5 november 2003. How handsome the autumn foliage. Not so much is made of it compared to the cherry blossom celebrations, but the beauty is even more spectacular. Tawny yellows, russet browns, deep crimsons—these colors I see outside my window. If I were strong enough to go to Nikko, I would see whole panoramas of these autumnal colors. They remind me of the color of a cello, burnished browns with orange shining through. But no promise of anything more glorious to come. Maybe that is why the cherry blossoms get all the attention—they herald summer. These fall colors mean wilting, drying, withering. They announce only deadly winter.
18 november 2003. At Roppongi, trendy nocturnal home of the carousing young, I am buying a subway ticket and suddenly standing in front of me is a young Japanese woman mumbling something. It turns out that she is asking for one hundred yen. Surprised, I ask why. “Shibuya,” she answers with an impatient frown, as though I should have known her intended destination. Surprised though I am to encounter begging in affluent High Town Roppongi, I would be inclined to give were it not for her manner. But she is so sullen, so unfriendly, and at the same time so expectant, that I smile and politely observe that she should be out on the street earning her hundred yen. Later, on the escalator, I think about my retort and remind myself that some of her hostility might have been embarrassment. Even so, however, common as this incident might be in, say, New York, where you are asked for handouts everywhere, in Tokyo it is rare enough that it ought be discouraged, nay, stamped out.
27 november 2003. During the FilmEx Festival screening of Father and Son, just at one of the most intense moments, the projector breaks down. Lights come up; loudspeaker apologizes and says it will be a few minutes. Eventually thirty of these accumulated and still the audience sat. And no one complained. No shouting, not even raised voices, and no demands for funds returned. I wonder in what other country this would have occurred. And, indeed, in less than an hour a new machine was installed and the projection continued.
30 november 2003. Winter slowly comes. The sky is gray and the leaves are black. The lotus petals yellow and fall away, leaving brown stems standing in the dark water.
It is cold. The crows are hungry and begin their calls at dawn as they swoop to savage the garbage bags. The homeless are hungry as well. As the sky slowly brightens they get up from their cardboard or come out of their boxes. A few exercise to warm themselves, but most don’t.
The crow problem has been addressed for ten years now but various plans have come to nothing. The homeless problem has been less publicly probed, but here also the result is the same. Still, a kind of solution is evident—solve the problem by getting used to it.
1 december 2003. I read that Nagare [Masayuki] is going to rebuild his sculpture that stood at the base of the World Trade Center. There will also be a new building to go with it, a soaring but seeming insubstantial structure that “echoes” the shape of the nearby Statue of Liberty. Nagare’s work will be smaller than the original, which was destroyed not by the collapse of the buildings but by the later clearing of the area.
3 december 2003. Reading Nagai Kafu’s diaries (in Donald Keene’s adaptation), and find that he wanted to stay abroad and only returned home upon parental orders. “I feel as if my life first began the day I set foot on the soil of the American continent, and I would like to forget memories of the past in Japan as if they were nothing more than a dream.” I know that feeling well, and I had no parental orders to go back, so I stayed.
Here, Kafu disliked Japan until the country had so changed that it was no longer what he had disliked. The Taisho period was very different from the Meiji. Consequently, he could come to miss Meiji because he had this new dislike of Taisho. Ditto for Taisho to Showa, and it would have been the same for Showa to the present Heisei if he had lived.
Have I escaped this? I wonder—not in regards the U.S.A. but in regards Japan. I, too, tend to romanticize the past and to excoriate the present. I do not want to be an old fogy, but I am one. So was Kafu. All romantics turn into them given time. So, I wonder if escape is enough. Apparently not.
20 december 2003. The Aum trial is slowly ending. Death sentences have been issued and Asahara sits and mutters, perhaps now truly mad. The courts have been criticized for taking so long—years. But due process usually takes this long in Japan and, in this instance, the prosecution wanted to make certain that all evidence—mountains of it—was in place.
Now the headquarters of the sect have been attacked by a group of right-minded men with swords. They are members of a right-wing sword collectors club. Newspapers are careful not to heroize such local efforts. To have such a questionable group assume such retributive power is something like Baragon coming to help during a Godzilla attack.
23 december 2003. I take Paul [Waley] with me to see a preview of Sakamoto Junji’s new film, Out of This World (Kono Yo no Soto e), set in the spring of 1947, just a few months after I first came here. The lights go down, and there is the Tokyo of fifty-six years ago: people live in shacks; they wear old army uniforms or, the women, monpe or kimono; the kids are often ragged and sometimes feral. GIs on the street in summer khaki with Eighth Army or Seventh Cavalry patches, looking at dressed-up pompom girls. A general air of benevolent business. Sakamoto has got the atmosphere more or less right, but I do not believe a frame of the picture.
I wonder why. Perhaps because it is in color, and movies in color are, if they attempt to look real, artificial. Black and white are, like it or not, the tints of reality. Or, another reason, perhaps because the story is mere melodrama—but then life, particularly life for the Japanese in 1947, was also melodrama.
A more important reason was suggested by Paul. It is strange about generations, he said. No matter what, people change. Those faces, the body language, the very walk of these actors are those of today. They tell us it is 2003 even as they insist it is 1947.
Mr. Koga [Masaki], of Shochiku, distributing the film, tells me that no one will notice anything like this. Young people of today were not there then; and indeed, he says, not all of them are aware that Japan and America had a war that ended in an Occupation. And these young, although he does not say so, are the only audience for this film.
But in the meantime I have had two hours back there—sort of.
24 december 2003. Christmas Eve, and the U.S.A. has been successful in cajoling and threatening Japan into sending troops into Iraq. I feel I have come full circle. When I was first here the U.S.A. was criminalizing all war efforts. Now it is applauding them. The Japanese army was being disbanded. Now it is being built up. It is not, to be sure, yet called an army. It consists of a large group of young men known as the Self-Defense Forces who are defending Japan by going off to Iraq.
I know why, of course, but from the reasons one learns little about Japan except of its cravenness. After having been a client state of the U.S.A. for over half a century, after having greatly benefited from the “nuclear umbrella” under which it has waxed and grown wealthy, it suddenly finds that, Russia gone, it must pull an international oar or two. The U.S.A. will make it pay for its passage.
One answer would have been to uphold the Constitution, which renounces war, and refused. But this is something that conciliatory Japan feels it cannot afford to do.
25 december 2003. There is another way of looking at my years here: An adolescent Roman, early fed up with the Imperial Way, went to help in the pacification of Antioch. He believed in Roman benefits, but also thought that the ways of the East were in many ways better than those of the West. Consequently, when the legionnaires went home, he stayed and watched the reconstruction. And he forgot that he was still the citizen of a major power and enjoyed all the comforts of living in a client state. He hated Roman arrogance, but did not recognize his own brand of it. He took advantage of his status while he at the same time deplored it. It was in a way an ideally balanced life. Rome turned more purely imperial, ruling over further extensive territories, over more colonies and dependencies, assuming supreme author
ity, turning regal, and majestic. This, the adolescent, now an old man, deplored, but remained a Roman citizen because of its convenience. And as Antioch turned into an imitation of Rome, he deplored the change and turned nostalgic, remembering the distant days of his first coming, now shimmering like a mirage on the distant horizon of his life.
27 december 2003. The first box of DVDs in the Shochiku edition of the complete films of Ozu. This sublime home drama may now be seen in the home; and the celebrations of Ozu’s centenary are complete.
Being ill and in hospital much of the time I missed all of them, though invited. Could not go to Tsu, where he went to school; could not attend any of the foreign symposia, not even the local meeting of scholars just ended.
I wonder what Ozu himself would have thought of these. He would have been gratified, certainly, and at the same time skeptical. Particularly, I think, at the theoretical claims of the new generation of Ozu scholars—Hasumi Shigehiko, Yoshimoto Mitsuro, and Yoshida Kiju.
It would not do to cast Ozu as the rough craftsman or as the sensible anti-intellectual, or as the homegrown humanist, but at the same time, one cannot see him as the Derrida of his generation.
And I certainly would not have fit well into the recent symposia, where post-structural papers were produced—Yoshida insisted that Ozu’s films were anti-cinema. Nor would I have been welcomed. Sato Tadao, certainly an outstanding early Ozu scholar, was not invited. Nor would I have been was I not safely ill.
I wonder what Ozu would have felt about his apotheosis. Nothing at all, I should guess. All of this has nothing to do with him, and he would have known it.
1 january 2004. Stayed up long enough to observe the end of the Year of the Sheep and the start of the Year of the Monkey. Stood by the big bonfire at the Benten shrine across from my place until the bells began and the doors opened, then went up, tossed my modest offering into the gaping money box, and made my prayer.
It was like New Year’s in the countryside, very quiet, the bark of a distant dog near. Few people, since so many have gone abroad for the holidays, and clear skies, since all the factories are turned off. And with this quiet, these few people, a certain simplicity as though complications had been shed.
I seem to remember that life was once made of much less than it now is, but perhaps this is because of a nostalgic self or merely a faulty memory.
10 january 2004. Asakusa Kurenaidan will finally appear. Translated, it will be published this year. It has been fifty-seven years since I stood on the top of the Subway Tower and looked out over ruined Asakusa. Now The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa will be read by anyone who wants to.
It is curious. My life is so entwined with this book. Often I have attempted to translate it, to have it translated. This desire was disappointed a good many times, but then Alisa Freedman did it, and I added to her work by creating the tone—that of the persona (the “Kawabata” of the book) with whom I had been living for half a century, the narrator of this strange book.
I used to live on Kototoi-dori in Yanaka because it led to Kototoi Bridge, which is where some of the action takes place. I used to go to Asakusa every month or so, just to be where those people in the book had been. I looked at other cities, searching for the Asakusa in each. Asakusa became Japan for me, the many in the one, the most fruitful kind of partiality—the final fetish.
15 january 2004. Fumio to dinner. We look at old photos. I turn up one of [Nakano] Yuji at work—part-time laborer, standing there for forty years now.
I wondered why I still think so much about him, now that I have not seen him for decades, now that he is an old man, if even alive. Fumio said, “Because, he was the last Japanese.”
It’s true. Yuji had all of the old virtues—he saw a connection between himself and nature, the way things are. He believed in authority, though he was sly about evading it; was polite, decent, honest to the extent that he did not get caught; willing to do his best and allow himself to be much imposed on; fond of pleasure, and probably drank himself to death. And, more, he embodied an attitude now extinct—he accepted without bitterness, and made the most of what was left. I don’t know if this defines old-fashioned Japanese-ness, but it defines Yuji.
20 january 2004. Listening to a collection of movie music by Takemitsu, I suddenly hear Gagaku—his own version, composed for some forgotten Toho epic. It is cut down, no sho, but all of its moving parts are there, though smaller, further away, as if seen through the wrong end of the telescope. And all the more captivating—its irregular regularity, its main “theme” returning over and over. There is something that reminds me of machines, but simple, small ones—like music boxes. When I first heard Gagaku I thought of music of the spheres—I was hearing geometry. Now I again remember the pines against the sky, the helmeted dancers, their grave movements, and the wondrous mechanism of the music.
Later I play it for Chris [Blasdel] and ask what the time signature is. I had tried to figure it out and not been able to. He listens, thinks, and then says it is 4/4 plus 2/4. Oh, 6/4, I say. No, you had to keep them separate—a bar of four followed by a bar of two. That then is what makes for that irregular charm, re-occurring as a waterwheel, but always surprising.
25 january 2004. This week I gave a talk, took part on a panel, wrote an article and several reviews, and appeared on a public television program—all were about Japan.
Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country. To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own—isn’t this odd?
Can I think of anyone else? No, not really, not even Lafcadio Hearn, with whom I am all too often compared. But he also at length described the West Indies, New Orleans. For a person to so devote himself to another single country . . . I must be unique.
But I never devoted myself. What I have done is to describe myself through Japan. People who do not read carefully still ask when I first fell in love with Japan. I never did. I liked the place from the first, but I fell in love with other places—Greece, for example; Morocco, for example.
What I have done is to draw and redraw my portrait in front of the backdrop of Japan. I have exemplified what Helen Mears devoted Japan, Mirror for Americans to. You look into this country and find yourself reflected.
It is not a simple process. You can do this only if you describe the place as it is. Only then, through what you emphasize and what you do not, does your own form become visible. I am the empty places in my books.
2 february 2004. Am being interviewed by a very intelligent graduate student who is doing work on national identity and the way some of us have used the concept. I outlined how I began to doubt its efficacy and how I now doubt the very existence of this “national identity,” finding people far too various to be described by such a limited if convenient term.
In the course of our conversation she wondered if women, as an identity, did not even more than men distrust such simplifications. I quite agreed. She then said that she had got the idea from my wife’s book [A Romantic Education, Mary Richie, 1970].
Here the interview turned a corner and we began to discuss personal identity and how it was constructed, how Japan had answered many personal needs among those foreigners who came to study it. She wondered why so many men were emotionally drawn, if that is what it was.
I told her and she, a Japanese herself, said: “I now understand. You discovered the virtues of being an outsider. And you would not have had you not been excluded. It was the benefits of stigma that you discovered here.”
14 february 2004. A warm St. Valentine’s Day, and I was looking for romance in the ordinary places. Not finding it, I took the bus to Sumida Park, where I had not been for some time. I remembered its winding paths in the growing dusk, the darkening benches on which the resting workmen might be found.
No longer. Blue tarpaulins have been spread, tents erected among the trees, homes for the homeless, homemade. The winding paths are now fully inhabited, the darkening benches are anchors for the tr
ansient homes. I look through the openings on this warm evening and there amid their comforts are the perhaps jobless workmen and their families.
The place is now a kind of suburbia, a collection of orderly homes with a good section (near the drinking fountain) and one not so good (next to the toilet) and no one out on the streets at night.
1 march 2004. I rent a tape of Tarzan of the Apes, the 1932 version, the first with Johnny Weissmuller. I first viewed it when I was eight, and I now, next month eighty, want to discover if anything remains of what it was then. Expectant, I stared at the tube and remembered nothing at all about the story—except a bit about when the tribe of dwarfs throw the white people to the monster gorilla. What remained, however, what returned instantly recognizable after seventy years was the erotic atmosphere of Johnny and his jungle. The picture was made before the Hayes Office was instituted, and Tarzan was mostly naked and Jane showed a lot of flesh too, and when he took her into his hut there was no doubt at all—even for an eight-year-old—what they did. What I had remembered and cherished for seven decades turns out not to have been elephants and crocodiles or even dwarfs. Rather, it is the loins of Tarzan, the naked hips hid barely by the loincloth. To be moved so at mere eight!
10 march 2004. Taking a leak at the Ginza subway station toilet, I see a flickering before my eyes. It is an electronic box installed at eye level, one in front of each urinal, and it advertises various health drinks as well as loan organizations, and has perhaps more sponsors if you loiter to view them.
I had noticed merchants renting space in Ueno Station and, of course, Tokyo Station now rivals the grand bazaar of Tehran. This co-opting of private corporate space into public merchandising is due to the economy—people rent or sell whatever they have. How deep the distress is indicated by now being unable to take a peaceful pee.
11 march 2004. Ed is back, just in time for the cherry blossoms. This I tell him as we settle down for supper. No, not at all, he says.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 61
