Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People

by Donald Richie

  I noticed that the film is, like all Ichikawa's, of a certain temperature. It is cool, not really chilly, not actually cold, but quite cool. People getting into it and moving around in it have not raised its temperature. They all seem to be working in the film from a distance.

  I remember Ichikawa getting into his invisible overalls. Moving the film around, moving the actors around, making a cool and pleasant experience of it. Then I remember his earlier films and I wonder who once climbed into Ichikawa and made him move around.

  Sumiré Watanabé

  What to do about the old Yamato; a problem, that. Madame Sumiré gazed around, sucked a tooth. Well over a century and a half, and looking every year of it. Still, the beams were strong. During all those generations the termites had never really settled in. Perhaps something more might be made of this—of sheer tradition. What with all the other older buildings gone from Ginza, what with concrete, steel, glass, and bathroom tile, the novelty of good, expensive wood was growing. Capitalize, perhaps, on that—age, probity, worth.

  The place had certainly seen changes. Back in the old days, a famous Edo geisha house, screens by minor master, cakes from Kyoto. Then a suicide, lovesick and indentured maid, so the legend went. No recourse then but to become a restaurant—everything traditional and expensive: eel and turtle, blowfish, shrimps served live. There the Meiji emperor himself appeared, the palace being not that far away. Consequent governmental popularity—part of Pearl Harbor planned within these very walls.

  And then decline. Though the place withstood the terrors of war, it could not the horrors of peace. Bombs and conflagrations gave way to higher taxes and the rising price of land. Tatami, shoji, fusuma—traditional materials all—now far too dear as demand diminished. No recourse then but to reopen as one of the better hostess bars.

  And here was where the fortunes of the old Yamato had become Madame Sumiré's own. Acquired from a second husband praying for peace at any price, it proved a challenge she had overcome. She, after all, knew the business—had met Mr. Watanabé while he was postwar slumming at the ratty Ueno cabaret where she had once worked.

  Minor master's screens were sold, partitions were knocked out, fusuma junked; holes were cut in ancient walls to hold the air-conditioning; tatami banished, giving way to purple wall-to-wall; modern sit-down toilets where the tokonoma was; then cocktail bar and floor-length mirrors, box seats and tabourets, cut-glass chandelier for proper mood and red plush drapes which always caught the dust.

  And then the girls. More problems there. One trained them, treated them like daughters, then watched each and every one turn bad. How she had encouraged with her nightly talks: Girls, give your all for old Yamato, keep up the spirit, make ours the winning team. And how she had watched them give their all in other, unintended ways, ending up madames themselves at other, rival Ginza bars.

  These youngsters, they knew nothing of tradition, of the deference owed an elder, being modest in their proper places, working hard, doing without—virtues all, now all but lost.

  Oh, the years of listening to them whine; watching for the wily ones, the ones who cheated on the side; the widows, crying on the customers; the greedy ones who ate the raisin butter. Madame Sumiré sucked her gold tooth and looked about.

  Seven o'clock—another night. Soon the old familiars, fewer now, and bringing fewer guests. Business was not going well. The ancient Yamato was sinking, the very beams groaning as in despair. Yet she had tried.

  Oh, she had tried. The monkey, so soon dead, unfed, purchased to amuse the guests; all her girls dressed up as nuns, a fad soon past; computer games to attract, she'd hoped, the younger executives.

  And then, her greatest folly. Keeping up with things as she invariably did, Madame Sumiré knew of Arab interests. This being so she put in plastic hassocks and glass-topped tables with gilded legs. Purple chiffon, hopefully harem-like, was bunched and candles placed nearby, romantically, despite the risk.

  She changed the name to Senichiya, the Thousand and One Nights, spray-painted the front all purple, a favorite color and one she fancied Middle Eastern. She had a star and crescent painted in gold over the bar, imported quantities of arrack to make her new guests feel at home, and redid the facilities: on one door, Sultans; on the other, Women.

  Originally she had wanted tiled floors and a purling fountain but, on being advised that the building would then collapse, she made do with plastic tatami, lilac-trimmed. This she had thought the Arabs might enjoy but it was her Japanese customers—she had no other—who delighted in the novelty of sliding shod across the mats.

  Then, over the new sound system, Bernstein doing Scheherazade, night after night, month after month, until the record hissed and one of the girls went funny in the head—and still no Arabs in their quaint burnooses with those cunning water pipes. Why, she'd even gone to the trouble and expense of finding a needy body-builder, stripped and oiled him, twined his violet turban all herself and given him a stage scimitar to shiver with in the neon-flooded entrance.

  All for naught. But no one could say that Madame Watanabé—Sumiré to her friends (Violet, a charming name)—lacked punch or fight. No sooner out of one disaster than bravely into yet another.

  She'd studied the papers, the financial reports; she knew prosperity when she saw it. Her country on an upward curve and the Dow Jones averages, whatever they were, leaping as though in hot pursuit. The wealth was there for the taking, and despite what the envious said there was nothing better than a pile of cash.

  She looked about her domain and her tongue found her tooth. Japan ... perhaps that, after all, was the answer. Revive the glory of the old Yamato! Yes, put all the fusuma back, get new tatami for the ones the guests had scuffed, and make them leave their filthy footwear at the door. Make them squat at toilet once again as well.

  Ah, there was charm in all this. Practiced eye on public pulse, she could see it now. With foreign novelty so rife, what further titillation than tradition? With things gone this far, old Japan was like a foreign land. A trip to ancient Kyoto was now as exotic as any voyage to London, England, or to Paris, France.

  What further novelty than this? And never mind the cost, an investment after all. Enthused, with shining eyes, petite and dumpy Sumiré clasped her hands at her velvet bodice, at the level of her lilac orchid, forgot her incisor, flashed a smile. Sumiré, enterprising yet, would make her money while she still had breath. People always said that things couldn't be helped. How wrong they were. How well she knew. There was always room for hope.

  And, outside, the old nameboard hung, almost illegible in the purple glow, and on it—Yamato—the first name for Japan, carved in oak by an artisan long dead, gone for well over a century and a half. Softly the board creaked, slowly swaying in the first night breeze.

  Toshio Morikawa

  We were talking about the furosha, those bums increasingly littering parks and malls and subway passages, propped against the wall or lying on the pavement, sleeping, sometimes drunk, always carrying shopping bags filled with all they own.

  They have chosen not to work, not to carry their weight in our society. There is plenty for them to do but, no, they want the easy life of lounging about and foraging in garbage cans. They are simply dropouts. This, at least, is the conventional view.

  - Surely, there's plenty of work they could do? I said conventionally.

  The youngish man with whom I was talking turned to glance at me. He was a workman, a tobishoku, one of those who build tall buildings, walk the high beams in their two-toed rubber tabi.

  The glance was amused. Yoku shitte oru da na, he said: A lot you know about it.

  - But these people are dropouts.

  - Oh, is that so? he replied, leaning back and crossing his arms over the expanse of bare chest above his woolen bellyband. He seemed to be thinking how best to solve the problem I apparently represented.

  - Look, he said finally: There's still work at proper companies, but not at small ones, the kind that use job-brokers.
If you want to learn something about it you ought to get out of bed at four in the morning and go watch them lining up for work, hoping they'll be hired for the day—five hundred men lined up for fifty jobs.

  He told me you had to look fairly strong, like you could do a day's work, but the trouble was that after a person had been out of a job for a week or two he didn't look too good. So he didn't get picked by the brokers.

  And after a month or two of that there wasn't much hope of finding any work at all. That was when you started poking around in garbage cans and drinking anything you could lay your hands on. You didn't wash, your hair got long, your teeth went bad. You stopped caring, you see.

  So a person could be a real bum in half a year. But he hadn't dropped out, understand? He hadn't chosen to be a furosha. Understand?

  I sat, surprised, chastened. One is rarely spoken to this directly and the message is seldom this straight. But then we were not sitting in the polite uptown—we were in the everyday downtown, seated on a bench in Sumida Park, watching the river flow by in the late afternoon of a day in early summer.

  After a time he broke the silence by pointing out a bus going over Kototoi Bridge.

  - I came to Tokyo on a school trip when I was about fifteen, and we all hung out of the windows looking at this and that. And we went right over that bridge there. I must have looked at this very park. I might have seen this very bench.

  He smiled, looked down at his tabi: And I sure didn't think I'd be sitting here like this.

  - Like this?

  - With none of that work that everyone's got so much of if he really wants it. You think otherwise I'd be sitting here in the daytime?

  - You're out of a job, then?

  - For two days now.

  He was from Kyushu, had done a few years in the Self-Defense Forces (which is what Japan calls its postwar army), then taken his separation pay and bought a truck. He and a friend were going into business ... and, well, he lost the truck—some unexplained misfortune—and began doing highrise construction work.

  - But they went and filled up Tokyo. Land is too expensive to build on now unless you're a really big company. But all the big construction companies, they got their own workers now, pay them by the month.

  - Then where do you sleep?

  - Up to yesterday, a bunkhouse in Sanya.

  I knew about Sanya. It was Tokyo's slum, filled with flophouses and often complained about in the papers. Furosha sprawled in the streets, drunk or sick or both. Sanya was where the brokers came early some mornings with orders for ten head here and five head there. Newspaper editorials spoke of the area as a blight on the capital.

  - And last night it was aokan—out in the open, right here in the park. But not tonight. No, tonight I'll be far away.

  - Why? Have you found work?

  He smiled: No such luck. And you better not be here either, he added.

  This was because the police were going to make one of their periodic patrols, here in our park as well as in Asakusa and Ueno. Any vagrants they found would be rounded up and put into vans, then carted off to hospitals. It was for their own good.

  I had heard about these, about the welfare centers and the free hospitals for the homeless. One of the official answers to the furosha problem was that, with these facilities, there was no problem.

  - No problem for them, observed the tobishoku: But you just try to stay in one of them. You can get in for a night or two, if you're lucky. Then you're kicked out again for a week or so. There are just too many want in. There's no more room.

  - Of course, if you really want a place to stay, permanent, then when they try to shove you into the van you get violent and fight back. That means that you're disturbed and so they pack you off to one of the crazy houses up north. And then you've got a home for good. Just try to get out of one of those places.

  Smile long gone, he went on to say: You see, if they get rid of everyone, then Sanya will be empty, so they can finally tear it down and build shopping centers or something. And, of course, that would stop the Sanya senso too.

  I knew something about this as well, the Sanya war, so long-continued now that the papers have stopped reporting about it. This is the endless battle between the gangs and unions.

  The gangsters also act as job-brokers. When they find work for a man they then take part of his wage. The labor unions want to remedy this practice, which results in such low pay for the workers. They want job allocation to be fair and they want the worker to have a full day's pay in his pocket. They also hope to organize the men into a real union, able to dictate prices to the bosses. This conflict of interests has led to much violence and a number of killings—most famously a film director making a documentary on the subject. But, I had also heard, the police now had it well under control.

  - The police? He laughed: They stand around and watch. They don't want to get involved. Maybe they have orders not to, for all I know.

  This, he explained, was because of the landowners, the local merchants, all those who had an interest in cleaning up Sanya; hence, the local politicians as well. They called it a disgrace to have a place like Sanya in this city. What they meant—besides the shame of having people freezing on the streets—was the shame of seeing all that land not being used profitably.

  I turned and looked at him more closely. An articulate, dissident laborer is rare.

  - And how, I asked, do you know all this? How do you know about the patrol tonight? Surely the cops must keep things like that secret?

  - Maybe they tried to. But we were told about it over the loudspeaker when I went to look for work this morning. The truckers announced it just before they drove off. They don't want Sanya destroyed. Good cheap labor like us. Lots of us to choose from.

  Then he smiled: Me—I'm off to Yokohama once it gets dark.

  - You ought to keep right on going, all the way back to Kyushu.

  He nodded: You're right. But when I do, I want to do it properly. I want to go back with a present for my mother, and something for my little nephews. I don't want to just slink back.

  - If you wait too long you won't be able to get back at all.

  - Yes, he said, nodding again and then, apparently quoting: Fall once into Sanya and there's no climbing out.

  Some schoolboys passed, laughing and shouting in the last sunlight.

  - That was the best age, wasn't it? I remember that age. I wish I was back there again, he said.

  We were silent for a while. I then suggested a meal, though he hadn't asked for one. So we ate chicken pilaf at a local place where the proprietress was visibly disturbed that a common workman with a bare chest should be there, and with a suspicious foreigner at that. She would have been even more upset had she overheard our conversation.

  He was telling me about this notorious hospital all the vagrants fought against being sent to. And this wasn't only because of its high mortality rate. It was also apparently because the place was well known for supplying organs to other hospitals: fresh kidneys, eyeballs, hearts—anything you wanted.

  This I disbelieved: Come on. That would make too big a stink in the press.

  - Well, maybe—if they found out. But, look, people don't care.

  We ate in silence for a time, while I picked out the bits of chicken skin and gristle I found. Then with a quick bow he thanked me and said: There, that'll last me till tomorrow morning and I'll be down in Yokohama at the docks. I hear the brokers down there aren't gangsters, at least not all of them.

  During the following days as I made my way around Tokyo I found myself looking at the furosha on the streets or in the subway passages, and not only downtown but in Ginza, in Shinjuku as well.

  On some days there were lots of them, on others none at all. I supposed that the police were moving them out. Certainly attempts were being made to keep them away. I noticed pools of water standing in a corner where the day before several men had been lying down. And wet sand along the corridors where they had sat, to make rest impossible. />
  Then one night in Ueno, going home, walking along a subway corridor, I saw several of them camped among the colonnades. Some were reading their newspapers, a few were lying down, curled up. But one, drunk or delirious, clothes torn and muddy, was standing by a pillar, pissing.

  And coming toward him in their green uniforms were two security guards. The younger saw the old man urinating and rushed forward. Shouting Hora, kono yaro—Hey, you stupid bastard—he struck him hard across the back of the head.

  The old man, unsteady anyway, fell, sliding in his own piss across the paving. Kono yaromé, shouted the young guard, with the other looking on, and kicked the old man's backside as he was trying to get up.

  The older guard took his arm to help him, then apparently thought better of it and released the piss-wet coat, and the two of them began cuffing the furosha down the corridor.

  And I, watching his wet, retreating back, thought of the good-natured, country-faced young worker from Kyushu. Was this what he'd become in a few years? But I would never know. I never expected to see him again.

  But I did—in Asakusa. He was striding along in his wide wing trousers and two-toed tabi, carrying a small bag and looking as though he was going somewhere.

  - Yo, he said when he saw me, his smile wide: They didn't pick you up in the park!

  - I didn't go. I stayed home.

  - Well, you're not the only one with a home now. I got this job. I leave tomorrow morning. Osaka. Good pay. I'll work there for a month and then have enough to get back to Kyushu. I'm going to ride the bullet train. With presents and everything. Here, look.

  And he showed me his contract, a precious piece of paper which presumably spelled everything out. I could read none of it except his name—the characters for "forest" and "river."

  - Hey, you can read. Yes, Morikawa. What about the given name? No? It's Toshio. Not Toshiro, Toshio.

  I congratulated him and then asked how he had happened to get the job. It was pure luck, he said. Some broker he'd never seen before. Said he needed five men but that they'd have to leave Tokyo. Everybody was ready for that, you bet, but there were fifty-some to choose from.