. It has been a dozen years since I stood there and got the first one and there was Madame Kawakita, smiling, and there was Kazuko making a winner’s handshake. And now they are dead—today is also the anniversary of Madame Kawakita’s death.

  There was a picture of the three of them—father, mother, and daughter, taken just before his death. Under this picture, the empty stage and the voice of Marcel Guilaris. It was he who won this year’s prize, but he is hospitalized, heart condition, and so he taped his message.

  It was a subdued party. Yodogawa Nagaharu is now so bowed that to speak to him you have to bend double yourself. Also, he has stopped being affable. He is brusque with the boy who handles the mike. He is like a man who has just realized that this is an emergency. The emergency is death. He might not be here next year.

  With Roger Ebert, 1994. japan times

  28 july 1994. I took Roger [Ebert] and his wife, Chaz, to lunch. They had been to Kyoto and Chaz, big, black, handsome, said that people looked a lot at her, as I imagine they did. And I hope with admiration.

  Tells me she made many a mistake. At Ise Shrine she was invited to ask any question she wanted and so she, thinking of mystical Shinto, asked, “Will there be peace in our time?” The shrine head looked uncomfortable and then said, “Maybe you would like to ask something like how many priests there are here.”

  Roger has been reading The Inland Sea and is able to quote whole sections, which is gratifying to both of us. Any author likes this, and kind Roger loves to give pleasure.

  After lunch they are going off to Sega Park to see virtual reality. He has a theory that it is really only good for games. That any movie using virtual reality would so work against the subjectivity of the film experience that it would not be satisfying at all. He believes that film demands a passive state, a suspended vision, which virtual reality rends.

  30 july 1994. Out into this heat with Jonathan [Rauch]. Seven in the evening and still hot. Drag him to Hyakunincho to show off the latest demographic developments. Girls all wilted and running. Boys sweating and showing stains under arms and over crotch. Thai girl comes up and wants to know how to say how hot it is in Japanese. I tell her. She repeats it and then uses it, I notice, to begin other conversations. Beautiful Persian man with one of the girls. “Are you a customer or a pimp?” I ask. He smiles, “Neither, a friend.” Turns out he lives with her. “Then you are a stud,” I say. “No,” he says, with that smile of his, “It’s too hot.” Jonathan and I both stand there, big spenders in the whore-house but really far too shy to try anything with this resplendent, shining, dripping presence.

  1 august 1994. To Karel van Wolferen’s for dinner. Also there Ed, Ian [Buruma], and Gwen [Robinson]. Ed’s leg is bad; he walks slowly, says it hurts. Says he went to the doctor. I ask which doctor. Acupuncture doctor, he says. No wonder he doesn’t get well.

  A few drinks in him, however, and he livens up. Tells a joke: “Descartes walks into a bar and the bartender asks, ‘Same as always?’ And the French philosopher says, ‘I don’t think . . .’ and vanishes.” Cheered by the success of this sally he essays another. The three kings are bringing tribute but Melchior trips over the lintel of the stable and says, “Jesus Christ!” “Oh, Joseph,” says Mary, turning to her husband, “that is a much nicer name than Irving.”

  Then we talk about North Korea. Ian and Gwen are going—as tourists. They have to get their visas in Beijing and then take the train. Twenty-four hours in this heat. Gwen says she is going to be a mistreated movie star, having heard of the predilections of the Dear Leader. Ian wonders what he will become. Ed wonders if they are going to get back at all.

  4 august 1994. Dr. [Robert] Owen here for the AIDS conference in Yokohama. We stroll through the heat around the pond and he tells me the latest. He thinks no vaccine will be discovered, that eventually over the eons those who are left will become immune. We talk about safety. He tells me why it was that the homo population proved so prone. Not only were there the Owen Cells (named after their discoverer) dragging the poison in, but that so many in the New York and San Francisco bathhouse crowd were shooting up. He thinks that drug use in such venues was very high and much of it was intravenous. A real recipe. Otherwise, he still thinks that fellatio is small risk—but perhaps only in context of the big risk of buggery.

  Owen is utterly out of whatever closet he may once have been in. Is resident Concerned Gay Medical Personnel, or some such. This being so, everything is devoted to the political aspect of homosexuality. And this means exclusivity. His is a polarized view. There are homos in the world and then there are heteros. Nothing else. A bipolar existence. Table d’hôte enforced. Either Lunch A or Lunch B. No à la carte.

  All of his stories have a homo conclusion; all of his references are to the “gay community”; all conclusions point to a closed and intensely self-conscious group society. Part of the reason, of course, is that he is talking to me. But another part is that he has committed himself. And when you do this, you invest. Political preference takes over. You become a card-carrying Catholic, a card-carrying Communist, a card-carrying Cocksucker.

  10 august 1994. I buy a cold drink from the machine. It says, in English, “Apple,” then, in kana, Apuru, and there is a picture of the rosy-cheeked fruit. But nowhere at all does it say ringo, the Japanese word for apple. This is odd, I think, not to have the product named in the tongue of the realm. But not if the realm is Japan and the tongue Japanese—happens all the time.

  I search for analogies. What if apple juice were known solely as jus de pomme in the U.S.A., what would that mean? Well, it would mean a new marketing device for apple juice, and it would presume a more moneyed and perhaps more literate audience, and it would very plainly say “new product.” All of which it says in Japanese as well.

  But I do not think there would be the assumption that pomme is a new English word, and that it has now fully entered the U.S. vocabulary. Though English-speakers appropriate (as do all other speakers), and such words as “chauffeur” are now English, there has not been the wholesale appropriation which Japan practices, often at the cost of understanding itself.

  What about the poor farmers in far Tohoku, who do not yet know what an apuru is and are at this moment shaking their heads over the just-purchased can? Well, things happen fast. In no time at all the native tongue will have curled itself around the new word. Such appropriation of Japanese-English is, of course, not a new form of English, but a new form of Japanese.

  18 august 1994. A Virtual Reality Parlour in Shinjuku. You put on
the glove and helmet, and create this cartoon environment where everything is cardboard stiff and manga bright. I do not go in. I know what awaits. And besides, why should I, when the same thing is free on the streets of Shinjuku itself?

  Tokyo as virtual reality. The architecture is comic book bulky; the streets are paper thin; and everything looks like a set for what it is. No glove, no helmet—Natural Virtual Reality.

  19 august 1994. The August moon, round as a plate in the hot night sky. How many times have I gazed and remembered. It has become my memory dish, catching in its curved surface all of the icons of my past. The first time I remember looking and thinking was in 1942 at Newport News, after my mother had left and I was shipping out to Africa the following day. I walked on the beach and thought of the future. Now over fifty years later I walk in the park and think of the past.

  I remember gazing at the moon in New Caledonia and turning slowly, and there was Dae-Yung , his profile silver, gazing as well. Tonight, wandering alone in Ueno, I turn but only to look in the darkened eternity of the rows of stone lanterns leading to the black temple of Benten.

  19 november 1994. Big ruckus in Ueno. A rightist sound truck stops at the corner, and a black-shirted crew-cut youth begins his haranguing—something about Russia. Suddenly a fat little man from the crowd steps forward and in a surprisingly loud voice starts cursing. He tries to climb on the truck. And he stops the speech as the speaker climbs down and is joined by companions. They start shouting, but he shouts louder and with such energy that he backs them down. Then the police (ready for such an opportunity) arrive on the run.

  They cannot touch the sound truckers, public nuisance though they are, but they can answer a complaint. Soon they have come between the screaming fat man and the furious rightists. In the end the fat man is led away and the sound truck crew is bid go elsewhere, which the youths meekly do. I see the fat man let go at the next corner.

  And all the while, crowds of folks watching. No one does anything. Just as no one does anything about the haranguing rightists and their noise pollution. I don’t do anything either. And I remember how disturbed Eric used to be at these noisy black-shirted rightist throngs—they reminded him so of Germany in the Hitler days. But here someone did something, for whatever reason—that gesticulating little fat man.

  7 december 1994. Day of Infamy. To celebrate the occasion, the U.S. Postal Service is going to issue a new stamp showing the Hiroshima atomic bomb explosion with a caption about how many lives it saved. Though Japan has long been rather proud of something similar—Pearl Harbor—it now reacts with resentment and shock. I too am taken aback by the effrontery of the U.S. Postal Service. It seeks to legitimatize—but it won’t succeed.

  10 december 1994. Dinner at Karel van Wolferen’s. We discuss Oe Kenzaburo and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Karel thinks that it is bad that a person who had done nothing political since the 1960s should stand up and parrot the “Socialist line” about the anti-war clause in the Constitution. Mr. Sharkey, the Irish Ambassador, thinks that Karel is too close to the subject, having studied political parties for years. We ought step back and see the speech in context. Then we would see what a brave and courageous person Oe is.

  Karel then turned and said, “Donald here is always very quiet about such matters, what does he think?” I responded with, “Did you know that Oe is Itami Juzo’s brother-in-law?” This created the desired diversion and Yasuda Hisako, the young lawyer sitting next to me, said that this explained it all. Oe had once told her that he had a relative by marriage who was handsome as a screen idol.

  Karel was not to be dissuaded however, and so I said, “I think that Oe is a brave and honest person and that he has said what he believes about the government and its coercive ways; he has identified his own society, and in his own responsible actions has suggested the corrective.” This, of course, ended the discussion and we went on to some excellent black goat cheese, some fruit, and a gingerbread “person” from Amsterdam whom we dismembered and ate.

  13 december 1994. Went to again see Yukinojo Hengei [An Actor’s Revenge]—a melodramatic warhorse all caparisoned up with some of the slickest graphics in Japanese cinema and sent out to canter. The line between old-fashioned purport and contemporary intention creates a hovering irony, which never settles but provides a knowing atmosphere.

  Whether Hasegawa Kazuo, playing the role for the second time, the first being the prewar Kinugasa version, knew this is unlikely. Big ham, he played his double role with his usual earnest dedication. But in the 1960s it was too late for a man dressed as a woman to make love to a woman without raising resonance. The fragile ironies of the picture sustain a spirit of fun that is neither satire nor camp. It is something else—a very subtle experience. One wonders also whether Ichikawa himself knew quite what he was doing.

  I was there, on the set when the love scene was taken. Hasegawa, heavily made up, was embracing Wakao Ayako, who was very businesslike about it. Neither seemed to think that what they were doing was in any way strange. Only I thought that. And perhaps Ichikawa. Maybe he did know what he was doing. I remember the eternal cigarette at a flippant angle, and an amused look when he turned away from the camera.

  14 december 1994. Teshigahara Hiroshi’s Christmas party, the entrance to his big Ichigaya house all decorated with massive crossed bamboos—that material which has become his—a tunnel leading to an enormous downstairs atelier already filled when I arrived.

  There was ex–Prime Minister Hosokawa, glass in hand; actress Miyazawa Rie in a boldly cut dress; I went to talk with Akiyama Kuniharu and his wife Takahashi Aki, the pianist. She was going to do a Paul Bowles disk, and so we talked about him and his music. I told her that he once told me that the theme for the final movement of the two-piano concerto was occasioned by a leaky roof—the sound of drops falling in an assortment of pans.

  Takemitsu there as well, but I did not ask about the opera. I have asked about it enough, and each time the answer is a deep sigh. Then, tall, withered, elegant in black Hiroshi’s ex-wife, Kobayashi Toshiko, whom I remember as a chubby stripper in the Kinoshita Carmen film. “Well, people say they want me to go back onto the stage, but what in?” I do not mention the play I once wrote for her—unperformed. Instead I suggest the Yvonne Bray role in Les Parents Terribles. “The Cocteau,” she says as though remembering her childhood, “Yes, of course, we were too early in doing his plays—now is the time, don’t you think?”

  Another actress—Kishida Kyoko, whom I had first met when she was covered with blood in Mishima’s Salome, then again met covered with sand in Hiroshi’s Woman in the Dunes. Now the grand old lady of Japanese drama.

  Kanaseki Hisao and Kuniko—in a pensive mood because they had gone to see Pulp Fiction. What had they expected, I wondered? “It wasn’t the violence; it was the attitude.” I told them it was just this brutal cool that had sold the tickets.

  The journal entries now grow fuller. As Richie gets older, his life becomes more valuable the less there seems to be left of it. He was going to leave behind the record of half a century, so he was writing for posthumous readers. This is indicated by his interest in the mechanics of journal keeping and his reading of the journals of others—not only those of Boswell, who remained a model for him, but of Saint-Simon, Pepys, the Goncourts, Waugh, Isherwood, and such contemporaries as John Cheever and Alan Bennett.

  8 january 1995. Dae-Yung having gone back to Korea after our ten days together in Kyoto, I tell myself how happy I am to be alone again. But it isn’t true. I miss him. So, after work, I go out and observe. The way to escape from one’s inside is to look at the outside and attempt to describe it.

  For example, with the New Year a new male fashion for the young has appeared. Before it was all hip-hop pants and the baseball cap worn backward. This is now all gone. The new look for the adolescent is to wear the stone-scrubbed designer jeans as low on the hips as possible. The belt cuts right along the pubic line. Along with this is a plethora of chains—key chains, wal
let chains, chains around the waist and around the neck. Also, an amount of piercing—the newly fashionable face jewelry. I saw a boy whose ears were covered with rings—a small elephant as he jingled his way about. One with eyebrow rings. One with an inconvenient lip ring. How does he eat? No tit rings, I should think, and no cock rings either. If it is not on view, why have it? The other anomaly is that all of this metal is only on the males. Girls have earrings and that is that. As in certain species of grouse, it is the male who provides the display.

  10 january 1995. In Ueno, dozens of people all in white snowsuits, and white bands around their heads to denote perseverance. They were stopping other people, turning from one group to another as though in some kind of feeding frenzy. Indeed, they reminded me of a flock or a school as they dipped and darted about. And as they approached they shouted out something that sounded like: Saiko desu ka? (“Aren’t things just great?”) At the same time they flourished a large board with paper and pencil attached. I stopped behind a middle-aged woman and her quarry, an old man with a briefcase. She was telling him all he had to do was pencil over the characters lightly printed on the page, sign his name and give his address, and everything would from then on be saiko. Such is the unquestioning, uncomplaining, uncomprehending nature of the populace that he did.

  Now interested, I followed a few around and before long a youngish woman came up asking if I were saiko, and I saw that she was exhausted, as were they all, with their darting movements. Were they part of a new religion? No, no, she shook her head, retreating. She had wanted to ask the questions, but was not prepared to supply the answers. Giving up on me at once she retreated and I, now quite interested, followed. Though she got away I managed to attract a fat young man, bulging out of his snowsuit and panting. In the face of my questions he produced a book from his backpack and brandished it. It had on its cover a picture of a man with charismatic eyebrows.