The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  I wonder how I feel about all of this. My leftover liberal reaction is to voice concern and pity. But only to voice it, not to do anything about it. Last night I was picking my way home through the homeless in Ueno Station, feeling bad about them but not feeling bad for them, not to the extent of giving out food or money, for example. Empty sentiment warmed me, but not them.

  27 january 1996. The police are having trouble with the evacuees. Some eighty of the homeless remain in Shinjuku Station, making noises, vowing permanency and, according to several quotes from restaurateurs in the proximity, “making a stink.” They are there also because they now have nowhere to go. The temporary shelter (complete with fence and moat) made for them can contain two hundred, but now contains less than half of that number. Nonetheless no more are being accepted because, you see, the deadline for entrance has run out. Also, since it was made for the Shinjuku sufferers, sufferers from other parts of the city cannot use it. Ten such hopefuls were rejected on the grounds that they had not lived at the Shinjuku eviction site.

  In the meantime the government is attempting to steal some billions of yen from the taxpayers (about five thousand from each man, woman, and tax-paying child in the entire country) in order to bail out the criminal housing organizations whose generous loans the yakuza now refuse to pay back. The Diet is stalled. Sleek Hashimoto, the new P.M., says that this is the only solution.

  And continuing on is the three percent tax that so infuriated this patient public. Why do the people put up with it? Because they have no infrastructure through which to do anything else, that’s why. There is no way for them to express indignation. Consequently we all pay three percent on everything; we will also pay off the delinquent and fraudulent loan organizations; and the homeless will be all swept under society’s carpet.

  2 february 1996. With some friends to the boy brothels of Shinjuku. The first is named Janny (Johnny). Some half-dozen boys are behind the bar and the master, one Mr. Manabu, sits at the table with us and explains his wares. They are all nineteen and they are all straight—two highly unlikely statements. The “system,” as it is called, is that one makes one’s choice, then pays for one’s drinks (when I later paid for ours I found the amount equivalent to $35), then pays Mr. Manabu the sum of $170, one hundred of which is for the bedraggled boy when he returns after his two hours of passion in a hotel room, for which you will be soaked with another $60. Altogether it will cost about $300. We leave, but it is not the price which has deterred us, rather that the acned youths on display did not seem worth it.

  The next place was called B-Flat—though B-Sharp might have been a better name. We were smartly ushered in, face towels flourished, orders taken, and information cannily offered. All were nineteen, all were straight, third from left was biggest, two on the end knew how to be sodomized, most could be brought to perform fellatio, straight though they might be, and the financial system was precisely the same—indicating some degree of cooperation among such establishments as these.

  We ogled the merchandise and one of us foreigners wondered which one spoke English. None of them did, it transpired. “Oh, in that case . . . can’t even talk to them.” I also looked the boys over, but they naturally did not possess that appearance of innocence and lack of guile that so appeals to me. One of my friends, however, definitely liked the one on the left who, as a matter of fact, was already smiling back at him.

  When I left, business talk was on, and I later learned that one was eventually selected but that the chosen lad could not only not be sodomized, he also could not even sodomize properly. In addition, though able to perform fellatio he did not do so with any degree of zest. Maybe the place really ought to be called B-Natural.

  3 february 1996. Cold winds from Siberia, no place for the homeless. They have disappeared from Ueno and the press is silent about Shinjuku. But the police are busy elsewhere. Now they are closing Harajuku. This was an area around the station and by the park that on Sundays was given over to the excesses of the young. There were bands and dancers and skateboarders and rock-n-rollers. It started some twenty years ago when the Takinokozoku, taking their name from a brand-shop, took to the Sunday streets, posturing and posing. Over the years the place has assumed the look of a benign counterculture—like the green plaza in front of Shinjuku Station in the sixties.

  Law and order has long looked upon it with a cold eye. When the Iranians also gathered there to exchange their news and fry their kabobs, the cops found their reasons and moved in. Now they have moved on and destroyed the place by arguing that it is really only a “pedestrian paradise,” one of a number throughout the city, and they are closing them all because they really do no good, they provide meeting places for undesirables, and they do not benefit the merchants in the area. I notice that the Ueno and Ginza paradises are still open on Sundays. Perhaps some paradises are more paradisiacal than others.

  6 february 1996. Telephone call, voice at the other end, polite: “Mr. Richie?” And the years parted. It was Zushiden, after all this time. Just thought he would call me up. I was still around? I was OK? Yes, he was OK, too. No, no, was only fifty-six, not time to retire yet. We ought to get together.

  So we ought. His voice was that of thirty years ago, and I remembered the house in Otsuka, and Zushi making the bath and us both in it, and our fight in a hotel room when I was married and we could meet only in such places, and his marriage when he proved too big for the bride, and the bad daughter.

  “How is your bad daughter?” I asked. “Just the same,” he said. “And she is still here, with us, unmarried, no one wants her. I don’t blame them.” And I said, “Oh, Zushiden, it is so good to hear your voice,” for I had not known until that very moment how much I had missed hearing it.

  10 february 1996. I dump Jane, after all these years, something I had never thought I would do. And I know why—it is Emma Thompson’s fault, hers and the other “film versions,” and their vulgarity. Not Jane Austen’s fault, to be sure, but there had been signs that I would read no more.

  We decorate ourselves with our books (besides initially enjoying them, learning from them, and feeling through them), and define who we are—they are our standard-bearers. I in this way went through Marcel [Proust], now Jane. And without any regret at all, except for where to find a home for my beloved discard.

  One was at hand. Paul McCarthy, literate as he is, had never read Austen and so he received my Folger Society set of the novels and returned home well pleased.

  17 february 1996. Gwen [Robinson] over for dinner—brought cod steaks and Toll House cookies. I brought out the family album and showed pictures of my family, lying there like pressed flowers.

  This must have occasioned my dream: I was showing Gwen around the hospital I called home; there was a stir, and a grand procession entered. Very excited, I dragged her over and sank on my knees in front of a large, black woman who was leading all the others—banners, trumpets, doves flying overhead. Adoringly, I grabbed the big, black hand, turning to explain that this woman had saved my life “after the operation.” But the black hand was snatched away, and I looked up to see the white face and blue eyes of Madame Yourcenar looking reprovingly down. Guiltily I dropped the hand I had been about to kiss, reasoning that, of course Madame did not like displays of emotion. But then I suddenly realized the real reason. She had thought I had been about to kiss the ring and this would have blown her cover because she was really the Pope.

  19 february 1996. I went to pay my taxes and the fat man to whose lot I fell glanced over my forms and told me I had taken far too many deductions and, anyway, where were my receipts? I told him that in decades of faithful tax-paying this question had never been asked. “I’m asking it now,” said Mr. Takahashi, for such was his name.

  Said it in English. From the first he was firm, rebuffing my attempts to speak his language—for I speak it much better than he spoke mine. He was, it seemed, spoiling for a fight. I should be pleased, I suppose, that the Japanese are no longer intimidated by
a white face and a high-handed manner. And part of me is. But another part is not.

  So I told him that it was customary to accept what the citizen said and then, if necessary, carry on an investigation. “They cost money,” was the reply. “Well, you cost me money,” I said. He considered this and then he said, “OK, only next year you bring receipts, yes?” “Yes.” This was a very Japanese compromise, and I felt back on firm ground again—and got half a million yen refund.

  20 february 1996. Zushiden is fifty-six now, graying, white in the eyebrows, heavier, the rounded shoulders of age. We sit at the Press Club and look at each other—it has been about six years since we last met. Then we fill each other in on who has died. Not so many on his side—but a fellow member of the Chuo Wrestling Team whom I remember as a tall, young student dropped dead jogging just last month. The Team is going to have its reunion next month—at the Imperial Hotel, and it costs the equivalent of three hundred dollars each to attend. “I will go though. I am curious to see what all those old folks look like now.” I tell him (speaking as his senior) that one of the best things about being old is that it is so interesting, finding out what finally happens to other people.

  Over our fish (he cannot eat meat because of his stomach operation; I cannot eat it because of my arteries), we talk about finance. [Sato] Hisako has just told me that next month the banks are all going bust. “Even Dai-Ichi Kangyo?” I asked, referring to my bank, the largest in the world. “Oh, especially Dai-Ichi Kangyo.”

  Zushi says he doesn’t doubt it. Japan has lived long all by itself, a single family. Now it cannot afford to. It has to live with other countries. It cannot protect just its own interests, this is now counterproductive . . . look at the economic mess. He himself keeps his money in stocks and bonds and the post office. Not that it makes any difference. If Dai-Ichi Kangyo goes, the whole country goes.

  With Shiraishi Kazuko, Joan and Walter Mondale, Michishita Kyoko, Jack, 1996. donald richie

  Talk turns again to the errant daughter, who has now reformed, has a job, joined something like AA for delinquents, and lives at home. “Twenty-six and not married,” said Zushi. “Wish she would.” I agree that that would be nice. “Nice for me,” he says. “Get her out of the house.” This leads to talk of women in general. He has a kind of girlfriend but she is in America. Just like me, I tell him. I have a kind of boyfriend but he is in Korea.

  She was a college sweetheart. Did he know her when he was living with me? I wanted to know. “Let’s see, I was a junior then, no, I met her when I was a senior.” Then, with that big smile of his, “After I left you I graduated.”

  After hot apple pie and ice cream (bad for both stomach and arteries), I said goodbye until the next time and then came home where I had a message on my machine from Fumio—telling me that Takemitsu Toru died this afternoon.

  21 february 1996. Chris and I went to the wake for Takemitsu this afternoon. It was held in a small hall, and they had not expected so many to attend. When we got there the director was explaining to the family that he had thought only they would be there, that he was not prepared for the throngs, and that he hoped everything would be all right—by which I suppose he meant that he would not run out of incense or white chrysanthemums.

  Toru was in a brocade box at the far end of the room, and on it was a color picture of him. I laid my white chrysanthemum in front of it and prayed. The box seemed so very small, like a child’s coffin, and then I remembered that Toru was indeed small, but when he was alive with his bright eyes and his big smile one never noticed.

  His widow and daughter were there, looking as though they had been hit. On the steps I talked to Yanagimachi Mitsuo—Toru had done a beautiful score for his Fire Festival—and upstairs was Shinoda Masahiro and Iwashita Shima. He was crying. Toru had often written for his films, and had himself created much of Double Suicide.

  28 february 1996. I lunch with Gwen and we talk about an early division we both made—that between lover and friends. You could never fuck your friends, and you should not make friends with those you did fuck. We wonder how this came about.

  She thinks that she got the idea due to the anonymous brutality of her first experience. He was a cocksure young surfer, and she was sure of nothing. “I didn’t even know what was happening to me.” She did not enjoy it or even guess that she was supposed to. No orgasms for her, perhaps consequently, despite constant experimentation, none until she was over twenty. What she sought to repeat was the anonymity of the first encounter, its astonishing force, and the fact that she knew that somehow she made it happen—she had this power.

  We both agree that sex is about power, no matter how you cut it, and that the both of us are adept at losing the battle in order to win the war. We are also pleased that we have to a degree graduated: I love my friend, Dae-Yung, and she loves hers, Tim.

  13 march 1996. Dinner at Michishita Kyoko’s—the other guests were Shira­ishi Kazuko and Joan Mondale. Our hostess busied herself with glasses and dishes, and her female guests commented upon them—praising and finding pleasingly curious this and that, then turning gigglingly affirmative as women of a certain age often do together. It was nice for them, like playing house.

  I, however, the only man, could not play. Further, the house cat, an ex-tom named Jack, having been raised with women, smelled me out, grew jealous, and attacked me under the table with his claws. Kyoko, more mother than wife, got under the table to get him out, and in so doing bumped about and knocked over a large vase of lilies, which landed on Jack, who with a howl was out of the room for the rest of the evening.

  Excitement over, champagne drunk, sashimi downed, we could turn to interesting talk. Joan is reading the anonymous novel Primary Colors and is appalled by it. I say that I have never heard of a president so vilified as Clinton. “Yes,” she says. “You know, Bush had a way with reporters. If they wrote something bad they were banned from the White House. Since they were on the White House beat they, as it were, lost their jobs. Very effective.” I said that the Clintons should do something like that. “Can’t,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Only Republicans can do that.”

  Commotion in the hallway, Jack alarmed. It is Ambassador Mondale himself, not expected, who had come to see what it was all about. We’d finished the fish but he said he had eaten anyway and he began, in his patient and gentlemanly way, to find out about us. Me, he said, he felt he knew since he read me. Kazuko, however, he did not, and asked many a friendly question.

  She, large, be-kohled, and sitting in her spotted fur, bloomed. Though I had often known her to be an assured and self-centered poet, I had never heard her so eloquent. Born in Vancouver, brought here at seven, she told what it felt like. There everything so brightly colored, here everything so gray—wartime Japan. “And they tried to make us believe that Americans, English, Canadians, were all devils, but I knew better. I had been there.” At thirteen she worked in a factory and it was bombed on their single holiday. “Maybe that is why I became a poet,” she said.

  Then Michishita talks sensibly and feelingly about her growing up in far Sakhalin, and how her parents fled, and how many of her friends did not get away when the Russians arrived. “But, you know, all the governor’s family, the police chief’s, they got back to Japan at once. It’s always that way. That’s the reason for the vertical society, so that those on the top can get out easier.”

  We then talked of the local royals. Mondale had been presented and admired the choreography and was impressed when Michiko remembered meeting him in Belgium long before. We were all filled with admiration for the much-maligned Michiko, and I told my impressions. The ambassador shook his head and then said, in the most American manner, “I just don’t see why the man doesn’t protect his wife. He must certainly have the power to do so. Why doesn’t he just say, ‘Lay off, guys,’ to those chamberlains?” I mentioned that much of the animosity had come from the empress-dowager. He nodded his head knowingly: “Mothers-in-law.”

  We move on to Reagan. �
��Absolutely out of it, now,” he tells me, “though it is difficult to be sure—for so many years that man’s innocent ignorance and stupidity has served him so well. I remember someone’s saying that the U.S. economy was in trouble. ‘Well, yes,’ said the President, ‘but you know, it has to go down before it can go up.’ Then that big Hollywood smile. And he got away with it.”

  I could imagine his feelings at seeing that fool in the White House. After all, he had almost gotten there himself. Now marginalized out here, he can do little but follow orders. This has not embittered him, however—he has grown nicely philosophical, if occasionally despairing. “Boy, do I have my plate full. That awful Okinawa [rape case] mess, and now China aiming at Taiwan, and I have to go to the Press Club and talk about it tomorrow and there is really nothing to do, though lots for someone to do. What are you going to do about it? I know, turn on the FM, get another cup of coffee, and write another book. Some people get all the breaks.”

  15 march 1996. I just heard that Oshima has had a stroke. He was in the London airport waiting for a plane to Dublin. And I remembered our talking about his heart, his circulation. And I thought of him all alone and no longer himself. Later I learn that he was brought back and is now under rehabilitation—and I thought of Eric, buried alive by his illness. Later I tried to find where Oshima was, but was told that he wanted no visitors.

  19 march 1996. Chris tells me that Miss Michishita came up to him at a party and told him that when I was at her house I behaved in a shocking manner. “Jack got under the table and rolled around as he does and then he started pushing against Mr. Richie’s legs. Oh, no. Jack is my cat, you see. And Mr. Richie, knowing that Jackie had been fixed, said, ‘Oh, he’s trying to get at my testicles.’ Imagine! He used a word like that at my table!”

  5 april 1996. Dinner with Fumio. We go and see Kuroyanagi Tetsuko in the new Albee play [Three Tall Women]. Afterward we go and see her. She shows us all the wonderful makeup (skins, wrinkles, and gloves with liver spots and veins) to make her ninety-something in the first act. Tetsuko herself must be near sixty or over, and so this showing off of an extreme old age is something few actresses of that age would so revel in. But then Tetsuko is like that—terribly enthusiastic about real things.