I asked the reasons for their choice of tattoos. Did it mean that they wanted to be like the images chosen (carp is strong, perseveres), or because they thought they already were? Neither. Obara chose a seated Fudo because one of the men with whom he works has a standing Fudo and he wanted to match. Asami liked the looks of Oniwaka and knew that this figure was a celebrated one—and that his tattoo-master drew it particularly well. Both chose carp because it is a watery creature and traditionally such were always included—creatures such as fish and dragons—since the tattoo began with the Edo firemen who were professionally always in need of water. Also, they are both cooks, and this is a watery business traditionally. Another reason, though they did not give this one, is that both are mizushobai, those professions which, like the river, flow and change . . . water work. Both know Edo history; both are gentle and manly (a combination rare I think in other countries), and both have the politeness of absolutely natural people. They are each of a single piece. A tattoo must, in a way, put a person together.
16 may 1978. To see [Kobayashi] Toshiko in Cocteau’s Le Bel Indifferent, the play written for Piaf. Toshiko can’t sing, but she can dance, so the heroine becomes a hoofer and opens with a solo production number. Toshiko is in her mid-forties. She ought to be showing us a dancer in decline. But the theater is filled with her female fans. Toshiko must not be allowed to grow old. So, signs of age are overlooked—by everyone, including Toshiko. Given the play, how poignant her age would have been had she used it, but she did not. Actually, tonight’s play was to have been my own Gendai Sekidera Komachi and not the Cocteau, but Toshiko was afraid of it. An hour of her alone on the stage in a Noh? Playing the ghost of a stripper? What would her fans think? This was better. So she’s also had an open rehearsal of the Cocteau for the fans, and they voted not to let Toshiko, our Toshiko, kill herself, as demanded by the text.
20 may 1978. To an exhibition of the karakuri ningyo at Matsuya [Department Store]. These are the mechanical dolls of (mainly) the Edo and Meiji periods—automata, small as a mouse, large as a child, either string-pulled or clockwork, which so delighted the Japanese then as (looking at the faces at the show) now.
A magician three feet tall who snaps open his fan, turns around, and in a flash has transformed himself into a box; a bald baby acolyte who holds a tray—when you put a cup of tea on it he races across the tatami to the guest and, after the guest has taken the cup, turns around and races back; little Momotaro making rattling sounds while inside his peach and then, as the fruit splits, steps out; an acrobat with hinged arms and legs, who throws himself through the air, catching onto supports in the most lifelike manner; a Chinese gentleman walking. This one I work myself by pulling ropes: as you pull he puts one foot before the other, swings his arms, and turns his smiling face.
The smiles. All the dolls smile, their enamel faces wreathed, their black eyes (some inset with glass) wrinkled with laughter. Nothing wistful or sad, as is usually seen in high-class dolls; nor haughty, nor martial, as is seen in the seasonal dolls, such as those for Girls’ and Boys’ Days. Simple good nature: the state of happiness. Most of the dolls are “Chinese,” that being the fashion during at least this part of the Edo period. Cute things Chinese were always conceived reassuringly small by the Japanese: little boys, tiny dogs, baby “lions,” etc. All in bright primary colors. A love for the infantile, imposed upon that sprawling and dangerously mature continent.
I watch a young woman work a smiling Chinese girl who writes (with a magic marker). And can she write English? “Yes, she can,” the woman answers. And then the Chinese doll draws a cat’s face and under it writes C-A-T. “She is very skillful,” I say. “Well, she tries,” answers the young woman.
I remember the collection of automata in Paris, Marie Antoinette’s collection, I think. Much more austere. Those two great silver acrobats that circled with the precision of Descartes. And the child Mozart at a rococo instrument, little hands doing a minuet, little face pensive, sensing death. These dolls were dead and we knew it, and we marveled as we might have at visible ghosts. The Japanese dolls are alive, and we marvel at them as we might at humans.
21 may 1978. To the Sanja Matsuri in Asakusa, that annual spring festival that for a day returns Tokyo to its rural ancestry. Bands of men (and nowadays girls) carry the mighty omikoshi on their shoulders, pressed against each other, wearing festival clothes from earlier times, shoulders and cheeks against the wood and the gilt, feet moving together as though each had become part of a centipede, lurching together, chanting, shouting, each caught, finally, gratefully, in the grip of something larger, bouncing the happy god aloft in his portable shrine. And for every person participating, one thousand who had come to see. By two in the afternoon the press was such that one could not move. Nakama doshi in every street, all by the god in his darkness, swaying in his shrine. An exciting, exhausting sight.
Ian and I go to take pictures of tattooed men—floats with the fully tattooed standing aloft, swaying; decorated men naked but for a fundoshi, straining and heaving under the crawling shrine; older men with belts and kimonos open, just a glimpse of rare old tattooing, leading the holy procession through the streets. A small, handsome, middle-aged man, strong legs, a paunch, cloth-strip around loins, cloth strip around head. Up the left arm swims a carp, down the right arm glides a carp, just that, and a scattering of cherry blossoms. Perspiring tattoos—Kannon weeping, Kintaro sweating with exertion, Fudo glistening in his painted fire as though covered with fresh blood.
Foreigners are always encouraged at this matsuri. Japanese are here so fully enmeshed in each other that they can drop the national xenophobia. They become Elizabethan, filled with gusto and cheer. I always feel like an early emissary—perhaps fifteenth century, probably Portuguese. People very friendly. The only time I have ever been touched, handled by the Japanese—by unknown Japanese, at any rate—is at festivals where a comradely hand is expected. A glimpse of history—more, a view of the Japanese as they might have been before the Tokugawa cookie-cutter descended. A haze of fellow feeling and good-cheer. Up to a point. Promising conversations cut short by the magic call of the shrine and its god, and all those waiting compatriots.
23 may 1978. Autograph signing for the Japanese translation of the Ozu book. I gave an introduction to Tokyo Story, recounting how Ozu hated just this kind of introduction. Explanation is always unnecessary. If you use your eyes and your ears properly you will understand; if you do not, no amount of explanation will inform you. The reason is that Ozu is interested in showing, not explaining. He implies; you infer. He builds his half of the bridge; you build yours. Each having made some effort, a real communication becomes possible. No effort, no communication.
This, I realize, is the only kind of art I admire. Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green. In the movies Ozu, Bresson, sometimes Tarkovsky, and less often Antonioni; lots of examples from painting because pictures cannot explain, and from music—in this sense the most mute of all the arts.
Then we sat and watched the film.
28 may 1978. Sunday—with Earle [Ernst] and Meredith to the nomi no ichiba, the Sunday flea market. There, spread on the plaza, is apparently all that is left of old Japan—battered remnants from the Tokugawa, from Meiji, from Taisho and early Showa; war medals from the long dead; an old doll, face cracked; bad prints, lots of late blue and white; some early Mickey Mouse shards from middle Showa—it is as though there had been a prewar explosion and this is the debris.
Like that, except for the prices. Tens of thousands of yen now for old sword guards. Ten years ago the price would have been mere hundreds. The inflation of scarcity, and the boom in history. Lots of customers, mainly young Japanese, picking through the ruins of their traditional culture. And not even recognizing it. It is a sale of “foreign” objects.
I watch two girls turning a flint lighter from Meiji this way and that, completely unable to decide what it is. A rather good Tokugawa tea caddy (priced at the equivalent of nearly a thousan
d dollars) is right next to a piece of 1930s beaded glass. A young couple talks about them and, oddly, decides that the glass is older. Watching the people milling as though in some nomad’s open market, seeing the hunched figures of the seated sellers, I think of people in ruins, scavenging, and I remember the street stalls along the Ginza in 1947.
Earle observes all this as well, but is by nature more sanguine than I. Change, he says, is inevitable and should therefore be embraced. “We must live with change, therefore must accept it.” I say that we should not, since change is always for the worse. He says this is not so, that a hundred years ago half of the older folks around now would never have had a chance to get that old. That in any event, all are now living better. I say that all are living higher, but it hasn’t made them any happier. “Oh, well, if you are going to go on like that,” he says. And he is right, of course.
Next to us a girl picks up some nicely cut Tokugawa kimono stencils, quite small. “Go on,” urges her friend, “Buy some. You can use them as coasters.”
1 august 1978. Zushiden on the telephone. Chotto hanashitai koto ga aru. Sinking heart. Why? One ought to be happy to see an old friend after all these years. The trouble is both his language and my experience. “Have something to talk over with you,” all too often means a request—almost invariably for money. Japanese amaeru at work after all these years?
Meet in Roppongi. Zushiden is now long-married, three little girls, and a manager at Kokusai Jidosha. A student at Chuo, captain of the wrestling team, he lived with me when he was twenty, for over a year—just before I got married. Mary, who could somehow tolerate all my other friends, could never stand him because he meant so much to me.
So there he stands in Roppongi, still looking much like himself. All the lines sharper now, once square shoulders sloping, a small and modest pot, a habit of keeping his mouth half open—an old man’s expression.
What he wants turns out to be (so often the case) just the opposite of what I had expected. Has so much money now that he wants advice on how to use it. Has a brave new idea. He will quit Kokusai Jidosha and use the money to open a store (sports goods maybe) or a Japanese-style nomiya. “After all, I’m thirty-six now and what fun do I get out of life? My most fun is playing with my kids. And that is all right. But it’s not enough.” So he will throw away his security, use his money to make something. And as Zushi talks he becomes animated, his eyes shine, he closes his mouth and his smile is the smile of a twenty-year-old again. Hope, curiosity, interest, these have kept him young.
I ask him, what had been his ambition when he was young. “Oh, you remember me, I never had one. I just wanted to be a salaried worker. Well I am one now. I’m a manager and I’ll never go any higher, but I’ve got my dream. I’m a late bloomer.” We talk for over an hour. And at the end Zushi is going to do something. It is like just before a wrestling match when he was young. He is determined.
2 august 1978. To Zakone—Fumio’s bar, and mine too, until he pays back the money I lent him to get it started. Small, nine tsubo, a four-story walk-up, but right in the middle of Shinjuku.
Bars in Japan have their own clientele as soon as they open their doors. People do not wander in off the street in Japan. They are introduced and the place becomes a home away from home. It has shelves of bottles with patron’s names on them. It is cheaper this way, to buy a whole bottle.
People bring people, friends bring friends—and little by little the bar makes money. Fumio decided everything ought to cost the same—five hundred yen—be it whiskey or beer or coke or a plate of cheese and crackers. He figures he has to make forty thousand yen a night to break even. He has been doing better than that in the two months he has been open now. He made a million net last month.
With Francis Coppola, Kawakita Kazuko, Tom Luddy. Tokyo/Yurakucho, 1979.
He is very good at mizushobai, the service industry. The customer is always agreed with, yet for a bar person to be a mere yes-man is no good. One must gauge the degree of resistance necessary. Not that the Japanese customer is all that demanding. He too is constrained by good manners. And not that Fumio did not always have this art of pleasing.
How did he learn it? Well—impoverished background, father disappeared, mother left to raise eight children all by herself on nothing at all. She worked on the roads to get money to support her family—still does. The boys started work at seven or eight—milk boys, then newspaper boys, then on into other jobs. Always wore hand-me-downs. Fumio, being second from last, got them when they were just barely wearable. Don’t know what his younger brother did.
I watched him last night being the host and behaving with a tact and a friendliness, a naturalness and a self-respect which is really only possible here—this miracle of the mizushobai.
4 august 1978. To the ueki-ichi at Shinobazu in Ueno. The wide, shallow pond, dark with leaves, filled with large pink lotuses, each tightly closed into a big bud. Night, the shore outlined with red and blue lanterns proclaiming the name of their donor—Kirin Beer. Under them the stalls: all kinds of bonsai—one perfect miniature red maple selling for a thousand dollars; rocks, big and little; fish stalls with many kinds of goldfish swimming, specially bred, enormous heads like bulldogs or long fins like the tails of sacred roosters; the insect stalls with little cages holding a bell bug or a katydid, larger cages with struggling stag beetles in them; shaved ice sellers, glazed squid stands, makers of spun sugar, crystallized cakes of brown sugar, or fruit in ice on sticks; fried soba, glass animals, quilted beasts, fireworks, the minnow game with hooks that bend, and paper nets that dissolve.
With Katsu Shintaro, unidentified girl, 1979.
Japan in the summer is always more Japanese, and never more so that at this fair. Families in summer yukata, clacking along on geta, gang boys hawking in cummerbunds and shorts; old gentlemen shuffling about in sutetetako and underwear tops, carrying fans; girls back from the bath with wet hair sleeked back, towels in hands. This is what Japan once looked like. Summer brings it back again.
And old attitudes as well. A sudden interest in nature. Exclamations at the size of the lotus buds. And a much slower tempo. No one striding, everyone strolling. And with it, the old politeness. People standing to one side for each other. Nor are they self-conscious in their “native” dress. This is because these few summer weeks are still the proper time for it. They get out the yukata every year. Usually there is dancing as well, but last night was too early. The tower is ready, and the drums are there, but the dancing circle is empty. People wander around it but no one even attempts to dance. It is not yet the time or the place. They look at the budded lotus, pink and heavy. These will open at dawn.
During this period Richie was suffering a good deal from a herniated disc. Finally, he was operated on and spent two months in hospital and convalescence. After that he traveled more than ever. He and Mizushima Fumio had been to many islands in the Okinawa chain before; now they went to the Gilberts, to the Marianas, to Palau, to Phuket, to Bali, and in 1979, traveled around the United States. On such trips Richie rarely kept a diary. Also, between illness and traveling, he wrote nothing except The Japanese Tattoo.
9 january 1979. To the machiai where Francis Ford Coppola is staying. He is giving a big party—Neapolitan food he cooked himself, served by geisha. At the last minute he went out and bought a recording of Madama Butterfly to symbolize this meeting of Italy and Japan, while the geisha served spaghetti with chopsticks and tried to make us drink the wine out of sake cups. Francis himself worked all day in the kitchen with the maids, all of whom got red and tipsy from trying the Chianti. One of them kept getting unbalanced by the big bow of her obi and sitting down suddenly. Francis in messy but complete command.
Oshima Nagisa in a new purple silk shirt. Takemitsu Toru supposed to go to the hospital next day for a checkup and told to eat and drink nothing after eight in the evening. One in the morning found him stiff with brandy. Event of the evening was Katsu Shintaro and his entourage.
I have not me
t Katsu for years, though he is fairly inescapable on TV and in films. Now that he is chosen for the lead in the new Kurosawa film [Kagemusha] and has successfully escaped the drug charge (opium, of all exotic things), he is ebullient again.
He also rather takes over a party. Endless stream of talk. Tells me about funny experiences in Las Vegas. Girl asks him if he likes love “French fashion.” Has no idea what she means. She at once goes down on him. It tickles. He does not know how to say it tickles in English. Has to, finally, content himself with telling her that he does not like chewing gum. Also, another girl, while making love asks if he is “ready.” Not knowing she means ready to come, and misunderstanding the word, he hears “lady” instead of “ready.” “No, I not lady,” he says indignantly, “I gentleman,” etc.
Mizushima Fumio. donald richie
Also plays the samisen—then a duet with Francis who taps one samisen with his chopsticks while Katsu improvises on the other. Everyone says it is very beautiful. The geisha hear this and after that refuse to play themselves. They would be too humiliated. It was at this point that they turned into waitresses. Probably the most expensive waitresses Francis will ever hire.
Francis now drunk as well, and expansively enjoying himself at his own party. Singing Puccini (joined by Takemitsu) and dishing out the food and pouring out the wine. All the Japanese under this sunny influence become themselves almost Italian. Everything gets more and more messy, legs stretched out. Katsu pulls up his kimono (is wearing loose jockey shorts) and walks on the table, very skillfully, not upsetting a thing.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 22