by Ian Buruma
Alas, the tension must have got to him. Tsuda told me that students often save up for these occasions, sex being relatively unavailable to them otherwise. The young man began to sweat, the girl made soft cooing noises, telling him it would be OK. But after a last hopeless shake of his hips, the young man gave up. Older men in the audience chortled at the boy’s failure. The girl patted his back, as he scrambled off the stage still in his white socks with his trousers pulled halfway up his thighs.
So was this it? I asked my friend. He motioned with the palm of his hand in a calming gesture: “Just wait and see.” The emcee made another announcement through his mike: “Honored guests, the time has come for the tokudashi.” “The tokudashi?” I asked Tsuda. “Just wait.” The emcee, breathing heavily into his mike, said in English: “Open.”
The men in the audience, as though waiting for this climactic moment, moved forward, wide-eyed, as three women sitting at the very edge of the stage leaned back on their elbows and very slowly opened their legs, exposing themselves to the prying gaze of the fascinated audience. The emcee handed out some magnifying glasses and small hand torches. “Please share them around, so everyone can have a proper look,” he said.
There was a deadly hush in the theater. No chortling or cackling now, as the women moved sideways like crabs from man to man, each taking his turn to peer into the female mystery with the help of torch and magnifying glass. The women encouraged the men to take their time. I was riveted by the spectacle no less than I had been when I first saw Terayama’s theater or Kara’s play in the red tent. Here was a world that was both deeply strange and utterly human, like some primitive ritual.
After it was all over, Tsuda and I had a drink in a tiny bar near the station. He had a theory about the spectacle we had just witnessed. Japan, he explained, still had vestiges of an ancient matriarchy. In Shinto, he continued, the sun is venerated as a mother goddess, named Amaterasu. One day, according to legend, the sun goddess retreated into a cave in a fit of anger. The world was cast in darkness and evil spirits roamed. The other gods, worried about this state of affairs, tried to coax her out. But Amaterasu stubbornly refused. They tried every trick: roosters were made to crow, pretending it was dawn; a tree covered in jewels and a bronze mirror was placed in front of the cave. Still, she didn’t stir. Then the goddess of mirth and revelry, named Ama no Uzume, began to dance wildly on top of a wooden tub, stamping her feet and lifting her dress to show off her private parts, whereupon the gods burst out laughing. The sun goddess could no longer contain her curiosity, peeked out of her hiding place, and was so taken by her own reflection in the mirror on the tree that the gods were able to drag her out, so light came into the world once more.
This Tsuda told me, and much more, before we parted ways at Kyoto station, Tsuda to go back to Tokyo, and me to the small town not too far away where I was hoping to visit the Human Pump and his family. I don’t know what I imagined their daily life to be like: a kind of carnival, perhaps living in a romantic wooden shack or even a tent with other carnies and geeks. I could picture them practicing swallowing swords and goldfish or crying like wolves.
Since Japanese addresses follow no logic, I had some difficulty finding their house. But I did in the end. It was an ordinary modern house with a blue-tiled roof, like millions of others, on a rather dreary suburban street. The Human Pump, dressed in khaki trousers and a plaid shirt, welcomed me in and offered tea and sweet rice cakes. We made small talk about the weather, the difficulty of recent tax hikes, and the bother of traveling. The television was on all the while, with the sound turned down. Wolf man, without his costume, was a rather taciturn figure in a thick gray sweater. The snake woman kept offering me more cakes, until I really couldn’t manage any more. And the chicken-eating girl asked me about Alain Delon, whom she adored, as did millions of other young Japanese women, assuming, perhaps, that as a fellow gaijin I would have special knowledge of her idol.
They couldn’t have been nicer. Yet I couldn’t help feeling a little deflated. The mystery had gone. There was no absolute Other. I had not penetrated the murky depths of some secret world. My romance had been punctured, a little.
So was my immersion an illusion? Not entirely. It was our common humanity, after all, that had attracted me to Japanese films when I first saw them in Europe. And common humanity is what I found in the middle-class household of the albino goldfish swallower. As with so many ordinary families, the placid surface may have hidden all kinds of secret strangeness. If so, I didn’t see it here. My illusion was to suppose that strangeness lies on the surface. But then it was Donald, my sensei, who often impressed me with the notion that “the Japanese” never assume hidden depths. “They take the surface seriously,” he would say. “The package is the substance. That is at the heart of their sense of beauty.”
Perhaps he was right. Surfaces matter. One of the things I had tried to imitate in Japan was the style of dress of people I thought looked cool. There was a fashion among young people in the seventies to wear traditional wooden Japanese sandals, or geta, especially in the summer. Geta are meant to be worn with a kimono, but young men sported them with jeans. They are made of a wooden block, with a thong made of cloth. A few really hip young men would wear the more dandyish high geta, normally worn by fishmongers and others who need to rise above wet and slippery floors. The takageta had super high heels, making it look as if the wearer were walking on low stilts.
I wore takageta, of course, tottering around the narrow shopping streets of Tokyo with the loud satisfying clip-clop of wood on tarmac, feeling very Japanese. This was part of my immersion. Until one day, on a visit to my relative’s mansion in Aobadai, where I had stayed during my first month in Tokyo, I clip-clopped my way to the gate of his house. There were quite a few people in the street, including some of my relative’s staff who had instructed me on Japanese ways. Suddenly, with a hideous crack of shattering wood, I felt my footwear give way, and there I was, with one geta still on, limping to the door. Nobody laughed. They were much too polite for that. In fact, everyone pretended not to have seen a thing.
FOUR
For Donald Richie, growing up in Lima, Ohio, must have been a torment. A small industrial midwestern town, where the influence of the KKK still lingered, was no place for an artistic young gay boy, hungry for adventure. His only escape was the Sigma movie theater, where a wider world opened up to him. He once wrote that Norma Shearer and Johnny Weissmuller felt more like parents than his real ones. In his words: “In the dusty dark of the Sigma I was content, at home more than I ever was at home.”*
Terayama Shuji grew up in the remote northeast of Japan, the thick accent of which he retained, indeed perhaps cultivated, even after years of living in Tokyo. His father had died as a soldier in the war. His mother was usually away, working in a bar at a U.S. military base. Relatives took care of him. They owned a cinema. It was there, doing his homework behind the film screen, that Terayama grew up, hearing the same ghostly voices as Richie in Ohio. That dream palace, “smelling of piss,” was a recurring theme in Terayama’s poems and plays. His fantasies had fed my fantasies. His was the circus that I followed out of my native country.
Donald’s great escape came at the end of the war when he joined the merchant navy. His favorite book at the time was a baroque travel account entitled The Asiatics, by Frederic Prokosch. It described the travels of a young man from Beirut to China. Since Prokosch had never been anywhere east of Berlin, the book was an invention, made up by the author from guidebooks and travel stories. Donald actually met Prokosch, in 1945 or 1946. His merchant navy ship was moored in Naples, where Prokosch happened to be spending the winter. The writer, dressed in an elegant cream-colored suit, eyed the ship’s crew, and selected some of the more fetching sailors for an evening on the town. Donald was one of them. Prokosch took a shine to him and wanted to know all about his rough life at sea. Donald answered by declaring how much he admired Prokosch’s writing, where
upon the great man of letters rolled his eyes and turned away in disgust.
Donald left the merchant marine and applied for a job in Japan, which he got because of his peculiar talent for typing at great speed. Arriving in Tokyo in 1947, he began writing for the Stars and Stripes military newspaper; Japan was still under U.S. occupation. There were strict rules against “fraternizing” with the “indigenous personnel.” Nightclubs, bars, cinemas, coffee shops, even the Kabuki theater, were off limits. Anyone caught sneaking into these indigenous spots could be sent back home in disgrace. Donald took the risk. He couldn’t imagine living without the movies, and he wanted to be where the natives were.
One of his preferred haunts was the old Rokkuza Theater, which still stood in the ruins of Asakusa, in the midst of hastily rebuilt striptease parlors, all-girl operas, and burlesque houses. There he was, “wedged at the back, smelling the rice-odor sweat of the people back then, mixed with the fragrance of the camellia oil pomade the men used to use on their hair, and beyond these, the beloved odor of the vast, cold, dusty expectant emptiness in the back of the screen. Then the lights went down.”
The movies for Donald were perhaps not a substitute for life, as they had been in Ohio. But they offered a glimpse into an entirely Japanese world. He couldn’t understand a word of what was being said on the screen, but this, he believed, was partly to his advantage. It forced him to pay more attention to what he was taking in with his eyes. If he couldn’t follow the stories, he could at least try to make sense of how they were told. He noticed the lack of close-up shots, compared with Hollywood movies, and he observed the body language of the characters seen in the middle distance. He was struck by the use of space in the way shots were composed, leaving much to the imagination, a bit like traditional Chinese-style paintings.
Thirty-odd years later, the smell of rice and camellia pomade had gone. But many of the old movie houses, in Asakusa, and other parts of Tokyo, were still there. Some were hidden in back alleys, some in underground shopping arcades, and some on the top floors of department stores. Tokyo in the 1970s was one of the world’s great cinema cities, its offerings as varied as in New York or even Paris. There were dozens of art cinemas featuring new movies or retrospectives of Antonioni, Oshima, or Fellini. The latest Hollywood films, as well as commercial Japanese films, were shown in hundreds of cinemas scattered all over town. And then there were the seedier venues, offering all-night showings of Japanese gangster pictures, roman porno, or samurai epics in a haze of stale cigarette smoke.
My own attraction to the reek of mud drew me to the yakuza all-nighters, starring Takakura Ken or Tsuruta Koji. Ken-san bore a remarkable resemblance to the rugged country boys in Donald’s private pinup collection. These films followed a predictable format, observed with the solemnity of a religious rite: the hero, provoked by intolerable humiliations meted out by the bad guys, would always die alone in a final scene of mayhem. Toei studios, which had strong connections to real yakuza gangs, were the main producers of these movies. Mobsters tend to be conservative. The bad guys were crooked bankers, corrupt politicians, or greedy construction bosses. They wore pinstriped business suits with flashy ties. Ken-san and other yakuza heroes wore kimonos. They were the last real warriors, faithful to the ancient codes of chivalry: loyalty, self-sacrifice, and justice. They fought with swords against the cowardly bad hats who invariably fought with guns.
The politics of the classic yakuza movie were not so much right wing as aggressively antimodern. A pure, traditional Japan, which was almost wholly fictional, was being corrupted by modern capitalism and Western ways. This caricature of history goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, when U.S. gunships forced Japan out of her state of relative isolation. Then the helter-skelter economic boom of the 1960s, as well as bruised feelings about the years of U.S. occupation, gave the fantasy a new life. Which is why Ken-san, an essentially reactionary hero, was an idol to left-wing student protesters too. They also longed for a pure society, which could only exist in myth.
Without having the same yearnings as the student activists of the 1960s, I, too, felt the pull of the yakuza myth, which in its classical form was already a thing of the past. Japanese gangster pictures, like American Westerns, which in many respects they resembled, had become darker, more cynical, by the 1970s. Perhaps my taste for the earlier films had something to do with the attempt to flee from my own background, but I think there was more to it than that. Who, with any romantic sense at all, would not root for the men in kimonos against the men in suits, for the swords against the guns? The lament in the classic yakuza picture was the universal one, for paradise lost.
And so I, too, cheered lustily when Ken-san slipped his samurai sword from his waistband, and set off, alone, to face certain death at the hands of his enemies’ guns. The suicidal mission would be accompanied by a rousing song on the sound track, usually sung by the hero himself, celebrating the beauty of death as a final act of vengeance against the corrupt Westernized villains. The kamikaze spirit still lingered, thirty years after the war. Even the sleeping bums would wake up for the climax and shout at the screen: “Go, Ken-san! Die like a man!”
* * *
• • •
I SOON DECIDED that my Japanese cinema education was not best served by the Nichidai art school. Even though I continued to use the darkrooms for my photography, I no longer attended the film classes, even those of Sentimental Ushihara. Instead, as Donald had done before me in the wreckage of bombed-out Tokyo, I immersed myself in the Japanese imagination as a reflection of Japanese life. That is to say, I spent much of my time in the cinema.
My school, in this enterprise, was the National Film Center, a banal white-tiled building tucked away under a flyover near the Kyobashi underground railway station. Donald had introduced me to the kindly curators who ran the place. One of them, Shimizu-san, had worked for a Japanese production company in Shanghai during the war, specializing in Chinese movies that complied with the aims of the Japanese military occupation, without descending to crude propaganda. Shimizu seemed like a dour fellow, until he had a few cups of his beloved sake. He would get giggly and red in the face, and tell stories about the good old days in occupied Shanghai.
Shimizu idolized the man who ran the wartime studio, named Kawakita Nagamasa, a legendary figure in the Japanese film world, who together with his wife, Kashiko, distributed European films in Japan before the war and continued to promote Japanese movies abroad. His genuine sympathy for the Chinese invited the distrust of Japanese military officials in Shanghai during the 1940s. There were rumors of attempts made on his life by thugs employed by the Japanese secret service.
I would occasionally catch a glimpse of Kawakita floating around the Film Center, a dapper silver-haired man in beautifully cut charcoal-gray suits. His reputation as a ladies’ man still hung about him, like a faint odor of expensive perfume. But his wife, Kashiko, was more often in attendance, very much the grande dame, always dressed in understated kimonos. She was not only a regular at the Film Center but also at almost every private film screening in town. Her manners were so fine that one felt boorish in her presence. After stoically enduring yet another “youth film” about young men in leather jackets and sunglasses, she would smile politely, tilt her beautifully coiffed head in a half bow, and declare that it was “a splendid motion picture,” without having the slightest intention of promoting it.
There is something a little creepy about film buffs living the imaginary lives of others vicariously in the dark. Tsuda sometimes came with me to the Film Center. And sometimes my companion was a Greek film student named Vassilis, a pale-faced man with fleshy cheeks, who had a passion for the films of Mizoguchi Kenji. He talked of little else, when his attention wasn’t drawn to some miniskirted girl passing by, which would elicit soft moaning noises, like a dog pining after his lunch. Vassilis would hold forth at great length on Mizoguchi’s silent films, or on that famous tracking shot in The Life of Ohar
u (1952), when the fallen woman, played by Tanaka Kinuyo, tries to see her long-lost son at the mansion of a nobleman whose mistress she had once been. Vassilis could even mimic the sound of the bamboo flutes playing court music at the end of Ugetsu (1953).
For a long time I would attend screenings at the Film Center every afternoon, and sometimes the evenings too. There were retrospectives of Ozu’s great films, as well as Kurosawa’s. I discovered for myself the masterpieces of Naruse Mikio, a still underrated director, whose bleak stories of lonely bar hostesses and women longing in vain to escape from suffocating marriages moved me as deeply as Ozu’s family dramas. The slyly subversive comedies by Kinoshita Keisuke were shown, as well as more unusual series: on the remarkably good wartime Japanese propaganda films, or the silent films of the 1920s, which were as interesting as the German expressionist movies that frequently inspired them. The wonderful films I had read about in Donald Richie’s books were no longer just names. They flickered into life one by one on the top floor of that dreary building in Kyobashi.
The movies covered every aspect of Japanese society, but one subject appeared to dominate all else in art films: the often melancholy role of women—heroic, self-sacrificing mothers, kind-hearted prostitutes, women caught in hopeless love affairs ending in romantic suicides. This interest might seem incongruous in a country where women’s emancipation was so slow in coming. Perhaps male guilt had something to do with it. Mizoguchi Kenji, himself a frequent visitor of brothels in Tokyo and Kyoto, once stood in front of a roomful of prostitutes at a VD clinic, apologized for what men had done to them, and broke down in tears.