Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People

by Donald Richie

  A prewar Japan imagined, because Terayama was himself too young to remember any of it. What he remembered was wartime Aomori, the far north, the snow, the family movie theater, a world of black and white where he grew up.

  As a child he took the tickets, swept up afterward, and sprinkled water to keep down the dust. His lair was behind the screen, a tangle of canvas flats, old stage kimono, into which he curled and gazed up at the giants, backward, hanging over him as he lay small in the darkness.

  We, likewise, gaze now into the miniature, private, magic world that is his theater, where the same drama is endlessly performed. It is an expressionist world, reality seen through other eyes, filtered through another mind, a private mythology. And, as in all expressionist theater, the system is closed; it can also be compulsive, claustrophobic.

  Terayama's is a world entirely visual. A deaf man could understand it, but not a blind one. It is theater for the eyes, not for the ears.

  To speak with Terayama was to become aware of his gaze. It was the candid stare of a child. The young are all eyes—they have to be. They know nothing, and seeing is their education. Terayama's eyes were like windows behind which he lurked.

  Yes, lurked. Though the gaze was direct there was also a sense of constant, guarded assessment. One felt he was rearranging what he saw even as he looked upon it. It is natural that a director of stage and screen be manipulative, but Terayama gave the impression that he was continually manipulating, that there was no time when he wasn't.

  Yet the directions that seemed to emanate from him were too private to be other than ambivalent. It was not an order the director was giving but a suggestion. One had to divine for oneself what he really meant, what he actually wanted, uncertain that he even knew himself. One sensed too that he was judging, not for any professional reason—will he do in the part, is he being honest?—but for something more personal: do I like him, does he like me? This he seemed to suggest as he gazed out at you from his secret place, his lair.

  Until wasted by illness, Terayama, given to turtleneck sweaters—those emblems of security—had the round face, the pudgy body, large palms, and short fingers of a grown child. And, like a child, he kept intact the wonders of his imagination. These he put on film, on the stage: odd, esoteric, often very beautiful images, variations on his central myth, his own childhood. He took in everything, assigned parts, animated lives. Yet the gaze from those caves in his face remained guarded, vulnerable.

  Yes, vulnerable. It was this gaze that killed him. It happened in this fashion: directed outward onto stage or film the gaze is called visual imagination; directed outward onto life itself it is called voyeurism.

  That Terayama liked to look was central to his person. He liked to sit in the dark and look at the giant figures, the adults, in their brightly lit space. Everyone knew this. It seemed natural.

  Not, however, to the police and, along with them, the journalists and their magazines and newspapers. The law had bothered Terayama before—nudity on the stage forbidden, theater in the streets banned. So had the press, hypocritically scandalized by the directness of Terayama's reconstruction of an amoral childhood which all of us once knew and some of us remember.

  Heretofore Terayama had paid little attention, had gone on with his life and his work. Now, however, a common voyeur, caught peeping into privacy—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen?—he was scolded by the law and pilloried by the press.

  Not for the first time. But, now, for the last. Before, he had gone abroad with his troupe, or had somehow weathered the local storm. But this one was massive. Everyone now knew—and one can imagine how this phrase must have echoed and rebounded in the mind of a vulnerable man, a man so vulnerable that he had to secretly revisit the scenes of his childhood in this way.

  One would have liked it had the artist hit back or, better, paid no heed. He was, after all, in addition to being a well-known director, one of Japan's finest modern poets. But that is not how artists are made. It is their very sensitivity that makes them artists. They cannot be expected to hold their own. And so Terayama became ill—illness, though real, always being a refuge with him.

  An old illness, cirrhosis—friend from childhood—had forced him out of university, and now it forced him out of life. This hidden degeneration silently consumed him. The childlike plumpness disappeared, the full cheeks hollowed. Yet the gaze, questioning, rarely answering, remained to the end.

  Terayama, child magician, dead at forty-seven. Did no one see the connection between his work and his death? No, no one did. The press, having hounded him, was respectful. Voyeurism was not mentioned in the obituaries.

  But that is just where it ought to have been. It was the glorious voyeurism of an artist who had the imagination to will a secret life open to the public, to remove the lid so that, fascinated, we can gaze inside. It was the splendid, single-minded need to truly see, to experience through sight alone, and then reveal the depths within.

  Isuzu Yamada

  Grand professional of the Japanese stage, every two months or so she appears at one or another of the uptown theaters: sometimes padded and kimonoed in historical roles; more often sleekly neo-traditional—the older geisha, the affluent widow, the knowing mistress of the restaurant.

  Great actress of the Japanese screen as well, though now more rarely seen, she was the worldly one in Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gton, the faded geisha in Narusé's Flowing, the hopeful widow in Chiba's Downtown, the matriarch's daughter in Ichikawa's Bonchi, and—well known in the West—"Lady Macbeth" in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

  She is an actress to whom acting is all, to whom getting everything just right is more important than anything else. Perfection is attempted, and often achieved. This she does through her dedication to her craft.

  This craft is an unassailable technique. Classically trained, Isuzu Yamada brings to her acting the means of traditional Japanese arts, those forms which make for flawless execution.

  In classical dancing and music, in the martial sports, in the No and Kabuki, these forms are the kata. In Kendo or Judo the kata are training exercises, series of them, practiced until instinctively there. In traditional acting and dance they are a recognized vocabulary of movement and gesture.

  Yamada has brought to her appearances a mind formed by this code of learning, of being. To new roles she applies old methods, and the kata discipline illuminates her presence both on and off the stage and screen.

  One sees it at its most rigorous when Yamada dances, these rote movements once more performing their original magic and turning into a young maiden a woman of considerable years. In her film appearances, even on the tube, one is also aware of the kata, though they have been absorbed now to the point of invisibility. One no longer sees them; one feels them.

  This art informs everything that Yamada does: the way she turns, the way she lifts her hand, the way she smiles. In classical roles, her admirers say, she is as good as any onnagata—high praise indeed.

  A knowledge this encompassing means that Yamada always knows precisely what to do and how to do it. When Kurosawa announced a month-long period of full rehearsal before a single frame of The Lower Depths was exposed, there was some grumbling among the movie actors. None from Yamada, however. She knew that this was the proper way to achieve the integral performance that Kurosawa desired—indeed, the only way.

  As I watch her now, years later, I see an older woman still possessed of this urge to perfection, this need to be continually right. There, the way she turned just now, up there on the stage, that turn, abrupt, right-angled, to indicate disagreement—that was just right. And, an instant later, that single glance, perfectly directed and of just the right duration to let us understand her disappointment at another's failings.

  Nothing is allowed to obstruct this urge, as I discovered once when I myself got in the way.

  It was long ago when the tube was new, and I was to appear on it with her. It was indeed so new that all TV, apart from films, was live and the gadget was
perhaps consequently still regarded as having a degree of artistic potential. At any rate, one was still supposed to behave properly in the studio.

  Perhaps the artistic potential was why, already, a famous actress was appearing. I forget why I was. Probably for the novelty I would contribute, foreigners on TV being rarer then than now.

  I was writing a book and had gone to interview her. In the course of this and a few further meetings I had become as friendly with her as my knowledge of the language and her inclinations would permit. During our meetings she was perfectly straightforward.

  She started in the movies in 1932, and by 1936—when she was nineteen—she was supporting a husband, a child, and her divorced parents. She had to because this was the right way of doing things.

  She also talked about Actress, a film she made in 1947 with Teinosuke Kinugasa, which resulted in a highly publicized affair but one, she said, in which she had behaved responsibly. Then there was her political career when she was in the group that led the famous 1948 strike against Toho. Even though this resulted in her being blacklisted by the industry, she congratulated herself on having done the right thing. There was also her marriage (among others) to actor Yoshi Kato, in which she had acquitted herself equally well while it lasted.

  Then when she found she could not work because of the blacklisting, she again did the proper thing. She wrote directly to those directors she wanted to work with, Kurosawa included. She effected a great comeback and won all of Japan's major acting awards for two years running, in 1956 and 1957, which indicates that she had indeed done the right thing.

  All this was told in language scaled down to something I could understand. In fact, she seemed very soon to realize the modest dimensions of my vocabulary and apparently accommodated herself to them.

  Back then my Japanese was much worse than it is now, and while I knew how to say what I wanted, I could do so in only one way—using simple, everyday, colloquial language. Great then was my discomfort when, the red light of the TV camera regarding us, suddenly live on the air, I discovered that I could not understand a word being said because the great actress was addressing me in keigo.

  This is a polite and refined way of speaking, quite removed from the colloquial, using a vocabulary all of its own, and suitable for formal occasions or when addressing someone thought to deserve such discourse.

  Isuzu Yamada's choice of diction was undoubtedly motivated by the former consideration. On an occasion as solemn as an appearance on television, keigo was the only possible vehicle. Even if one of us did not understand it. Or perhaps it was not initially apparent that I didn't, no matter how palpable it later became.

  This was because—hypnotized by the beady red light, traumatized by being "live on the air," deaf, dumb, naked—I resorted to temporizing measures, such as I still use when I can't understand what is being said to me. Ah, I say, mochiron (of course); watakushi mo so omoimasu (I think so too); sono tori (that's right), etc.

  These are all trotted out to hide my inadequacy. And the nature of the language being what it is they nearly always work. Indeed, it is almost impossible to go wrong, however indiscriminately such phrases are used—almost, but not entirely, as I was soon to find out.

  Yamada was smiling sweetly, turning an eye of approval on the camera from time to time, and using words like goran ni naru for "see" when I only knew miru, and o-kiki ni naru for "hear" when I only knew kiku. And much worse.

  Reconstructing the conversation, aided by what keigo I now know, it must have gone something like this:

  - And such an elegant, such a skillful Japanese you speak, she said.

  - Mochiron, said I.

  - This would seem to indicate a degree of assiduous application.

  - Watakushi mo so omoimasu.

  - And perhaps an equal degree of mental aptitude.

  - Sono tori.

  And so on.

  Whether what was occurring was apparent to Yamada or not, it certainly was to the rest of my audience. I imagine people from Hokkaido to Kyushu were rolling on the tatami during my part of this nationwide transmission.

  Yet it is likely that the great actress did not once realize that I could not understand, and did not once wonder at the oddly static nature of our conversation. At any rate, the steady, serious gaze never wavered, no small smile once flickered in my direction, no irony informed that handsome face. She could not, as a loyal friend or two suggested, have done it on purpose.

  The reason is that to have done it on purpose would not at all have been the right way of doing things. And to have acknowledged that this was occurring, had she noticed, would also not have been the right way. And as for using colloquial Japanese, a choice that would have rendered my problem much less acute, well, that too would not have been correct.

  Did she detect my muted struggles, did she note that flush of distress which, I am told by those who witnessed it, rendered my performance the more exquisitely amusing? Did she?

  Well, that is not a proper question. For, even if she had, she could not have abandoned her mode of expression. She owed it to her public, to her art, to the great new instrument of culture and education on which she was for the first time appearing, to accord it, herself, and me the due amount of formality.

  But there was more to it than that. What Isuzu Yamada was doing, something I could actually have watched had I managed to collect myself, was inventing kata for television.

  Here was this new medium and she was in a way just as lost as I was. Her spectators were no more visible than they were in the movie studio. But there one had time and space and the possibility of correction. Here there was nothing like that. We were "live on the air."

  She was thus just as unprepared as I was, but her approach to the problem was much more creative. She started running through available kata, as it were. Those who watched told me it was an education just to see the way that the look, the turn of the head, the display of the hands changed as she became increasingly familiar with the medium, as she visibly decided which would be appropriate to the small screen. By the time our fifteen-minute "conversation" was over, the viewers had had a demonstration of a great artist creating before their very eyes. Nothing was allowed to obstruct that creative urge, and in the end she got it all just right.

  That quarter of an hour was perhaps historically significant. It may well be that the current kata for TV appearances (and they certainly now exist, because people on the tube all act the same way) were born that very night.

  I only wish I had paid more attention.

  Kon Ichikawa

  Bright lights, red carpet, stars, smiling Toho executives—it is a special premiere, Kon Ichikawa's Happiness. Director right there at the end of the receiving line. Smiling, greeting, talking—famous cigarette stuck between lips.

  - Ed McBain original, he says: Only really this much of a story (holding up a hand, forefinger and thumb almost touching, to indicate how little it was. Fingers then stretch apart). The rest was all us.

  Lips expertly juggle cigarette among the syllables. We have been expecting lip cancer for years. No sign of it, however.

  - Rest was all us, he says, eyes crinkling in the way they always do. Pantomimes stepping into a pair of overalls, perhaps. That's him getting into the Ed McBain original.

  - Great fun to make, this film, he says, beaming.

  I have never heard him say otherwise. All films were great fun to make. Great fun to make the cannibal sequences in Fires on the Plain too, I imagine. Such fun really that it isn't to be taken all that seriously—filmmaking.

  During the obligatory pre-screening speeches the leading actor is unable to say a single word. Part of this is perhaps pose, it being thought smart to be inarticulate in public. But most I think is real, that seeming stupidity which afflicts some actors. In the film itself, however, the same actor is very good, seems to know precisely what he is doing, does it skillfully. Again I see Ichikawa pretending to climb into the overalls.

  Since everythin
g is great fun to make, one infers that it isn't all that difficult and that the results aren't all that important. This must reassure actors considerably, I would think, but, just as important, it suggests that this is the way Ichikawa keeps his distance from his work, and himself.

  Certainly it explains why he can keep working in a period when other more earnest directors can't. Ichikawa, since he does not have to be serious about it, can take any script he is offered. Then, no matter how bad, he can amuse himself by making it as good as he can. Fun to make that film, he will say of his very worst.

  He told me once that the director he most admired, the one he would most like to resemble, was Walt Disney. I thought this was mordant Ichikawa humor until it occurred to me that he meant, literally, what he said. Disney too had great fun making films, he too could climb inside and do everything himself.

  Yet there was a period when Ichikawa's films became serious—Erijo, Kagi, Bonchi. This was when his wife was doing his scripts. The experience of seeing an Ichikawa film suddenly deepened. One was moved by its beauty, its truth, its sadness. I was very enthusiastic about these films back then. Ichikawa just stared at me, cigarette in mouth, as though he did not know what I was talking about.

  Perhaps he didn't. His wife is now gone and others (including a number of film-studio hacks) write his scripts. He takes what is given him, puffing his cigarette, his eyes crinkling.

  The film begins. Lots of Ichikawa-type humor involving a cop papa and his motherless kids. Actor very competent—plaintive, amusing, believable. Filled with the that's-too-bad-but-it-can't-be-helped feeling which, even now, is so attractive to Japanese audiences. Let's just get on with life, says the film, and the audience smiles. Applause at the end. Beaming Toho executives, a grinning Ichikawa.