13 november 2002. I read that it was Rousseau in his Confessions who invented the notion of the self as an “inner” reality, unknown to those around us. It is now so ingrained, and used to create such bad faith, that I thought it had occurred much earlier.
There is a quote, too. If he did not hide this real self, then he would have to show himself “not just at a disadvantage but as completely different from what I am.” It was the disadvantage he was thinking of, hence his deciding that he was something else.
The Japanese (and many other Asian folk) have escaped this. There is no hidden and real self. Rather, the social self and the individual self are twins, living happily side-by-side, though occasionally quarreling. When getting along together, the social self is called tatemae and the personal is called honne and the combination is in the West called hypocrisy. When not getting along the social self is called giri (obligation) and the individual is called ninjo (inclination), and all of Japan’s drama is made up of the consequences.
14 november 2002. Walking down the street with Paul [McCarthy] and Ed [Seidensticker], Japan specialists both, we see a youth approaching us. “Oh,” says Paul, admiringly. “Now that’s attitude!”
What he is approving in the slovenly young is the way this schoolboy has altered his uniform. His shirt is open, the coat buttoned wrong, his pants pulled down so that the belt is far below the navel, and the crotch sways.
“No,” says Ed. “That’s fashion.”
16 november 2002. What do I want to be when I grow up? An attractive role would be that of the bunjin. He is the Japanese scholar who wrote and painted in the Chinese style, a literatus, something of a poetaster—a pose popular in the eighteenth century and typified by Yosa Buson, and right now by my friend Kajima Shozo. I, however, would be a later version, someone out of the end of Meiji, who would pen elegant prose and work up flower arrangements from dried grasses and then encourage spiders to make webs and render it all natural.
The bunjin is useless, knows nothing of commerce and politics, tends to be something of a dandy, and yet in his own way strives after truth. Art is for its own sake, but it also has a moral purpose. It makes one a better person. Privately he is heterodox, and here history is mostly silent.
This budding bunjin, myself, writes in English rather than Chinese, is a talented dilettante in almost everything, but a scholar in his field nonetheless. For him, art is a moral force and he cannot imagine a life without it—but art does not mean pictures (though he paints) but, rather, everything—fiction, poetry, drama, music, and films. He is also the kind of casual artist who, after the day’s work is done, descends into his pleasure park and dallies.
18 november 2002. I look out at the band shell. Only seven in the morning, but a long and ragged line. The jobless, homeless, waiting. In a few hours the evangelists will come and open the gates. In they will go, all of them, hundreds by then, and then the gates will be shut and locked. The seventh-day people will evangelize them with hallelujahs for an hour or two and then, having saved their souls, will hand out the rice-balls that are the reason the congregation gathered. And no one complains. The reason I know this is that one of the congregation told me. And this was not in complaint.
24 november 2002. Overnight, frigid autumn. North wind—that harsh edge remembered from winter—and shadows fading as cold clouds cover the sun. Why then, as I look out over the ruins of the great lotus pond, this sudden feeling of pleasure, of contentment?
It is because I am observing a great seasonal change, because I am here to do so, and to do so in comfort. It is because I am old and have many of the advantages of age.
I no longer care what people I don’t know think of me. And I take the opinion of those whom I do know lightly. I am no longer afraid of empty surmises. I am freed of the tyranny of my loins, if not yet from that of the loins of others. I am no longer afraid of my future since my future is already here, and my seventy-eighth year is my happiest yet.
25 november 2002. Ginza. I look about me. Not a sign of traditional Japaneseness. And to expect it would be like expecting powdered wigs in Philadelphia. Yet search we do, we foreigners. But since no one looks for colonial attributes in the U.S.A. why look for kimono in Japan?
One reason is that we occasionally see them. Another is that the Japanese make a big fuss about their traditional “heritage.” Yet another is that the past is centuries deep in Japan, and though erosion is swift and the water is rising, islets of tradition still float by.
Japan started late in the business of being modern. Before that it was timeless, a flat expanse with occasional eddies of modification. Consequently there is a backlog of tradition. But being traditional is nothing that inspires a contemporary young Japanese. Indeed no distinction is made between now and then, and if something old is useful it will be incorporated with no consideration, and if not it will be tossed out.
What I had thought a wall between the Japanese and the foreign no longer exists. And any barrier between then and now has been destroyed as well. And why not? This has gone on for centuries, and the destruction of tradition is a part of tradition itself. We do not remark on this in countries with shallow histories, only those with deep ones.
26 november 2002. In this signaling system that is life we must examine our own earpieces before we use our mouthpieces. We must learn to distrust ourselves, our own apparatus. Instead of assuming that the other made a mistake, we should at least admit the possibility that we did. This is particularly necessary in ascribing motives. How many times have I erred—allowing my agenda or my paranoia to garble the message?
Since my life has been spent in translating, in comparing and judging, my opportunities for error have been more than for many. Years ago, I was attempting to bend a younger person to my ends and he used a word I did not know that ended in kusai, a word I only knew as “stinking,” “putrid,” and so on. I at once took this as an insult and stalked off. Later, I heard the word again and this time recognized it as terukusai, a simple phrase meaning, “I’m embarrassed.”
28 november 2002. Student eating sandwich on the subway. Egg salad, I think. Big Adam’s apple bobbing above a celluloid collar. Very intent on delicate task, egg salad being what it is, and not a glance for those around him, no indication that he is not at home alone.
That is the difference. Even five years ago there would have been some concern at being thus seen consuming. A lapse of decorum—that is how it would be viewed. And still is sometimes. An older woman across from the youth is regarding the spectacle (some egg salad has just dropped onto that black gabardined lap) with a cold gaze. But she will die, this old woman, and the youth will grow to manhood and middle age.
The young may still talk about being ashamed or embarrassed, but this is merely a conversational ploy. No one under twenty feels the kind of social restraint once standard. Now not only does youth eat and drink in full view, but they also (boys and girls alike) pluck eyebrows and pop pimples. Also (just girls this time) put on full make-up in public—lipstick, rouge, and mascara.
Is this a Good Thing? I find it difficult to become as indignant as does the old lady, because it argues for a certain freedom which the young did not before express. Also I remember that the old lady’s generation (the men at any rate) pissed freely in the street, something today’s youth would not think of doing.
30 november 2002. Fumio for dinner. His birthday, his fifty-third. We met when he was twenty. Now, passion long spent, we are good friends, meet every week or so, and take a selfless interest in each other. I ask about his daughter, Haruka, and he asks about Dae-Yung, the son who took his place.
Over our tandoori chicken he asks me if I was ever interested in someone my equal. Since this was in Japanese he could ask it, no matter how strange it now sounds in English. I suppose it could be translated to mean had I ever “fallen in love” with anyone with the same “general interests,” that is, caste/class. In any event the answer is no.
My interests are entirely in dif
ferences. The beloved other has to be all things I am not, though I might wish to have been. Dae-Yung, a soccer champ, not interested in books or movies, straight, much more interested in action than in cogitation.
I ask Fumio about himself. Oh, no, for him it is similarities that attract. His wife, for example. Or me. Now wait just a minute, I thought. How come his difference attracted me, and my similarity attracted him?
As though I had said it aloud, he smiled, put down his fork, and said, “Maybe I was not much like you at first, but I became like you. You had more influence on me than anyone else. You didn’t see how much I had grown like you, and when you did we stopped making love and became friends instead.”
I had not known that before.
3 december 2002. On the plane coming back from Korea I sit across the aisle from Kitano Takeshi. We are both returning from the Pusan Film Festival. Now he has opened a large, blank-paged notebook, the kind used in primary school, and is scribbling in it, the writing large, unformed. He is creating his new film script.
This is the way he always works. He fills notebook after notebook, and these he presents to his associates. They all sit down and read them and then cobble together a scenario. After Kitano approves it, production begins. Filming is accomplished in an analogous manner. Something shot is inspected. If everyone agrees, it is used. If not it is discarded and the scene is rarely re-shot.
He nods as he writes, apparently agreeing with what his hand is doing, and then starts on a new page. There are many ways to create and this is one of them. Not perhaps the best, but one that fits Japan, where corporate accomplishment is so common. But as I watch his studious profile, observe his careful avoidance of all those staring (me included) at one of the most famous men in Japan, I recognize what he reminds me of—a diligent student doing his homework.
4 december 2002. Ian [Buruma] calls from London. He is writing about me for the New York Review of Books and wonders how to handle the subject of homosexuality. Cannot leave it out, wonders how to put it in. So do I—I remember Auden: “A capacity for self-disclosure implies an equal capacity for self-concealment.”
Possibilities: Not “gay”—gay is a lifestyle now, not a sex style. And not “queer,” which I otherwise like, since it has now been taken over by academe. “Faggot” might be misunderstood, and “homosexual” is just too solemn, a po-faced word bristling with medical associations.
Ian does not want to use terms like “preferences,” “lifestyles,” etc., because they are euphemisms. Perhaps no word then. Words are half the trouble anyway. Instead, dramatize. He will think about how to do this, and I add that he might mention the advantages of homosexuality.
There is John Updike: “Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society’s circumambient encouragements, feels the isolated, disquieted human condition with special bleakness: he must take it straight.” A quote that means several things. Many men finally settle for the fact that they had children and this becomes why they are here—this is something that many women do, too. There is family life to sustain everyone except those who have never made families. In the end, the human condition wins out, to be sure. Maybe this is something that people with specialized roles know.
Later I look up another reference and fax it to Ian. It is from A. M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay. “Vice—bestower of solitude—offers the man marked out by it the excellence of a separate condition. Consider the invert . . . he does not accept himself, constantly justifies himself, invents reasons, torn between shame and pride; yet—enthusiasts of the fatuities of procreation—we go with the herd.”
5 december 2002. At the FilmEx festival a large, sturdy, bald man comes up to me. It is Amir Naderi, the Iranian film director. We had met some twenty years ago, after he had first gone to the United States, and he had after that made a point of reading me and wondering about me.
Why? Because we are the same. We are both expatriates. He had left his troubled country in order to have the freedom of being himself and so—half a century before him—did I. He went to my former country, and I came to this one.
Now he is, for the first time, here and wants to talk about our condition. He thinks mine was perhaps the more difficult of the two experiences—language and all. Perhaps, I say, but his was the more difficult in another way. After all, there was a period when my adopted country maintained a certain interest in the country I abandoned. He, however, had to cope, still has to, in a country which despises the country that he abandoned.
Does he ever go back? No, never. Could he? Oh, probably—then, do I go back? Yes, I go back, but only if I am invited and only if I have some work to do—about once a year. What do I feel? he asks. Culture shock, I answer.
6 december 2002. [Tomiyama] Katsue has been to see Oshima Nagisa. He was dressed and put in a wheelchair for the occasion. She shows me a snapshot taken. He is wearing a red shirt and looks very thin, smiling away.
But he is not well, she tells me. I ask if he remembered me and he giggled and said in a very high voice that yes he did. But he didn’t.
It has been six years since he had his stroke. I remember the doctor telling me after Eric [Klestadt] had his that patients usually live five or six years. Eric lived five terrible years.
Oshima’s five years have been terrible too, but he somehow found the strength to make one final film, Gohatto. After that, the hospital again, then the nursing home, and now a room in his own house.
Does he want some beer? Oh, beer, beer, he says, his voice high. The sister shakes her head, no. The wife, seeing this, says yes; today is an exception.
I look out of the window at anonymous Tokyo in the rain, growing colder, winter here.
11 december 2002. Being old is like being convalescent. People tell you how good you look, as though they are pleasantly surprised, had not expected you to look good at all. They also give you their seats and open doors for you. There is tendency to pat as well, as though you are not only convalescent but also a child, or a dog.
One of the best things about being old is that you are no longer expected to do your share. You may now drift down life’s stream and not wield the oar. Also, you are asked questions about the course of the river, the coming scenery, just as though you have taken the trip before. You are not, however, asked about the maelstrom at the end.
24 january 2003. A memorial meeting—ten years since Alan Booth died. His wife and daughter have arranged it. The friends gather—Tim [Harris], Stephen [Shaw], and others. It has been a decade—some of those I met at the funeral are now unrecognizable.
Since the daughter, still very young though no longer a child, does not remember much, the meeting is to tell her about her father. I talk about the trip to Yufujin and the hot spring jaunt, leaving out his lusting after a local movie star, and instead remember that he told me that one of his ways out of an unhappy childhood was to go and take a long, hot bath.
Most of the others are not so temperate, and when people started talking about his arrogance and his bad manners, the memorial became somewhat like the second half of Ikiru. A kind of climax was reached when someone remembered Alan in a coma being visited by Karel, who murmured that they would meet again in a better place. At which point the body opened an eye and said, “I certainly hope not.”
If I had stayed I would have seen it turn more accepting, and at the end quite sentimental. What the daughter made of this, what kind of impression she gained of her father, I don’t know, but whatever it was, she impressed me as being quite able to take it.
1 february 2003. Cold on Chuo-dori as I walk from the subway to the corner where I turn for home. Many girls, as usual, out on the street, hanging around, their coats open in this cold to show their short skirts and long legs.
Hello, hello. Usually I am ignored as a bad business bet, an elderly white gentleman who most certainly knows no Japanese. This girl accosts me, however, and when I am about to plead being tired and sleepy, she says, in Japanese, “No, no, no. English, Englis
h.”
She wants to study. So I tell her how to say “I give massages,” and “I am cheap.” Then she asks how to say ¥15,000. I say that that is not cheap. That is true, she says, but she might as well start high.
Her Japanese is quite bad and I ask where she is from. Shanghai, she says, with a large smile. Since she is so forthcoming I learn more. Her keeper does not like her to fuck in the massage room, so she and her client have to go elsewhere, which is a bother. She has never had a client who merely wanted a massage, though that would be less expensive for him. Usually she begins at ten thousand yen, but will bargain. What else can she do? she asks. Then, suddenly, “I have a very bad accent in Japanese don’t I?”
This I tell her can be part of her charm, that Japanese don’t like it when we can speak all that well. She nods in a matter-of-fact fashion, and then we part. Actually she only wanted an English lesson, and this she has had.
5 february 2003. Economy worse, the cracked bottom showing as the money recedes, visible even to me. Today I lost the second of two jobs. The first was last month when Sogetsu, the flower school whose copy I had been doing for years, called and said they would do it themselves, that they could no longer afford even my pittance. Today I called UniJapan Film, that consortium whose yearbook I have done for decades, and they said that they, too, would be doing it in-house. I say that they might at least have told me. Mumbled apologies, indicating that they were afraid to. Many make livings as I do, various jobs here and there, retainers, editing this or that. This is where my money comes from, certainly not from the books I write. And now the convenience of a native English-speaking person on the premises is no longer affordable.
9 february 2003. A hard and sunny winter Sunday and I go to the Furushiba Bunka Senta to see the Ozu Yasujiro exhibition. But first I have to find it—it is on the other side of the river in a section of this enormous city that I do not know.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 59
