The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  She is right—it is emblematic of the country in a way that Mom’s apple pie never was for the U.S.A.—even the Emperor used to have to muck about in the paddies for a brief demonstration. Now, in this morning’s paper I see that what the press dignifies as “rice panic” has struck the populace: long lines of struggling housewives wild to get the “last” of Japan’s real rice; grave fears that a “rice famine” will result. My country has nothing quite like this. What if a foreign franchise took over McDonald’s—well, what if it did? No, the American behaves badly over other things—not food.

  14 february 1994. The world . . . After our late, liberal flirtation we are once more turning to the repressive right. Fundamentalism—that rush to the predestined terminal to don the blinders. I look at righteous Billy Graham, fist in the air, and at the righteous Iranians on their faces with their butts in the air, at the pious face on the Soka Gakkai as it buys up Shinanomachi. The embracing of the law, any law.

  But during the very moment of my deep and warm dislike, a thought intrudes: this is, to be sure, merely a way of keeping people in line, but is it not also a viable alternative to their not being kept in line at all? And I turn the plate over and look at the back, and there I see what happens when the masses of the irresponsible are given liberal treatment. I quickly turn the plate back again since I do not want to see this, do not want to admit my own illiberal thoughts. The majority of people need to be controlled because they are capable of destroying everything in their rush to greed. This is the fascist thought I harbor. And this I sit and ponder—on this St. Valentine’s Day.

  20 march 1994. Newspapers today inform that the police have decided to do something about the indigent. They have dismantled the cardboard city that sheltered the homeless all along the tunneled road leading from Shinjuku Station out to the City Hall. They did it for the sake of the poor men who lived there, they said. It was no proper life. Now they will be housed somewhere or other. There is a picture in the evening edition: Men looking on as their homes are folded away, as they are put into trucks.

  25 march 1994. Today the evening edition says that a group of homeless men have gotten together to sue the city government for destruction of their property. It seems that when their houses were taken away so were their belongings. Also, they themselves were simply taken to another part of the city and let loose. No proper housing is anywhere available—there is, in fact, no welfare system of any sort. Now the braver have gotten themselves an attorney. The American Way.

  6 april 1994. I go to NHK to see the film on Takemitsu. And there he is—both up on the screen and right there in the audience. He handles his fame with that gentle courtesy with which he treats everything. Later we talk about the new opera he is working on. I ask if it is going to have any fast passages. “It’d better,” he says.

  14 april 1994. I am talking to one of the local whores when a largish form comes and stands beside us. It is Edward Seidensticker, swaying slightly and looking benevolently at our conversation. After she has left, he says, “I simply cannot talk to anyone I do not know. But you do; you thrive on it. You like to talk to strangers.” I say that all are strangers until one has talked with them. He stops, thinks, sways, then says, “What I meant of course was in the better circles, not these,” and he glances around the park.

  Then, “But how do you go about it? How do you talk to them?” I answer, “I just say, ‘Hi, where you from?’” “You do?” “Or something like that. They are lonely too, you know.” “Well, perhaps, but I could not bring myself to do that.” Then—hollowly, “Hi, where you from?” Then, “No, no, no, no, no.”

  15 april 1994. An early morning call from Tani in Osaka. Now sixty-one himself, he has remembered my coming birthday. “Thought you might be up, early as it is,” he says. “We oldsters get up early.” Talks about health. He now has half a stomach—ulcers. And his wife has liver problems. And his daughter, healthy enough, is twenty-nine and still lounges around the house and doesn’t get married.

  Financial health, however, is sound. “I never bought property—just bought and sold at once. So I wasn’t caught.” But he does have a lot of stock, which is just sitting there, not earning. At present he is spending much in drilling for hot water. Why? “Well, onsen water seems to help her pain, you see.” It is typical of Tani that he does not send his ailing wife to a spa but brings one to her.

  Then we speak of dead Holloway and he remembers the dinner of several years back and tells me (finally) what a good time he had. After that we wax nostalgic, and I find that he remembers that strange tree in the compound at Horyuji and the round boat on Sado Island. We look back over more than forty years, then we say goodbye, our friendship all mended.

  17 april 1994. Fumio took me out for a birthday dinner, Thai shabu-shabu. Had wanted to bring along a nineteen-year-old, since he was now the age I was when he met me, and he was then just nineteen. Fumio has a fine sense of proportion. But he has a finer sense of balance, and knew that I really wanted just him at the dinner. Naturally, since we both also have a fine sense of the passage of time, we talked about the past. He remembers that it was July 1970, when we met. A quarter of a century: so soon, so fast. Then we smile at this banality.

  But now into the nostalgic mode, we decide to walk (since we are in Roppongi anyway) down a road neither of us have taken for well over a decade, back to the old Weatherby house where I once lived and which, I had heard, had not yet been torn down. And as we turned that remembered corner off memory lane, there was its roof—a Meiji farmhouse brought to Tokyo by Meredith [Weatherby] and re-erected in the early fifties, then abandoned in 1980 or so. Abandoned because Meredith moved out and went to San Diego.

  It was a lovely old building—beautiful because the structure was visible and one at once comprehended it, just as one understands a person who shows you who he or she is. This despite a certain House Beautiful air created by Meredith’s turning doors into tables and kotatsu into whatnots, and filling all the space with “modern art.” I kept my room plain. Just added bookshelves.

  From my high window I could look out into the garden—at the single large tree, at the sarusuberi growing at a slant, at the pond. Up there Fumio and I used to lie and look out of the window and talk about the future. And now the future was at hand as we carefully slid open the stuck garden gate and, visitors from the future, walked through the dark garden, stumbling among the weeds and bumping against the sarusuberi, now grown so large that it crossed the path at head level. Over us the roof gaped, tile teeth missing, and there was dust on the doorknob, which for ten years had not turned. The pond was gone, bushes had billowed, and feral bamboo now waved above the ridge of the roof. We stood in the ruined garden. This was where Mishima had posed, miming his own death in the snow.

  It was all dark. Yet peopled. There was one authentic ghost—[Yato] Tamotsu, who was exiled from the place by Meredith and died in his sleep in an apartment safely distant, for which Meredith had paid. Yet exiled though he was, Tamotsu had kept coming back. He still had a key. Meredith, in bed with his new friend, would awake in the night and there standing over him would be the black and baleful Tamotsu. Or the maids would find the exile asleep under the house, matches in his pocket. I too was concerned. I did not want the house burned down nor Meredith murdered in his sleep.

  All dark. No—there in the back, a single bulb in what had been the maid’s room. I knock. No answer. No one there, simply a precaution against intruders—like us. Put there by Mitsubishi Shoji, which owns the now expensive land on which the house is built. So expensive, indeed, that they cannot afford to tear the house down—that would clear the land and put it in a different, even more ruinous tax bracket. So, they will wait until it collapses and becomes a health menace, or until it is burned down in an accidental conflagration. Then they will bulldoze the garden and turn it all into a parking lot for a time—which also qualifies as a tax shelter. Then finally, years later, when Fumio and I come back from the past and peer up, there will be a sky
scraper of steel and glass and marble, something from the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.

  18 april 1994. The final Jane Austen Dinner—Shulamith took Ed and me to the restaurant at Tokyo Station. There, sitting by the big windows, we watched the trains coming in and out and ate our avocado mousse and pepper steak. It is like an old-fashioned English railway terminal—Victoria Station, end of the century. And so it was fitting that we were laying out Jane.

  Not much talk about her, though—only about some dignified way to terminate our organization, which, since we had never told the mother society in England, was illegal anyway. Finally we simply raised our glasses (me, my water glass—after all, Jane did not drink, unlike Ed), and said goodbye.

  And then Shulamith told us she would not be visiting again. She had been doing so to gather antiques for her modest California business, and there are no antiques anymore—the barrel has been scraped clean. So, no more reason to come, and no more money to come on. Ed and I both much cast down by this, since we are both very fond of her “Oh, but surely you will find a way,” he said, a Christian, always hoping for the best despite his occasional curmudgeonly manner. “It really does not seem likely,” said she, Jewish and consequently more realistically pessimistic, used to living with adversity. “Let’s wait and see,” say I, the atheist, the pragmatist.

  Shulamith has some last advice. “Here is my plan: I want you two to write each other’s autobiographies.” Ed and I look at each other with concern. “I do not want to write his,” said Ed, to which I add, “Me neither.” Then, “We have already in a way. We both keep journals. Ed, are you going home to write this up?” “Yes, I am.” “So, am I,” I said. “So you see, Shulamith, your wish is already accomplished.” “That is not what I meant,” said Shulamith, as the smiling wraith of Jane Austen tarried above us.

  20 april 1994. Lunch with Makiyo, now much more sunny that things are looking up. The bubble burst and tossed him out, but now prosperity is just around the corner. He is, despite everything, ever hopeful. Not only did he take me to a good birthday lunch, and have a present for me, he also handed me an envelope with ¥100,000 in it. He is beginning to pay back the million. Even the gloom of the Yokoo Tadanori painting show we then went to see could not dim his spirits—he is as full of plans as he was five years ago. If there were any justice in this world he would be a millionaire.

  22 april 1994. Meeting of the board of the National Film Center. It was held in the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art at Takebashi, a venue too small for all of us. Consequently, I was at one corner of the table. And next to me was Yamamoto Kikuo, that fine film scholar and translator, incidentally, of both my Ozu and The Inland Sea. Seeing me there, he said, “Oh, you are so big. You cannot fit there. Let’s change places.”

  Seeing the foreigner as somehow huge, though I am certainly smaller than Oshima sitting at the other end of the table, is such a convention that it becomes tiresome. Yet I know enough to know what he means. Yamamoto wanted me to be comfortable as the only foreigner, and so he was using the size ploy so that I would feel all right about it. Consequently, I gratefully changed places rather than bridle (my first impulse) at perceived marginalization. Later we talked about his failing health. He told me about his operation and the state of his inner organs. And then, with that beautiful smile of his, he made a joke in English: “Yes, I have the liver of no return.”

  24 april 1994. Demographic changes. Now on Sundays in Ueno, the plaza at the top of the stairs is filled with Chinese. They gather there as they do on a Sunday at the heights of the Summer Palace, talking, laughing, spitting out pistachio shells. Over them in bronze stands Saigo Takamori, stern nationalist. I wonder what he would think, he who was so committed to expelling the barbarians. I wonder what he thought forty years ago, when the same plaza held all those destitute and their pathetic advertisements for lost relatives.

  21 may 1994. I am with Ozu at a long table, and we are facing a room full of journalists. The reason for this event is not apparent, but I feel privileged. I look at the light hair on Ozu’s hands, the big thumbnails, and tell myself I must remember all of this. Together we are answering questions, and Ozu from time to time turns to me with a small smile inviting confidence or commiseration, I cannot tell which. In answer to something asked him, he says, “Oh, but that was a real scandal.” Then turns to me and I say, “In contrast to now, which is a mere scandalette.” This makes me laugh so hard that I wake up, but in the process I realize what the press conference is for. It is on the occasion of Ozu’s return from the dead.

  2 june 1994. A swing around the new international red-light district, a modern Yoshiwara. This is an area near Shin Okubo, which is called Hyakunincho, the “Quarter of One Hundred People.” Why I do not know, but it turns out that there are about a hundred people standing around on the street on a Saturday night. None are Japanese.

  The whole neighborhood is Southeast Asian, and these girls are all from Thailand and Burma and Indonesia and Malaysia. They stand in various stages of undress—some in just tank tops and jeans, others in miniskirts. Some in native-looking slitsheaths. They smoke, chew gum, and engage in banter with possible customers. Again, no Japanese. The men are Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, and Iranian—the out-of-work work force for the city. Still, they must have some money or they would not come.

  The Iranians play pocket-pool, the national sport, and occasionally a girl will pair off with one and they will go to a cheap hotel. (Not that cheap—least expensive I saw was $50 for an hour; more often it’s $80.) I do not know what the girls get. One of the Iranians told me he thought they asked for $200 for a short time but rarely got it. It paid to haggle. I see no sign of the girls’ keepers, but they are probably around.

  I had seen a large bus pull up in front of one of those club-filled buildings in Kabukicho, and about two dozen women piled out. Prostitutes going to work. They filed in like kindergarten pupils. Herding them were hard-faced Japanese in suits, with punch-perms and probably fewer little fingers than ordinary. The girls seemed inured to their fate. Indeed, what can they do? The first thing that happens is that their passports are confiscated by the yakuza; the second is that they are burdened with debts they have to pay off. I heard that there are thousands of such women in the country, that every little town now has its bar with its dozen Thai girls to whom randy farmers swarm.

  Now, walking along the street I see lots of blondes with full, rounded, white bodies. I stop and ask. Odessa. I wonder which is the worse health bet—Thai or Russian. We decide that Thai is, because AIDS has had such a head start there. I heard that half the women in the business in Bangkok have HIV. That means that perhaps half the girls I am looking at will die within five years or so, after having maybe infected a number of customers. Perhaps the Russians would be the better bet.

  At that point, a good-looking Persian cruises by and stares at us. Whether he is business himself or simply recognizes us as distinguished amateurs, we decide against him as well. He has long been around, handsome and intent. I see that the authorities are alert to the problem. They have put up signs outside some of the hotels in both Japanese and English. The latter reads: Prohibit to Go Into with Foreign Ladies Who Are Waiting on the Road.

  1 july 1994. I learn a new slang term. The hotaruzoku—the “firefly folk.” These it turns out are husbands who, home from office in the evening, are banished into the darkened street to smoke.

  3 july 1994. Go to Bunkamura to see the last day of the Sebastiao Salgado show—several dozen big photographs of workers from all over the world. Though there is no political focus, the political strength is great. Looking at child workers, one must consider the employers; watching Indian women sweating, one wonders about who hires them, pays them. Most explicit are spectacularly hideous shots of workers in some awful open mine in Brazil. There are so many, winding about the naked cliffs, climbing up the bamboo ladders, each with his own stone on his back, that I think of illustrations for Dante. It is that grand, that openly
evil.

  The young woman in back of me begins to laugh. For a second I am angry, and then realize that for some people (many of them Japanese) laughter is the only way they have of papering over an existence in which a rent has just occurred. In her comfortable life, such a thing as this monstrous Brazilian mine with its exhausted, naked workers should not occur.

  Later I come upon a photo of two workers resting, Ukrainians, stark naked in a sauna. It is not just the nakedness. It is the context. Again I realize how much sexual attraction has to do with a presumed power—how sex is a way of bending to the will. These naked workers are defenseless against my gaze. This I understand and shake my head at myself—for what is the difference between the laughing girl and the lubricious me? But I buy a picture postcard of the Ukrainians nonetheless.

  7 july 1994. I look at the summer fashions of the young. Those of the male are most curious. Big, heavy, leather-laced shoes have taken the place of last winter’s big, heavy, laced track shoes. The shorts are of stout jersey, with great, wide leg openings and consequent panoramas of thigh. With this is worn a lettered tee-shirt—one with an algebraic formula, another in the Cyrillic alphabet, yet another, worn by a fresh-faced innocent, with “I Am a Pervert” on the back. Or, the outfit consists of a ragged dress shirt held together with safety pins and jeans that have been carefully ripped at the knees, suggesting some strenuous labor which has, in fact, not been undertaken. All of these soft-skinned kids are strangers to work. Their outfits cost money and came from Harajuku. They are affecting the proletariat.

  This, says Veblen, occurs where money seeps far down, accompanied by a like decline in standards. Romans in full fashion dressing like Goths. All of this shabby finery looks strange in Ueno, however, where the fashionable young must compete with the real thing—bums with the knees of their pants honorably worn through, homeless old women actually needing to safety-pin shut their blouses.