This I much doubt, and even if I do have it, do not believe that my GI readers will be interested. Nonetheless, I am assured that my piece has human-interest and that human-interest fits in with the major aims of a democratic press. As such my man under the bridge qualifies and, consequently, so do I.
Eighth Army photographers are sent to capture Mr. Iwasaki in his watery lair and a rewritten version of my article becomes a cover story in the Stars and Stripes Weekly where it again excites some mild interest.
A year before it would have excited none—lots of people were living under bridges. But now they are few, there is creeping fraternization, and the Occupying stance is relaxing. The days of Japs and Gooks are numbered. We are now living with a fellow race. I have, despite or because of my patronization, indicated this. The newspaper authorizes my transfer, my grade is moved a step up, and I am feature writer and film reviewer.
Feeling guilty at having gotten so much from this penniless person, I take further cigarettes as well as a fifth of Four Roses to my benefactor under the bridge. He is, however, no longer there. My article has alerted the Japanese police, who have swiftly removed this unwelcome relic from the old days.
Having ruined the life of an affable old man, I find myself haunted by his ghost. In my new office at Stars and Stripes comes the shout: “Get Richie to do it. He’s good at human-interest.”
*
I, strangely, did not regard movies as human-interest stories. Perhaps because, as for so many of my generation—those who, like me, had profitably spent their youth in the dark—films had become sacerdotal, something so out-of-body that they were no longer quite human.
For me, as for so many, the movies were a preferable form of life. I knew nothing about films themselves—did not know how they were made, or why. And if I knew next to nothing about the movies of my own country, I knew nothing at all about Japanese films: did not understand the language, recognized neither stars nor directors, and knew little about Japan itself. From such beginnings knowledge of the Japanese cinema could only grow.
Though I was supposed to merely endure the latest Hollywood product in the comfort of the Signal Corps screening room, I defined my mission as otherwise. Coat collar turned up, eyes alert for the marauding MP, I bravely sneaked into Japanese motion pictures theaters all over the city, where I was forever getting sisters confused with wives and mistresses with mothers, and becoming lost in the labyrinths of the period film.
Dumbly I absorbed reel after reel, sitting in the summer heat of the Nikkatsu or the winter cold of the Hibiya Gekijo. Yet, in these uncomprehending viewings of one opaque picture after another, I was being aided by my ignorance. Undistracted by dialogue, undisturbed by story, I was able to attend to the intentions of the director, to notice his assumptions and to observe how he contrived his effects.
Though I understood little about cinema, I had seen a lot of it, and now I began to realize that space was used differently in Japanese films. There was a careful flatness, a reliance upon two dimensions which I knew from Japanese woodblock prints. And emptiness, I had already guessed, was distributed differently. Compositions seemed bottom-heavy, but then I realized that—as in the hanging scrolls I had seen—the empty space was there to define what was below: it had its own weight.
And there were also many fewer close-ups than I was accustomed to in American films. The camera seemed always further away from the actors—as though to show the space in between. A character was to be explained in long shot, his environment speaking for him. Sometimes I could not even make out his face, but I knew who he was by what surrounded him.
I also noticed the pace of the films of the period: slow, very slow. Time, lots of it—long scenes, long sequences—was necessary. Feelings flowed and flowered to what Ohio would have thought extravagant lengths. The screen was awash with undammed emotion. Yet, though allergic to the displays of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, I somehow did not mind the emotionality of women I later discovered to be Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko.
Wondering why I so willingly wept along with them, I decided that the very fact that they were so far away, and crying for such a long time, compelled my moving nearer, and hence feeling more. So different from the big and demanding close-ups of Joan and Bette, their nostrils large enough to drive trucks into. Being apparently asked for nothing I gave more. And so, sitting there, smelling the rice sweat and the camellia pomade, I was learning my early lessons in Japanese art.
I wonder which films taught me. 1947—one could have been Ozu Yasujiro’s Record of a Tenement Gentleman, released that May; another could have been Mizoguchi’s The Loves of Sumako (with Tanaka Kinuyo), released that August. Whatever I saw, I have forgotten, if I ever knew. I later looked at both the Ozu and the Mizoguchi but not a memory budged. The first Japanese film scene that I could identify was one I recognized only because I had watched it being made.
*
I was taken to the Toho Studios not because of my new critical position, but because I had met with the composer Hayasaka Fumio. He was a pale, spectacled man who having heard that I had some recordings of new music, wanted to meet me. Regulations on fraternization with the indigenous personnel having been relaxed, I could ask him to my billet, and escort him up in the front elevator. In my room we heard the Berg Violin Concerto, newly recorded and inexplicably on sale in the PX. He sat silent, lost in the music, and when the Bach chorale appeared his eyes filled with tears.
Hayasaka responded by inviting me to Toho to watch being filmed a movie for which he was doing the score. Setting out early to avoid the MPs, late risers all, we stood bouncing in the suburban train as it bumped and rattled through the new, raw countryside west of Tokyo.
The Toho Studios, large white barns, were in the midst of muddy paddies. Inside, the big, muffled prewar camera clunked by on metal rails and the mike was held aloft on a bamboo pole. Both of these were aimed at a carefully ruined set of buildings, meticulously constructed, every brick out of place, in back a dirty gray cyclorama with miniature ruins on the nearby horizon.
A whole blasted neighborhood had been built around a scummy-surfaced sump on the banks of which were a few new plywood buildings, their fronts festooned with neon. In the sump itself floated carefully placed garbage, a single shoe, a cardboard box, and a child’s lost doll. Yet what I was seeing was no different from what I had seen on my way there.
Ono Tadamaro performing Bugaku. stars and stripes
It had not occurred to me that film heightened reality. I had always thought of it as an alternate. Yet this—though different from Johnny Weissmuller’s lost city or from Norma Shearer’s Versailles—was still a movie set. Obviously so, yet, huge on the black and silver screen, it would look real.
There was the camera, there was the mike, and there were banks of lights. And there was the director, wearing a white floppy hat; there was someone I guessed was the star. He, in a loose Hawaii-shirt, a young actor with slicked back hair, was practicing menacing an older man with a beard and round-rimmed glasses.
The young man was supposed to walk along the sump toward the older man. This short scene was taken several times very swiftly, no stopping, apparently, for consideration. I wondered at the speed with which this reality was captured, having always thought that making films took an enormous amount of time.
And the noise. Shouting and clattering, things dropped. I had thought of the film studio as a kind of cathedral, filled with a hushed and reverent silence as the great arcs illuminated a famous profile. Instead, cacophony as one scene was finished and another was begun. It had never occurred to me before that movies were actually made.
For each of the walking scenes the doll in the sump had been repositioned. Now it sank. The director smiled, shook his head, waved his hand, and signaled for a break. Seeing Hayasaka he came over and I was introduced. Then the two actors came and I met them too. I could not speak Japanese and Hayasaka often mumbled, so I caught no names.
Later, Richie has elsewhe
re said, the composer took him to the Toho screening room to see the finished picture and he learned that the young man in the shirt was Mifune Toshiro; the man with the beard was Shimura Takeshi; the man in the floppy hat was Kurosawa Akira, and the film was Drunken Angel. Whenever he now sees this film and that sequence by the sump comes on, he looks to the right of the screen: “There I am, just a few feet off the edge, twenty-four years-old, watching a movie being made.” Otherwise, from the period 1947 to 1949 the only journals remaining in their original state are those below. The first of these appears in a different version in The Donald Richie Reader.
16 october 1948. This afternoon Meredith [Weatherby] and I went to a performance of Bugaku in Ueno Park. And this afternoon, watching Ono [Tadamaro] again dance, I felt that he had come to contain for me the beauty, grace, and dedication of Japan—as though he were an emblem of his country.
Meredith and I entered the small park behind the museum and came upon the small tent where the performers were already putting on their costumes, where the orchestra was already tuning or warming their instruments. I thought of the Heian period recaptured: the costumes of antiquity, the different flavor of everything Japanese. We passed the tent (for we could not stop and stare, so conscious were we of being foreigners—which attitude we conscientiously cultivated so as to be differentiated from other of our countrymen here); passed four little boys dressed in costumes of the eighth century court, with wings and little tails attached to them; passed the musicians already arranging their brocade and the dancers still taking off their street clothes; till we reached the red square lacquer platform with its copper railing and, before it, the empty seats for the audience.
Invitations apparently were given only to higher officers. Consular representatives were here, and Meredith saw many acquaintances. [Weatherby was at this time in the consular service. Later he was to create and head the publishing firm John Weatherhill, Inc.] The various missions were here as well, as were the more socially prominent in the Occupation. We were told that today was the elite party and tomorrow the plebeian. I had had no invitation at all to this one but found my press card acceptable.
Just before the musicians arrived Prince Takamatsu appeared—a tall thin man with a large nose and dark eyes. He never missed a social engagement—indeed, was probably not allowed to. Princess Takamatsu was less in the background than usual, wearing a pretty kimono and a smile, and they were soon surrounded by Allied friends.
Then the music began. “Celestial” is the word I always think of, and so it is since it does not seem of this world. The sound of the sho, that frail, dissonant noise floating into attending trees, disappearing into the clear blue sky; the curious double time, the apparently accidental syncopations, the stately stance of the music—surely this is celestial.
The dancing—maybe that is what makes the music celestial; the simple opening prelude, unchanged for a thousand years: the dancer with halberd, walking forward to kneel, then the slow turning of the head to the right until the profile shows against the sky, and the unexpected, mechanical quick movement which brings the profile to the left.
Ono appeared only in the last dance, a famous one I’d seen once before, in which four men performed in the costumes of the eighth century, covered with brocades and stiff gauzes, hats of lacquered wire, halberds of lacquered wood, only their heads and hands visible. As each of the four entered the platform from among the trees and emerged into the sun, the same choreographic formula was repeated, like a fugue or, more exactly, a four-part canon, repeating each other’s movements, a movement behind.
All four stood, each at a corner of the platform, and then began the dance—a war dance in which a stylized battle takes place. The two on the left precisely imitate those on the right. Swords are therefore held both toward and away from you at the same time and all movements are identical. The most beautiful moment comes when, the accompaniment of the music reaching that curious double beat, the dancers begin slowly moving around the inside of the square, each occupying, within two beats, the place left vacant by the man before him. The movement, the deliberate raising of the leg and bending of the foot and knee, the squat with hands on thighs as the dancers change position, the curious up and down motions as they bend their toes in their rounded lacquer boots. The prescribed, ritualistic movements of the hands, all in exact accord with the other. The studied expressionless faces and blank dark eyes which so ignore the three other dancers. The movements are like beautiful human machinery and the music soars to the sky.
The dance is finished and the dancers depart: all four describing a figure—one steps down, leaves three, steps down, leaves two, and finally Ono alone describes the figure. His back is to the audience but I still see his face. For, in this hour, he has embodied all that Japan holds for me.
Later I have Meredith take me to the tent, now shorn of its Heian associations: it is simply a garden tent where Japanese are replacing Western clothes, tying shoes, fixing worn neckties and putting back on black horn-rimmed spectacles. Ono is introduced to me. He is wearing a coat too small for him, a clean but worn white shirt, a dark necktie. In his lapel is one of the tiny red feathers which mean the wearer has contributed to the current Community Chest drive. He smiles, bows and then shakes hands.
Am I disappointed? Oh, no. How could I be disappointed with the Heian period? Meredith later said that Ono is not particularly attractive—and I suppose he’s not. Without his costume he becomes ordinary and on the street I shouldn’t notice him. But I have seen him wearing stiffened gauzes and salmon brocades, and I have seen his head surmounted with lacquered wire and the feathers from birds that ceased to live a thousand years ago. I have seen Japan in him.
17 october 1948. Like so many of these autumn days, this one began in clouds and damp mists and, looking from the window at six this morning, it seemed the day would not be fit for picture-taking.
Later in the morning Al [Raynor, a friend in the same billet] and I went to Kanda to buy books. This was arranged, put off, rearranged, and again scheduled several times before we actually left. The reason for this was Al. Originally he had wanted to go into the country today, for he revels in great open spaces and likes to shake from his heels not only the dust of the city, but also every place where he is acquainted and knows his way about. He often says he would be perfectly content traveling always, but I doubt it. He is too fond of study (his translation of a Noh we have been polishing these last two weeks) and too fond of comfort too (his attachment to his room and habitual three helpings at meals) to ever be more than mildly fond of the movable life.
This morning he was looking for Noh books and I was looking for the one on masques that I saw last summer and have been looking for ever since. I didn’t find it but did buy a 1922 number of Broom with half of Claudel’s Protée translated in it, and the Sacheveral Sitwell book on southern baroque art I’d been wanting for some time. Also I got several copies of this month’s Europa that has my article on Gide in it. While at the magazine stand I noticed a young student reading it and longed to declare myself the author. Also found an early Shakespeare Company edition of Ulysses, only the price was over two thousand yen and the proprietor knew its value. Al found a Noh picture book that pleased him.
It was now time to go again to the Bugaku. Al suddenly said he would rather go out in the country and was already regretting he had spent the time in Kanda. I began feeling sorry for myself, wondering what I should do if he wouldn’t go; he doubtless feeling I was using him—as I was naturally—and resenting the fact that he wasn’t out in the country. We drove for a long time in silence. He broke it once to ask me to stand up: we were going fast and I like to stand up in the roofless jeep when traveling fast, but I refused and he said no more for a time.
The silence continued and was then rent by his flatly stating in a tone of exclamation that he was going to the Bugaku and that we were going to stay all the way through, too—just as though I’d been disagreeing with him.
The cr
owd was much grander this afternoon, much smaller. When we arrived, about half an hour before the performance, the little tent was surrounded by Americans. Cameras were everywhere, from box cameras to big German models, from hand-wound motion picture cameras to large and expensive tripod battery-run affairs.
Ono appeared, this time in full costume, looking again like living Japanese history. He was polite, talked some with Al about the dance and then asked where we wanted to take the pictures. I drew him away from the crowd and posed him in the sunlight. Then, ashamed at being among the snappers, I took several pictures and had Al take my picture with him. Again, through Al, I asked Ono to visit me, and he, through Al, said that he would be pleased to. I told him that I would let him know the time and date. Exactly why I did that—why I invited him—I don’t know but I knew I didn’t want to lose what I had captured.
18 october 1948. In the afternoon I willfully stay in the [Stars and Stripes] office working over a synopsis of the vampire cat of Urashima for the paper. In the evening—while Holloway [Brown, his current roommate] entertains a Mr. Gunji and his younger brother—the elder Gunji absurdly good looking, noisy, and as American as possible, while the younger Gunji, not at all good looking, is reserved to the point of being incomprehensible—I work with Al, editing his translation of Sumidagawa. I don’t like the lines:
By the shores of Horie High above the busy boatmenAlways crying, always cryingAre seen miyako-dori.
I recite this Longfellow-like to the tune of Hiawatha, which irritates the translator. He likes his original, arguing that, after all, it is a quoted poem. I, in turn, state that no Japanese poem ever sounded like that. After half an hour of wrangling we straighten it out; but now, neither is satisfied.
By the shores of HoriegawaAlways crying as they flyHigh above the busy boatmenAre seen miyako-dori.
Any translation from Japanese to English, certainly including my neglected Asakusa Kurenaidan, [the Kawabata novel] contains the difficulty of connotation. Every Japanese knows that miyako-dori are seagulls and are mentioned in a famous poem by Inahara, and are called the capital bird because they are, for some reason, never seen in the old capital. You can’t say that in English and if you do the book is mostly footnotes. Al feels this is such a difficult point that we get no further on the subject.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 5