Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People

by Donald Richie

  The first real indication that something was wrong was that my electric pencil sharpener disappeared. One day it wasn't there, just the screw holes where it had been. I asked around, no one knew. I jokingly suggested a burglar, no one laughed.

  I also noticed a coolness among the rest of the staff. Poor Mr. Yago never really had time for me now. The secretaries turned a bit curt. The cleaning lady slopped a bit around my desk and that was all.

  Even then, it may not have been too late. The boss reassured me that his door was still open. Maybe it was, but in a state of pique, I left it shut. I who was being slowly ostracized—like strangulation by degrees—decided to ostracize him, to deprive him of my care and company. If he had no use for me, then I had no use for him.

  After all those years in Japan, I still didn't have a clue. I may have known all about mura hachibu (ostracization in the village, where all they'll do is douse the roof if it's on fire), but I could not recognize it off the page. And I decided not to make the customary—indeed, obligatory—New Year's call on my superior. That would let him know of my displeasure with him.

  Instead, after the holiday came word of his displeasure with me, a formal letter expressing his complaints: that I was not doing my work, that I was taking days off, that I was doing other things on company time, that I was missing company meetings. He therefore had no recourse but to fire me.

  One does not fire people in Japan. But then the Japanese do not behave as I had done. From my point of view, he had read everything wrong; but, from his point of view, I had done everything wrong.

  My friends—my American ones—said I should sue. But suing takes time and money, and besides I am not one of that generation of Americans that regards suing as an immediate recourse. Instead, I wrote him a letter, upholding his right to do what he did, but deploring the way in which he had done it. And, rather like a wife served with divorce papers, I wondered what had gone wrong. What had he expected me to do? What had he really wanted?

  He replied announcing the terms of my severance pay—quite generous, he was a gentleman till the last—and giving me instructions on how to get unemployment compensation from the government. Perhaps he knew that if I applied I automatically lost my sponsorship, and then perhaps he didn't.

  Since I never saw him again I could not ask. He continued to overwork and to oversmoke and before long he was in the Cancer Institute and in another six months he was dead. I went to the funeral, where I saw his vivacious wife and, uninterrupted, we spoke of Marie Laurencin.

  I also learned for the first time that Hiro had been a Catholic. As I sat in the dark church and thought about what had happened, I still couldn't decide how much of a sinner Hiro was, how much of one I was myself.

  Masako Tanaka

  Masako worked in the barbershop, third chair, the one in the back, the one few customers sat in since Japanese men do not like to entrust to a woman something as important as having their hair cut. The waiting bench would be full, all the comic magazines open, and Masako would be idle.

  A plain girl in an apron, she would make tea, sweep the floor, see to the hot towels. Occasionally she was allowed to wash a head, a lesser occupation. After that the male barbers would again take over. Masako was paid, I would imagine, half of what the men were.

  I ask for her. This pleases her: she flushes a deep and beautiful pink. The male barbers, the other customers, all swivel, then, having stared their full, decide that there is nothing unusual in a gaijin asking for a girl. We have both found our level since neither of us belongs to this barbershop nakama, this just-us-Japanese-males-together.

  I have my reasons. I need not wait since her chair is forever free and I do not have to make the barber's life interesting by acknowledging his chatter, and—since women barbers always take a very long time—I can read a large chunk of whatever book I am carrying. Finally, Masako is a good barber.

  She looks at my head, thinking. She has beautiful, soft, brown eyes. Her gaze is contemplative, inward. She seems to be assessing the work at hand, deciding how best to complete it. She is tentative, combs the mop this way and that, then with that small nod which signifies decision, she picks up the shears and begins to snip. I open my book.

  One day, engrossed, I was surprised to hear Masako addressing me. What was I reading, she wondered. And was it English?

  - No, it's French. A French novel by a woman called Colette.

  She paused, scissors raised. She knew that name. Where could she have heard it? Oh, yes, in a former neighborhood, back in the country, the man down the street had had a small dog. It was called Koretto. Was my book about a dog?

  - No, it's about an actress.

  She shook her head and, for the first time, smiled. It was a smile that indicated that this was all beyond her, that she knew nothing of such things but that she marveled nonetheless.

  I outlined the story and Masako listened, then asked: And did she really have the courage to go out into the world, just like that, all on her very own, knowing no one, having no friends, and then just get up there on the stage and do her best?

  It was a very long sentence. She stood back once it had appeared, as though surprised. Then, with a small smile, a shake of the head—such dreams were not for her—she lowered her gaze and went on with my haircut.

  The next time I went to the barbershop—more than a month later, since Masako cuts hair short—I carried a small paper-wrapped volume. As I had hoped, Masako remembered Colette. Had she found true happiness, she wanted to know. Well, she found this man, I began.

  - No, not things like that, said Masako.

  Here, for the first time, I saw impatience, willfulness—in short, character.

  - I mean, she said, was she happy leading her own life on the stage?

  - Well, she seemed to find it interesting.

  The scissors ceased. Masako was thinking.

  - I think, she said, it must have been very interesting.

  When I left I gave her the book I had been carrying. In a secondhand bookshop in Kanda I had found a Japanese translation of Mes apprentissages. She accepted it and looked at me. The other barbers looked as well. One of them smirked and asked, as I was going out the door, who Masako's new boyfriend was. That is how I first learned her name.

  She responded, as Japanese girls often do, obliquely. After New Year's I found in my mailbox, unstamped, a small parcel. It was decorated with colored ribbon and had a Snoopy card attached with her full name on it. Inside were six rice cakes brought all the way back from the northern province where she was born.

  Other girls might have responded in kind, another book. But some Japanese proceed through analogy—I had given her a product of my civilization and so she now gave me one of hers.

  When next I went to the barbershop I smiled to indicate both my gratitude and the fact that I was not going to embarrass her by thanking her. Neither Colette nor rice cakes were mentioned. Yet a difference had been made. She was no longer looking at my nape, my brow: she was looking at me. And her gaze was plainly thoughtful. When she had finished I, for the first time, tipped her.

  I had my reasons. Money restores equilibrium. Any male foreigner in Japan soon learns that he can be attractive to a dissatisfied girl. It is his foreignness, not his maleness, that attracts. She wants a mentor, not a friend; a confidant, not a lover. The foreign male, this one at any rate, is wise to avoid complications. Plain Masako with her touching ambitions was not, I decided, going to complicate my life. Hence the tip. Money is a conservative, even reactionary commodity. It always restores the status quo.

  Snipping away, Masako was thereafter silent. No talk of Colette, no mention of rice cakes and the far north. I looked at her reflection in the mirror as, sober, serious, she cut my hair. And I wondered why I had been afraid of her. That she would touch something in me? In me, who had already touched her?

  Then, one day, I went to the barbershop and at the back chair stood an acned youth.

  - Notice anything different? asked
the head barber with a smirk: Your girl friend's gone. (This was said with a laugh.) Just upped and left. Not a word to anyone. Never saw anything like it. Why, she doesn't know a soul in Tokyo but I called her folks back in the country and they haven't heard anything. The young people these days. No idea of what a woman should be (onna rashikunai).

  - Aren't you worried, though? Something might have happened to her.

  - Well, she moved all her stuff out of the room we'd put her in. All this without a word of thanks, not an ounce of gratitude. Just upped and left. Oh, she had us fooled, she did. She was a sly one.

  I thought of quiet Masako and her brown eyes. Whatever else she may have been, she was not a sly one. She might have been a desperate one. She might yet be a brave one.

  And now she was out in the city, out there somewhere, alone. She had done what few girls did. And I wondered, too, if I had helped her. Colette and I.

  Thereafter as the months passed I always asked after her while the acned youth snipped inexpertly and left my mane fashionably shaggy. But no one had ever heard anything at all. It was their opinion that she had shortly come to no good. Was probably making more than they were by doing something indecent.

  And I came in time to regret my cowardice. I would very much like to know what happened to Masako, out on her own in the cold world— she, who had so much more courage than I did.

  Akira Kurosawa

  One day in winter, 1948, when I was twenty-four, my friend, the late composer Fumio Hayasaka, took me to the Toho studios to watch the shooting of a film for which he was doing the score.

  On an elaborate open set of postwar streets, ruins, shops—so detailed it looked hardly different from the neighborhood outside the studio—a good-looking young man in a white suit and slicked-back hair was being directed by a tall, middle-aged man wearing a floppy hat.

  During a break Hayasaka introduced me. After our halting conversation they went back to work. I spoke no Japanese then, and they, except for Hayasaka, no English. I watched and wondered who they were and what the film was about.

  The young man in the white suit was Toshiro Mifuné, the tall man in the hat was Kurosawa, directing the young actor for the first time, and the film was Drunken Angel.

  Then there was a spring day in 1954, and I had just emerged from the first screening of the full Seven Samurai. Never had I seen a film like it—my ears were still ringing, my eyes still watering. People gathered, talking, as they do when the film is a success. Several clustered around a tall man in a floppy hat, the same man I had met six years before. I did not think I would be remembered (Hayasaka was nowhere around). So, though I could now speak some Japanese, I did not go and congratulate him as the others were doing. Instead, I stared, admired.

  In late autumn, 1956, Joseph Anderson and I were in Izu, at one of the open sets for Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth. It was known that we were doing a book on the Japanese film and would probably be writing this picture up for the press. Toho was most co-operative.

  Work was running far behind schedule, Kurosawa having refused to use a completed set because it had been constructed with nails and the long-distance lenses he was using might show the anachronistic nailheads. Both Joe and I were thrilled by this unwillingness to compromise.

  The present set represented the provincial palace of Lord Washizu, the Macbeth character, and Duncan's approach was being filmed: soldiers, banners, horses, a stuffed boar slung from poles—an entire procession. When an assistant gave the signal it moved forward under the late autumn afternoon sun.

  Above us, on a platform, were Kurosawa and his cameraman. We had spoken with the director earlier and he had told us his plans for this scene. Now we were watching him do it. The entire afternoon was spent stopping and starting this distant procession. Sections of it were being filmed with the long-distance lenses, then refilmed, then filmed once again.

  Half a year later when we saw the finished picture in the screening room, not one of these shots was in it. I asked him why. The scenes were nice enough, he said, but not really necessary. Besides, they interrupted the flow of the picture. Both Joe and I marveled.

  Then again, in late summer, 1958, I was at one of the open sets for The Hidden Fortress, near Mt. Fuji. After a long day's shooting Mifuné was in the bath. I was sharing it with him. It had been a difficult day, the same scene shot over and over again.

  I had noticed that, during this scene, Kurosawa's ballpoint pen stopped working. Instead of throwing it away and getting another, he had spent all that afternoon, between takes, trying to make this particular pen work.

  Mifuné was sunk up to his neck in the hot water. He had been in the offending scene. I mentioned the ballpoint pen.Yes, he said: I know what you mean. I felt just like that pen ... But did you notice? He finally got it to work.

  It was a cold winter day in 1964, on the studio set for Red Beard. The picture was over budget and long over production schedule. Not a happy time, and Mifuné, with other contractual obligations, was still in full beard and unable to fulfill any of them.

  By now it was known that I was writing a book on Kurosawa. This being so, I could approach him whenever he was free. He was sitting in a canvas chair, wearing a white cap and dark glasses, now that his eyes were giving him trouble. He looked dejected.

  In order to have something to say, I told him that he didn't really look so different from the first time I had met him. Yes, he remembered the occasion, way back in the days of Throne of Blood, with Mr. Anderson.

  - No, I said: Back in the days of Drunken Angel, with the now longdead Mr. Hayasaka.

  He looked at me and frowned. On the Kurosawa set a mistake gets first a frown.

  - I don't remember that.

  I observed that there was no reason he should but that it had happened. He then set to work remembering. Nothing came of it, but I remembered the nails in the abandoned castle, the ballpoint pen that would not work, the unhappily bearded Mifuné. We were problems—all of us—problems to be solved.

  In 1978, a summer day, I was at the Toho studios at Seijo. No film was being made but Kurosawa was there because that was where he had an office. He was now in the office, working.

  The work consisted in drawing and painting. He had no money for his film—notorious as he was for going over budget, over schedule, over the wishes, the commands, of producers and production companies—all so that he could create the perfect, uncompromised film.

  In order to keep firmly in mind the film he next wanted to make, he was now doing it by hand. There was picture after picture of samurai, of battles, of horses. His large craftsman's hands were painting one scene after another, the movements swift and sure. He always knew just what he was going to do. The entire film was in his head, emerging through his fingers. Since he had no money, he would make the picture on paper. What other director, I wondered, would do this, would care this much, and would be this immune to despair?

  What was the name of this impossible film, I wondered aloud. Well, I was told, they were thinking of calling it Kagemusha.

  It was two years later, March 23, 1980—Kurosawa's seventieth birthday, and a party at a Chinese restaurant near Seijo: his family, his children, grandchildren, staff, a few friends. And presents, lots of presents. But the best present of all was that the money had been found. Thanks to profits from Star Wars, Kagemusha would become a reality.

  Watching him, I thought back to the thirty-eight-year-old director on the set of Drunken Angel. The intervening years had not made much difference. Now he wore caps instead of floppy hats, now he wore dark glasses.

  Those big, strong hands were delicately opening birthday presents, the fingers precise but very firm with unwilling knots. I thought of the will that had created those films. Kurosawa turned, smiled, and with one large hand carefully smoothed the hair of a favorite grandson.

  I thought too of that now long-gone ballpoint pen, coaxed until it forgot it was broken, until it began again to write.

  T
oshiro Mifuné

  I look again at Mifuné. He is sixty-five now. Yet he remains much as he was at twenty-five. The face has changed but the person is the same.

  His laugh, for example. The lips curve but the eyes remain serious. It is a polite laugh, one intended to bridge silences. It is also a social laugh, one intended to prevent misunderstandings. In addition it expresses agreement, concern, unease—all qualities other than humor.

  Mifuné's humor consists of belittlement—of himself. He learned early on, perhaps, that making light of himself, or seeming to, was a way of earning regard. When speaking of himself he adopts that reasoned, fair, but guarded tone that some men use when speaking of their sons. He will spread his fingers and raise his eyebrows when he mentions his career, then sigh—as though it were not his own. This is charming—something he perhaps discovered long ago.

  The laugh is part of the charm: it indicates that he is not taken in by himself, that he is not vain, not proud, regards his accomplishments (whatever they are, he seems to suggest) seriously but not too seriously, and is quite willing to consider himself as just another person, someone on the same level as—well, you and me.

  His manner has its uses. When a famous man, and Mifuné is now world-famous, projects what is called a low profile, then the result is likability. If the actor is also a businessman, as Mifuné is, owning his own production company, the result is also productive—he is a man to be trusted.

  Yet one should not consider this a veneer, a front, something he deliberately uses. The self we present is no less real because we choose to present it; it is something we come to embody. Mifuné is an actor, but in this sense we are all actors. And the qualities he embodies—hardworking, scrupulous, trustworthy, nesshin (doing his very best)—are real enough.