The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  And he told me his:

  I sat by the duchess at tea.She asked: Do you fart when you pee?I replied, with some wit:Do you belch when you shit?Which, I think, left the honors with me.

  We agree that that last line is a masterpiece.

  14 august 1995. Coming back on the late express, I saw that the black-clad, middle-aged man opposite was gazing intently. Then he turned to the man next to him and said something, then resumed his staring. This was all very benevolent, and so I smiled and nodded, at which he stood and came over, sat down beside me and took my hand, all unmindful of the stares around him and my own surprise. Then I looked more closely.

  He was one of my old students—Waseda University, 1955. He, the man beside him, and several more on their side, all of them my former students, were coming back from the funeral of yet another of their number—one who had, they said, swam too far out and drowned. I thought the reference perhaps metaphorical but, no, he had gone to the beach with his family.

  The man telling me this (his name was Saito I now remembered) said he had looked at me sitting there reading my book, and then he saw that I was making notes with my left hand, and that convinced him that here, sitting before him, was his old teacher—but looking so young, he quickly added. So we sat together and I watched these elderly men turn into boys as I removed layer after layer and again glimpsed those young, vanished faces. But try as I might I could not recall the face of the dead.

  31 august 1995. In the evening out with Ed [Seidensticker] for no reason in particular—just to talk. He is pleased with my getting the Japan Foundation award, and I politely say that he got it first. “Oh, but that must have been a fluke. They should never have given it to me. Nor would the Japan Societies ever ask me to speak. You see, I am known as being critical of this country and they can never allow that. No, the award was a fluke.”

  To which I answer that I too am critical. He responds with, “Perhaps, but not as I am. I simply do not have as sunny a disposition as you do. And I could never stand there and say things I do not believe.”

  I look at my plate. He does not mean that I say things I do not believe and hence win awards. He is just thoughtless, and deaf to his own implications—though acute enough to those of others.

  My thought is communicated. “Not,” he says, “that I am saying that those who like this country are being insincere. That would be a foolish thing to say.” I agree that it would be foolish.

  2 september 1995. Overnight, summer is done. This morning the air is clear and the sky is a deep blue. It is still hot, but the light is different. The hazy heat of full summer has vanished, and in the morning sun every distant roof is clear, every antenna etched. This coup de saison occurs every year and I don’t know how. Like all magic, it is suddenly there.

  Walking past the National Science Museum in Ueno, I see that Natsume Soseki’s brain is going to be on exhibition from the middle of the month. Preserved since his death in 1916 at age 50, it will now be for the first time viewed by the general public. To what end, I am not certain. His face, of course, graces the thousand yen bill, but what lay behind it has until now not been made visible. Still, the view, I am certain, will be educational.

  9 september 1995. Looking at the old people in the park—women and their grandchildren, a man painting—I notice that I am thinking about how nice they look. I wonder why and then remember something that Oida Yoshi told me years back when I asked why he liked only older men. He said, “But their lives are in their faces; their character is all there, built up line by line. How anyone could find those smooth, unformed faces of the young attractive I do not know.”

  11 september 1995. Reading about the tribulations of Republican Senator Robert Packwood, I note that someone said, “Why didn’t he just not keep a diary?” But I know why he thought he had to. He wanted to vindicate himself—to present himself as he wanted to be: big man in the Senate, wheeler-dealer, a way with the ladies, and maybe even President of the United States some happy day. Like all diary keepers, he wanted to present the basic pattern and be understood by it. It is ironic that it is this pattern that now relieves him of his senatorial duties, but this is a part of the pattern too.

  One admits in order to be exonerated, and exonerated one is—Boswell, Pepys, Gide—if you are not in politics. But if you are, then never commit one private word to paper. Big Bob did nothing that would not be forgiven in anyone but a politician. He made muzzled little passes at women, and tried to get business friends to help him get jobs for his divorced wife—but he was also (as he says in his diary) powerful in the Senate. The competition got him. I think I understand him well—at least I recognize that need, known to all diarists, which fathers this compulsive urge to recreate, to explain.

  Greeting HIH Michiko and Akihito, 1995.

  13 september 1995. She is quietly well-dressed: black, pearls, poised, a cigarette at her lips, a small smile, and a cup of coffee before her. He is in his baggy shorts and running shoes with his cap on backward, a chocolate parfait melting in front of him. Mother and child? No, a girl and a boy on a date.

  26 september 1995. Tokyo Film Festival Party at the Imperial. Oshima in full kimono. This he usually wears at international gatherings. It seems a statement, but what kind? He was leftist radical, and the kimono is (as a political sign) rightist radical.

  Spoke with the Iranian directors. They were forthcoming about their troubles with their repressive government. Talking with them always reminds me of speaking with children who have despotic parents. They are all such good boys, and they are all treated so badly. Mifune used to attend gatherings like this, but there is no hope of seeing him now—he is in a home somewhere, memory gone, I hear.

  2 october 1995. They are everywhere, on every corner—young people, boys and girls, standing, hands outstretched, giving flyers to whoever will take them. Sometimes they are stuck into packages of tissue to make them more attractive. Usually they are naked, shamelessly advertising. This is an index of the economy. Nothing in this nation of merchants is selling. Stores are sitting with merchandise piled high, but no one is buying. Cash is in short supply and the great shopping boom—shopping instead of living—seems over. Even brand names sit glumly in their boxes. And there are not nearly enough jobs. Hence all these young hands, trying to reach you on street corners.

  5 october 1995. We got into our limousines and—a perk I earned by winning the Japan Foundation Prize—started for the Imperial Palace. Though the Hanzomon gate would have been nearer, we were taken in by the Sakashitamon, which is the one opposite Marunouchi. The reason was that we could thus see much more of the grounds.

  This I much wanted to do. After fifty years of looking at the palace grounds from the public side of the moat, seeing the tops of the forest and the roofs of distant palaces, I wanted to see for myself. Passing through police checkpoints and the outer gates, we were shortly inside the inner moat and passing through the park-like gardens of the Imperial Household (Kunaisho) Offices; then down what looked much like a country road, on either side of which were further walls, and behind them the virgin forest that is the heart of this land. I had heard that rabbits and foxes still lived here.

  The cars pulled up under the porte-cochere of a large, recent building that looked like one of the grander wedding halls. It was the new palace—and chamberlains were waiting. Much bowing by everyone, and we were ushered into a series of rooms, all decorated in modified imperial style. This style was set in the Meiji period and is hence Victorian, with plush covered sofas, wainscoting, and coffered ceilings. Since this palace was built in 1993 and not 1893, however, there are no sofas and the plush has turned into brocade. Still, the imposing comfort of Windsor is there.

  A chamberlain announced himself and then with great patience and kindness explained how our audience would proceed. He had a piece of paper with circles drawn on it and arrows showing how everyone should move. My role was modest; I was second from the right and would simply bob back and forth. The president of
the Japan Foundation had the most difficult role. He was choreographed to move forward, then to circle back, describing as he went an arc around the recipients about to be introduced, then he had to come full stop to our right. It was a complicated geometrical pattern—just like the Bugaku.

  We then all lined up in a further room. This one owed more to Shinto than to Victoria. It was paneled with cedar and had hanging curtains, like in Ise, and though the furniture was Western—blonde wood holding gold brocade—it still looked ecclesiastical. Outside the wide windows stretched the gardens and beyond them the forest. It was like being in a lavish country estate far away from any city, though over one treetop I could see the staring eye of the Wacoal Building.

  The chamberlains bustled about and I was struck by the resemblance of the palace and its staff to a really expensive ryotei, a Japanese restaurant which costs so much that absolutely nothing must go wrong. There were the same watchful glances, the same purposeful scurrying. Then someone of them solemnly said: “They are coming.”

  We all stood straight and in they walked, both smiling, the Emperor in a black suit and what looked like a school tie, the Empress in a cream-colored kimono with a matching obi. They took their places in front of us, just as the diagram had indicated, the president went through his steps, and then we looked at each other.

  Good will was evident; both were half-smiling, and I realized that this too was part of the pattern. It was graciousness—they seemed so filled with good will that it verged on the solicitous. Aristocratic, the stance seemed to deliberately avoid condescension through this expression of concern. It was as though they were about to ask us if we really had enough money, or really felt all right.

  They were also, however affable, grave. One did not, to be sure, expect laughter and tossed heads, but this gravity can resemble sadness. The graciousness was somehow funereal, like flowers slowly fading. And yet behind all this, I also saw something that looked like curiosity, and realized that we represented to them not only duty but, perhaps, diversion.

  When my turn came the Emperor put out his hand and I shook it. This indicated that the reception would continue in a foreign manner and, sure enough, he congratulated me in English. Afterward, it being my turn to speak, I asked if there were any animals in the forest. Yes, he believed so. Some rabbits—yes, he had seen some rabbits.

  He paused and I congratulated him on his new palace and noticed that you could still smell the cedar. He paused and then sniffed as though to ascertain this, then agreed. Following this, as was polite, he spoke of films. He was fond of Kurosawa and remembered seeing Ozu once when he had received an imperial award. Yes, Tokyo Story, he said, with something like relish.

  The Emperor had been going up one side of our lines and the Empress had been coming down the other. Now they met, and with an adroitness one does not usually see off a dance floor, they pivoted around each other and she now stood before me.

  Her husband had looked at me in that affable and detached manner I had before noticed only in the really wealthy, but her gaze was focused somewhere in front of me and slightly below, as though she were regarding my tie. Her voice was soft, modulated, and her English was good—better than his.

  I congratulated her on her nice new house and she wanted to know where I lived—exclaiming in a soft voice, and taking that affable, distant interest that, I have heard, is common to royals. “Ah, Shitamachi,” she said, then, adroitly, like a good hostess, mindful of the guest’s interests, “As in the films of Ozu.”

  Had she seen many? I wondered. “Well, Tokyo Story certainly,” she said, then added that here at the palace they couldn’t really see many films; what they saw was cassettes on television sets. They had a screening room at the Imperial Household Office, but one didn’t much go. So what they could get in the way of cassettes were mostly popular films or the classics. “But I feel that I ought to—no, I want to—take an interest in younger directors and discover what they are doing.” I told her about some younger directors and their films. “Oh, how I would like to see them,” she said, and I promised to send her a list and some cassettes.

  As we talked, I thought about her life. They were both sequestered here, and besides their duties there must have been little for them to do. Royalty is in this way held captive—displayed and then put back in the box. The temptation to escape must be strong. I remembered the princess in Roman Holiday and her escapade. But there was no escape for Michiko.

  As she spoke I remembered pictures of her I had seen when she was young, tennis-playing. Now she was frail, gracious, tentative, and that steady gaze regarded my necktie. What a life, I thought, and resolved to send her all the cassettes I could find.

  Later, talking to a chamberlain I mentioned what I had promised to do and wondered how to do it. What a good idea, just send them to me and I’ll make sure she gets them. He gave me his card and I realized that the Imperial Palace had an address. It is: Imperial Palace, 1-1 Chiyoda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100.

  We had been scheduled for thirty minutes, and sure enough their Imperial Highnesses were now back in their beginning positions and then, amid gracious smiles and bowing chamberlains, they glided from the room. Yes, glided—for their gait was also practiced.

  The couple held the otherworldly aspect of royalty; they carried their sacerdotal roles in front of them, but behind these I saw the two people, and how heavy the roles were, and I saw the gentleness and sadness that goes with a resignation. I wondered if that soft glint of curiosity had been satisfied or whether we too had disappointed them.

  After they had left there was a sudden lightness and we realized that we had been oppressed. Our departure was, consequently, less dignified than our entry, and we departed the palace in the best of spirits. The limousines rolled smoothly over the gravel and out into Tokyo, and I pondered over whether Okaeri would be a good film to send. It is about an unhappy wife who develops schizophrenia. And I remembered that when the Empress was recently attacked by the scurrilous media (she keeps the servants up after hours; she demands food at night; she is bossy . . . ), she responded by turning mute—did not speak for weeks.

  Our party was reunited that evening at a Yonbancho ryotei, quite expensive enough to behave just like the palace. As the elderly geisha-like waitresses wheeled expertly about on the tatami bringing us all sorts of kaiseki delicacies: red caviar on udo, egg-filled pregnant trout, one perfect matsutake mushroom—we caroused, lightheaded after our visit to the palace and all it had shown us.

  Eventually, the cars were called and we all got to go home, after a most exhausting if interesting day. [A shorter version of these activities is included in Public People, Private People. The entire chapter is excluded, however, from the Japanese translation of the book.]

  16 october 1995. Letter from Ian [Buruma]. “Inspired by your description of Boswell’s London diary, I instantly went to the London Library to borrow the book. It is, as you say, wonderful. The key to the success of these diaries is their ruthless honesty. Boswell hides very little: not his fear of impotence, not his moods of despair, and most important of all, not even his vanity. His boasts ring absolutely true. There is a boaster hidden in all of us, but only an innocent, or a rare writer would let that embarrassing braggart out of his cage. Perhaps it takes a kind of humility to be able to display one’s vanity for all to see.”

  Also a kind of trust. After all, we all keep our journals for reasons beyond the ostensible. At the least, we wish to structure life, to make some sort of pattern. At the most, we wish to forestall posthumous criticism, to redress supposed wrongs and (if we are the notorious autobiographer Frank Harris) to lie. Indeed to not lie requires a very real effort. The slippery nature of language assures that we will, of course, but the effort not to may make the accounting a bit more reliable.

  My father used to keep a diary, I tell Ian. Every night at ten sharp, he would uncap his pen and open that green ledger, pages of which he had filled, dozens of volumes by the time he died. He recorded the tempe
rature, and the barometric readings, which he had faithfully taken. Then the household news. Donald to school. Jean scraped knee. And that was it. Jean and I used to laugh at this, but I would not laugh now because I know what he was doing—he was holding time at arm’s length; he was finding a pattern; he was emblazoning a day. My own diaries are not that different from his.

  Except they tell more; they are more like letters. I remember reading of the fuss that Gide made when he discovered that his unhappy wife had burned all of his early letters. “But they were my diaries, my very life!” cried the eminent author who, nevertheless, left behind five full volumes of journals—which he called his “major work.” He was not writing for himself. But does one ever? Only, I think, when you really intend them as an aide-mémoire, and are going to mine them—they are then the quarry of the past.

  18 october 1995. A walk in Ueno Park, where I see that the workers are removing all the benches and putting in new ones. These are so much shorter that I stop a workman and ask if this is being done so that the homeless cannot sleep on them any more. He says that that perhaps is the reason and shakes his head, then adds, “But the couples on dates can still sit on them.”

  I wonder if this is a peculiarly Japanese way of solving a problem. You do not run off the homeless, nor help them get lodgings. Instead, you (at great expense) change the circumstances.

  21 october 1995. The trial of followers and leaders of the Aum cult has begun, and with it come further revelations. Since Asahara had prophesied Armageddon, he had to make it happen. Not only the subway gassing, but also germs spread by helicopter. But, fortunately, the followers were also inept—and the “success” of the subway gassings was mostly accidental. One welcome result of their trials is that the other cults keep off the streets. No more people wanting to pray over you; now, no more smiling folks asking if you are genki. Even the Soka Gakkai is getting perturbed. If the new law limiting religion goes into effect it will hurt their finances. Yet, every country needs such a law. If you can ban alcohol and nicotine, why can’t you ban religion?