The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  They have cut the play. (The woman called A doesn’t get to screw the groom, I don’t know why.) But Fumio tells me that the translation is pleasingly colloquial and that Tetsuko lends her dryness, her humor, and makes the character both irritating and pleasing, which is perhaps something Albee intended.

  7 april 1996. Paul [McCarthy] and I lunch in Ueno and then go to the Central Asia exhibition—a collection of Buddhist art from the caves of Dunhuang and the archives of the Hermitage. We examine an eighth-century mandala showing not heaven but hell—a spectacular delineation of the temptations of the Buddha, including sexual details I have never before seen in early Asian art. One of the beasts has an erection, another has its hands in curious places, and, right in the middle, a creature has bent double and from its asshole pour flames, which lave the lotus upon which the Buddha sits—an infernal fart. “It looks like Bosch,” says Paul.

  9 april 1996. Alex Kerr over for dinner. He is leaving tomorrow for Thailand, has had it with Japan. Feels the changes deeply and finds no compensatory factors. We discuss the reasons. These include wholesale despoliation—once the most beautiful of countries, Japan is now the ugliest. The return of Tokugawa totalitarianism, as evidenced in the male young, etc. All of which he has treated at length in his book [Lost Japan]. We do not mention that it is no longer easy to sleep with the younger population, but the air of easy romance has certainly dissipated. We talk about Japan the way it used to be. He says he has heard that men worked naked but that, of course, is sheer romantic wishing. I say, not at all, and show him my pictures of the Choshi fishermen at work, ca. 1947. He drops his bread into the coq au vin in surprise, examines the pictures with care.

  We talk about what this means. I say that public nudity is read (by me) as public availability, and that we are rather like imperialists regretting the Raj. This he agrees to, though regretting the regretting, and I say that the problem is that Third World Japan became First World, and that that is why he is going to Third World Thailand, even though he’s too late. We’ll both end up in a Dayak long house and even there it will be too late. He agrees. He takes a long look at the naked fishermen, and we have chilled peaches with frozen yogurt and speak of other things.

  15 april 1996. Ed appeared with a large black eye, a scratched nose, and bruises on the upper lip. “No, no,” he said at once. “I was perfectly sober.” He has had balance problems before, and since his hip operation he is sometimes given to falling. “I fell against the wall.” “Is that the wall near your home mentioned by Mori Ogai in Wild Geese?” I wanted to know. “The very same.” “Well, you showed a fine literary sense then,” I said, at which he smiled wanly.

  Once seated with a bottle of beer, however, troubles were forgotten and we had a good talk. We discussed our affection for Gwen; we spoke of the decline in the quality of the Tokyo strip parlors, and paid brief but sincere tribute to our “Janet.”

  Then I admitted that I had given up Jane [Austen]. “It is like the moon,” I explained. “It has been trodden upon by someone from Wapakoneta, Ohio.” He was impressively restrained at this and said, “Well, so goes the world. About the moon, however, I know just how you feel.”

  16 april 1996. To a party being given Beate Gordon upon publication of her memoir. She was here during the war, and after it was, despite her youth, entrusted with putting the part about women into the postwar constitution because she was one of the few foreigners who understood Japanese. I knew her during the Occupation—a smart, slender, steady girl—and we have seen each other sometimes over the intervening half-century.

  “And you stayed and I didn’t,” she said with that friendly directness that has always been hers. “And you know,” she continued in the measured tone, which also was always hers, something a bit sententious but always for one’s own good, “it is still a very good place to be. People tell me how changed it is, that they are leaving, and this too I can understand, but, still . . . How do you find it?”

  I say that the whole world has changed but has retained its proportions. Japan, though reduced, is still best, at least for people like me.

  She had been to see Empress Michiko that afternoon and wanted to compare impressions with me. Not much to compare. She had had the Empress all to herself with only a single lady-in-waiting, whom she already knew. Not a chamberlain in sight. Consequently Michiko was apparently much more herself, looked Beate in the eye as she spoke, laughed a lot, and had a good time.

  “You only got half an hour, but I got an hour and a half,” she said in her winningly arch way. “And at the end, she took me right to the foyer, right to the door, as a hostess ought.”

  8 may 1996. The Tokyo Broadcasting System has decided to cancel a news show because it had privately shown the finished program to the Aum people, who then went out and killed the lawyer who appeared on it. This had frightened TBS into not airing that program at all. The now-cancelled news show has nothing to do with the cancelled anti-Aum show, but it was felt something must be done, some gesture or other to placate public opinion. Public opinion will be placated. Justice by analogy.

  The problem is not that Japanese behave this way. All people behave this way. The problem is that Japanese so often get away with it, are so rarely called to account. A symbolic placation appears and is accepted. As to why it happened in the first place it is, again, not because Japanese are prone to doing things like this. Everyone is. But few Japanese are prone to speaking up and denouncing. The reason is that they are afraid to. And the reason they are afraid is that such an individual would receive no support and much intimidation. He would also lose his job.

  Yet more and more brave individuals are speaking out against this system, and losing jobs and friends and family in the process. They are truly brave, for the system is truly formidable.

  10 may 1996. In the evening, in Ueno, I see two young girls loitering in front of the local porno, the Star-za. They are wearing the tartan skirts, dark sweaters, and thick ankle socks of a private school. I ask them if they like porno and they—one pretty, one not—say they don’t. Then I ask if they are waiting for kozukai, spending money. This they say they are. How much? I ask. Go-man yen—that is, nearly five hundred dollars.

  “For the both of you?” I ask. They nod. Still, it is a bit expensive, I say. “No,” says the pretty one, “usually that is what just one high-school girl gets. You get two for the price of one.”

  At that point we were joined by a large and savvy Bengali, whom I often meet hanging around the place. “No short time,” he says. “You spend the night. We go to my house.” The girls confer and then the plain one says, “No penetration though.”

  “No penetration!” cries the Bengali. “What am I paying for?”

  “Look,” says the pretty one, “we have to get married sometime, we got to watch ourselves.”

  “What I get for my fifty thousand yen then?”

  The pretty one smiles and delicately flicks her tongue.

  “Oh,” he says. Then he indicates me: “Better take him then, he likes to do that.”

  “Actually,” I say, “this place around here is mainly homo.”

  “Homo!” cries the pretty one, then turns to her plain friend, “You picked the wrong place again.” Then, “He’s cute,” politely indicating me. I smile and show my long, pink, foreign tongue, and they both laugh like the little girls they are.

  We are then further joined by a well-dressed younger Japanese who is carrying a briefcase and following our conversation with interest. Also, a passing cop on the beat. The Bengali disappears as though by magic and I with a nod pass into the porno. When I look out again, the street is empty. I don’t know what happened.

  11 may 1996. I think about prostitution and wonder why anyone thinks it wrong. If the other person does not want to sell, well, maybe. But if she or he does, what’s the problem? Yet these girls would be held up to shame in the hypocritical press, and my commerce will doubtless be so seen by an equally hypocritical posterity.

  I
feel about prostitution as Flaubert did. Let me quote the passage: “It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks in their corded robes have always excited some deep, ascetic corner of my soul. The idea of prostitution is a meeting place of so many elements—lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold—that to peer into it deeply makes one reel. One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love.”

  12 may 1996. In the evening I take my tape of Oshima’s Ai no Korida [In the Realm of the Senses] over to Gwen’s. She has a house full of people and serves Thai curry before we begin. I had not seen the film uncut since London well over ten years ago, and I am again moved by it.

  It is so sad, and so honest. It properly equates love with fucking and fucking with love. Nakedness always gives you a choice: the chance to feel sexy or to feel sorry—you want to take on the unclothed body or you realize that we are all fragile, unprotected bipeds. Fucking too can inflame or douse. Oshima’s great accomplishment is that it acknowledges sex as power, shows it in detail, and then exposes it in all of its hopelessness. Though his asocial lovers devote their lives to it, really try; he demonstrates that it is not enough—that nothing is enough.

  Afterward I wonder why it was ever considered pornographic, that it could never turn one on. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Gwen, obviously much moved.

  13 may 1996. I was talking with the taxi driver and he looked out of the window as we drove through Ueno Park and said, “You see that green? That’s a real spring green. In the summer it will turn a lot darker—last year it got almost black—and that fresh feeling will be all gone. But this is the shade I really like, spring green.” I looked out of the window and admired the light, fresh color. And I also admired the driver for liking it and I wondered in how many other countries I could have had this conversation with a taxi driver.

  16 may 1996. Cold for May. I walk through the park to the station and notice that the north wind is blowing the leaves, turning them over. A lopsided haiku (four lines, five syllables each) occurs. I ought to save it, put in these pages a few months from now in its proper place, just as did the poets of yore. But I won’t. Here it is:

  North winds turn the leaves.What had been JulyBecomes March again:Southern spring green.

  23 may 1996. Alex [Kerr] came over. I decided to make him accomplice to my desertion of a god. This deity, some kind of ur-Shinto folk god, has been sitting in his box ever since Frank cleaned house and gave him to me. He is hideous—a black hump, a small, narrow face, pursed mouth, and tiny eyes. Since I am superstitious I did not want simply to put him out with the garbage. So I decided to find him a new home and settled upon that little island, already filled with Shinto stones, off from the Benten Shrine in Shinobazu Pond. This is where stands that fine phallic stone, last of old Edo, before which I have performed many a rite. Not recently, however. All this year the gate to the island has been padlocked—too many young lovers, too many voyeurs. Today, in the late afternoon, however, we managed to crawl along the fence and get into the place. At the base of the phallic stone we reverently placed my ugly little deity, now among his own kind. As we climbed back over the fence I saw him grimacing happily into the setting sun.

  1 june 1996. The Dai-Ichi Bank does not collapse. Instead, it merges. Two sick banks get together and make a healthy bank. It is called by a new name, Mizuho. This is typical. Nothing ever fails in Japan. It merely changes its name. You can even sometimes use the old one and simply add shin (new). Recently a popular actor accidentally ran over a child. Feeling dreadful about it, he shaved his head and changed his given name.

  8 june 1996. A discussion, arranged by the people reviving my films, all taped and recorded. Two young directors were invited to come and talk with me—their unlikely names were Furusawa Binbun and Sono Shion. They were bright and funny and serious.

  View from Richie’s balcony. donald richie

  We talked about the sixties, which is to them something like the Gay Nineties used to be to me. Underground films, wow, what could they have been like? I tried to tell them what it was like thirty years ago when young people were trying to find out what the truth was, and were devising various ways to express or reflect it.

  I told them about the excitement of a new Terayama play, or a Hani movie, or a Hijikata dance. I told them about Kara Juro and the antics of the Zero Jikken. They wagged their heads and wished they could have been alive then—an age of heroes.

  I tell them that art is dissident—it undermines the status quo. That anything celebratory is not art. Art is by its nature critical. That is its moral dimension. This I believe. Back then Japan had a number of dissidents, those who disagreed, and who spoke out. Not now though. With a new generation bred not to think we only have that great accord of which Society is so fond. And yet without the dialectic of a social culture and a counter-culture there is no art, underground or otherwise. Now official art is all there is. Artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, are all social products. They have been subsumed into the social/financial structure of the country. Not just Japan either. The triumph of consensus.

  They are respectful, are mindful that I am elder, but at the same time they are frank and honest. “I read your books,” said Sono, “but I only thought I’d like to meet you when I learned you’d made a film about this guy who wants to jack off and his cat gets in the way. What a great idea.”

  10 june 1996. I finally again finish Kumagai, after ten years of work on it. It has changed much. Originally it was a movie, a Liebestod about love and death, but that got a bit too perfumed even for me and so it turned into whatever I thought an anti-roman was, with pages of description and nothing much happening (the Battle of Ichinotani section still has part of this in it), and then slowly it became a fake diary of its hero, and then the hero himself turned fake and it turned out he did not kill Atsumori, the only reason the man is remembered at all. The book became his own feelings about this and his consenting, finally, to become his reputation.

  Now what to do with it. I wish I had an agent—I could just send it off to him or her. But I can’t. No agent has ever accepted me. You’d think they would. I’m now famous enough. But there are problems. First, I am perceived as about Japan, now a deeply irrelevant subject. Second, I am already placed—I am about film. What am I doing writing novels and the like? Publishers are New York folks who want a big, fast kill, and I am not that kind of author.

  11 june 1996. Rainy day. I awake from a dream of being lost in India, wallet gone. So I look into the gloom of morning and consider.

  Life is a palindrome. As we entered, so we backward depart. I have now reached the correspondence of puberty. My juices are drying up and shortly the last drop will reflect the first spurt. Then I will continue on through the mirror image of being twelve, eight—then the legs will go and I will once more have trouble with stairways, and then I will crawl, and then I will lie down and squirm, and then I will end in something like that dark bed from which I came.

  So one must prepare. I live in a third floor walk-up. The stairs now leave the heart pounding and will soon leave the lungs gasping. Just as I know I can now never see Tibet, so I learn that I must find a place with an elevator.

  12 june 1996. Coming home through the park I see that two of the homeless have found brooms and are carefully sweeping the plaza, the steps down to the water, and the paths. They are not paid for this. It is voluntary labor. Why, I wonder. Perhaps if they police their place the cops will let them stay undisturbed—but the cops do anyway. No, I think it is because working is all they know, and their enforced idleness is a terrible punishment for them. So they find brooms and in the middle of the night sweep. If they were given buckets and brushes they would scrub.

  18 june 1996. Lunch at my hou
se with [Numata] Makiyo. He is going to help me apartment hunt. My lease is coming up in a month or so, and I know that sooner or later I must move.

  We do not find much and then, passing the large apartment building at the southern end of Ueno Park, opposite Shinobazu Pond, I jokingly say that I have wanted to live there for ten years now. He looks and says, “There’s an apartment listed, want to look?” We are taken to the eighth floor, let in, and there it is, from the balcony all of Shinobazu and Ueno hanging there before me like a mandala, with Benten right in the middle. “You got tears in your eyes,” said Makiyo. And so I did.

  “Well, if you feel that way, we got to get it for you,” he said, and we went down and he went to work. Lots of proof of solvency needed, but I have that, and my official standing here, and my c.v., in two languages. The rent is a bit more than I am now spending, but I can afford it, for a time at any rate.

  I am very excited by this move. All of the bother of moving is forgotten in my joy that I will be able to live the rest of my life in front of such beauty, just outside the window. As with a forthcoming journey, I am already there. I sit here, but I have already left.

  21 june 1996. I read that Kenzaburo Oe has said that the Japanese abroad, or in commerce with non-Japanese, tend to present self not as an individual but as “a Japanese.” He criticizes this presentation of an agreed-upon set of characteristics, a simulacrum offered as the real thing. And while it is true that other peoples do this (“as an American, I want to say that . . .”), they do so more openly (politicians, preachers), and they do not always get away with it. Presenting self as American (or English or French or German) does not enjoy social approval. The reason is that one thus denies the individual. In Japan, however, one has been taught to deny the individual for over four hundred years. Consequently presentation of self as mere nationality is so rarely criticized that Oe’s observation makes headlines.