The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  17 april 1999. My seventy-fifth birthday—diamond jubilee—lunch at the New Sanno Hotel, where University of Maryland was holding its graduation ceremonies, where I was speaker, and where I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Humanities. Wore a cap and gown, and was given a hood, with a white velvet lining.

  Maryland has strong military connections here, and the hotel is a small bit of the Occupation, still working fifty years later. The prices are in dollars and there are other indications of transplanted America, all of which I found pleasing. There is a kind of symmetry. This is where I began, in Occupied Japan, and this, for one afternoon, is where I am ending—all that is left of Occupied Japan.

  More, I liked the easy American good manners of the occasion. There was none of the solemn reserve, none of the inadvertent coldness with which many Japanese would invest such an gathering. People, the military (particularly the military) relaxed, out to put you at your ease. My dinner companion was a wing commander, and we talked about some existential touches he had noted in my speech and then went on to Camus.

  2 june 1999. With Michael Rayns to the National Film Center to see the Gosho [Heinosuke] Where Chimneys Are Seen. Since it was shot largely on location, there unreels 1953 Tokyo. The plaza with its statue of Saigo where I now walk almost every Sunday, how small the trees were, and how empty the view. I see the old Nikkatsu Theater down below, long gone, long forgotten. One of the scenes is right in front of where I now live. It is filled with construction and the lake seems smaller. Also there seems to be no Benten Temple, now the principal ornament of my view. The structure was the postwar I knew, but more than eight years postwar . . . ? What moves me most are the people—that friendly, ragged, wily, beautiful, and hopeful crew that I can never forget, even now that they are extinct.

  4 june 1999. Went to Maruzen for a photography exhibition—Meiji-period photos taken by early photographers including Shimoka Renjo. Scenes of the Fujiya Hotel, of Nikko, of all the other places early travelers liked. Also scenes of the various “professions”—naked palanquin bearers, a tattooed man, and a village girl, nude, standing, her hands crossed in front of her, all taken over a hundred years ago, everyone peering out from the sepia past. And all for sale. Meiji meishi prints, which even ten years ago might have cost a hundred yen in an antique store, are now half a million. Big prints are the equivalent of ten thousand dollars, twenty, and thirty. Such inflation is due to the snobbery that keeps things high here but, I suppose, such things are now rare. I saw no one buying. I wonder how much my modest fifty-year-old monochromes of Ueno are now worth.

  9 june 1999. A bill is passed today that specifies the Hinomaru the national flag and “Kimigayo” the national anthem. This will be followed in a few years by a bill that will make them, once again, mandatory. Already, last month, a school principal was knifed because he refused both at graduation ceremonies.

  14 june 1999. Early, a uniformed policeman comes to my door and salutes. He wonders if I would be so kind as to close my balcony doors from 10:30 to 10:45 a.m. and again from 12:30 to 12:45 p.m. The Emperor will be passing in the street below. I ask if I should draw the curtains as well—thinking of prewar customs when no one was allowed to look down on the Emperor. No, that would be fine.

  I mention that his Imperial Highness has been driven back and forth under my window many times before without my having to close my balcony doors. He sighs, says he realizes this, and then tells me about the threat. He used the term kyohaku, which means blackmail. Since neither the Emperor nor the police force is blackmailable, I gather he refers to a bomb or something. I assure him that I will do as he bids, and receive again a smart salute. At 10:35 I peek from behind the curtains of my closed balcony doors, and there below progresses the modest imperial cavalcade—slowly and safely.

  21 july 1999. [Oda] Mayumi came over for lunch, bringing me a new print—a green Kannon, very cool, reserved—quite unlike this ordinarily ebullient goddess. It reminds me of the Kudara Kannon, so quiet, so filled with dignity. We talk about goddesses in general and why they are so strong. She knows all about this, being a goddess herself. And strong. She and her lawyers stopped a plutonium shipment, turned it around in midstream, and sent it back.

  Now she is here to show newer goddesses, one of which I have just been given. We talk about her fellow-goddess, Utako, who until age fifty sometimes had a twenty-year-old surfing consort. Not now though, too much trouble. She uses some kind of jade implement. Showed it to Mayumi.

  This again reminds of us of another goddess, and after lunch we go to the Benten temple, in the middle of a pond now covered with opulent leaves and bright pink clitoris-like budding lotuses, and Mayumi gives a copy of her goddess book to the gently surprised young priest on duty.

  “If we were a couple on a date,” says Mayumi, “Benten would break us up.” “Lucky we are not a couple on a date,” say I. But we are—I love Mayumi for her strength, her beauty, her acceptance of life, and her fight for what would hurt it. She is fifty-something now, and her fine, strong-boned face is lined with use, but inside she is still vibrating, the same woman I knew thirty years ago.

  22 july 1999. I went with a new student, Karim [Yassar], to see a Kawashima Yuzo film at the film center. It—Ginza Nijuyon-cho—was just a program filler of the fifties, but it was filmed around the Ginza, and so I see again—living—the buildings, the streets, and the people of over forty years ago. There was the Olympia bread shop, where I used to find French bread, the only place in the city; there was the roof of the Matsuya Department Store that used to have plants for sale; there was the Sukiyabashi canal, with boats for hire.

  Karim, fifty years younger than I, noticed differences in the people then and now, and wondered if they were always this friendly with each other, or whether this is just the movies. No, they really were. And I, too, noticed the difference. Now the young are closed, blank-faced, unsmiling, and hiding behind their portable phones or their Walkman or their held-up manga. They do not know how to look at each other, so they hide.

  What catastrophe caused this? We wonder. Well, this generation was taught nothing. It had to infer everything, and did not do it well. Also, it demands nothing of itself—the latest gadget satisfies it; it goes to see Star Wars. What do they want, I wonder—other than a Sega game, a Prada bag? They can’t all be as empty as they appear.

  Karim says they are not. He goes to school with some of them at Geidai, and he finds pockets of spontaneity, particularly among young people who come to the city from the country. He finds the nadir in “Young Town,” the land of the juvenile robots—Shibuya. There these youthful herds await a deliverer, someone to organize them, and a country to give up everything for. Someone like Mussolini or the Emperor Hirohito. Then we discuss the bill making both flag and anthem compulsory now being openly rammed through the Diet.

  29 august 1999. More and more, girls are going out together. The streets are filled with their groups—sometimes in twos, more often in fours or fives. One notices because they are so noisy. They are always laughing. Hard laughter, as though it hurt, interrupted by squeals of simulated delight or surprise.

  Boys do not act this way with each other. This is because boys are not trying to reassure each other. Also, perhaps, because boys do not have feelings for each other—usually. Girls, however, empathize. Each knows what the other has gone through. At the same time, each also knows that the other is a kind of rival for what those around her regard as desirable: a job, a husband, a child. So the empathy is wary and takes the form of continual reassurances and much noisy laughter to indicate what a good time we are having, just us girls together.

  30 august 1999. The summer half gone. I walk in the evening in Sumida Park, maybe my first time there this year. It is still as beautiful as ever, though many more high-rises block the sky and there are no bats. The barricades for the fireworks tomorrow are up, and there are fewer people. I sit on a familiar bench, remember others with whom I sat there, and wonder where the summer went.

&n
bsp; Ed and I were talking about the increasingly rapid flight of time. When one is older, he says, and he is three years older, time accelerates. Young, time is timeless, and a summer afternoon lasts a week. Old, it races, in a minute or two it is over. This is a blessing he says. Just imagine, he says, the other way around!

  I sit and think about Nagai Kafu, who would this year be one hundred and twenty years old and whose big memorial exhibition I have just been to see at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku. There were not only the books and manuscripts, but also his glasses, his seal, his famous greasy hat, and his brown mohair suit with one of the buttons broken. The River Sumida, Peonies, A Strange Tale from East of the River, they were all written around here, though I do not remember this park being mentioned. (Others mention it, however—Saikaku for one.) But his spirit is here, the crumbling past, the passing time. He who regretted vanished Taisho would now regret vanishing Showa. Me too—and if I feel like that now, what will I feel like when I am dead?

  1 september 1999. Burt Watson came to lunch and we, two of the last survivors, talked about all the dead we shared: Herschel Webb, Gene Langston, Charles Terry, Meredith Weatherby, and Holloway Brown. Burt himself is holding up well. If I just glance, I see an old codger in a baseball cap. If I look closely, I see my old friend Burt there, owlish, and the finest translator into English of Chinese and Japanese poetry.

  We talk of the strange way people have of regarding our companions. Ted de Bary drops in at Burt’s place in Kyoto. Burt says, “I believe you’ve already met my friend, Noboru.” Which he had. To which Ted says, “Well, I can’t be expected to remember if that’s the same young man you were living with before or not.” To which Burt now adds, “Imagine someone saying, ‘I think you know my wife already,’ and you say, ‘Well, I can’t be expected to remember if that’s the same woman you were living with before or not.’ ”

  Then we went on to talk about the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists. I mention that someone is writing a book about this. “Oh, must read it,” says Burt.

  3 september 1999. Watching some young people at the Fantasia [game center], I observe their satisfaction with all the virtual reality. There are games where you zap dinosaurs and the walking dead, others where you pilot fast planes, drive fast cars, others where you don helmet and glove and have adventures that I, standing on the outside of this reality, cannot see. And I wonder at such popularity.

  Then suddenly, without trying at all, I understand. Virtual reality is never threatening. This is because it is always virtual and never real. And the reason for the preference is that reality is read as dangerous.

  This is, come to think of it, what one would expect in a land where every mother tells every child that something or other is menacing (Abunai da yo!), where teenagers are continually advising each other about dangers, real, imagined, or hoped for (Yabai da yo!), and where a populace is careful, measured, and suspicious. One never knows where looking at strangers, much less talking with them, might lead.

  Much better the manga comic book so you will not have to look at reality, even better the Walkman earphones so you will not have to listen to it, and best of all, the various virtual reality machines where you no longer have to be, strictly speaking, really alive any more.

  It is possible to live a life of nothing but special effects. These are always virtual, in that they have no other reality. Fashion offers a beginning—hence its extremes: at present carefully grayed hair on the very young, chestnut faces stained deep with something that comes from a tube, lipstick (for the girls) that is corpse-like, and (for both boys and girls) carefully plucked eyebrows and sparkles that stick to the skin and glitter.

  But fashion is still somehow too natural. It is attached to something that is real. Therefore, it is safer, to deny the real entirely and enter into a state (drinks, drugs, virtual reality) where nothing is real anymore, and therefore nothing is threatening.

  But what a world have we made for ourselves (for Japan is not the only place preferring the virtual) where we spurn the real? Japan traditionally has preferred something other than rank reality, to be sure, hence the classical Japanese garden, ikebana, bonsai, etc. But virtual reality was invented for those who are afraid. Therefore the world had to be fearful before it is invented and (in Japan more than elsewhere) perfected.

  The couple I have been looking at laughs as they manipulate their buttons and it is impossible to say that this laughter hides fear. But then you do not have to know to be afraid.

  4 september 1999. Recently fewer homeless in the park below me. Could times be getting better; could the authorities be finally doing something? I wondered. There were now just a few, one or two of the more seasoned, including the homeless prostitute and two younger crew-cut types, always drunk, always abusive.

  I saw them several nights ago, squatted in their hoodlum manner in front of a peaceable old man who had been a part of the scenery all summer. One was saying to come on, cough-up, and the other was saying that he knew he had two hundred yen hidden on him. I thought they were marauding high school boys, notorious for picking on the weak, and that they would tire and leave.

  Today, however, at a train station down the line I saw the same peaceable old man, sitting in the midst of the commuters. I asked him what he was doing. He said that they had been run out of the park, all of them. It was now too dangerous. There were a lot of homeless yakuza (his term), and they took it over.

  I then understood why there were so many fewer homeless, and I wondered that the jungle should be so near the surface of our ordinary lives, and that we should be so blind to it. I gave the peaceable old man some money, but felt none the better for it.

  5 september 1999. Talked with Philippe Pons on the phone, and he asked if I was still entertaining my goût de la boue. I had not thought of that term for a long time, but as I this time heard it I realized that indeed I was. Why else am I roaming the park? It is because of this “taste for mud” (the term does not translate too well)—but, I wonder, why then do I have this taste?

  It is because I, like many another, confuse the “low” with the “real.” Somewhere Bernard Shaw spoke of the sentimentality of linking the poor with the virtuous and making the monstrous assertion that to be penniless was to be good. I do something of the same. To me, the poor are more real, more “themselves” than the well to do. It is true that they live in a fashion more elemental—but more “real”? Or, is it because I am intimidated by the moneyed? They also have power. I prefer the powerless, because I am not intimidated by them. There is nothing intentionally sinister in this, but I must think more deeply about the origins of such inclinations as the goût de la boue.

  4 october 1999. To the Korean restaurant with Ed. We talk of various kinds of food, and he asks me if I knew that when cannibals eat humans they must be careful to also consume lots of vegetables, because otherwise human meat is difficult to digest. He says that there may be innate enzymes that prevent digestion. I say that this is unlikely; that the prohibitions against cannibalism are cultural. He is not certain, and then suggests that perhaps the genes could be trained, through careful cannibalism, to remedy indigestion.

  This leads to talk of other kinds of odd habits. I tell him that the Goncourt journals speak of Napoleon’s habit of rolling small pellets of his excrement while talking. Ed wants to know where it came from. Did he bring a bowl of it to table?

  This somehow led to a discussion of the stilt shoes now worn by young women. What could it mean? He wonders. I say it means they want their legs to look longer. He wonders at the possible high incidence of broken ankles. Then he says that the country is truly changing. For years he thought that there was change on the surface, but the core was holding. Now he does not think so: the family system in ruins, the Confucian ethic dead, employment a shambles, and no one making children anymore. I say that these are late Hellenistic times. He says that shortly the last Japanese will go on display, like the last Tasmanian. />
  12 october 1999. Dae-Yung and I went to Nagatoro, a place I had not been for over forty years—back in 1958 when Tani got married for the first time. I somehow remembered the cliffs higher, the boat ride bumpier. But this time it was fall and back then it was spring, and the water then was all mud and now it is green as jade.

  Nor did the boat stop at the lair of giant carp, and no one jumped naked off the craft. We were sitting with families and their squirming children, and the water was so low there was no great pool for the giant carp anyway. I found myself remembering an even earlier time there, maybe 1951 or so. This time it was Meredith and [Yato] Tamotsu and Tani. He was wearing a suit for some reason, and Tamotsu was being very funny telling stories, and no one knew he would be dead ten years later.

  I tell Dae-Yung about these memories, about this being my third time at Nagato. He never met Meredith nor, of course, Tamotsu, but he has met Tani. How old was he? He wants to know, knowing him only an elderly man. About thirty, I guess. So young, he says, now thirty himself, shaking his head at time, at life, as we drift down the deep green river.

  Later, as so often, his thoughts turn to death—mine. He has prepared himself with various contingents. Until recently he was going to carry me up to some mountaintop and we would both live in a temple and bang drums until my demise. Now, however, he has given it up. Either he will come here or I will go there. In either event, he will take care of me.

  I hope to die in hospital. It is the best among bad choices. They insure a more or less painless departure and clean up the mess afterward. The ashes will be taken by Dae-Yung and Fumio and dumped into the Inland Sea. They have agreed, and the lawyer has been notified, and dumping ashes is no longer considered by Japanese law to constitute the abandoning of a corpse.