Japanese Portraits
Other Books by Donald Richie
ON FILM
The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, with Joseph L. Anderson, 1959 Japanese Movies, 1961
The Japanese Movie: An Illustrated History, 1965
The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 1965
Japanese Cinema, 1971
Ozu, 1976
Viewing Film, 1986
Japanese Cinema: An Introduction, 1990 A Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema, 2001
ON JAPAN
This Scorching Earth, 1956
Companions of the Holiday, 1968
The Inland Sea, 1971
A Lateral View, Essays, 1987
Tokyo Nights, 1988
Zen Inklings, 1992
The Honorable Visitors, 1994
Partial Views, Essays, 1995
The Temples of Kyoto, 1995
Lafcadio Hearn's Japan, 1997
Tokyo: A View of the City, 1999
The Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai, 1999
The Donald Richie Reader (Ed. Arturo Silva)
Japanese Literature Reviewed, 2003
The Image Factory, 2003
A View from the Chuo Line: Stories, 2004
Japan Journals (1947-2004) (Ed. Leza Lowitz)
D O N A L D R I C H I E
Japanese Portraits
Pictures of Different People
A series of intensely personal portraits of unforgettable
Japanese characters
T U T T L E P U B L I S H I N G
Tokyo • Rutland, Vermont • Singapore
The original, unexpanded edition of this book was published by Kodansha International in 1987 in hardcover under the title Different People, and in paperback in 1991 as Geisha, Gangster, Neighbor, Nun.
First Edition, Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, 1987
Second Edition, Geisha, Gangster, Neighbor, Nun: Scenes from Japanese Lives, 1991
Third Edition, augmented and enlarged, Public People, Private People: Portraits of Some Japanese, 1996
Fourth Edition, Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People 2005
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd, with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12 Singapore 534167.
Copyright © Donald Richie.
First Tuttle edition, 2006
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-4629-0217-0
Printed in Singapore
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For James Merrill
Contents
Foreword xi
Hajimé Saisho 1
Yasunari Kawabata 5
Shozo Kuroda 9
Yasujiro Ozu 12
Setsuko Hara 15
Fumio Mizushima 19
Tadashi Nakajima 22
Yukio Mishima 29
Sada Abé 33
Eiko Matsuda 36
Kazuko Morinaga 39
Saburo Sasaki 43
Kishio Kitakawa 47
Hiro Obayashi 51
Masako Tanaka 58
Akira Kurosawa 62
Toshiro Mifuné 66
Ruriko Otani 70
Kunio Kubo 74
Minoru Sakai 79
Oharu Kitano 84
Taro Furukaki 88
Toru Takemitsu 91
Mieko Watanabé 94
Sessué Hayakawa 98
Daisetz Suzuki 101
Tadanori Yokoo 106
Tatsumi Hijikata 110
Utaemon Nakamura 114
Tamasaburo Bando 119
Tsutomu Yamazaki 122
Sonoko Suzuki 126
Kikuo Kikuyama 130
Keiko Matsunaga 134
Hidetada Sato 138
Shuji Terayama 148
Isuzu Yamada 151
Kon Ichikawa 156
Sumiré Watanabé 158
Toshio Morikawa 161
Shintaro Katsu 168
Hisako Shiraishi 170
Hiroshi Momma 179
Chishu Ryu 183
Hiroyasu Yano 187
Nagisa Oshima 192
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi 197
Mayumi Oda 201
Toshikatsu Wada 204
Makiyo Numata 209
Koichiro Arai 213
Noboru Tanaka 222
Hanako Watanabé 226
H.I.M. Michiko 230
Foreword
The idea for this work came after much of it was written. From journal entries, diary jottings, failed stories and novels, I had accumulated a number of pages that appeared to be interesting, but I did not know how to use them. There seemed to be no form that would hold together pieces this various.
Then, as I was reading Marguerite Yourcenar's book on Mishima, I came across this passage: "A chain is formed of people different from one another, who are united, incomprehensibly, because we have chosen them." And I knew what this collection of mine was about and what form it should take.
I had for some time wanted to write of my years in Japan, more than half my life, but I did not want to write a memoir; those I had read seemed so explanatory, so self-serving. But here, by assembling a group of stray people who had lived on in memory, I saw a way of recording some of my own experiences without "exploiting" them. The deeper experiences might be excluded, but what perhaps counts most—the dappled surface of life itself—would be visible. And I would be there among the crowd.
I had no model for this book, though I much admired the collected character studies of the nineteenth-century Japanese writer Doppo Kunikida and his talent for what he called "sketching from life." But I did have a number of anti-models. These were those books on Japan which are written entirely in generalities. It is all them-and-us, and "the Japanese" who emerge from these works bear little resemblance to any Japanese I have ever known. I had become impatient reading about such all-explaining qualities as giri and ninjo, hone and tatemae, ura and omote, and all the rest of these abstractions. Such hypothetical opposites do exist in Japan, but they exist everywhere else as well. The terms describe theories, not people. In this collection, I wanted to draw particular likenesses undisturbed by theoretical considerations.
My methods vary. There are views from the outside, views from the inside; there are monologues and dialogues; interviews and impressionistic descriptions. If the techniques of fiction are used, they are employed only so that the likeness may the more clearly emerge. I am writing about people, not "a people"; a series of portraits of certain Japanese I have known personally, each of whom, being human, is unique.
Donald Richie
Hajimé Saisho
I awoke early that midsummer morning in 1946. The sun was not yet up and
the eastern sky over the sleeping sea was dark. Walking toward the still surf over the cold sand, where I had walked the afternoon before, I suddenly stopped.
Something had changed. It had not been like this yesterday. Then there had been fishing boats and drying nets and people from the village. Now it was deserted and the beach was filled with mounds of sand, pocked with the large holes from which it came.
There were a number of them, these strange holes. I peered in the faint light, the eastern horizon now a hazy gray. There were perhaps twenty in all, as though a small army had dug in during the night.
Then, in the growing light, I saw that each of the holes seemed to be occupied. Something was lying in each. I ceased thinking about war and began to think about an invasion of creatures from the sea. It must be a migration of sea turtles, I decided, come to lay eggs.
Slowly I walked over the sand to the nearest and looked down. There, lying like a chick in its shell, was a small boy. In the next one too another was curled, and in the next. The beach was pitted with holes and in each was a sleeping child.
As the darkness drained from the sky, I stood in the middle of this foreign sandscape and wondered what had happened. It resembled a battlefield. The end of the Pacific war was just a year behind—thoughts of battles, bodies, came easily.
Then one of the small bodies stirred. A hand was thrown across the eyes. Overhead the sky was that dim, translucent gray which precedes dawn.
Another of the bodies, one further away, moved, and I saw a small knee shift. At the same time I was aware of the whisper of the surf, as though it too had just awakened, stirred by the growing day.
As the horizon warmed to a faint yellow, I moved across the still cold sand and looked into the holes. The children were all quite young. The eldest, in the largest hole, could have been no more than twelve or so. The youngest, in the mousehole he had dug himself, seemed only five or six. All were sleeping curled in their sand nests, all were alive, all now waking in the early light like the newly hatched.
The surf began to splash as though the unseen sun was working on it, and with a yawn a head appeared over the rim of sand, looked toward the east, then with a sigh disappeared. When I reached his burrow the child was again asleep, knees drawn up.
What were they doing, why were they here, I wondered, standing over this small, sleeping army. I was curious but not surprised. It was, after all, a magical land, as I had learned, a place where the mysterious often occurred. Just the day before, on arrival from Tokyo, we had walked along this beach—Kujukurihama, in Chiba—and I had stopped in surprise at the sight of the fishermen.
Young and old alike, they were utterly naked as they worked at their nets, helped by half-clad wives and sisters. Each of the men wore only a headband and, as I soon noticed, a narrow red ribbon around his penis.
They saw us there and smiled, nodded. Not at all self-conscious, they went on with their work.
- It's something to do with not offending the sea goddess, said one of us.
- Going naked like that?
- No, wearing the ribbon.
- I wonder if she's Benten, I said.
- But just look, it's like the Garden of Eden...
And now, on the next day, prepared for innocent magic, I stood above these sleeping children in the clear dawn of a midsummer morning.
All sign of the adults of the day before had gone, all the boats, all the racks for drying nets. It was as though the set had been dismantled, leaving only these inhabited sand castles as the scene of some strange nocturnal play.
A wave slapped and a child sat up, dark against the brilliant yellow east. Then another, and another, as if responding to a signal I could not see, some hidden sign. Soon all were awake, looking eastward, waiting.
I knew what they were waiting for. The sky shone in expectation, for there, in the wings of the ocean, was the sun itself, ready to make its due appearance.
As the sea swayed and lapped, each child, I saw, was now sitting formally, his legs beneath him. And as I gazed out across their ranks, it seemed as if those tiny figures had all been cut off at the waist and planted there, to face the sun.
Then, slowly, each half-child turned a solid black as—first a narrow, piercing sliver, then a growing, blinding wedge of light—the sun rose.
The boys, kneeling, looked ahead. I had perhaps expected them to bow or chant some prayer, but nothing happened. They knelt and watched the slow sun appear.
Overhead the plovers dipped and cried, as if also in answer to some summons. Then, when the sun, like some great radiant balloon, left its perch upon the sea and miraculously began to soar, the mysterious children stood up and, yawning, shaking off the sand, became themselves again.
One of them turned and saw me standing there. He stared without surprise, as if I were expected, then pulled on his baseball cap.
- What were you doing? I asked, as best I could.
And, unselfconsciously, as though he met white, round-eyed creatures every day on the beach, he explained as best he could. But my Japanese was primitive and he spoke with the ripest of country dialects. All the same, some understanding did pass between us, and now, knowing more, I can reconstruct what was said.
- We've been waiting for the dead, he would have answered: They come at dawn in big boats we can't see, and they're happy when they find us here, asleep. Then we take them back with us to our houses. That's where we're going now. You see, today is the first day of Obon.
Obon is the feast of the dead, a Buddhist rite held in the middle of summer, when the spirits are welcomed on their annual return to the land of the living and, three days later, bade farewell. There are round dances, the altars hold flowers, dumplings, fruit, and at the end there are lanterns to light the departing spirits on their way.
This was why the parents had moved their boats and taken down their racks and left nothing behind. They had swept the beach clean for the arrival of these ancestors, the older generations, to be greeted by the new.
- Did you see them?
- No, but they see us. We sit and wait and they come and then we take them home.
- Where are they?
He smiled, a small boy's smile, proud of an accomplishment. Here, he said, indicating perhaps himself, perhaps the brilliant sky, the shining sand, the glittering sea—or nothing in particular.
Now all the little boys had gathered in a quiet ring, filled with their own importance. It was suddenly full morning and the surf slapped and the happy dead were all around us.
And that was forty years ago, that morning on the Chiba beach. Even the youngest of those children is now nearly half a century old. There are few boats left, fewer nets as well now that fish are to be caught only in the deep sea beyond, with heavy metal nets hauled in by motors. The fishermen wear jogging shorts or cut-off jeans; and there are no longer nests of small boys asleep in the sand as the sky slowly lightens and the silent surf brings in the barges of the dead.
But back then the now grown men were the new generation, each escorting an ancestor home for three days of dancing and music, food and company. And I was not that far distant in time from these children—only ten years older than the eldest, still young enough to feel the wonder of the daily rising sun, of the ceaseless ocean, of the notion that the dead return.
The boy, a plain country child, bowed and smiled—this country boy I never saw again, whose name I never knew (and for whom I have made one up), this child who remains for me, not a person since I never knew him, but a messenger.
Then he turned to the others and, like a flock of plovers, all instant accord, they flew off down the beach, weaving through the dunes, along the shouting sea, back to family, back to home.
And I, my shadow black behind me in the morning sun, turned to look at their sandy nests. Already the approaching tide was filling them in, one by one.
Yasunari Kawabata
The Sumida River, silver in the winter sun, glistened beneath us. We were on the roof of the Asakusa subw
ay terminal tower, looking out over downtown Tokyo, still in ruins, still showing the conflagration of two years earlier, scorched concrete black against the lemon yellow of new wood.
This had been the amusement quarter of Tokyo. Around the great temple of Kannon, now a blackened, empty square, had once been a warren of bars, theaters, archery stalls, circus tents, peep shows, places I had read about where the all-girl opera sang and kicked, where the tattooed gamblers met and bet, where trained dogs walked on hind legs and Japan's fattest lady sat in state.
Now, two years after all of this had gone up in flames, after so many of those who worked and played here had burned in the streets or boiled in the canals as the incendiary bombs fell and the B-29s thundered over—now the empty squares were again turning into lanes as tents, reed lean-tos, and a few frame buildings began appearing. Girls in wedgies sat in front of new tea-rooms, but I could see no sign of the Fat Lady. Perhaps she had bubbled away in the fire.
What was he thinking, I wondered, looking at the avian profile of the middle-aged man standing beside me, outlined against the pale sky. I had no way of knowing. He spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese. I did not know that Yasunari Kawabata was already famous and would become more famous still. But I did know he was a writer who had written about Asakusa, and it was the place itself that interested me.
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