The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  31 march 1992. Warm, sunny day, and the cherry blossoms are out. Ueno Park is covered with them, clouds of pink—like a Kano screen. The sakura are in full bloom. And how could a country which looks like this every year be anything but artificial?

  More than usual this year, I also feel strongly what poets have called the “menace” of these blooms. There is a tradition that finds them sinister—madness in the blossoms, with long-haired and crazy maidens cavorting under burdened branches. Or, as Mishima used to say, in a sinister way quoting some minor master, homosexuality (nanshoku ) is a “. . . wolf asleep under the blossoming sakura.”

  A reason for my ambivalence toward this year’s blossom is that I remember Eric. One spring we were walking around Yanaka, and found in some temple courtyard a perfect sakura in full bloom. I have looked for it again and again in the labyrinth of that district, but never have found it. And now because Eric is mute and halt, and being carted off to Australia next Monday, I find cherry blossoms sinister.

  1 april 1992. Woken at six this morning by hovering helicopters battering the air above me. Peered out. High up, two of them, stationary. What could it be—disaster? riot? coup d’état? They hung around all morning, puttering in the sky, making an enormous racket. Finally I discovered what it was: the cherry blossoms. They were up there taking pictures for the press, showing the extent of the quiet blossoming, making life below hideous so that they could present tranquil beauty on the covers of rag and mag.

  2 april 1992. Thoughts on aging. It is not the thinning hair, the spreading wrinkles, the occasional misstep, or the misplaced word that bothers me. It is the creeping conservatism. I find myself agreeing with a majority opinion and am surprised to discover that emotionally I am with the masses, as I have not been since a child.

  This seems to me craven. I grow afraid for self and even for property. The elderly, if they are not careful, turn bourgeois, anxious for their holdings. With this fear comes an inclination not only to be disagreeable, but also to collect injustices. All feelers out, I make up my mind about people in the street and idly criticize them—making it all up, of course.

  When I am in temporary power, however, I am ruthless. How dreadful I could be if I did not watch myself. So cold, preemptory, for no reason but a chill center and fear for self. This is what growing old does, or does for me. It makes me afraid. I have never, all through my life, been far distant from that emotion, but now it moves closer, as close as it was in childhood. I must be vigilant and refuse it entry.

  In the evening a party, sort of, for Eric. His expansive elder brother, Albert—carrying him off to the antipodes on Monday—was there, and the suave Sawada [Ichiro] in full kimono, and Frank and Chizuko. Only once did Eric look at me and slowly shake his head. The hopelessness of his awful life from now on. It was a moment of real communication. Then he returned to apathy.

  4 april 1992. The wedding of [Numata] Shinsaku, Makiyo’s younger brother. It was held at the new Meguro Gajoen, a vast wedding palace, on the outside all chrome-period modern Japan. A fine example of the wedding industry.

  The reception and dinner takes place in an enormous room, paneled in silk, chairs and tables faux Louis XV; hanging above all of this is lighting and sound equipment as in a recording studio: weddings as show biz.

  Then the lights lower and John Williams is heard on the sound track; the spotlights flash on, and the voice of the compère asks us to give the couple a big hand as the portals open, and there stand the happy pair, he in hakama, she in wedding kimono, wig, and face painted white.

  There are other touches of tradition. The compère chats throughout, in Japanese but the tone is that of Ralph Edwards telling you that This Is Your Life. Everything else is twenty-first century. No Wagner, no Mendelssohn, just E.T. And when the knife is inserted into the slit of the ten-foot high inedible plastic mock-up of a cake, a device is triggered that envelops both confection and couple in clouds of dry ice. The cut cake is wheeled off. At the end it will reappear, all wrapped, one piece for each guest. Or some cake will. It is always a different cake.

  A toast next, champagne, then speeches from his side, speeches from hers, then a pause while the food is expertly dished about by the liveried waiters. The menu is “international”—Chinese/French with Japanese additions. Everyone holds back, as is proper until the sushi comes, and then something more basic than manners appears. In the scramble I end up with just one piece of squid because I was too polite.

  The only foreigner there, I did not feel I ought to dive in like everyone else. For despite the international intentions, I was still something of an unknown quantity. People peered and then turned away. This was because they feared that I would utter something in a foreign tongue and embarrass them when they were not able to respond. Knowing this, I asked in Japanese a simple question about the printed menu (“What is that kanji?”) and everyone was much relieved.

  The couple returns—the groom in a white satin suit with a frilled shirt, looking like Xavier Cugat, and the bride in flamecolored silk with fan and tiara. I am at the mike because I am to lead off the lighter part of the festivities, supposed to dilute the seriousness of the prior speeches. So I begin by being skillfully insulting—talk about the groom’s failed attempts to learn English, always a favorite topic. The crowd is receptive and pleased that I seem to understand my role. I am the Kyogen, an interlude during the Noh-like solemnities of this major Japanese ritual.

  After me comes dessert (expensive melon, assorted petits fours) and more fun speeches about how awful the lovable pair is. Then songs and high jinks as the drinks (Chinese schnapps, hot sake, iced beer, whiskey, and sloe gin) take effect. My job done, I change tables, invited to the “family” table by Makiyo’s parents, who are now relieved at having married off their last son. Makiyo’s father is just like Makiyo will be when he is that age (two years younger than I am), and we share a cup or two while Makiyo looks benignly on at the getting-together of his two fathers.

  I wondered if my loan might have paid a tiny fraction of this doubtless enormous bill. I said nothing. But Makiyo, with that way of his, understood, took me to one side, and let me know that the bride’s side had paid for it all. And then I realized that poor Shinsaku had gone yoshi. This meant he had been adopted into his wife’s family, was no longer on his own family register. It also meant that he was at the mercy of his in-laws. They wanted a child to continue the line and that was what he was there for—to make it.

  I look at the groom, young, handsome, smiling, flushed with a drink or two, and wonder if he knows.

  7 april 1992. In the evening I give a dinner for Tani, my oldest friend, now fat and rich and with four children, each by a different mother. It is difficult to see under all that weight, all those years, the poor, bright boy I once loved. I invited also Holloway and Michio. These three have not seen each other for three decades or so, when we all went to Nagano together, when Tani was still a student.

  Now again we meet. They look at each other and observe the ravages of time, but before long they are remembering things and the years are falling away. “Remember that smoked trout? Remember when you told off the hotel lady because she wouldn’t let Donald play the piano? Remember in the bath when Tani invented this soap with a picture of a naked lady in it, to make dirty students want to wash more?” The past flowed back and bathed us all.

  And, too late, I remembered that alcohol and Tani do not agree. He became noisy in his company-president kind of way, opened his pants and pulled up his shirt to show off his scar, a stomach operation for ulcers—he had worried that much making his millions. Also, since this is the way men in his world act when together, he began joking about the host—complaining about me all of these years, said I never once bought him anything but a suit and he still had it, he took that good care of it. Also that Holloway and Michio are always together. This was a good thing. Me, I always had to have someone new. Not that the new ones are very much. Fumio runs a bar. Makiyo—well it takes someone smarter than
him to be a good developer. And even a Korean—nice guy but a Korean!

  All of this is tiresome and I parry it as best I can, realizing at the same time that he is still jealous without knowing it, and that also all those early years in my shadow (I had the money then, he didn’t) made him resent me. It had never before come out because we had never been among old acquaintances with whom he could “joke” in this manner. Also he had never drunk this much with me before.

  I know how he feels, but my idea of regard and of good manners is different from his. The ordinary Western idea of propriety is much more strict than the Japanese. I parry and turn pleasantly sarcastic so that my guests can have a good time. So they apparently do. At the end, Holloway says, quite innocently, “That Tani—still the life of the party. . . .”

  11 may 1992. The elegiac thoughts occasioned by Dae-Yung’s going back home to Korea always linger. Today I walk by the pond in the setting sun, and have in the warm spring air autumnal thoughts.

  I remember walking by the little lake in Faurot Park in Lima some fifty years ago, wondering what to do with my life. Eighteen, soon out of high school, and all I had really decided was that I would not stay in a place where I had to live only for how much money I could make, and what I could buy. This was how I saw materialistic wartime 1942 America.

  And I did something about it. I left and eventually came to this poor, defeated island, where it was spirit that counted and not money because no one had any, and any money (what there was of it) was put in white paper before being paid over—that is how dirty it was. And it is here that I have remained, more or less happy.

  And now, I look around. In fifty years it has changed: materialistic, peacetime Japan, 1992, where all that counts is how much you make, and what you can buy. I read Main Street and Babbitt back then and determined never to stay. It is now full circle: the Japanese are new-rich Babbits in the true American mold, and Tokyo is the new Main Street.

  12 may 1992. In Japan, I interpret, assess an action, infer a meaning. Every day, every hour, every minute. Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing. For me alone I wonder? I do not see how a foreigner can live here and construct that shroud of inattention, which in the land from whence he came is his natural right and his natural tomb.

  E. M. Forster used to say, “. . . only connect . . .” and it is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering, and concluding.

  Maybe in another country the resemblances to where one came from would be strong enough that such continual regard would not be necessary and would not be rewarding. But Japan, which now so seems to resemble the worst of the land I came from, is actually so different that none of my habits protect, none of my prior assumptions are valid.

  Denied, fortunate foreigner, the tepid if comfortable bath which is daily life back “home,” he cannot sink back and let the music flow over, mindless, transparent; he must listen, score in hand.

  I know the difference well. It is the difference between just going to a movie and living it for few hours, and going to the same film as a reviewer, taking notes, standing apart, criticizing, knowing that I must make an accounting of it. The former is the more comfortable; the latter is better.

  I like this life of never being able to take my life for granted. The Japanese connect—in Forster’s sense—less than any other people I know. Lafcadio Hearn once wrote Chamberlain about the nonspeculative quality of most Japanese—though he meant it as a compliment. And it is true that so many are so submerged in daily routines, so anesthetized by habit and agreed upon opinion, that they rarely stick their noses above the surface. When people observe that some Japanese have no fellow feeling, this it what they mean. Closed, boxed-in lives, taking just everything for granted. Naruhodo, the world.

  Except those who do not. Fumio: always seeing the edge between the apparent and the real. And all the women I have known, kept alert by the lives they are forced to lead. Women are alive, vibrating, connecting. These are those I love and celebrate, and myself never take for granted.

  13 may 1992. In the train I look at my fellow passengers. The public Japanese now has an indrawn look. Like an indrawn breath, it means caution, reserve, care, and fear. To be sure, anyone staring about at the rate I do would everywhere encounter this kind of retreat. Still, some people (young usually) behave that way with each other too. Gazes do not meet, but slide away, glances rolling over and out.

  It did not used to be that way. People were openly curious, frankly stared, and if you smiled they did too. Not now. You smile and they turn away, fearful that this is prelude to some unwanted intimacy. I can hear their mothers indoctrinating them, over and over again. Abunai comes the matronly tone. What a loss. Is it always lost in First World countries? Like the U.S.A? Is it only to be found in the Third—like friendly Thailand? Is civilization really a plague? Is Rousseau right?

  16 may 1992. Life in Japan, cut off, in exile. This is how other people see it. I am asked how I keep up with contemporary thought. I cannot seriously answer, never having thought of such a question. And I see why. Here, undisturbed by vagaries, I can regard what I think of as eternal. My world does not change—and the best, in Arnold’s sense, is what I look at, listen to. Film for me is Bresson; art is Morandi. So I may be cut off, but I am always turned on.

  19 may 1992. Went to the American Center Library to look up what they have on Jack Kerouac. A large, empty room filled with viewers and TV buzz and persons in frameless glasses, who look up and ask, “Who? Never heard of him. Will you please use our deck?” One pointed to a keyboard. I did not know how to use it. It was a computer of some sort. With ill grace and an unbelieving expression she pecked out after again asking, K/E/R/O/A/C. Pushed a button. Machine clicked. Nothing.

  “We have nothing,” she said. “You do not seem to have any books at all,” I mildly remarked. “Would you care to see our magazine file?” “Can you really see it, or do you conjure that up too from buttons?” I asked, now revealing nastiness. She narrowed her eyes in irritation. “Are you truly a library?” I pursued. “Yes, we call ourselves a library,” she said. “You are wrong,” I said. “You are a database.”

  I do not know what a database is, but my chagrin and rage at finding out what had happened to what was once a perfectly good library was not immediately to be denied. Storming out was OK, but it still left me with my Kerouac problem. One which became even more complicated when I returned home and discovered that I had spelled the writer’s name wrong. There is a U in Kerouac which I had left out. The computer, not being able to make allowances, could not find him, even if he was there, lying in the dark. Shall I go back? I think not.

  22 may 1992. In the train going to Kyoto I meditate upon my former trips to the old capital. Almost half a century of them, from the eight hours of sleeping car at the beginning to the two and a half hours of bullet express right now. Over the years I have looked from the window. These used to open and the train stopped and I would buy local food and drink from farmer vendors. Now they are sealed shut, the vendors are gone, and in any event we stop only in Nagoya.

  Just past Mishima is a culvert. Now it holds a bridge, pink, with a post-modern pergola on one side, part of a new golf course. But once, four decades ago, the train slowed down and I looked out of the open window and there in that small, wild gorge was a boy washing a horse in the stream. The animal was stamping in the water and the boy had taken off his clothes so he would not get them wet. The animal and the human, both naked, both beautiful and shining in the sun, and the train slowed down as though to show me this. I watched for the culvert this time. It is by in a flash, and I catch only the tiny trickle of water under the ridiculous pink bridge, but I remember and hold the vision of the boy and his horse.

  Soon we are going past Fuji, soaring after the rains. And no one looks up from book or magazine, no, “Oh, look, Fuji!” Not e
ven a child to crane a neck as this magnificent mountain moves majestically across the view. In all my trips before there has been someone, even if only a foreigner, to mark this passage with a bit of attention. Today, nothing. Fuji, like the bullet train itself, like Japan, like life itself has become a commonplace.

  23 may 1992. Travel stirs. On the way back from Kyoto I thought of Tani and remembered his wedding, and with it came the smell of fresh water, the taste of sake, and into view slid the memory of his first wedding, in the country with his tough friends. It came in a shape like a small boat. All I needed do was to look up what I had written, and then the full memory sailed past.

  25 may 1992. Rainy, clouds lined up, waiting turns, the drip of the broken gutter on the tin roof beneath my window. It plays its primitive tune over and over. The rain hangs like a curtain and a wet spider shelters under the ledge. Time to board the past and steam into the distance, to close my journal.

  Closing and opening the journal became more frequent in these years—and there are many more relatively untouched pages. At the same time, completely untouched pages are probably fewer, since Richie had begun culling them in a different fashion. He told his editor that he thought their value was only in the picture of Japan they offered, and of himself looking at Japan. Consequently he began removing whole passages. These he kept separate. Thus, Richie’s extant journals include several others in addition to this one. There are those written in New York (1949–53), the journals he kept while being analyzed, The Persian Diaries (devoted to the Iranians’ plight in Tokyo), the Journals—Exclusions, and (a later addition) a file titled Vita Sexualis.

  1 july 1992. In Ueno I see a middle-aged man, Japanese, clad only in his underpants and sandals. This seems to me sensible, one of the common forms of summer dress. He is, however, drunk—weaves, mumbles. He is also seen by a policeman, sweltering in his gray uniform, who stops him, says something, then pushes him. The nearly naked man strikes back, and two more police appear since their koban is right there, on the park corner.