Over our meal we talk of many other things, having a whole half-year to catch up on. President Bush is execrated; we wonder what the country is coming to; Hello Kitty is attacked, as is the general fecklessness of the young; and then we turn to other things—the Vatican show of Roman statuary, which I have seen but he not yet.
In mentioning a sarcophagus picturing the death of Adonis, I note the customary small penis of the gored hero. Then we wonder, why “customary,” why did the Greeks and Romans make so tiny what the Japanese in their shunga make so huge? I quote a twelfth-century Buddhist monk who said that it had to be, that the only way to make such a dull organ interesting was to enlarge it.
This we do not accept, and I then remember Truman Capote’s leaving the country in chagrin at finding no “tenpennies.” “Ten what?” asks Ed. I give Truman’s explanation of long ago. Lay it out on the table, and if you can put ten pennies in a row on it then it is a “tenpenny.” “Let me see,” says Ed, “just how large would that be?” Only one way to find out. We do not have pennies, but we do have ten yen coins. We empty our pockets and pool the contents, lining the coins on the table, and then observing the results. “Oh!” says Ed, and then the conversation turns to other things.
18 march 2004. Again I take the train to Kita-Kamakura, first time in years. This time I recognize nothing. Malls, department stores, apartment complexes, all crowded so near the tracks that it is like traveling through a gorge. What was once open country with paddies and groves is now densely urban, and all in that industrial blue-gray color that civic Japan is so fond of.
Once at Engakuji, I again stand before the great gate. But this time it is early spring, fifty-seven years later. The carved eaves still stretch above me, the roof still soars and touches the pines, and I am still about to enter the land of Zen. But now there are lights, mikes, and cameras. I am being interviewed for a documentary on Dr. Suzuki.
Since his little house is gone, I am taken to a room in the main temple where the acolytes gather before their interviews with the roshi. This teacher estimates their progress and attempts to ascertain whether it was really enlightenment that was experienced. The place is thus appropriate for me, though I had experienced little progress, much less enlightenment.
This is what I now talked about, and Dr. Suzuki’s attentive guidance out of the maze I had walked into. I tried to remember what he looked like, what he said, how he thought. At the end, asked to describe him in one sentence, I said that he knew how to think in ways other than what I had known.
At least that is what he taught me, what I gathered. And as I sat there remembering for the camera, conjuring up the ghost of my teacher, I also called up my own early twenties—me with my mouth open, somehow learning. And between sentences I thought of this young man I had invoked, and thought how surprised he would have been to learn that nearly sixty years later he would be again sitting, again with Dr. Suzuki.
20 march 2004. Lunch with Karel and Ed. We discuss the fact that no one will publish us. Karel’s new book, George W. Bush and the Destruction of World Order, cannot be published in America. Publishers already each have one book critical of the Bush policy and want no more, one is enough. Also, since all publishers have now been bought by conglomerates, only those books that will sell well are published. Also, the media has a plot to dominate the world. Ed’s book, apparently about yakuza, but a novel, cannot be published because, he says, no one takes it seriously. My book of short stories has been the round, but, I am told, short stories do not sell. Only I am doing something about this. Next week I take my orphan manuscript to a self-publisher. Whether by he himself or me myself, it will at least be properly printed, if not perhaps properly published.
25 march 2004. Shulamith on the telephone. How much better she sounds. Before, enfeebled by her stroke, she seemed an echo at the end of the line stretching from distant California. Today she holds that line in a firm grip and sounds like herself again, pulling California nearer.
31 march 2004. Reading the Isherwood diaries in bed last night I find this passage: Christopher is writing about the United States and says, “I love this country. I love it just because I don’t belong. Because I’m not involved in its traditions, not born under the curse of its history. I feel free here. I’m on my own. My life will be what I make of it.”
Christopher wrote that March 31, 1940, in Los Angeles. He experienced early what I would later. Much later—it is only recently that I can see what Japan has meant to me. He was about thirty-six when he knew this about America. Took me twice as long.
When I knew him he was past fifty, and naturally did not see here what he saw there. We sat on the bench at the statue of Saigo, and he wondered if I would not find it too narrow, too deep, this valley of an archipelago. And I said, well, yes, compared to wide and shallow America. Then we both laughed.
3 april 2004. Tonight I go to Image Forum and talk about Hijikata Tatsumi. They are showing a long documentary of his last performance, and each Saturday someone involved comes and talks. Tonight it is me, and I show War Games and talk about him.
He had said I would need help making this film, and that he would assist. He was right, without him I could not have made it. I needed a dozen little boys, and it was he who found them, picked them right off the streets of the little port we chose to film in. He, so like a child himself, approached them with a smile and they, recognizing another child, I suppose, came with us. He also found the goat I needed.
With Christopher Isherwood. Tokyo, 1957. don bachardy
The idea was that the goat would be accidentally killed by the children and they would be sorry for this, would have a kind of funeral, but would then forget, would become children again, and would run off down the beach, death forgotten.
Hijikata knew what I wanted, and after the funeral, as the boys were standing solemnly around, he slowly pulled down his trunks and showed them his navel. He pointed at it and gave them a big smile. The boys smiled a little and one nudged another.
I was photographing the boys, and on the screen it seemed as though they were still looking at the dead goat and had just realized that it was only a dead animal.
He then began dancing about, outside the range of the camera, and pointing to his navel. The boys began laughing, one pointing to another. On the screen it appears that the children are no longer seeing that death lies at their feet.
As his dancing became more extravagant, the children began jumping about as well. And on the screen it appeared that they were happy about being able to forget about death, able to deny it. Then he suddenly started running, and the children, a flock of boys, followed. He ran in back of the camera and the boys took off down the beach.
There they go—death, guilt, and remorse all forgotten. It is a lovely shot, the boys running into the distance; the surf rolling in, each wave seemingly higher, for a typhoon is coming, the sea spray blowing across the sand as the boys run further and further.
I watched it again this evening: that beach of forty years ago, those children now maybe grandfathers, Hijikata long dead, and me soon to be eighty.
10 april 2004. Gwen here on her way from London to Sydney. We talk about Crown Princess Masako. She is at the villa in Nagano and refuses to return to the palace. Her constricted life has given her shingles—that answer to constant stress.
We also speculate on the father of her child. For some years, no children. The inbred Crown Prince was suspected of infertility. Then the child. Whose? Gwen says that the customary procedure would have been his brother, in a test tube. But then he is inbred as well, so who could have been called in?
We sympathize, and congratulate ourselves on our own stress-free lives. But shortly we are bemoaning that we have no one with whom to share them. We disguise the need by restricting it to sexuality, but that is not all that we mean.
12 april 2004. Tani calls from Osaka. Remembers that my birthday is some time around now. Knows that I will be eighty. Knows this because he is near seventy and t
here is a decade between our ages. We talk about this. Half a century since I first met him but his voice hasn’t changed. No, he says, but lots else has. Had third of his stomach removed—ulcers. Still smokes, but stopped drinking. And hame hame? I use that old-fashioned Osaka term which I learned first from him. Not much, he says, can’t get it up much any more. We laugh genially at this, two elderly gents sharing a joke, but I know we are both thinking back at the time when he could always get it up.
So what does he do now? He has all the money he will ever need, yet still keeps working; his new hobby is farming. He owns this house and garden in Nara and he grows vegetables—radishes, pumpkins, potatoes, and tomatoes, just everything. I think of him tilling the soil, encouraging a sprout, and feel a wave of affection for him—handsome Tani, his youngest now twenty-four, older than when I first met his father, who now spade in hand, encourages an onion.
He also feels something, because he says he wants to come to Tokyo to see me again. Says we can go to the cabarets and watch the girls. I tell him that there are no more cabarets and those girls are as old as we are, but come anyway, even if he can’t get it up.
We have never talked about ourselves, how we feel about each other. Always we have spoken through the medium of the expected—two guys who have known each other for a long time, which we also are. Lots of jokes, never a word of affection, yet behind this stands what we have been for each other.
He will come to Tokyo this summer, my oldest friend.
14 april 2004. My Kodansha editor Stephen Shaw gives me a birthday party at a Japanese restaurant in Ueno Park, a beautiful boat-shaped room that looks out over the illuminated trees of the park as the soft spring rain falls and we drink champagne and eat kaiseki food. The others are Chris [Blasdel], Paul [McCarthy], Ed [Seidensticker], and Tim [Harris], and we discuss languages and their relative difficulty and beauty.
Ed thinks that Chinese is the ugliest of tongues. Someone quotes Tolkien as saying the most beautiful word in the English language is “cellar door.” I remember that Truman Capote said the most beautiful was “cistern.”
We then turn to belief, Easter being just over. Paul smiles and says that he gave me up for Lent. Ed, a more reluctant Catholic, says he had nothing to give up, he had already given up everything. “No,” says Stephen, “you have given up on everything.” Ed complains that he is still writing, just not being published. This is a pointed rejoinder, since Stephen is with Kodansha, one of his publishers.
Fine food, all of it unrecognizable in the kaiseki manner, and no one gets drunk.
16 april 2004. With Dae-Yung and [Numata] Makiyo to see Fumio in Three Sisters at Kinokuniya Hall. He is the ancient Ferapont and does not have much to do. The others make up for it. Hysteria, the three sisters throwing themselves around, great towering rages among the visiting military. All of the melodrama that Chekhov so carefully hid is dug up in Japanese productions such as this, and flung raw onto the stage. Why? I wonder. Perhaps it is because the Japanese usually hide their melodramatic lives as carefully as did ever Chekhov. The stage offers an opportunity to let everything out. For the same reason stage actors gabble and care little for audibility—they are forced to speak slowly and carefully in real life.
As I watch I remember that it was upon this very stage that Fumio appeared in the four verse dramas I directed here in 1975. He was the young boy in the Yeats, and he lost his trousers in the Gertrude Stein. Thirty years ago, he was about twenty then.
Afterward, at Zakone, where we all went for drinks and something to eat, I ask if he had thought of that early appearance during this later one. He smiles and says that maybe he once did, but that he has now appeared at Kinokuniya so often that he no longer does.
17 april 2004. My eightieth birthday. Dae-Yung is here, and after breakfast we go to Harajuku and see an exhibition of Kobayashi Kiyochika prints of nineteenth-century Tokyo. There are a number of Ueno, and one sketched from just about where I now live. Unrecognizable. The original Benten Shrine was not as pretty as the postwar concrete version, and the trees are different. But, since it is a print, the view seems pristine—as though it is the original and what I see every day is a copy.
Then, buffeted by the fashionable young, we push our way up Omotesando and into the grounds of Meiji Shrine. The contrast—in one step from noise to silence, from fabrication to nature. Here we are surrounded by old trees, whole stands of them, a forest, and a wide gravel path leading to the old gods. This is the way to see Tokyo. It was not called a city of contrasts for nothing.
The late-afternoon sun slides down, the shadows lengthen, and we go to the restaurant in Nakano where Chris and Leza are giving me a birthday party. Tunisian food, wine, friends, and a cake.
18 april 2004. I wander into the future—Roppongi Hills, an enormous complex of high-rise buildings, including a mighty tower near where I used to live. This is the new Japan—gargantuan, expensive, and wasteful. There are, to be sure, concessions to tradition (trad but mod) in the transplantations of zelkova and gingko trees, all of them expensively mature, and in such touches of the Japanesque as a pocket garden here and a teahouse there. But Keyakizaka Street is lined with Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Gucci, Bulgari, and other high-priced merchants. These are matched by the kind of restaurants now called cutting-edge, which are far too expensive to eat in. People who work in the tower complain that they have to leave the Hills and walk far away to find a place to have an affordable lunch.
I am reminded of other places with captive audiences and high prices. It is said that since opening, Roppongi Hills has attracted twenty-six million visitors, double the draw of Disneyland. Yet it is Disneyland, a new model. It is built like one, with all sorts of blandishments and temptations, little byways lined with tourist traps. Again I marvel at the Japanese genius for making space cozy, for anthropomorphizing emptiness. I am also reminded of an airport—this one turned inside out, and open to the friendly skies.
Though there are a lot of cute manga folk around on walls or pavements (standing in for Mickey and Minnie), the real icon is an enormous, nine-meter-high bronze sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. It is in the shape of a spider, some kind of tarantula, and this is somehow fitting.
Roppongi Hills (every hill of which is artificial) cost, it is said, the equivalent of four billion dollars, which might account for the prices now charged there. It costs nearly fifteen dollars to go to the top of the tower for a look around. Mori Minoru, whose company made the place, must somehow manage a return.
I have taken the subway from poor, proletarian Ueno, with its homeless, its bag ladies, its suicides, to this land of the future, futile luxury, and impossible prices. What does it mean? I wonder. Well, it means that Tokyo can, like Calcutta, contain great wealth and great poverty, that there is still fat enough on the old Japanese bones to patronize such an enormous folly as this.
Like all classical follies this one has its tower, and so I go fifty-four stories up to view the city from the height. Out of the great windows I gaze. Here one may look down on high-rise Shinjuku, trace the alleys of pulsing Shibuya, take in Tokyo Tower at eye level, and Mount Fuji, low on the horizon.
I can also look straight down at International House, resting near the base of the tower like a mushroom at the foot of a mighty oak. And I can look at pulsating Roppongi crossing, near which I once had a house, the plot now firmly sat upon by the IBM Tower. And, on the other side of the crossing I can trace, through a maze of alleys I only now see and understand, old Ryudo-cho, a street that long ago lost its venerable name (Dragon’s Way) and is now called Roppongi something-or-other, and there to one side the single, pointillist dot that is the car park where Meredith’s beautiful old farmhouse used to stand.
But eventually I tire of my tiresome nostalgia. It is all very well to regret the past, but it is not very practical because it fails to account for the present, and what is is always more consequential than what was. The present is substantial. It is not there, it is here, and it must be encountered.
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This then, Roppongi Hills, is the new Japan, just as Las Vegas is the new U.S.A. In just a number of years every place will look like it, and this kind of economic expediency will be the rule, as will those cute nods in the direction of retro and trad, that comedy team of contemporary design. Here, under the spider, I look into the future which is already here.
Uncollected Journals
These Japan Journals—plus their appendices, Excluded Pages, Vita Sexualis, and The Persian Journals—are the only edited journals of Donald Richie, but there are many journal collections. Below is a listing, with some indication of mss. and contents. They are in the Donald Richie Archives, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, 771 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 02215
A. 1943–44: paperbound booklet containing mainly thoughts, handwritten.
B. 1945: journal, full-year, wartime travels, bound, leather diary, handwritten.
C. 1945–46: black leather-bound notebook, containing mainly thoughts, dated, handwritten.
D. 1946: paperbound booklet, journal, 1 January–24 March, dated, handwritten.
E. 1953: loose sheets, held by clip, unpaginated, a collection of remembered vignettes from the late 1920s to 1953, titled “A Work in Progress,” typed ms.
F. Blue folder containing uncollected travel diaries from 1955 to 1965, typed ms.
G. 1960: brown cloth notebook, mainly travels, handwritten.
H. 1962: two red spiral notebooks containing all the notes that eventually became The Inland Sea, handwritten.
I. 1963-64: loose sheets, held by clip, unpaginated, notes to analyst, plus “A Report on Transcopal,” typed.
J. 1967: olive cloth-bound notebook containing notes on travels in India, handwritten.
K. New York Journals. 1950–52, computerized print-out, manila envelope.
L. The Persian Journals. 1992–96, computerized print-out, manila envelope.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 62