24 november 1997. It has begun once again—the rash of performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that so disfigure the year’s end in this country. There will be, it is estimated, two hundred renditions in Tokyo alone. Why? I wonder. One understands the Christmas invasion of the Messiah in England. After all they like oratorios and it is, after all, a Christian land. But why Beethoven’s difficult and vulgar score in a non-Christian country, which does not have the resources or the disposition to create proper performances.
Reasons are offered: It was first performed by a German POW band (a large one apparently) in 1918, and this began a trend. Another reason is that the end of the year is otherwise a time of financial depression—one needs an ode to joy. Another says it is a strategy to generate much-needed New Year’s cash, since all the family and friends of chorus members must buy tickets. Yet another says it is an excuse for large numbers of Japanese to get together without having to talk—a kind of a big karaoke.
3 december 1997. Walking, I notice a young man, fashionable, long brown-bleached hair, artificial tan, and an earring, stopping young girls and trying to start a conversation, often failing as they brush by him. Nonetheless, all smiles and confidence, he is always ready to begin again. What perseverance, I think, and all just to pick up a girl.
From today’s newspaper, however, I now learn what was going on: He was engaged in what such young men (hundreds, says the account) call “scouting.” They themselves are called “catchers.” Trying to talk girls into work in bars or massage parlors—in other words, pimping.
He gets a thousand yen an introduction plus a thousand yen an hour for his time. They work in teams of six, usually at stations or in the subway. Most can make about ¥150,00 a month. The girls make considerably more.
One of the scouts is quoted: “When you start your pitch never block her path; it puts her on guard. Instead, just walk alongside and gradually you reduce your speed, and then they’ll slow down too. If you get them to come to a complete stop, then you’ve got them.”
6 december 1997. Went with Stephen Barber and Catherine Lupton to see the Kudara Kannon, just now back from Paris and stopping a few days at the National Museum before returning to Horyuji.
There she was, all seven feet of her, standing slightly sway-backed, a pose perhaps fashionable in the Asuka period. One hand lightly swings an oil flask, and the other is bent at the elbow (a very art deco pose) with the hand held out more as though to receive than give. I decide she looks parisienne.
But she is like that, always changing as you yourself change. I first saw her when I was twenty-three and she had not been dusted for decades. The fine powdery finish made her look human. Then I went to see her whenever I went to Horyuji, and each time both she and I had changed. The dust gone, her skin condition got better and, as the fashions changed, her Korean hat came back into vogue.
23 december 1997. Yesterday Itami Juzo killed himself, jumped off his balcony. Or fell. I’ve been on that balcony; the ledge is very low. Maybe he was drunk and toppled. Or was pushed—this last is the contribution of one of the dailies. Lots of other attempts at accounting. There was this girl, or there was the fact that his later movies were not very successful, or there was the mob. I tend to favor the last. The local mafia was furious about a 1992 film he directed, Minbo no Onna [A Taxing Woman], cornered him in his apartment garage, and slashed his face. The movie says that yakuza never actually attack non-yakuza, but Itami’s experience proved it wrong. Did they drive him to dive off the balcony as well?
28 december 1997. Eithne [Jones] has a friend in the Imperial Household. Telling her about the speakers she is representing, she mentioned my name. “Oh, not that dreadful man,” said the friend. The reason was what I had written about the Emperor or Empress in Public People, Private People. Taken aback, Eithne wondered what in my sympathetic and feeling account could have been taken such exception to. Turns out it was not what I wrote about them, but what I implied about the Imperial Household. She asked if their Imperial Highnesses were equally upset. “Oh, we would never show anything like that to them,” was the retort. Eithne told me that the Household reads just everything and holds grudges for centuries.
Ah, there goes my decoration, my imperial kunsho. I was in line for one, and had even toyed with the idea of refusing it. It is all right to get awards from the Japan Foundation, but I do not want to be this much Japan’s creature, have never joined the chrysanthemum club, and do not want to. My ancient aversion to joining anything raises its hoary head. Now I will be relieved of the decision, since I will never be offered the choice. [Richie, to his astonishment, was awarded an imperial kunsho (medal of honor) in late 2004.]
30 december 1997. The end of the year—cold, raining. I look from my balcony high over Ueno Park and see that one of the homeless has built himself a cardboard house. As I look down, he emerges with a broom in his hand. He carefully sweeps away in the rain, cleaning up what is his front yard.
I remember another homeless man. This one lived under a bridge in Nihonbashi. It is to him that I owe my present eminence, since it was he whom I interviewed for a story, which got me my first job at Stars and Stripes, which led to others, during which I learned how to write. That was fifty years ago, and he was about the age of the man sweeping away in the rain. What was his name? Kiyoshi—Kiyoshi something. He had been put under the bridge by the war. This man has been put in the park by the peace. I remain, above it all, high on my eighth floor, looking down, wondering.
Richie’s close friend, the journalist Gwen Robinson, in reading to this date, suggested that his entries were disproportionate—too much sex. It was not that Richie had had too much sex, but that what sex he had he wrote about, neglecting other aspects of his life. So, just as he had pruned the journals, putting things not directly pertaining to Japan in a separate annex, he now grouped together the entries about sex, some of them at least, and removed these from the main manuscript. This new entity he named after the Mori Ogai collection Vita Sexualis, and apparently based his decision—what to include, what not to—upon an observation of John Stevens, author of The Cosmic Embrace, that the erotic cherishes, celebrates, and elevates sex, but that pornography cheapens, degrades, and negates it; further, that erotic art presents the sexual experience in a bright, positive, and sympathetic manner, but that pornography relishes violence, violation, and perversion. Despite the fact that all of Richie’s promiscuous encounters seem to have been both bright and positive, he apparently wanted to make a distinction.
8 may 1998. Ed Seidensticker has written a new book and there is a party for it. The volume is called Lovable Japan, Less Lovable Japan, but the title is the only part in English, all the rest is in Japanese. Indeed, it is Ed dictating to Shirai Maki (Herb Passin’s friend), and her taking it down and then editing it. There is no manuscript and so I must guess as to what it is about. The Japanese title is more explicit—translated it would read: The Japan I Like/The Japan I Don’t Like.
Ed has dressed for the occasion and wears a tie filled with large question marks all over it. Though he told me that he thinks the publication a “grave error” and that he hates such gatherings, nonetheless, he seems to be enjoying himself. In an expansive mood, he tells me something he remembers Gene Langston’s saying to him: “You go up the hill or, if facing the other direction, you go down the hill.” He admires this.
The party is held at the Kojimachi residence of Kase Hideaki, a political figure who has put money into the new film version of the life of Tojo, an effort called Pride. The man from the London Times keeps talking in scandalized tones about our being there at all, but journalist Sam Jameson says that it is perfectly all right to be entertained in the homes of those of whom you disapprove—does it all the time.
Back in Ueno, I am stopped on the street by a young girl carrying an electric guitar and wearing just a slip, underwear, and a large childish hat—this being the fashion of the week. She asks me to go sing karaoke with her—asks in English. It will o
nly cost me six thousand yen. Since this is one thousand less than I paid in order to attend Ed’s party, I am tempted.
“You like me?” she asks. I diplomatically tell her she is very pretty. OK, she says, let’s go. I tell her I am waiting for a friend. OK, he come, we all go. No, I say, not he, she. Her face falls. Oh, not OK then. But she gives instruction on how to get to this expensive bar for which she is shilling. I, waiting for no one, go home.
This is sign of the new poverty, grown considerably this year. Bar people are hard hit and throng the streets every night, showing off what charms they possess, and trying to entice the public. The homeless swarm, and there are lines at the garbage cans when the restaurants throw away their food for the day. Bankruptcies are daily, and suicides by disgraced Bank of Japan and Ministry of Finance underlings are weekly.
They always hang themselves, though why this is the method of choice I don’t know. Last month three such officials went together to the same hotel; each booked a room and each hung himself, using sections of the same rope—jointly purchased and cut into three identical lengths. They could have saved money if they had used but one room, but many people here like their togetherness separately.
9 may 1998. I go to Yokohama to see Kajima Shozo’s new exhibition of poems and sketches. He is there in gray monpei with a dove-colored obi and lemon-yellow straw zori. Long hair, beard, the very picture of a bunjin, one of those literati so much a part of old Japan. When I first knew him fifty years ago, he was young, round-faced, all eyes, and looking toward the West. Then he was translating Yeats and Sherwood Anderson; now he is writing his own tanka and brushing nihonga. “You are so Japanese now,” I say to him.
“Oh,” he says, “but being ‘Japanese’ is very Japanese of me. First we look West, then we grow up and look East. Think of Tanizaki and his Bunraku, think of Kawabata and bonsai. We can’t help it. It is part of our national character.”
“I don’t believe in national character,” I said.
“You ought to. You are the most American person I have ever met.”
This is in English. We have never spoken anything else. When we first met I could speak no Japanese, and we called each other Sho and Don. We still do.
“Don,” he said. “You are my oldest friend. All the others are dead.”
We have gone to a coffee shop and begun to reminisce. He is just back from Australia. The reason he went was that half a year ago he met a woman in the train on the way back to the mountains where he lives. She was fifty-something and they were much taken with each other—went to his place and made love. Then she invited him to Brisbane and he is just back.
“At seventy-four you still get it up?”
“She made me. She was my first foreign woman. I was so surprised. And every night too.”
Then he went on to say that this nice foreign woman was not really the first foreigner. “Oh? Who was it?” I ask. Didn’t I know? Sho wondered. Holloway. Some fifty years ago. In the back of a jeep. Sho had been shocked. Not sufficiently to escape, however.
“Holloway never told me,” I said. Sho nodded, looking back half a century. “That was because it was not a success,” he said. “I had to let him know I didn’t want any more of it.”
We nodded over our coffee, then he asked, “Why didn’t you ever try anything like that with me back then? You did with others. I knew about it.” I told him that back then I made a distinction between head and heart, and that Sho and I were all head—poetry, literature. My heart was given over to those with whom I had less in common. Those who were into sports, for example.
“Oh, I can understand that,” he said.
Then we talked about whether he should marry the Australian. I advised him not to, since neither of them wanted this and also that this particular piece of paper, the marriage license, could ruin a relationship. “Besides,” I said, “you are thinking of it only as a kind of insurance. Neither of us has anyone to take care of us, and we’re both old, and anyone who might is already gone.”
He sipped his coffee and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right. You see how American you are. No Japanese would have said that.”
And so we sat, quietly, happily, friends for fifty years, until he had to go back to the gallery and I had to go back to Tokyo.
12 may 1998. The International House found the funds, and tonight we opened the symposium on translation—experts on Japanese into English. I remind the audience of what Shelley said about translation (. . . it must again germinate from the seed or there is no flower . . .), and then introduce Edwin McClellan who talks on Soseki [Natsume] and Shiga [Naoya]. The speech is elegant, and the answers to later questions are filled with charm. (“I don’t know. Perhaps I just don’t like some authors,” he says.) Later at dinner I talk with his wife, Rachel, who is an expert on James Boswell. “Oh, yes,” she tells me, “there are whole passages of the Life of Johnson that have never been published. There are two volumes of a complete edition out, but it is rather stuck now. There will be no end.” Later yet, in the car going home, Ed Seidensticker says of the presentation, “Yes, charming, but I had expected more nuts and bolts. Mine is going to be more nuts than bolts.”
13 may 1998. Fumio came over to show me the pictures he took in India. There he was on the steps of the Ganges at Benares just opening his trousers. He then removed them and in his shorts descended until he was crouched in the holy river. Around him people were bathing and brushing their teeth, upstream they were burning corpses, and the bits left over floated past. Then he poured the water over his head and did seven salutations and felt, he told me, a great peace. His tour party, waiting in safety on the boat, were scandalized and prophesied illness. Nothing, however, happened. He remains healthy.
I admire this. He wanted something so badly he went and did it. He is now very glad he did, even brought back some of the water in a little brass vase. Brought me some too, but then, since he was bringing it to me in hospital, he threw it out and just gave me the thoroughly washed vase.
After the Korean vegetable dinner Fumio produced an envelope. It contains money, which he is giving me so that Dae-Yung and I can have a really good Kaga ryori meal when we go to the Noto Peninsula week after next.
28 august 1998. Things looking bad for Japan—politically paralyzed, economically in recession, edging its way closer to a depression. Money fleeing, jobs disappearing, poverty growing. Japan gross domestic product has fallen four percent this year and eight percent since 1989. Public and private sector debts are estimated at around fifteen trillion dollars, which in proportion to the GDP, is much larger than the American debt during the “Great Depression.”
I remember that. Canned tomatoes every day. Weevils in the flour. My grandfather appearing on Sundays with bags of groceries for the impoverished family. One early Christmas with no presents, as well—though that was later explained by my parents no longer speaking to each other and hence failing to prepare for the little lad’s holiday, each thinking the other had probably done something. I remember lines of unemployed and hands held out. Maybe I will go out as I came in, surrounded by other people’s poverty.
I am already. As I was walking back from the subway a wild-eyed, frantic old man busy running along the pavement and eyeing the people, fixed on me as likely quarry. Haro, haro, he croaked. Had I stopped he would then have somehow tried to communicate his need, thrown himself upon my foreign mercy. But I did not stop. Like everyone else I did not hear; I brushed by.
30 august 1998. Am reading a new book on Chekhov and find a surprising entry in an 1890 letter to his editor. He had met some Japanese women “. . . with big complicated hairdos, beautifully dressed. . . . When, out of curiosity, you use a Japanese . . . she shows an amazing skill in this business, so that it seemed to you that you do not actually use her but participate in a top-class horse-riding event.”
1 september 1998. A morning call from Tani [Hiroaki], wondering about my health. When I called him last year to say I was going into hospital he wa
s a bit distant. In his business (construction) you have to be—politicians on one hand, gangsters on the other, both wanting money. Maybe he thought I wanted some, too. I did not, but I also did not call him again. He has been thinking it over, hence the call this morning—we have been friends for too long now to just drift apart.
Satisfied with my health, he spoke of other things. No, he does not need Viagra. He is only sixty-five and twice a week is quite possible. And who with? The youngest of his collection, though she is already thirty-nine. He must go out and shop for another. That is the problem. Once the purchase is made it is all right, but the acquiring of it takes time and energy. I tell him I know just what he means.
4 september 1998. Walking in a park, a familiar figure—Ed. He says, “As you are perhaps unaware, I often spend an evening in Asakusa.” I accompany him to the bus stop. On the way I see a young scaffolding worker to whom I had recently spoken. On his own in the park, he had also worked at a Shinjuku host bar. So I now ask him, “Going to climb higher or dive lower?” He smiles and says he will stay at sea level. Ed understands the words but not the context. “Well,” he says, “you certainly have a way with the wildlife.”
5 september 1998. Lunch with Gwen, here for a few days to close up the place where she and Tim lived. Says she sat at the kitchen table and cried. Had no idea she would take it so hard. I ask if it was love. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know what love is. Some combination of respect and wild sex—if that’s love then this was it.” I say consoling things about eggs in baskets and the need to move on. But she, so admirable, has herself under control and is outlining what she plans: go to London for the job, then to a friend’s wedding, then back to Australia. She blows her nose and shakes her head. She is herself again.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 54
