by Ian Buruma
That was written in the 1930s. Here is Seidensticker describing exactly the same place more than fifty years later, long after the old houses of pleasure were transformed into gaudy massage parlors, known as “Turkish baths” (Toruko) until a Turk objected and they were renamed “soaplands.”
One may not come upon much that looks Turkish beside a Yoshiwara street, but the more ornate styles of Europe and the ancient Orient are most of them there, with an occasional touch of Egypt among them. It is all very interesting and amusing, but a result of anti-prostitution has been to make the Yoshiwara slip yet a bit further from the height of other ages. The more dignified houses went away, and the less dignified ones stayed and became less dignified all the time.
What strikes the reader is a similarity not just of taste—that for solitary wanderings through the old quarters of ill repute—but of tone: wry and melancholy. Life is no longer what it was. Of course it never is. Perhaps it is better now that people are more prosperous, own cars and television sets and whatnot. “So it may be argued,” writes Seidensticker. “Yet variety is lost, uniformity prevails, and for some this is a development to be lamented. Certainly a stroll through the Low City of a summer evening is not the fun it once was.”
Like Kafu, Seidensticker can be said to have sought a kind of refuge in the back alleys of Tokyo: a refuge, possibly, from the smug, prosperous, progressive America of the Truman and Eisenhower era—a fine time, perhaps, but not congenial, especially outside the largest cities, to those with a romantic temperament and unorthodox tastes. This might explain why Japan after the war proved so alluring to American romantics with a penchant for low life. Like Isherwood’s Berlin or Henry Miller’s Paris, Tokyo offered freedom from the straight and narrow social restraints that prevailed back home. To be sure, such restraints existed for the Japanese themselves, but they were rarely, if ever, applied to foreigners, for foreigners were beyond the pale anyway.
The lure of Japan has, over the ages, proved especially irresistible to homosexual men. Truman Capote, during a trip to Tokyo, declared himself to be in heaven. J. R. Ackerley found love there that was more pleasing and certainly safer than his fleeting affairs with sailors and guardsmen in London. Seidensticker describes a quarter in Shinjuku that used to be a red-light district and is now “the homosexual capital of the nation” and, with its hundreds of bars, bathhouses and short-term hotels, is “in the running for the designation homosexual capital of the world.” Its cosmopolitanism has been somewhat tarnished by the arrival of AIDS, which has prompted many establishments to bar foreigners from their premises. Nevertheless, the romance of guilt-free male bonding (as common today as it was in the samurai past) and the lissome charms of Japanese boys still attract many Western men, who, even after reaching a certain age, continue to find love in Japan.
Such freedom has its price. For the sense of being beyond the pale, of living as a permanent outsider in a provincial and often xenophobic society, can get on one’s nerves. This is how the so-called (so-called among fellow stragglers in Tokyo) Seidensticker syndrome is born: the love that can turn to hate and then back to love again at enormous speed. There is a way to short-circuit the syndrome, which is to do something akin to Zen meditation, to reach a point of nonthinking, a spiritual mellowness Zen adepts call satori, which is to say a point where nothing matters anymore: I’m OK, you’re OK, everything’s OK. This, to his eternal credit, Seidensticker has always refused to do. His This Country Japan reprints his last column for the newspaper Yomiuri, just before returning to America in 1962, after having spent more than a decade in Japan. He wrote:
There we are. I have felt recently that I might be getting mellow, becoming a reasonable meadow mouse. The Japanese are just like other people. They work hard to support their—but no. They are not like other people. They are infinitely more clannish, insular, parochial, and one owes it to one’s self-respect to preserve a feeling of outrage at the insularity. To have a sense of outrage go dull is to lose the will to communicate; and that, I think, is death. So I am going home.
Seidensticker has approached the city in a variety of ways, but two themes stand out: language and popular culture, particularly the culture of sex, and, since Tokyo provides or promises to provide so much sex, this is appropriate. The language of Tokyo, expressed in popular songs, in the names of bars and restaurants, in street slang and advertising slogans, is often a mixture of Japanese and English. A superficial observer might conclude from this that Tokyo and, by extension, Japan and the Japanese are hopelessly Americanized. It is hard to measure such things, but this conclusion would be only partly correct at best. As Seidensticker observes, “Among the pleasures of modern Japanese is that its use of one’s own language so often requires explanation.” What, you might well ask, is a “mobo” or a “maihomu papa” or a “nopan kissa”? Well, mobo is shorthand, current in the 1920s, for modern boy, a young man of fashion; a maihomu (my home) papa is a house-proud family man; and a nopan (no-pants) kissa is a bar offering the services of nude waitresses. The English language used in this Japanized way is ornamental, expressing a mood of exoticism or modernity. It sounds cosmopolitan, but isn’t.
There was a song, popular just after World War II, which perfectly expressed the quasi-cosmopolitanism of modern, urban Japan. It was entitled “Tokyo Boogie Woogie,” and went something like this:
Tokyo Boogie Woogie.
Rhythm. Wowie Wowie.
My heart goes pit-a-pat. Tick-a-tack.
A song of the world. A happy song.
Tokyo Boogie Woogie.
It might be a song of the world, but only a Japanese could make sense of it, despite the jazzy English phrases. One of the interesting things about Tokyo is that it is at once utterly fashionable, utterly up to date, utterly metropolitan, and utterly parochial. Tokyo people like foreign things—or at least things that sound and look foreign—without necessarily liking foreign people.
Tanizaki Junichiro caught this idea wonderfully well in his novel Naomi. The two main characters are a man called Joji and a girl called Naomi. Joji is a dull office worker, born in the provinces, and Naomi is a floozy from the Low City, a kind of bitch goddess of Tokyo lowlife. She adopts every Western fashion: high heels, lipstick, all the newest dances, and the latest hybrid slang. Joji is so besotted with her that he becomes her slave. He is the provincial Japanese in love with the image of the exotic West, as, in a way, is she. But neither, despite all Naomi’s fashionable posturing, is remotely Westernized, in the sense of being a citizen of the world. They are citizens of Tokyo, and their feet remain firmly planted in Japanese soil.
Tanizaki often used sex as a metaphor for culture. The clash between Western fashion and Japanese tradition is apparent in many of his great female characters. Seidensticker’s use of sex is somewhat similar. Through his descriptions of brothels, nopan kissa, peep shows and pornography, one catches the spirit of the Japanese metropolis. He has clearly done his homework in this department with the thoroughness of the true enthusiast, and one could not wish for a better guide to the arcana of the wonderful world of Japanese sex.
There is much to be said for this approach: the back alleys rather than the main avenues, low rather than high life, popular rather than highbrow culture. And it is easy to empathize with his preference for the old, messy, increasingly déclassé streets of the Low City, rather than the ritzy, suburban sprawl to the west of the High City, which is where all the action is nowadays. The center of Tokyo, certainly as far as nightlife is concerned, has shifted from the east to the west, from Asakusa to Shinjuku, a suburb that was still an outpost 100 years ago. Shinjuku is now where the literati and artists seek their pleasures.
Seidensticker is almost as disdainful of these literati and what he calls “the odorless rarefaction of the High City intellectual world” as Kafu was in his day. They are usually described as “artistic types” or “intellectual and literary people” who “read difficult publications and discuss constitutionalism and such things.” Ag
ain, anyone who has busied himself with the frivolous chatter of many Japanese intellectuals, or “intellis,” as they call themselves, cannot fail to see some merit in Seidensticker’s disdain.
And yet nostalgia can sometimes cause one to miss out on what is interesting about the new. One of Seidensticker’s saddest laments is that Tokyo no longer has such writers as Tanizaki, Kafu or Kawabata to celebrate the city’s moods. “No novel conveys a sense of Shinjuku as a place, no novel is suffused with affection for it. Shinjuku has no regional literature. It may be said that Tokyo has had none since the war.” The implication is that modern, bustling, high-rise, high-tech Tokyo lacks poetry.
I am not sure this is quite true. The great Shinjuki novel is perhaps yet to be written, but, especially in the 1960s, the quarter was celebrated in drama and the movies. It was the center of experimental theater, much of it, as always with experiments, dross, but some of it as good as anything of its kind in the world. Seidensticker does not do justice to the excitement generated in Shinjuku by such playwrights as Terayama Shuji or Kara Juro. The performances by the latter’s troupe are mentioned in one sentence, as being “conspicuous for their lurid colors.” This is a bit like saying that Fellini’s films are notable chiefly for their odd costumes.
Whether or not they were to one’s taste, the films of Oshima (among them Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) and the plays of Terayama, Kara, Suzuki Tadashi and others were as important to the cultural life of Shinjuku as the nopan kissa or the massage parlors. And the underground theater of the 1960s and 1970s was as nostalgic in its luridly colorful way as Seidensticker’s books. Playwrights, poster designers and novelists showed a particular interest in the 1920s, a relatively liberal period associated with the catchphrase “ero, guro, nansensu” (erotic, grotesque, nonsense), and the immediate postwar years when most of the artists prominent in the 1960s grew up. They evoked the atmosphere of the postwar ruins and the liberal 1920s in the same way Seidensticker does: through popular music, slogans, slang, movies and so forth. They, too, had a horror of the homogenized, anonymous, conformist prosperity of the economic miracle. Far better, they seemed to say, to live passionately in the midst of ruins than boringly in the riches of concrete and glass.
“Perhaps,” writes Seidensticker, “what has happened to the High City, now so close to being the whole city, is among the things encompassed by the voguish expression ‘postmodern.’ A city that is urban in the abstract may be what the future holds.” It is an interesting notion: life experienced entirely vicariously through television, advertising and other mass gimmicks; life without odor, barely human, homogenous and cold as the modern architecture Seidensticker deplores.
Perhaps, indeed. But one of the most remarkable things about Tokyo is the way the Japanese, unlike the inhabitants of many Western cities, have managed to make the machine age more human. Television, instead of being a sinister flickering presence behind closed curtains on deserted city streets, has been dragged out into the open. It is everywhere—not only in shop windows, but on giant screens looming over the crowds, in taxis, on trains, in coffee shops and in restaurants. The same is true of music, blaring forth constantly from every corner, Mozart mixed with “Tokyo Boogie Woogie.” It is as though Japanese can only enjoy themselves in crowds, with everything going on full blast. The effect is not restful, to be sure. It is cacophonous, relentless, often irritating, but it is not inhuman, and it contains a peculiar kind of poetry, for which at some future date, when the city has been transformed yet again, some writer will feel the deepest nostalgia. One may only hope that he or she will express it with the wit and style of a Kafu, or a Seidensticker.
1990
Wilfred Thesiger
WILFRED OF ARABIA
When people or their ideas become the object of cults, it is time to watch out. For cults by their very nature are beyond criticism. The beauty of cult worship lies in its irrationality. Cultists substitute exultation for thought.
Wilfred Thesiger, adventurer, writer and photographer, has become a British cult figure. His autobiography, The Life of My Choice, received the highest praise in Britain and was a best-seller to boot. I once expressed some doubts about Thesiger to a British admirer of his and got slapped on the wrist: Thesiger is a Great Man, a real traveler, unlike those smart-alecky young writers today who parachute in and out of places; Thesiger really knew the people he wrote about; he lived with them; he loved them. Not for him the effete banter of literary London. He prefers the company of real people, noble people, pure people, like Marsh Arabs, tribal warriors in Kenya or stern nomads of the Arabian desert.
To be sure, there is much to admire about Wilfred Thesiger. His book on the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, with whom he lived for about five years during the 1950s, is a unique document of a vanished way of life. What was left before the slaughter of the Iran–Iraq war surely now is lost forever. Thesiger’s prose survives, however, as well as his excellent black-and-white photographs, which have been beautifully reproduced in Visions of a Nomad, an album that spans much of Thesiger’s traveling life. It is divided into three parts: Africa, meaning Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya; the Arab world, consisting of Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, Lebanon and Iraq; and Asia, mainly Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
In between the pictures of noble graybeards in Persia, armed Arab youths in Oman and naked warriors in northern Kenya, we are offered snippets of Thesiger’s likes and dislikes. He hates tourists, cars, airplanes: “Airports represent to me the ultimate abomination, everything that I most detest in our civilization.” He does not care much for Europe, “either its people, its towns or its landscape, and I certainly have no wish to visit America, Australia or New Zealand.”
On the other hand, Thesiger loves “relaxed and graceful tribesmen,” with whom he can share “comradeship”; he has had a “life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums … for long-established custom and ritual, from which I would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands”; and he loves shooting large numbers of animals.
Apart from the shooting, which he admits is no longer fashionable now that wildlife has been largely depleted, there seems to be nothing especially objectionable about Thesiger’s views. Most of us can sympathize with his distaste for, as he puts it in The Marsh Arabs, “that drab modernity which, in the uniform of second-hand European clothes, was spreading like a blight across the rest of Iraq.” For “Iraq” read “the entire developing world.”
Indeed, Thesiger deserves praise for his sympathy for remote peoples, his deep understanding of their ways, and the healthy skepticism toward the White Man’s aims in those places where the sun never used to set. His tolerance and curiosity must have been rare among colonials of his generation (Thesiger was a colonial by profession, if not necessarily by inclination). And if Thesiger appears, at times, a bit condescending in his passion for barbaric splendor, well, as Osbert Sitwell once said, “A certain love of the exotic was, perhaps, innate in those of English blood, counterpart indeed, of our proud insularity.”
One can understand why the British have taken Thesiger to their hearts. He is the quintessential English eccentric, forever embarking on impossible adventures in impossible countries, among impossible people; the well-bred aristocrat—his uncle, Lord Chelmsford, was viceroy of India—reveling in excruciating discomfort and horrid food. He is like a character in a John Buchan story. He is what English romantics like best: the last of a kind.
There is, as I said, nothing ostensibly wrong with all this. And yet … I wonder about the nature of Thesiger’s romanticism. His empathy with tribal people is fine and good, but his admiration for the noble warrior tends to border on cultishness. His sympathy for browns and blacks is wholly admirable, but his preoccupation with racial purity strikes me as suspect. His tolerance for native customs is to be commended, but his delight in violence, killing and other more exotic forms of nastiness comes rather close to ghoulishness. About his taste for
blood he is at least entirely honest. It was developed early in life. As Thesiger’s father wrote to his mother:
Billy goes out shooting every day but does not get much as his only weapons are a tennis bat and empty cartridge case which he hits at the birds. He says he can’t get them flying but if they would only sit for him he is sure he could kill one. His sporting instincts are very strongly developed.
Indeed they were. Billy (Wilfred) was three at the time.
In The Life of My Choice, Thesiger offers his hunter’s philosophy in asides, in between descriptions of how he bagged ever more hippos, lions, boars and whatnot. “I believe that most men have an inborn desire to hunt and kill and that even today this primitive urge has only been eradicated in a small minority of the human race.” Maybe so, but those are not the members of the human race that interest Thesiger. He was happiest when in the company of such “savage, and good-looking people” as the Danakil of Abyssinia, for whom a man’s social standing depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated. He describes in The Marsh Arabs how he charmed even the dourest of tribal friends by offering them his gun. “You can usually get on terms with people by helping them to kill something” is his typical throwaway remark.
Now it may be that I misunderstand him: that this is an example of the last Great White Hunter’s cynical wit. But I don’t think so. For one thing, Thesiger is not an especially witty writer. For another, he clearly approves of the desire to kill. This is not just confined to animals either: he kills men with equal zeal. Some of his wartime exploits as a guerrilla in Libya, paving the way for Montgomery’s victory, make for a chilling read. He would drive up to German canteens: “Inside men were talking, laughing and singing. I fired a long burst into the tent.… During these operations we must have killed and wounded many people, but as I never saw the casualties we inflicted my feelings remained impersonal.”
