The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  Finally I managed to be stopped by a young girl, her lips all chapped from questioning, who proved more forthcoming. No, it was not a religion. They were all toku’n-chu, which I suppose means tokubetsu deshi, or very special disciples. They were on the street doing their very best for their dear sensei. And who was this beloved teacher of theirs? Out came the man with the eyebrows. Fukunaga Sensei, of course. It was for him that they were all doing their best. Out there bringing saiko to everyone. And what did this bring to them, I wondered, doing all this work selling Sensei’s book? Did he pay them? She looked at me with wonder. Oh, no. They were doing it because he had turned their lives around. Just look at her—and she licked her bleeding lips and blinked her exhausted eyes—all saiko now, thanks to Sensei.

  Stopped next by a middle-aged man, I asked how many there were in the group. Oh, about a hundred right here he guessed, but many more elsewhere. Last night was Shinjuku, but as for tomorrow they had not yet received their instructions. I wondered if all those people who penciled in the sutra-like characters would next receive instructions through the mail and be pressed into the throng. This he did not know. So I asked why he did it—why he was rushing around accosting people, just to sell a book and to get names and addresses for what sounded to me a rather suspicious project. He did not attempt to explain, just looked at me with an expression that seemed to say it was past all comprehension, at least the kind of comprehension that I might bring to it.

  Unsatisfied, I followed a few of the white-clad folk about and once when I was again accosted, in reply to saiko, I gave its antonym, saitei. But this caused such a pained expression, that I did not do it again. Indeed opportunities for being accosted were growing fewer. I thought that perhaps, like certain birds in flight, they had somehow communicated that something in the path was to be avoided, but it seemed that there were actually fewer. Then, suddenly, there were none. The flock had shifted and vanished and I was left on the pavement thinking that I had seen something like the medieval Pure Land adepts, or the Eijanaika dancers of the nineteenth century, or the beginnings of the brown and black shirts of our own time.

  17 january 1995. Earthquake (7.2 on the Richter scale) in Kobe. I wake up at seven, turn on the radio, and hear all the details: it had occurred only half an hour before but already NHK had lots of information, including how many buildings collapsed, how many dead, how many injured. No panic, though an empty feeling when the announcer said, “Now we will hear from Kobe . . .”—and there was no answer. “Kobe, Kobe, are you there? Kobe, come in.” No answer. Facts and figures hide the horror—silence reveals it.

  Robin Magowan, Octavio Ciano, Mizushima Fumio, Stephen Magowan, James Merrill, Numata Makiyo, Peter Hooten. Tokyo, 1986. donald richie

  The earthquake skipped over Tokyo where everyone was expecting it after the whole nest of earthquakes recently in the north. But nothing is safe in this quivering archipelago.

  18 january 1995. For two hours the radio has been reading names, those of the missing in Kobe, Nishinomiya, and Osaka. One after the other, like a litany. It truly is. These people are dead. Yet the announcer, hopeful, reads on: “Will Minakami Jiro-san please contact Minakami Shizuko-san, she is worried about him.”

  More than 1,500 are dead and 1,000 are missing. A whole hospital collapsed; an elevated highway fell over with everyone on it; a bank caved in; fires broke out. In Kyoto, the Golden Pavilion cracked and several of the Kannons in the Sanjusangendo fell over. Most of those people killed were in their beds, since the earthquake came at 5:46 a.m.

  I have not been able to reach Tani, who lives in Osaka. The operator says, over and over, that the lines are full, to please call again. I leave the radio on; the names continue, as though unscrolling. It does no good to listen, but I would be awful, somehow, not to.

  19 january 1995. Got through to Tani. He is all right, though the house moved around a lot. He had gotten up early and he didn’t know why. Then the earthquake, and he knew why. The death toll is much higher than originally thought. It will be over six thousand dead. Tokyo is very subdued. People on the streets, in the subway, have an inward look. Everyone is thinking the same thing.

  21 february 1995. Just today, I am out of the hospital. Nearly a month in Jikei Daigaku Byoin, where I always go when I get sick. A cold turned into influenza, which turned into pneumonia. Now I know the cause: I have emphysema, asthma, and chronic bronchitis. This is just the trio that carried off Gene Langston—and my father as well. And, like the latter, I have angina pectoris, which makes conventional treatment of the lungs impossible. When my father was in the hospital they didn’t know this—he died at sixty-four. Now they know. I am saved at seventy. Conventional treatment was attempted but my heart went into spasm—I saw it on the machine; the pulse was so fast it looked like a video game. So, a long detour involving steroids. Got out after a month of intravenous antibiotics, with a one-third chance of within a month having to go back in again.

  Friends gathered round, flowers, fruit, and phone calls. I finished Temples of Kyoto and wrote the second chapter of Watching Myself. So, the time was not entirely lost, but I had to cancel my tour of the U.S.A., on which I was supposed to be leaving day after tomorrow. And so first thing I did was call Jimmy [Merrill], for I was to fly first to Tucson to see him and then go on to Houston, Atlanta, Tampa, New York, and so on.

  He sounded so well, so much better. He not only accepts his disease, but also he does something with it. He makes it a part of his life, though he knows that he will soon die. He asked about my angina, and then told me a joke about an elderly couple who are going to make love. The man becomes progressively disturbed the more she unveils. When she says that she ought also to tell him she has acute angina he says, “Well it better be. Nothing else is.”

  And a week later Jimmy is dead. His heart. I think of that fine intelligence—that mind that was Jimmy—inexorably blinking out, cell by cell, until at last he was no longer here.

  I lay awake in the hospital and remembered being with him in Athens, and when we went to Persia together, and in Japan, and in New York, and in the Roman red dining room at Stonington. And turns of phrase, jokes, small admonitions—they returned all night long, a life unreeling before my closed eyes. And a few days later a book came to the hospital—from Jimmy, thinking to relieve the tedium of being ill.

  22 february 1995. I call Tani on the phone. Turns out he had been calling me. We talk about his wife (liver cancer) and his daughter (dental school), and then the earthquake. He has had another fit of prophecy. I am not to be in Tokyo this August or September. That is when the big one is going to hit. “How do you know?” I ask. “Inspiration,” he says. He was being driven to work in the Chrysler and it suddenly hit him. He at once told his chauffeur who, naturally, being his chauffeur, agreed with him.

  I often think of Tani. His life has been so surprising. This poor but handsome twenty year-old student would eventually become, as he recently told me, the eighteenth richest man in Osaka. Now, on the phone, he suddenly remembers what he wanted to ask me. Did I know anyone at the Smithsonian Institution? Because they had a Japanese Zero fighter and he wanted to buy it. Where would he put it? I asked. “Oh, I’d build something,” he said. I have to tell him that the Smithsonian is government-owned and not allowed to sell, even if it wanted to. He is very surprised, had thought everything was for sale in the U.S.A.

  5 march 1995. Went to the Edo-Tokyo Museum gallery to see the Tokyo Dai Senso Exhibition, a collection of things from 1940 to 1945. The pre-Pacific War period displayed old radios, umbrellas, children’s games, and school uniforms—all lined up, like Assyrian remains. Then came the wartime things: army uniforms, piggy banks in the shape of cannon shells, and gas masks. Several films were being shown on monitors. One was American footage of the 1945 destruction of Tokyo. The B-59’s took off; clouds parted, and there lay Tokyo. The bombs were off-loaded, plane after plane. Below the explosions blossomed, but the horror of Tokyo burning was not photographed—no pictures o
f Fukagawa on fire, people burned and boiled. Then came maps and photos to show how much had been destroyed, graphs and figures to show how many killed. The whole exhibit was neutral. And though the aerial photos showed the terrible destruction around the old sumo stadium (just where the Edo-Tokyo Museum now stands) no one looking seemed to have made the connection but me. But then most of the people viewing it were young. It was all history to them. But when I arrived in Japan, there were still ruins and barren fields. It is a part of my life.

  21 march 1995. Last night I found my answering machine had garbled my messages and so I did not know that Fumio had called, apparently in some alarm. He called again at six this morning and I learned that he was worried lest I had been on the subway yesterday. Passengers were attacked with sarin gas—six dead and dozens ill.

  Everyone I talk to says it is the work of one of the new religions, the Aum Shinrikyo, which is run by a bearded man who calls himself Asahara Shoko. He is also suspected of having abducted a lawyer and his family. Also of having made off with a notary public whose sister was being pressured to give her land to the new religion.

  22 march 1995. The Sarin Attack. No one talks of anything else, TV and radio flooded with speculation. A part of the extraordinary attention is that the event itself is extraordinary: Safe Japan suddenly becomes a Death Trap. A part is due to the Japanese tendency to think in packs. There is always some sort of celebrated cause going on in the media. But part of it is the random suddenness, the calibrated cruelty, and the knowledge—for everyone knows—that this was done by the followers of a local führer. Just as during wartime ordinary people followed orders and committed every one of the atrocities one has heard of, so this postwar Japan has people in it who unthinkingly, blindly, do the same thing. This is enough to sober the entire nation.

  27 march 1995. An important day—I finally, after eighteen years of waiting, get to see Bresson’s Le Diable Probablement. One of the reasons for my so wanting was that this was the only one of the director’s pictures I had not seen. Another was that here was an unknown part of the work of a man I much admired, and from whom I had learned much. Yet another, the strongest perhaps, is that when you love someone, you want to learn everything, want to gaze long, want to become a part of the beloved vision.

  From the lucid beginning, a newspaper clipping that tells the outcome of the picture so that the viewer will not be disturbed by story, to the laconic conclusion, action completed (but not in the way this viewer expected), I am in that reasoned world where there are no imposed moral values, just verities: a world that is black and white even when the film is in color. I am returned to this universe, beautiful in its severity, which is my true home.

  The door opens (how many doors there are in Bresson, always for entering—and how few windows, just one, Une Femme Douce, and that for jumping out of), and the camera—in its favorite position, gaze lowered—sees the knees, the thighs, part of the hand, of whoever enters. It turns to follow the figure and only then raises its lens, and by then the face is passed and we see but the back of the head. (A joke I remember: Bresson is finally being allowed to film the Bible. His producer has, following his instructions, built a great ark and assembled all the animals. Just before shooting, Bresson clamps the camera in his favorite position and says, “You realize, of course, that I am just going to photograph their hoofs.”)

  Again I see that admirable deletion of the inessential: On the bus, a crash, camera inside, focused on the door, thighs of the conductor, and then nothing at all while we listen to the noises of the accident (whatever it was), and its aftermath (whatever that is)—the camera focusing on the door of the bus alone. (I am reminded of the opening sequence of Un Condamné à Mort s’est Echappé, where the camera stays inside the car while the Gestapo are atrociously, but invisibly, busy.)

  And, again, here, the magic of Bresson’s vision. At the end when the two men are going to the cemetery, the subway door opens and the station slowly glides past. Bresson’s miracles are made of the mundane—as I do think all miracles are. The subway platform is utterly ordinary, but unscrolling like this, the camera unblinking, it is more magical than any magic carpet.

  And the sudden shock of the ending—the film just stops. At the moment of death. It has no reason to continue now that Charles is dead. And the death—here one minute (in the middle of a sentence), and gone the next. Whether this is the way real people die is not to the point—this is the way metaphysical death occurs. And so young. (Even younger—I later read an interview with this actor: He was fifteen when he made the film, something Bresson did not know.) And after the tape stopped and my viewing screen went black, I sat there in the dark for a time—moved, alive, refreshed, renewed, restored.

  And grateful. The Bresson was a gift. Dan Talbot, knowing I had been in hospital, knowing I wanted to see this film more than anything, sent me the cassette.

  22 april 1995. The Aum Effect continues. Though it would ordinarily be as difficult to enforce in Japan as anywhere else, concern is now such that the subway announcements asking patrons to leave nothing on the seats or overhead racks, not even newspapers and magazines, are fully obeyed. And there are no complaints about the trash cans all being removed, the coin lockers all closed, the rooms for baby care all shut.

  The sarin attack is taken very seriously indeed. There are no jokes about it, sick or otherwise. No TV comic would attempt levity. At the same time, the media have turned it into an obsession. There is nothing else on the tube but culprit Asahara and his followers, nothing in the papers and magazines but that fat, stupid, self-satisfied face. Still, this is better than cynicism.

  So serious is everyone that a small Yokohama “attack” is made much of, though no one was injured, let alone killed. It seems that someone with mace got loose in a station corridor. But this is something the press is only slowly admitting. I see in the evening paper that someone high up was eventually of the opinion that one or more Aum culprits could have done it. The rest was supplied by a people on the verge of hysteria—so unused to violence is this populace. Still, how much better this than complacency.

  26 april 1995. To Shinjuku to see the Maxfield Parrish show. Pictures lined up—the glaze still so brilliant that they looked illuminated from behind. I remember the artist’s son giving the recipe for Maxfield Parrish blue: add emerald to cobalt. And there is Daybreak, that picture (pillars, androgynous creatures waking up, incredible mountain background) a reproduction of which used to hang over the piano when I was a child. Many times I stood on the precarious stool to look into those bright morning cliffs. I had never seen anything more beautiful. Now, again leaning forward, I examine those romantic mountains, glasses on, nose near canvas. They are just as magical as they were sixty years ago.

  16 may 1995. The day after the Aum guru was brought to ground I had to get up and out early to go to the hospital, something I dislike since it means I hit the rush hour. But not that day. I got a seat, no people. The rush hour and no one was rushing—afraid to, frightened of an attack by the crazed followers. The media frenzy has taken its toll, made cowards of everyone. Except me. But then I do not have TV and only read the papers after it is all over.

  I think that now whole populations, now seeing on TV things while they are actually happening, fail to use what reflective powers are left. If the naked actuality of an event is hanging there before them, they do not have to think about it. Reality resists interpretation.

  17 may 1995. With Gwen [Robinson] to the dohan kissa, Kon. Among the potted plants much activity—people milling about, staring. I leaned over a booth back and watched a girl on her back with her legs open and a group of men bent over her crotch, intent. It looked like a medical inspection. In the next booth a man was standing looking about as though on a busy street corner while his girlfriend, or someone’s girlfriend, sat in front of him and inexpertly sucked his cock.

  When I came back to our booth, Gwen had been joined by a young man with a big smile, who already had his hand on h
er thigh. While he gently massaged, we talked. Married, one child, yes, a boy. Only his second time here—usually liked the one in Shinjuku better, a younger, more uninhibited crowd. Of course, there you are not allowed to walk around and stare as you are here.

  He now had one hand on her thigh and one vigorously rubbing her breasts. “I hope you realize,” said Gwen, “that I am enduring this only to further your anthropological interests.” “Yes,” I said, reached over and felt his cock—short, hard. “Your friend is very exciting,” he said to me, with a smile, the kind of compliment men pay one another. Then he asked me if I had ever had a three-way—two men and a girl. I said that, yes, I had. So had he, he said. We were becoming mildly interested in each other when Gwen said she did not know how much more of this she could stand.

  I sent him away, reclaimed my date, and asked why. She had meant the mauling of her breasts. “They know nothing of what might make a girl feel good,” she said. “They learn this awful nipple pinching and breast rolling on the porno screen where they do it because that is the only visible thing they can do.”

  21 may 1955. The big day of the Sanja Matsuri in Asakusa, so I strolled through the neighborhood. This year the festival was much cut down. Government said the grand procession of all the omikoshi was too dangerous and would be stopped. Each just circled its own neighborhood. Creeping disciplines—in the late 1930s the processions were stopped entirely. If no one complains (and no one does) then governments do as they want. This year, with people afraid to congregate because of the insane guru, the police can protect them more effectively than ever. And, indeed, there were far fewer here than usual. I went to the north, now a ghetto for the tattooed. They made a fine show but the younger members are not able to sport many masterworks—the new tattoo style looks like manga and I saw lots of green!