The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  We talk over all this while enjoying the flowing river from a restaurant window, looking in the late afternoon sun at all the fruits of the earth as we slowly spoon our persimmon sherbet.

  8 november 1999. I go to the premiere of Oshima’s new film, Gohatto. It is sober, serious, and beautiful. The style is recognizably his, but it is now autumnal, contemplative. He comes onto the stage, walking haltingly, his hand on his thigh as though pushing himself forward. After his stroke he created this film through willpower alone, and now appears before its screening, standing there, upright, victorious.

  In the audience is his wife [Koyama Akiko]—we bow. I would not have recognized her, so altered has she been by this illness and its cost. It is as though she herself somehow absorbed all that pain and despair.

  9 november 1999. I go to the National Film Center to see Umi no Seimei-sen, the first feature-length propaganda film, a documentary edited by Aochi Chuzo in 1933. It is about the Marianas and the Carolinas, and opens like a travelogue, with all the strange animals and fruits, with bare-breasted beauties and Yap warriors in loincloths. Then, bit-by-bit, its annexation by Japan is touched upon. The natives happily assemble to greet them—they are naked, but the Japanese are in full uniform. Eventually we have the natives in clothes and singing the Japanese national anthem and doing banzai for the Emperor. Then, with maps and martial music, we are shown why these islands are important and what would happen if they were threatened. It is like propaganda from any country, except for those animals and fruits and the long lyrical sequences of palm trees. Back then, Japan found nature just everywhere.

  I then go to Ueno Station and eat in the station buffet—have a typical Japanese buffet meal: salted fish, seaweed, miso soup, and tofu—the sort of thing one used to eat all the time and rarely does now. And as I am eating the fish, I look around and remember these Ueno Station corridors fifty years ago when the natives lived in them among strange animals, like rats, and ate strange vegetables, like American rice. And they would have sung the American national anthem if America had insisted, and would have cried three cheers for MacArthur if required.

  13 november 1999. Last night in front of the park three rental busses stopped and a number of people, all carrying shopping bags, rushed out and, encouraged by numbers of cropped youths in Puma sweat suits, began running through the park. This morning I heard loud chants and cheers that went on for a long time, and when I went out I saw the Puma boys, each a group of three, earnestly instructing them. One girl had to get down on the pavement and pretend to scrub it, in the meantime saying she was sorry and would never do it again. Another was instructed to approach all strangers.

  Interested, I asked a cropped youth what they were doing. “We are a part of the Try to Be More Happy Group.” I said I had seen them last night and wondered where they slept. “Oh, no one slept; we stayed up all night to prepare for being happy today.” I asked how one managed to be happy. He explained: First, one signed one’s name and address on these forms and then gave five hundred yen to join. Join what? I asked. “Oh, Nakamura Genpei’s Happiness Group. You have probably heard of it.” I admitted ignorance. The girl was pushing against me, pencil in hand.

  “What is that woman doing scrubbing the pavement? Is that being happy?” “No,” said the boy, “but our Teacher thinks we have to show some examples of unhappiness before people will join us in our mission to be happy.” I thanked him and walked away.

  And this is going on at the very time when the Aum trial is announcing some of its results. Today the driver of the subway poisoners is given life. One poisoner has been sent to death row. And tonight coming home I see Puma-suited youths in the park stopping just everyone. Getting nowhere, but stopping just everyone. Much later I hear them in park, exhausted but chanting away, their calls now hysterical. Terrifying.

  24 november 1999. I take Edwin and Rachel McClellan to lunch at Spago. We talk about the suicide of his friend Eto Jun. “Sat in the bath, he did,” said Edwin. “Slit both wrists. Very Roman.” “Like Seneca,” I said. “But by no means instantaneous,” said Rachel. McClellan is giving the memorial talk on Eto at International House. I had earlier asked Seidensticker if he wanted to come with me. “Not on your life,” he said. “A perfectly dreadful man.”

  “His wife had died, you know,” said Rachel. “A perfectly lovely woman, and he was lost without her.” I looked at them. She is lame and her husband pushes her wheelchair everywhere, and they both handle this permanent impediment with patience and bravery. If he were to die where would Rachel be?—or the other way around.

  25 november 1999. Finishing the Alan Sheridan biography of André Gide, I am filled with admiration. For the book itself, to be sure, but also for Gide himself. In his eighties and still out on the street, as promiscuous as ever. What an inspiration, what a model to emulate.

  27 november 1999. As the economy collapses prices remain high. This is, I guess, very Japanese. In some other countries there would be at least a few merchants who would lower their expectations. Not here, however. There are new alternatives (the hundred-yen malls), but nothing established lowers anything. Perhaps it is because quality is judged by price. If you lower the price you lessen the quality. There is thus really no such thing as a bargain. Indeed, some raise their prices as though to tempt through exceptional quality—this is the way Wako Department Store works. The goods are in no way exceptional, but the prices are. Consequently anything merely wrapped in Wako paper is first-rate. I remember tales that in the far hinterlands people used to paper their walls with Tokyo department store paper, simply to give tone.

  1 december 1999. Karel [van Wolferen] back in Tokyo and over for lunch. He is enthused about some new ideas he has been having: One of the reasons that the description of the Japanese economic system has been so inaccurate is that all the wrong questions are being asked. When foreigners (particularly Americans) ask a question, their premises determine what it is—that and their agenda. This is not the way to approach it, he says, as indeed it is not. I mention that in the literary field, reforms have been going on for some time, to say nothing of anthropology, where it is has been determined that the very presence of the anthropologist determines what kind of information he receives. Karel is quite right, however. Such an idea is radical in economic circles. If you so rigidly depend on your own system of public and private sectors, you will not notice that Japan has none.

  2 december 1999. To International House to hear Edwin McClellan talk about Eto Jun. Spoke of him as a teacher and as a friend. The political persona was not there, since Ed, as he told us, never saw it. And so he heard others denounce Jun (who once left a dinner party because some American was there), but never understood why. He still doesn’t—but gave us some indications. Those who hated him did so because he was one of “them” and not one of “us.” The divide was political—after Princeton had provided for him, he then went and said that Marius Jansen waddled like a duck. Ed deplores this, but only on grounds of manners. He remembers his friend with warmth and sorrow.

  5 december 1999. “We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.” This is Rilke, as quoted by Coetzee. The poet, hating Austria (where he was born) and spurning Czech (his citizenship), decided to be French. I may have rejected the U.S.A. where I was born, but I did not decide to be Japanese. That is an impossible decision, since the Japanese prevent it. Rather, I decided to decorate Limbo and become a citizen of this most attractive, intensely democratic republic.

  15 december 1999. End of year, end of millennium. This one especially dramatic because of the computer chip crisis—the Y2K affliction: the fear that our machines cannot read past ninety-nine. This well fits the apocalyptic end of this most brutal of centuries, the one where it was discovered that violence was prime entertainment. People are afraid of the Y2K the way that children are afraid of deserved punishment. Made all
the more delectable because we do not know what will happen. Imagine—trusting our lives to machines we do not even understand.

  16 december 1999. Still, for the other millennia people trusted gods and they didn’t understand them, either. The difference is that the machines are ours. We made them. But, come to think of it, that is not a difference. We made our gods too. Since I early learned to get along without gods, have lived with a minimum of machines, spurned portable phones, e-mail, and Internet because I do not think much of promiscuous communication, I feel not superior but curiously out of it. As though there had been a party to which I was invited but did not attend.

  17 december 1999. Glenn Miller—the last popular music I remember listening to. Of everything after that I know nothing. Rock is noise to me. I missed most of American pop culture by not being there. I asked just recently who the Who was. This is not, I know, a loss—particularly in that I had other music. But I find it curious that, like Briar Rose, I managed to sleep through my generation.

  I did so by coming to this magical land where everything looks much the same but acts sometimes otherwise, and where I was forced to share nothing—much less pop music. But, since I escaped all this, I can also know what Rip Van Winkle and Urashima Taro both felt. But they interpreted loss. I feel gain.

  30 december 1999. Japan shuts down earlier than usual this year. There is such poverty (recession they still call it) that every day’s wage saved is a gain for the employers. Even the banks and post offices are closed. Yet there is little of the accustomed New Year emptiness. Most people have no money to travel, and besides they are afraid to—on the first day of the new millennium planes will fall from the sky. Against further threats people today crowd into stores—which will close tomorrow—to buy food, water, flashlights, and oil heaters. Electricity, that force that shaped our century, is no longer to be trusted. In a few days they will feel strange, facing their useless hoardings, but right now they fearfully buy. Me too. I go to the bank and take out enough money that I can live a week or two in case the cash machines fail.

  Amid all of this, a rare public rudeness—people shoving each other out of lines, spiteful remarks at others fumbling at the cash machines. Just today the wife of a former prime minister was mugged—a man on a motorbike grabbed her purse and knocked her down to get it. This would not make the news in some other countries, something this common. Nor did it make the news here, but the reason was different. No one in the media wants to admit what is happening.

  31 december 1999. I go with Chris [Blasdel] and Mika [Kimula] to see in the New Year at the Benten Shrine in Inogashira Park, outside Tokyo. It is cold but clear, and the stars stare down as we walk through the chill to the distant shrine, the fire of which we can see through the bare groves. It is near midnight.

  Then we hear cries and shouts and turn to look. There, on a bridge spanning the large pond, are a group of high school children. The girls are screaming with excitement and the boys have taken off their clothes and are standing on the railing of the bridge, one of them with his portable phone to his ear.

  He is counting down, timing himself with the telephone company’s exact-time service. His hand is in the air, fingers extended. All five, then four, then three, then two, then one. Then all the boys, five or so, jump off the bridge and into the pond.

  The girls shout, the boys cry, out thrashing in the pond, the dark water now white with waves. Then, like otters, the boys clamber up the banks and dance around in the cold; one of them lost his underwear, holds his hands over himself and laughs.

  Seeing us there the wet boys race forward and throw their arms around us shouting New Year’s greetings. I put my arms around a student wet as a seal and we kiss each other’s ears, then he races off as the girls squeal and again he jumps into the pond followed by all the others.

  A temple bell is booming, the girls are dancing, the boys are clambering up the banks to join them, my ear is wet, and the fires of Benten burn, warm in the distance. For this one moment everything returns—it is the new millennium, but my fifty years have not passed. They have been for this time returned to me. “Happy New Year,” sing the jumping girls and the leaping boys.

  Originally Richie intended to permanently close the Journals with the above entry. And indeed, he wrote no more for several years. But, as he said at the time, he came to miss the daily record and, more important, living seemed to have less meaning when it went unchronicled. Other writings for the year included his final book on cinema, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Also, in the following year (2001), Arturo Silva’s The Donald Richie Reader appeared.

  20 january 2002. Ate lunch at the cafeteria at Ueno Station. Walked in, sat down, waiter appeared. “What’s for lunch?” I asked. “Mother and child over rice,” he said. “Sounds good,” I said. Ordered and ate oyako donburi, mother chicken covered with child egg. No one thinks this strange, and it is not strange in Japanese, only in English.

  15 march 2002. Lunch with Chizuko [Korn], the first time I have seen her since Frank’s death last fall. Cancer of the brain, and I sat with him, my oldest friend, as he napped. And now, half a year later, she has been through the awful final days: the cremation, the scattering of the ashes, and the trouble with the daughters. She picks at her salad and says she has no idea what to do with herself—she is no longer Japanese (he made her an American citizen for tax purposes), and she no longer belongs here anyway. Still she is tough and brave and, somehow, smiling.

  1 april 2002. Last week, a day or two after his eightieth birthday bash, Ed [Seidensticker], finishing his morning shower, was drying his toes. The bending threw his artificial hip out of its joint and there he was, on the floor in enormous pain, and all alone. It took him an agonizing hour to get to the phone and then, when help came, it could not get in because he still had the safety chain on the door. The janitor had no cutting tools, nor did the ambulance. Finally, the firemen were called, and one leaped from an adjoining balcony to his; the door was not locked, and he got into the apartment, and when he told me about the fireman coming right in the window he again wept with relief. Now he is much his old self, though much muted about the inconvenience he must endure. He is in a wheelchair and will be in hospital for at least another three weeks. Then he will have to wear some kind of wrap-around spandex affair to keep his hip in place.

  14 april 2002. Ian [Buruma] interviewed me on the Occupation for his BBC radio documentary, and we then met Philippe [Pons] and went to a Korean restaurant. He, author of a book on the bas-fonds of Japan, has found a new dohan kissa, right around the corner from me. He has been twice, and says the clientele is younger than at the Shiro but it is also more expensive—and, of course, you still have to have a girl to get in. In Shinjuku, on the other hand, is one where you can go in by yourself and look away to your heart’s content. Shows me where the Ueno one is. I walk by it every day and never knew. We discuss the goût de la boue that we both share. “I share it too, you know,” said Ian, slightly put out by our exclusivity. No, you don’t, not at all, we reply. You are married with a child. “That makes no difference,” said Ian, defending himself, “I can still appreciate the goût de la boue.” It had become a point of honor, I saw, so allowed that perhaps, just maybe, he could. We then went into a definition of terms.

  15 april 2002. Thinking about writing and how difficult it is to capture anything like the reality of what you are writing about, I remember what Kurosawa once said when I asked him the meaning of some scene or other: “If I could have put it into words I wouldn’t have had to film it.”

  There is something then in the nature of words, of language, that prevents this apprehension. Perhaps it is because words must put things into code before they can communicate. The writer writes his encoding, which the reader, if he can understand it, decodes as he reads.

  “She drew her dagger and stabbed him.” Not at all realistic. Our minds trip over the words. They are too familiar and leave out all of the details that individualize reality. Already, what
we wrote is a genre scene, resembling all others, lifeless.

  “The glint of her silver blade, the dripping of his scarlet blood . . .” Also bad, but at least this kind of writing attempts to convey an impression, something like what we might have felt had we been there. A stab at uniqueness, but no bull’s-eye.

  In fact, try as we may, words hit no bull’s-eyes. They are not made for that. They are made for general description, for describing genre scenes. But if you made this sentence into a film, then you would have a unique moment, done once for all time and packed with real detail, no matter how phony the event.

  This too is encoding, but how different. This is because the encoding process is special. Read the above sentence, then see this scene (in Rashomon, except for the blood), and note the differences. One is more real than the other; one communicates (on one level) more than the other.

  25 april 2002. Though it is a bright spring day I suddenly, definitely, feel autumn. Why would that be? I wondered. Then I smelled it. Smoky, pleasantly unpleasant, reeking of the fall. I looked around. An unseasonal chestnut seller, his smoking cart (the nuts baking in hot gravel) sending this strange smell, which is to me completely autumn.

  At first whiff I saw not the pleasantly, placid streets of springtime Ueno, but the dappled horse chestnuts of the Rue Canebière in wartime Marseilles, and the dusky streets of Brindisi after dark, the flares making holes in the night, and the dock at Bari, when the sellers came out after the sun went down and it was cold enough that the chestnuts warmed the hands. This was when I first knew this smell (none in Ohio), and it is to these images that the odor returns me.

  Strange, the reality of this illusion. Proust says taste, but he could have said smell. They are the same. I stand there and see the past still faintly stenciled on the present, but fading as familiarity follows.

  30 april 2002. Out with Susan [Sontag]—had not seen her since last fall when she came to my Japan Society dinner right after she had been attacked on TV for writing her courageous assessment of the World Trade Center attack. In the short New Yorker piece she reminded the U.S.A. that there were reasons for its being so hated—that is all. “Oh, it got worse,” she says in that fine way she has, as though speaking of someone else. “Death threats, midnight calls.” I say that if that happened to me I would have folded up. “No you wouldn’t, you just think you would. Anyway, you just wait till they stop.” I ask what kind of people. “Oh, professional people, intellectuals, no low life.” She tells me that The New Republic had an article that began by rhetorically asking: What do Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and Susan Sontag have in common? Then answering it with: They all wish the destruction of America.