6 september 1998. Tonight I learn that Kurosawa is dead. The Asahi calls up for a statement. I say what I believe. Then add that I most admired his bravery, his making The Bad Sleep Well. The girl interviewing me on the phone asks if I knew that when the Kurosawa Retrospective was held at the Chanter Theater a few years ago, the Toho film company vetoed its being included and so it wasn’t. I said I was not surprised, and as I was saying it I realized that there is now no one in all of Japan who would be brave enough to make The Bad Sleep Well. After I have hung up, I think about him lying there, in his house. That tall, big-boned, large-handed body that I never once saw in repose is now motionless.
23 september 1998. Back from the U.S.A.—taught once more how young Japan has kept me. Over there I am suddenly Urashima Taro, gray, ancient, friends and family dead—a Rip Van Winkle. I am old, damaged, withered, and all things have changed.
However, this is also cause for rejoicing as well. I am still young, at least while I am in here in Japan, sheltered from the great, racing wing of time.
Things change here too, though, and I can enjoy the metamorphosis, but since I only came in the middle of the performance, as it were, the change is not great and, in any event, Japan has always incorporated change into its structure, so there it is nothing to explain.
The country where I was born makes no such allowance. So I am there a child of the fifties instead of, as here, a part of the late nineties. And here people can see me, and there, being a ghost, I am invisible.
26 september 1998. How do you write after you know that what you are writing will be read after you are dead? Since you can no longer defend yourself, you begin early by protecting against any and all possible allegations. It is like planning the perfect suicide. You must think of just everything. Also, the need to make a pattern, any pattern, since it is the unpatterned that is to be avoided. And the drive for vindication, as if you had to prove your right to have lived. I think of all this while reading [Stephen] Spender’s journals, and I think of it after looking over this one of my own.
Adrienne [Mancia] has told me that I always want everyone to like me and that this is a defect. She’s right. If you want everyone to like you it means that you change yourself to fit everyone. You acquiesce, and this I certainly do. But only to a point. I will bend, but not break.
27 september 1998. But I am also a descriptive journalist, and this I think more highly of. I want to be the person who penned the best likeness. This is a possible ambition, because for the last half century I have been in the best position to do so. Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatized, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted. I am still complimented after fifty years on how well I use chopsticks, and so I become aware of using them—as I never am of using knife and fork, a feat upon which I have never once been complimented.
The person complimenting is, of course, being merely polite. The exclusivity he is implying does not occur to him. For him the word gaijin is neutral, a descriptive term—something we cannot claim for, say, “Jap,” but one which moves just as readily off the tongue. We may interpret racist overtones in gaijin, but that is our problem, not his. Knowing this, I am aware of all words. I know that okashii does not primarily mean “funny” (dictionary definition), and that if I use it about him I am saying that he is singular, odd, and—in Japanese parlance—limited. I know that omoshiroi does not only mean “interesting,” but can also imply the lightweight, the negligible, and the unimportant.
So, how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right—I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.
30 september 1998. Wandering in the park under the harvest moon, finding no harvest myself, I realize that I have become like those pandas that will eat only one kind of bamboo, a commodity that they have now eaten all up. Soon they will be extinct, done in by specialization. Concerned friends counsel me to the jungle-like swamps of the sauna, or the conversation pits of the bars, or the strict and narrow confines of the public conveniences, but this is not for me. Only the street, the corner, the park is authentic to me. Only that which is fortuitously found is real.
28 october 1998. Loud chanting: “Long poles, we have long poles, poles for just everything, bamboo, bamboo, bamboo.” This is an ancient street call, but now it is bellowed from a small truck with a big loudspeaker. And he is selling plastic poles at that.
29 october 1998. Walking back home through the park I meet one of the local transvestite prostitutes, the quiet one—round face, long hair, fat legs, the one with whom I usually pass remarks on the weather. I say that it looks like more rain and she turns to me, face serious and says: “I have cancer.” I stop and ask where. She names the hospital. “No,” I say, “where on your body.”
“Oh, my lungs, it’s my lungs.” And as she speaks I see that her normally placid eyes are now disturbed, a small twitch at the corner of one of them. “Just today,” she says, “just now, just got the test back, just have to tell someone. Sorry.”
I ask if she smokes. If she does I can tell her to stop and she may get better. But she doesn’t. “No, I drink too much,” she says. I then tell her what little I know about modern medicine, but neither of us are convinced. Advanced lung cancer is fatal. “It makes you frightened,” she says, standing there in her heels, her long hair held back with a ribbon, her eyes twitching.
17 november 1998. I ponder a new fashion: perilously high-soled shoes for young women. They teeter on something like six inches of superfluous shoe—boot, really. They lurch and spill on the pavement and in a group sound like a herd of elephants.
This footwear I compare to the high-soled geta of the Tokugawa oiran, the highest rank of entertainer/prostitute. They teetered on the pavements of the Yoshiwara and had grand parades where one could view them negotiating their way about—and still can in the Kabuki.
There and then, the reason was somewhat like that for foot binding in China. The women were expensive chattel, and were maimed in the same way that cows have ears nicked, brands imposed, and rings put through noses. The results were less instantly utilitarian, but the effect was the same: this is property.
Labor-intensive property, and hence the more valuable. The patron of an oiran must have felt like the owner of a thoroughbred. And from this came the allure. Rich Chinese merchants, having crippled women so they could not run away, soon learned to savor the various fragrances emitted from the unwashed, curled under, slowly putrefying feet.
But how does one read these equally crippling new Japanese boots? From the woman’s point of view the new fashion might be seen as enabling. Now she can be as tall as he, now she can have a military strut, if she doesn’t topple over. Now she can also attract a bit of foot fetishism, and—of course, the clincher—she is in the height of fashion.
Are these fetters chosen? Is it a new way to balance femininity (which is all imbalance, the need for a male shoulder on which to lean), with masculinity (taking charge of one’s life, forging ahead, jack-booted)? Men read it only as yet another new fashion, and none seem either to resent it or take advantage of it.
12 december 1998. Another word everyone has forgotten. I go to the Little Mermaid Bakery and ask for tomorokoshi pan [corn bread], as I have for decades. The girl says she can’t speak English. I tell her it is Japanese. She says she never heard of it. I point to what I want. Oh, kon buredo, she says.
On the way home I hear that Yodogawa Nagaharu, the popular film appreciator, has died. Lots of nostalgic talk about him. He never saw a movie he didn’t like. Actually, in private, he was often critical, but never on television. No matter what, it was, oh, what a swell (sugoi) movie, wasn’t it swell though? I wonder how it feels to live such a mendacious public life. He probably felt nothing at all. He was a performer.
17 december 1998
. When I look at others it seems I lead a much more conscious life. I am more aware, I notice more. Not that this is desirable. I notice to no point, to no end. It is difficult for me to be unconscious, just as it is difficult to go to sleep. This is nothing to brag about. It doesn’t mean whatever Socrates meant when he said that an unexamined life was a life not worth living. Being conscious does not mean that you examine anything. It just means that you’ve left the motor running. You can’t find the switch to turn it off, probably because your kind of consciousness is self-consciousness. I am always aware of self.
I wonder why I am not an addict of some kind. A druggie, or a drunk. I was recently called a sexaholic. Certainly I am as addicted to that as was ever boozer to bottle or gambler to game. It is like shopping, which can well become a substitute for living, something that preoccupies you and hides you from yourself. Other things work too, though not for me. Religion, fast driving, compulsive work. Or—and this does work for me—love.
In addition to the journals, Richie was writing Tokyo: A View of the City and doing a final editing of Kumagai (Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai), to be published in 1999. He was no longer mining his journals for material for other works. At the same time, he was now editing them as he wrote them. Thus, only Richie knows what originally filled the chronological blanks.
7 january 1999. Kinoshita [Keisuke, film director] died on the last day of the old year. I did not go to the wake or the funeral, but I did sit down and think about him. A smallish, dapper man, demanding and sentimental at the same time. An air of undefined unhappiness about him, which made it easier to understand why he so threw himself into work. No family except that which he created on the set—his unit. Takamine Hideko, Matsuyama Zenzo. He married them to each other as though they were his children. Sada Keiji, Okada Mariko, other Shochiku actors—the family, the only family. All of those placid films about adolescents, usually boys, and then, like mountaintops, the peaks of a few films—Twenty-four Eyes, and others.
I remember once showing him a film of mine. Perhaps it was Dead Youth. He watched it almost greedily, but by the time the lights were turned on he had already pursed his lips and was shaking his head. Later he told someone (who told me) that he had been shocked, so shocked. Such a vulnerable man he was. And such a long death, well over a decade in that apartment in Aoyama. Today a card from Max [Tessier] about this death, and wondering who might be next.
13 january 1999. I am reading the journals of Ozu. They have been translated and Catherine Lupton sent me a copy. Translated into French, which makes for a certain oddness—Ozu’s expostulating: “Zut alors!” They are curious in other ways as well. I cannot imagine why he kept them. Each entry reads like a social calendar, though it may also include the weather, how he felt, and what he ate. Certainly what he saw—he went to the films every other day. Rarely did he indicate how they struck him. Only occasionally—nothing extraordinary about La Kermesse Heroïque, not too impressed by All About Eve.
But he knew everyone, and saw everyone all the time. Many entries about being with Shiga Naoya, being with Takamine Hideko. Among the directors he apparently socialized most with were Shimizu Hiroshi and Uchida Tomu. And every night a dinner or a party or a bar. Bars with names like Florida and Candy, geisha houses, hotels. And lots of drinking. “Tonight, again, I overdid it. Upset stomach.”
31 january 1999. I went to a memorial concert for Hayasaka Fumio, through whom I first entered the Japanese film world. They played first an early work, the 1937 Ancient Dance, a bit like Gagaku, something like the later score for Rashomon. At the end they played his last work, the 1955 Yukara, a suite based on Ainu folklore: strong, personal, dissonant, raw—a kind of Sacre from the far north. Takemitsu told me once how he cried when he first heard it—for the music but also for his dead teacher, Hayasaka.
In between, the 1948 Piano Concerto. I had heard it at its premiere. I was sitting in Hibiya Hall, and there was my friend smiling and bowing from the stage. I now wondered what I would remember of it, as I had not heard it since. Nothing of the rhapsodic opening lento was familiar, but when the rondo started—oh, of course, how could I have ever forgotten it? An engaging pentatonic tune that went through its possible permutations with assurance and charm, and always landed on its feet. And as I listened I relived my five-decade-old delight. It was like meeting Hayasaka again.
1 february 1999. I talk about the Occupation, a panel with only me and Nishiyama Sen on it, a “Luncheon Discussion,” as the Press Club calls these things. Afterward, questions. I am asked to account for films, and Sen is asked to account for Reischauer. “Was it not true,” asked Sam Jameson, “that you were to make a mistake or two in translation so that Reischauer could publicly correct you and hence know more Japanese than even a Japanese?” Sen denies this.
2 february 1999. I buy a plastic shopping bag to carry home groceries and on it is written: “Knowing—where you’re blowing getting to where—you should be going—Golden rain—bring you riches all the good things—you deserve now. Find your way out of Silent Forest.”
Opening up a Lotte Choco Bouchée, I read: “Confidence of creating deliciousness. This tastiness can not be carried even by both hands.” Slowly chewing, I meditate upon this strange culture that makes so free with mine. Such English as this affects them only as something pleasantly modern, but it makes me believe that I am living in a world where behind every object—a shopping bag, a chocolate cookie—lies paranoia, madness, violence, and death.
12 february 1999. Took Karel to lunch. He says that Japan’s only way out of its dilemma is through some kind of revolt that would stop the machine, overturn the bureaucracy, but that he could not imagine it happening. I told him that Nagisa Oshima had said that this had occurred only three times in Japan’s history: the Tempo Reforms, the beginning of Meiji, and in 1945. And each time the structure re-crystallized, and petrified. We agree that there are no villains, no tyrants; the problem is structural: this model no longer works in 1999.
17 february 1999. The Hanis, Susumu and Kimiko, take me out to lunch, a new French restaurant specializing in fish. This is in return for my having designed his retrospective and gotten it on the road—where it still is, showing in Toronto this week. I am satisfied that I made this happen, and he is satisfied that it did.
Miho, his daughter is there too. How much she is like Sachiko [Hani’s first wife], and she is just now about the same age Sachiko was when I first met her. The same slightly shy way of looking at you, the same modesty. This is now all lost in the mother, but it lives on in the daughter.
21 february 1999. How much greater the display of public anger now that portable phones are everywhere. Never have I heard so many voices raised in ire. A boy with gelled hair shouting into his receiver, adopting that abusive yet whining tone of the wronged young. Seeing that he is observed he begins to gesture as well (though with only one hand)—the clenched fist, then fingers splayed in displeasure.
Very shortly, a fat yakuza with a permanent, pinkie in the air, rolling his consonants and calling the other party omae and temae. Seeing me watching he scowls and turns away. Later, a young man in a gabardine suit shouting into his phone and at the same time pissing on the seats of the parked bikes in the small shelter where he is standing. Noticing that he is observed, he just stares back and then starts to shout again.
I think this kind of behavior (except for the pissing) is only possible because of the portable phone. It is not anonymity that it offers, but distance. The other party cannot get back at the caller, cannot reach out and rebut.
11 march 1999. In my readings I find that in the Edo period, incense was thought of so highly that the term kyara—meaning highest-quality incense—became one of general approbation. Kyara clogs meant high-quality clogs, kyara women meant beautiful women. Also, find out that there was an Edo term indicating dangerous extravagance. Kuidaore meant an overweening taste for fine food, kidaore for expensive dress, hakidaore for lavish footwear. The implication was that this was a
weak point, a source of ruination—particularly for those from Kyoto and Osaka who had come to fashionable Edo.
18 march 1999. [Numata] Makiyo took me out for a birthday dinner and brought along his daughter, Maki, now five. She is beautiful, a little girl version of him. They are very close, she and her father. He no longer speaks baby talk to her because she is no longer a baby, but he still dotes on her, and she on him. There is also a younger child, and I hear yet another one due next month—all girls. He says he wants a son, too. I ask if he is using the lottery method—try and try again.
We talk about what we have in common. Our travels together, his family, but we do not talk about the fact that I at one time loved him almost as much as he now loves his daughter. This always baffled him but, being a good person, he went along with it so far as he was able.
I look at Maki, much as her father must have been as a child, and wonder why I felt so strongly. Then, turning to look at him, late thirties now, my friend for fifteen years, I realize why—he is like a son to me.
25 march 1999. Tani calls. Also he wanted to tell me that he has become a grandfather. “That daughter of mine,” he said, “thirty-four, now. Always was lazy. Just slid under the wire, got the baby out. Nice little boy. They named him Kohei. Two months old now. I went to the big shrine here with them today. First time I ever went there. Nice place. Then we all had dinner.” About India: “Did you see any crocodiles?”
Consistency . . . Tani does not change, no matter what happens. This is, in the flux we live in, reassuring. Tani was interested in crocodiles at twenty-five, and he is equally interested at sixty-five.
27 march 1999. Re-reading Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain. Can anyone now understand him? I wonder. All those flowers, all those trees, all that regard that is now so un-Japanese that it looks sentimental. Young people, with their Walkmen and manga, their portable phones—not only do they not know one flower from another, they do not even see them.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 55