The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan Book

This was my introduction to Donald Richie, an expert on Japanese film and supposedly on Japanese culture and people. I discovered I did not like this person. In the Foreword, Arturo Silva says Richie is "an expert but with no pretense of being one" despite living in Japan for 50 years so far, but I found Richie made plenty of statements, some quite insulting, as though they were the truth about all Japanese people. He loved old Japan, did not like the "ugly" modern Japan rising from the ashes of WWII. I understood "ugly" to mean Westernized. Yet he stayed, always the "gaijin" foreigner and loving the freedom in being a perpetual outsider. And by "freedom," I understood him to mean he could behave as he wanted and he would be excused for his oddities and apparent ignorance, unlike in his birth country of the US. What fun! Apparently he appreciated being able to have lots of casual sex there (sex is a great souvenir of your travels).

He said things like for the Japanese "there is no god looking over his shoulder... consequentially there is no conscience," he may "feel ashamed but he cannot feel guilty" (p. 196). And "tattooed men must need a simplified life," because those tattoos ensured they would be restricted from life choices, since in Japan tattoos are taboo and signify you are a gangster (yakuza). Or Japanese think "the strong social rules we obey are necessary because otherwise we would not know who we were" (p. 95). Statements like that made me think Richie was full of himself.

On the other hand, Richie is a great writer, good with words and with many astute observations, some that opened my mind to new ways of thinking about certain aspects of Japanese culture and traditions. As an American, I do feel like Japan is an alien world, and I can appreciate how Richie examines everything as though he's found strange new insects. I just didn't like Richie as the person he came across as, and I didn't like when he made up denigrating (IMO) stories about why those people apparently all behave like they do.