A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  Forster was not convinced that East and West could never meet. “Only connect” remained his hope for overcoming differences of culture and religion. The rocks in his final metaphor were thrown up, not by cultural difference, but by the colonial system, which prevented even the best meaning of men like Fielding and Aziz from being equals. This leaves the door open for future change; Aziz can still promise the Englishman that after the British have been thrown out of India, “you and I shall be friends.”

  An element of this plays a role in the gaijin’s relation to Japan, even though Japan was never colonized—occupied, yes, briefly by the Allied forces led by the Americans, but not colonized. Nevertheless, when I lived in Tokyo, the white foreigner stood too far outside the norms of Japanese society to be treated as an equal. There had been too much history of assumed white superiority. Japanese nerves were still sometimes raw. On rare occasions, the gaijin might be the subject of hatred or contempt. More often, he was privileged. I was not treated by Kara as I would have been had I been a stagestruck Japanese of my age. In a sense, the gaijin is offered a sojourn in a fool’s paradise. For some lucky fools the sojourn might stretch to a lifetime.

  Kara occasionally mentioned John Nathan, an American who had preceded me in the social thickets of Japanese film, theater, and literature. Nathan lived in Tokyo in the glorious 1960s, where he had distinguished himself far more than I ever had. He appeared in major plays, wrote the script for a movie starring Ri Reisen, and translated Mishima. Nathan was the first American to be admitted as a regular student of Japanese literature at Tokyo University, where he had “felt the exhilaration of belonging to the group. I felt Japanese.”*

  But not for long. A famous Japanese movie star named Katsu Shintaro, celebrated for his performance as Zatoichi, the blind samurai swordsman, told John that he understood the Japanese like no other foreigner, that he spoke Japanese like a native, but, John, he said, “in Japan you cannot win!” What he meant was that foreigners would never be judged by the same rules. For years, Nathan wrote in his memoir, “I had been troubled by the possibility that I possessed the wherewithal to distinguish myself only as an exotic foreigner in an insular island country. I determined to prove myself on home ground.”

  I had learned a similar lesson, which Kara, wittingly or not, had taught me. But there is an important difference between the gaijin’s experience in Japan and that of Mr. Fielding in colonial India, or Kara’s in New York City. And this is something Forster does not touch upon, at least not overtly. Kara’s Japaneseness is defined by the culture of his native country. Fielding and Aziz are drawn apart by colonial inequality. But the exotic white foreigner in Japan remains fixed forever to a racial or ethnic type. These differences can be exaggerated, of course. Race, social inequality, and history overlap. To many Japanese, perhaps most, to be Japanese is an ethnic category, like a birthmark that can never be erased. I once had a conversation with Kara about the plight of the outcasts in Japan, the burakumin, who are condemned by birth in buraku families to be marked forever by their ancestral association with death, even if they are dentists or schoolteachers instead of butchers or tanners. Kara then said something extraordinary: “You know, I think of the whole of Japan as a buraku.” The notion of the Japanese as outcasts in the world seems patently absurd, redolent of an unpleasant sense of self-pity. And yet Kara put his finger on something real: the difference between outcasts and a chosen people, driven by quasi-religious propaganda in the 1930s and early ’40s to dominate Asia as the descendants of the sun goddess, is not so great. But that precisely was the rock that separated the Japanese, not as individuals, but as a people, from others. That is why I, like John Nathan, decided I needed to leave.

  It is of course perfectly possible for a foreigner to lead a contented and productive life in Japan. There are various ways of coming to terms with the gaijin status, some more enervating than others. One can simply enjoy the privileges without the illusion of ever being anything but an outsider. In some ways, that is the easiest option most likely to lead to a kind of serenity. Not speaking Japanese very well, or at all, can be reassuring to the native born. There is no pretense, no performance, no attempt at passing; the foreigner is precisely what he appears to be. The inscrutability of the Oriental is an old colonial prejudice. But it is also something to which many Japanese cling. To remain beyond the understanding of outsiders confirms the uniqueness of the native culture.

  This insularity can be a source of constant irritation to some foreigners who try their best to understand; the Mr. Fieldings who would have liked to have gone native, in one way or another. Even if the irritation is not constant, it can recur often enough to become like a neurotic compulsion. Edward Seidensticker, the great American scholar and translator of Japanese, lived in Tokyo for several years in the 1960s, when he wrote a sometimes acid but always amusing column for the English edition of a large Japanese newspaper. He wrote an extraordinary valedictory column, published in May 1962, where he explained his reasons for leaving Japan to return to the United States.

  There once was a meadow mouse, he writes, who was thought to be unreasonable on the subject of a fat snake slithering around outside the meadow mouse’s hole. The snake bore a striking resemblance to certain Japanese politicians and bureaucrats. A friendly fellow mouse tells him to relax, have another drink, and just make friends with the snake. Snakes, after all, are just like other folks: they work hard to support their children, they enjoy baseball, and so on. The meadow mouse, getting drunker all the time, is finally convinced by his friend, lets down his guard, and is swiftly devoured by the snake in one satisfied gulp.

  But not Professor Seidensticker: “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 the sense of outrage go dull is to lose the will to communicate; and that, I think, is death. So I am going home.”*

  Remember, this was written in 1962. The fat snake metaphor is a rather dubious one. And much has changed since then. But perhaps not as much as sufferers of gaijinitis might wish. The arguments between the meadow mouse and his friend are still being fought out in the letter columns of the English-language press in Japan, where outraged complaints about Japanese insularity are countered by assertions that Japan is misunderstood, that Japanese are just like other people, or indeed in most respects superior to other people. If the foreigner in Japan is a writer, these arguments can become the main focus of his work, an obsessive theme that will not go away, an endless debate that neither side can win. For an insular people can also be misunderstood, clannish people can still be like other people, and some foreigners will find living in Japanese society more congenial than others.

  Those who find it most congenial often make a virtue of their outsider status, embracing their gaijinhood like a protective shell. This is rather like going native, paradoxical as this may sound. For living in a society, to whose customs and norms one is not expected to conform, gives the outsider a radical kind of autonomy. But the point of this is not to rebel against the norms of the country one has chosen to live in, but of those one has left behind. This is what Donald Richie was trying to tell me when we were first introduced by John Roderick, the American newspaperman, in the apartment of their friend, the gay British novelist.

  The Richie solution is now less common in Japan than it once was. Western gay men have less reason to fear the customs and norms of their own societies, and gaijin don’t enjoy the same radical autonomy they once did. Strangers are no longer quite so strange in Japan. Along with prejudice against gaijin, their privileges have shrunk. More and more, residents of Japan are expected to do as the Japanese do. And this is the way it ought to be.

  And yet, the voice of the meadow mouse can
not be stilled entirely. Despite the extraordinary spread of certain aspects of Japanese culture—sushi, manga, Pokémon—Japan still is an insular nation, not much understood in the rest of the world. This opens up great opportunities to a writer, who knows Japan even a little bit, for so much still needs to be explained. I benefited from this myself. It was the start of my life as a journalist. Not long after my trip to New York with Kara and Ri, I was asked by a British newspaper to fill an entire issue of their Sunday magazine with articles on Japan, illustrated by my own photographs. This led to a contract for my first book. Japan was the making of me.

  And yet I didn’t want to spend all my writing life explaining Japan. The constant explainer runs the risk of no longer learning, and becoming a bore. And I didn’t feel the same need to escape that shaped the life of my great American mentor. I had no reason to fear the customs and norms of my own culture. What I did fear was to catch a dose of gaijinitis, and become obsessed with the often imaginary slights that go with being pegged to one’s ethnicity.

  And so I said goodbye to Japan. But not to go home. I was no longer sure where home was. Holland, where I grew up, did not really feel like home. London, where my English mother grew up, was as good a place as any. Not because I could ever feel entirely English myself. That, too, was a performance to an extent. But I chose London because I wanted to live among people who could read what I wrote in their own language, a language I was not educated in but was still part of me. Because of my mother, I had grown up with English comic books, nursery rhymes, and children’s books; I was an Enid Blyton child. But apart from letters to my grandparents, I had never written in English; that, too, came from my time in Japan. But the main reason I chose London, I think, is that unlike Tokyo it was a city of many cultures.

  Even though I decided to leave Japan, I knew that Japan would never leave me. I arrived in Tokyo when I was still unformed, callow and eager for experience. I can only hope that this eagerness will never be entirely dissipated. To be fully formed is to be dead. But Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet.

  There was another reason why Japan did not leave me. Sumie and I decided that home could be a moveable feast, as long as we were together. Soon after my break with Kara, I moved back in with her, in the same apartment we had rented when we first arrived in Tokyo. Just before leaving for London, she became my wife. She had come with me to the country of her birth, where she had always felt an outsider, and she would return with me to Europe, where she felt more at ease. Like Richie, she longed for radical autonomy. I shared that feeling. As the wise Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri once said, to be déraciné is to be on the road forever. We were both gaijin for life. And we felt safer together.

  When I told John Roderick, over lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo, that I was going to get married, he pulled a face of mild disgust. “How very, very boring,” he said, as though I had finally sold out. He was wrong. It was never boring. The arrangement was not destined to last, but then one thing Japan had taught me was that nothing ever does. That is the sadness and the beauty of life.

  We took off from Narita International Airport on a late autumn afternoon. I had hoped to get a last glimpse of Mount Fuji as we turned toward the ocean, but all I saw was a thick white blanket of cloud. My thoughts drifted to a boat trip I had once taken, not long after I first arrived in Japan, to an archipelago off the North Pacific coast celebrated by classical Japanese poets for its extraordinary beauty. Alas, on the day I set off to see the famous beauty spot, all the rocky little islands were shrouded in dense fog. There was nothing to be seen. But the tour guide, undeterred by reality, chirpily told us to observe the exquisite features of this island or that. Obediently, we looked left or right, as instructed, and sighed. The performance had to go on. We saw what we wanted to see.

  Just then, the captain of our Japan Airlines plane announced that if we looked to the right, we could see Mount Fuji. We were sitting on the left, so I craned my neck to gaze across the row of seats, and there it was, the sharp outline of Fuji’s proud cone, sticking out from the bed of clouds in all its glory. That was the last thing I saw of the country I had been living in for the last six years. I had been looking through the wrong window.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I never kept a diary. And I wrote very few letters while living in Tokyo from 1975 till 1981. All I have to remind me of that period are photographs I took (none of myself; this was the pre-selfie age) and memories. Naturally, memories are fragmentary, fallible, and subject to constant change, as the story of one’s life (never coherent in the first place) keeps being reedited in the mind.

  All I can claim is that I have written this account of my Tokyo years as best as I can remember them. I have not consciously made anything up. But it is, for all the reasons mentioned above, as well as for literary purposes, an edited version.

  I owe thanks to a few people who shared some of my experiences and were kind enough to jog my memory, above all Graham Snow and Rob Schipper.

  Jim Conte, whom I first met in 1975 at the beautiful home of a mutual acquaintance in Kamakura, where he left an indelible and wholly misleading impression of impossible grandeur because of his ankle-length raccoon fur coat and plausible small talk about grand country houses, remained a friend for life. He was kind enough to read my manuscript. As was my wife, Eri Hotta, whose encouragement has been a constant spur to carry on.

  Jin Auh, of the Wylie Agency, saw the project through from beginning to end with her usual tact and moral support. And I couldn’t have wished for more flexible, understanding, and professional editors than Scott Moyers and Christopher Richards.

  INDEX

  The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

  Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  Abe Sada, 43–44, 118

  Abraham, F. Murray, 209

  Adachi Masao, 149

  Ahen Senso (Opium War) (film), 12–13

  Akatsuka Fujio, 197–98

  Ali, Muhammad, 28, 114

  Amagatsu Ushio, 123–24, 131, 133, 136, 137

  Ama no Uzume (goddess of mirth), 65

  Amaterasu (mother goddess), 65–66

  “American Hijiki” (Nosaka), 152–53

  Amin, Idi, 104, 105

  Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness), 114, 123, 124

  Antonioni, Michelangelo, 71

  Anzu, 127, 128, 131, 136

  Arafat, Yasser, 105

  Araki (photographer), 53, 54, 198

  Arashi (“Tempest”), 130–31

  Asahigraph, 189, 208

  Asakusa Opera, Tokyo, 139

  Asbestos Studio, 113–18, 115, 129

  Ashikawa Yoko, 114, 116, 117, 118

  Asiatics, The (Prokosch), 70

  Austen, Jane, 34

  Aznavour, Charles, 218

  Barry Lyndon (film), 81–82

  Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal) (film), 10–11, 89

  Bellmer, Hans, 116–18

  Bloomsbury group, 31–32

  Blunt, Anthony, 8

  Bolero (Ravel), 130–31, 134, 135

  Boy with Cat (film), 49

  Breton, André, 187, 202

  Bunraku theater puppets, 91, 178

  Buruma, Ian:

  and Butoh performance, 125–26, 128

  decision to leave Japan, 222–28

  documentary filmmaking by, 91, 177–80

  early years of, 3–14, 33, 104, 226

  First Love (Hatsukoi) film by, 129–30

  formative stage of, 39, 49–51, 118, 129, 165

  and his uncle, 4, 77, 81, 152

  interest in Chinese culture, 8–10

  interest i
n cinema, 74–79, 129, 151, 165, 177

  interest in Japanese culture, 3, 8, 10–14, 34, 51, 55–56, 67–68, 74, 89

  interest in photography, 52–54, 55, 73, 117, 156, 158, 165, 171, 218, 225

  interest in tattoos, 158–63

  as Iwan the Gaijin, 183, 186–87, 188–89, 194, 199–200, 208–9

  on life as continuing act, 104

  living accommodations of, 106–7

  Mask of a Virgin translated by, 165–69, 171, 180

  move to London, 226–28

  on New Year’s Eve, 107–11

  nostalgie de la boue of, 55, 61, 123

  as outsider, 32–34, 48, 52, 77, 96, 104, 106, 107, 137, 147, 150, 151–52, 156, 162–63, 169–70, 172, 174, 177, 188, 189, 190, 199, 201, 204–5, 208, 219, 220–21, 222–23

  as photographer’s assistant, 171–77

  Butoh dance:

  Arashi (“Tempest”), 130–31

  author’s interest in, 123

  author’s performance of, 125–26, 128

  Dairakudakan performance of, 120, 121–22, 124–26, 133–34, 137

  Dance of Birth and Death, 124

  Dance of Darkness (Ankoku Butoh), 114, 123, 124

  established style of, 122–23, 132

  foundation of, 23, 114, 116

  full-body makeup of, 122, 131

  fund-raising activities, 126