It is holiday season, Golden Week, and she remarks that there are no Japanese flags. We compare this with the U.S.A., where the American flag is now the most commonly found decoration—Stars and Stripes just everywhere, a country swathed in bunting. We discuss the implications of this triumphalism. “Well,” she says, “this is the first time in history that one country has had this much power.”
3 may 2002. Susan and I go to Asakusa, where we went during her first trip, more than a decade ago. “How clean it all is,” she says. “I remember it being much more scruffy.” Asakusa has been gentrified, turned into taxidermy, I say. We tour the neat little clutch of Edo temples, and she notices that they all now look plastic, even the real ones.
What will happen to Japan, she wonders, and guesses that the first thing to really go will be the banks. I tell her that everyone is now living on his or her fat, and since Japan was financially obese there is a lot of that. She tells me a “joke” that her son, David, told her: What is the difference between Japan and Argentina? Answer: Three years.
She finds much else different and at the same time now sees things she formerly did not. “These people do not know how to have discourse.” Invited here for one of these expensive “conferences” among intellectuals, she tells me what it is like, and gives a very funny impersonation of a famous Japanese architect making a presentation. “And I saw this building. And it was very big. And I thought, this is big, very big.”
I mention that the language does not really accommodate discourse, but it does encourage analogical talk, one thing leading to another, and I mention that in Japan it is suji instead of plot. At once Susan is interested. With her it is a way of learning.
Out comes the notebook and suji is spelled out. I tell her about that favored form, which looks no better written than it seems spoken: “following the brush” (zuihitsu), spontaneous nattering. I suggest that this is what the other people in the conference were up to. She writes all this down, and at once agrees that there are, certainly, different modes of thought, then she stops.
“Still, everyone is so corrupt—intellectually, morally.” We cast about for reasons why this should be so, and she, only here a couple of times, hits upon the one real answer: “It is because everyone is afraid. They do not want to be punished. And this country is so crony-prone, so given to authority, that if you do speak out, if you are intellectually honest, you will certainly be punished. If the people on my panel spoke out they would not get invited to the next panel, architects would not get commissions. That is what I mean by corrupt.”
Corrupt Susan is certainly not. Have I ever known anyone more honest, more forthright, more brave? I think not—nor anyone more moral. She can cut through cant; can see through any amount of bad faith. Just to be with her is to think more clearly, to become more courageous.
4 may 2002. I look from my balcony and see that two plainclothes cops are making a derelict woman move her belongings—a set of wheels piled with cardboard boxes, many shopping bags filled with newspapers—the kind of things these people cart about with them.
I used to wonder why, but I really knew. Why do I have books in my bookshelves and clothes in my drawers? It is because I am defined by what I have. My belongings are proof of me. If I had nothing, then I would be nothing. Me in a foreign city, me in the train, me in the airport—I always have my bags about me just as she does. And I imagine the panic I would feel if these worthless things were taken from me.
From high above I watch as she tries to wheel away her cart but no, they want her to go far away, not just a bit. They gesticulate. Far, far, far. So, as though reluctantly, she pushes her cart and tries to gather her bags. But, like all of us, she has too much.
Her further adventures I decline to watch, though I wonder why they are doing this to her. When I descend the street to go out she is gone, but they are there, radios in their ears. They are waiting for a royal—probably the Crown Prince or the Emperor is coming from Ueno, and these two have been given the task of clearing the roads.
5 may 2002. To the hospital to see Ed—a precise reprise of last year: in the shower, washing the feet, hip gets dislocated, finally reaches the phone, help comes, to the hospital, knocked out, hip manually reinserted. All this happened three weeks ago. He is sitting in a wheelchair, looks up, and smiles. “It seems the only solution will be for me never again to wash my feet.”
I bring him the paper in which I review his memoir. This pleases him. And we speak of banks and the coming collapse, and he is of the opinion that it is richly deserved. Mentions that further injury was that he had planned to finally take out state insurance the very week the accident occurred. So he has to pay the enormous medical bills that Japan insists upon.
19 may 2002. The Sanja Matsuri in Asakusa, the greatest of festivals—thousands in the streets, over a hundred floats on the shoulders of naked young men (and some clothed young women too these days), all noise and sweat and violence. And it went unseen by me, once again.
I used to be excited by it, used to go every spring, often with [Yato] Tamotsu, and I would ogle and he would snap away. He died (on this very day, the day we were to meet by the big Asakusa gate), but that is not why I no longer go to see the spectacle.
I don’t go because I am not satisfied merely to watch. I am excited by it, and I want to touch it. Several times I succeeded, but now I find that the kind of exclusion I thought I was used to is still painful. It is so dramatic, this exclusion. But at least it is natural and understandable. What is less so is my ambition to be a part when I know that I cannot.
15 october 2002. Rereading, after all these years, André Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt, I find a compelling sentence. Of some incident he writes: “And if it is indecent to relate it, it would be still more dishonest to pass over it.” Though I have nothing to relate that I consider indecent, it is Gide’s constant attempts at honesty that continue to impress me. So this sentence is enough to push me to again begin some accounting for my days.
16 october 2002. Most of my life has been spent regarding Japan—observing it, considering it, comparing it. And I have been happily occupied; have learned much I would not otherwise have known. It could have been anyplace—even places I like better: Greece, Morocco. The results would have been much the same, since I did not remain where I was born.
But now I can see that I am getting older because there are waves of memory, a tide that wants to sweep me back to where I came from. This will not occur, but I must experience its effects.
I, who have spent my time meditating on difference, am now presented with “similarity”—what I experienced then and what I remember now. Forty-five years ago Igor Stravinsky told me that at his age (which is what mine is now), he could for the first time remember the smell of the St. Petersburg snow of his childhood. Now, just today, out of nowhere, comes to me the sweet, watery taste of mulberries.
There was a tree in my aunt’s garden, and I used to climb it to pick the white and purple fruit, to get it before the birds got it since, even back then, people did not much eat mulberries.
I remember the reason offered. The birds are fond of them, you see, I was told, and the seeds go right through them and so every tree is born from excrement and you don’t want to eat that, do you?
I did not then know that many plants and trees thus grow, but I do remember seeing that this made a kind of dim bond between me and the mulberry tree, and that I ate more berries than ever. And now, suddenly, this remembered taste.
17 october 2002. My balcony overlooks the great lotus lake. I am often on the shore, sitting there, enjoying my goût, nay my nostalgie de la boue. Why is mud so comforting? We have mud baths, along with sand baths and seaweed baths, where you are covered with the stuff. Medicinal claims are made, but I think it is the comfort of being thus lathered that attracts.
The only other time this will occur is after we are dead. Whether cremated or not, the remains are covered with earth. “When I am laid in earth . . . ,” sings Did
o, and Purcell sets these words to a descending melody of grave beauty, both accepting and celebrating.
The nostalgie extends to other kinds of boue as well. The other day, in the park, I smelled something I could not place. It was pungent and meaty, but at the same time it was rich, even opulent. And familiar, so familiar.
Tovey writes of a similar experience with a melody he knew well but could not place. It was ambiguous, beautiful, and difficult. And when he did recollect, it turned out to be one of Brahms’ most famous tunes, but for a time rendered innocent again, luxuriating in its originality, freed of all those hearings that had made it famous.
So this smell, which I eventually identified as shit. Someone had shat in the bushes. The odor at once lost all of its interesting qualities. These were instantly replaced with thoughts of dirt, filth, etc. It was no longer a fragrance but a stench.
I stopped and considered. It was the same smell. It had not changed. What had changed was merely what I chose to think about it. Or had been made to think about it. My initial reaction had been the authentic one.
Walking slowly homeward through the park, the sun setting, the pond slowly disappearing into the dusk, I thought about my liking for mud, fecund mud. My equally strong attraction as well toward a different kind of mud—the smell of humans, their armpits, their crotches—even their smegma, which as a child I thought was a Greek island.
In the growing dark it seemed natural that I next consider the dead, these now useless bodies slowly disintegrating, and the sweet smell of death. All of this seemed a part now of the mud that nurtured the lotus, which I could come and see tomorrow morning blooming pink and glorious for just one day.
18 october 2002. In Japan, the incessant urge to aestheticize—everything, from tea ceremony to capital punishment. What this means is bringing everything to an extreme order, which is then presented balanced, and regularized.
In the park I look at the homes of the homeless. Cardboard boxes precisely placed, a blue tarpaulin exactly draped. Inside, the found blanket folded as neatly as it would be at the Imperial Hotel. At one side a smaller box—this is for the shoes. The effect is not only utilitarian; it is also “beautiful,” that is, in accordance with the principles of good taste. And this from some anonymous builder who is completely severed from the common opinion he still represents.
23 october 2002. What phrase is most overheard in today’s Tokyo? It used to be sumimasen (excuse me). Now it’s ima doko? (where you at now?). But, apart from such portable phone use, the one I am hearing more and more these days is hazukashii. It is used in a very open fashion by men and women alike, and it describes self in an apparently attractive stance: being ashamed or embarrassed. I wonder why.
I cannot imagine an English-speaking nation where every other phrase is: “Oh, I was so embarrassed.” Yet I have heard Japanese footballers thus sugar their remarks. Is this, too, a legacy from the police-state days of 1604–1858, where you were required to show yourself in disarray, to apologize for simply being, the shogun’s power so internalized that being craven was good manners?
26 october 2002. Coming back through the rain I am stopped by a young woman who asks me if I am Japanese. I ask if I look Japanese. She says not at all, but that sometimes foreigners just don’t know where to go of an evening—she has a nice place and perhaps I would like to come. I decline, and she thanks me and proceeds. Hopeless to attempt to connect my perhaps appearing Japanese with her further request. I am like borrowed scenery, and her query was merely to find out if I could speak the language or not. If I could, I was potential. And the rain continues to fall.
28 october 2002. Big moon out tonight, but small signs that all is not economically well. We have the newspapers to assure us of coming prosperity, but we have long ago learned to distrust the papers almost as much as we doubt the tube. The smaller the sign, the louder it speaks.
Usually I am ignored when I walk along the Nakamichi, that frantic little street in back of my apartment where every evening touts gather to cajole customers. The boys carry menu cards with pictures of girls on them. The girls themselves display their charms (bunny outfits and the like), and attempt to lure the sarariiman into their basement lairs.
Now, however, business is so bad that the passing foreigner is also accosted. You come my house? asks a hesitant lad in English. Why? I ask. Drink, he says. I shake my head. Fuck? He says, but so tentatively that it sounds like a conjuration, a spell, or a hex.
Earlier, Ginza, too. Business so bad that outside the pretentious Sony Building there stands a small girl dressed as an “English” maid with lace cap and frilly apron, and she is passing out flyers for the Briar Rose Pub. And over it all—the moon, now looking like an advertisement for something.
29 october 2002. There are cats in Ueno Park, quite a number of them now. They take the bread from the pigeons and steal bits of dried squid and rice crackers from the sleeping homeless. In so doing they have become quite tame—once turned feral, they are now again domesticated. One of them is rubbing itself again the thin shins of the smallest of the resident transvestite prostitutes.
“Looks like you have a friend,” I say.
“Only one so far,” he replies, ruefully. “Really bad tonight. No customers.”
“And you with a family,” I say, sympathetically. I have seen him with two of his children and once with his wife. It is her clothes he wears.
“Well, there’s always death,” he observes.
“But you wouldn’t make your family . . .”
“Oh, no, just me.”
The cat purrs, rubbing itself on the man’s wife’s stockings. Then he adds, “We are all in Buddha’s hands.”
“Buddha’s lap,” I correct.
He smiles, “I wonder if Buddha’s got a big one.”
And the cat rubs and purrs.
30 october 2002. Smells—they change too with the years, just like sights and sounds. On these very streets the odors were those of roast squid and broiled eel, of pickled radish, and above it the brazen scent of beer, and above that, like a piccolo, the schnapps-like whiff of shochu.
Now, though these foods and drinks are still available, the smells are the sweetish reek of the hamburger, the oily stench of the French-fry, and the costly scents of the young.
1 november 2002. All these homeless, all these liveried people trying to get you into their establishments, all the talk in papers and magazines about the new poverty—and yet . . . The new Hermes store is packed; so is the new Vuitton “Centre.” So are the fanciest restaurants. People may be living off their fat, but how much fat can you carry around?
I also hear that this recession is really an engineered event, intended to fool the world, particularly the U.S.A., and excuse the criminal banks and the idiot government. I do not believe this, but it would help explain.
4 november 2002. Showing at the Press Club of that film about me, Sneaking In. I’d seen it several times before and was hence mostly over the shock of viewing myself as I actually appear rather than as I remember myself, or as I currently like to remember.
And again I am struck by how much I am like my relatives. The way I purse my lips, the narrow look—that is my mother. The measured gravity, the specious reasoning—that is my paternal uncle.
Have not before seen the film with my peers, however. They behave well enough. During the questions afterward nothing much except for one Japanese man, who is confused by the parade of personae, and asks, “Who is this? Critic, filmmaker, s/m addict?” (This last inspired by a clip from my Cybele, a film made with the Zero Jikken, a group that would do anything.) “Who are you?”
This was a pertinent question—indeed, what the film had been about. I asked the audience what it thought. No answers.
10 november 2002. Leo Rubinfein over to ask questions for his book. He asked me what I most regretted, having lived half a century here, and witnessed all the change. I said that I most regretted the loss of a kind of symbiosis between people and where they lived,
a kind of agreement to respect each other. I again mention the paradigm—the builders make a hole in their wall to accommodate the limb of a tree. No more now. It is more expensive to make a hole than it is to cut down the tree, just as it is cheaper to raze than to restore. And since the environment is now so different, the people are different. This is symbiotic, too, degraded environment makes degraded people who make more degraded environment.
And with it I regret the loss of a kind of curiosity. People used to be curious about each other. Now they have their hands full with their convenient and portable environment—Walkman in the ears, manga for the eyes, and the portable phone (which now contains their lives) in the palm of their hands. Many Japanese no longer look at each other, or those they talk to—those on that select menu of known voices on their phones they cannot see. These robots, I regret.
11 november 2002. Rainy Tokyo—and from my elevated seat on the Yamanote Line I look out at the thousands of revolving rooftops, glimpse the hundreds of streets stretching away from every vista, stare at the improbable complexity of this tangle of a city, and suddenly understand the affection of the Japanese for M. C. Escher. He with his thwarted perspectives, his people going up and down, over and under at the same time, his lunarscapes shown from left, right, above and under, simultaneously. This impossible sight from the Piranesi of our times is an accurate rendering of the experience of the Japanese capital.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 58
