The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Book

The opening passage of Donald Richie's Japan Journals begins with a poetic description of a 1947 firebombed Tokyo and the horrific aftermath that its citizens experienced. This is a fictional account, eventually used by one of his characters in his novel Where Are the Victors?. In 1947 Richie had just arrived in Tokyo from Lima, OH. Beginning as a typist for the U.S. Civil Service, he would eventually find work writing for The Pacific Stars and Stripes, an independent news source that operated from the United States Department of Defense. This is the paper that he would cut his teeth on, writing film reviews, and doing little pieces on life in Tokyo. He was twenty-three at this point, and led the richest life an American expatriate could possibly dream of in Japan.

Richie is well-known for his work as a film scholar whose focus is Japanese cinema, albeit he does know his fair share about the French director Robert Bresson. He has written definitive pieces on both Kurosawa and Ozu, and recorded numerous commentary tracks for the Criterion Collection, on such classics as Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story), Mouchette, and Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs). His Hundred Years of Japanese Film is a masterful blend of erudition, cultural insight, and flawless historiography. And he has written numerous books on Japanese culture. In the American filmmaker Paul Schrader's words, "Whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie." Richie stands as a marginal figure amongst most Japanese scholars, such as Donald Keene and Arthur Waley; seemingly less academic, but this may have something to do with the fact that Richie has lived a majority of his eighty-six year old life in Japan, and his observations are much less academically removed. If nothing else, he is America's preeminent scholar of Japanese film, and he presents this information with the theoretical agenda of a cineaste who finds importance in social and historical context.

Reading these entries opens the reader up to a breadth of knowledge that completely transcends that of mere film comment. The early entries make mention of such French writers as Andre Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre; both literary inspirations for Richie to begin keeping a journal of his own. As a young man, we come to understand that Richie didn't initially have a specific interest in Japan. Early on, he was motivated by the possibility of escaping the Midwest, as the Civil Service offered at the time. In 1947 the United States occupied post-war Japan, and many Americans took the opportunity to travel abroad. It's interesting reading about his first encounter with the famous Zen Buddhist Suzuki Daisetz bearing an offering of Ritz, Spam, and Velveeta (a contrived care-package from the PX). At this point he meets a few fellow expatriates by the names of Eugene Langston and Herschel Webb. Impressed by their ability to speak the language and talk at length about the arts and culture of the country (as well as their mutual adoration for Marcel Proust), Richie begins his own expatriate journey, making friendships with some of Japan's most famous and well-respected artists. Of course, timing was crucial because anyone who just happened upon the set of Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, was clearly in the right place at the right time. An interesting way of paraphrasing Richie's life in Japan would be to say that he is sort of like Japan's answer to Forrest Gump (sort of), yet far more articulate. He would become good friends with Mishima Yukio, enough so that he showed Mishima around New York the first time the author visited the states, and probably the only English speaking writer to comment upon the author's famously odd suicide. He was friends with Kawabata, showed an ungrateful Truman Capote around Tokyo (Capote complained of a lack of "Tenpenny's", in other words, too many small penises) as well as the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia (who spent most of his trip nauseous, longing for Italy), generally found himself surrounded by famous and talented personalities (from all over the world really), befriended directors Oshima Nagisa, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira, experienced the political and social effects of the Aum terrorist attacks, won the Japan Foundation Award in 1995, and intently observed a poverty stricken, post-war Japan metamorphose into an economic superpower.

A majority of the journals present Richie as something of a cultural elitist. This characteristic snobbishness is, in so many ways, responsible for the sharp and perceptive insights that he has to offer on Japanese culture. Granted, many contemporary film critics have complained about Richie's conservative and classicist bent. This attitude is most apparent in his entries throughout the nineties, as he constantly bemoans the seemingly tasteless departure from traditional Japanese values that he sees growing around him. So naturally, the go-to film scholar on Ozu, a youth of the American occupation of Japan, is going to frown on young Japanese walking while eating in public (once considered vulgar etiquette in Japan). He also has an almost obsessive problem with the technological introduction of the Walkman, complaining of young Japanese constantly ignoring or disrespecting their elders. Although, reading Richie, the somewhat conservative westerner (writing about complaints that occasionally sound Japanese), frown on this lack of reverence for tradition that he sees in contemporary Japanese public life is part of the beauty of his journals, as he laments his inability to accept one of his favorite Japanese philosophical and religious concepts, mono no aware*.

This nuanced awareness comes across through the sadness of reading about his close friends passing away as he grows older. Many of his close friends begin passing away in the nineties. Richie himself, has a bypass surgery due to Angina Pectoris, and is asthmatic (and so he must quit smoking). What's truly interesting is to read a man coming to grips with death, one who has grown old in a culture that seems to accept the process of aging and decay in a much different light than his native country does. Of course, like many cinephiles and writers, he finds a certain consolation and source of solace in the endless supply of cultural beauty around him; in the films of Ozu, in the multi-personae, histrionic legacy of his close friend Mishima, in the subtlety of a Noh play, and in the abstract beauty to be found in the feeling of never truly being "at home".

His personal life reveals itself with much more naked immediacy as he comes closer to the age of ninety. The biographical fact of his homosexuality was never revealed earlier in his life. Richie, always the lone escapist, doesn't identify as a homosexual because the word has communal, or group connotations to it; he'd much prefer the epithet queer. A few raunchy episodes are narrated here and there, but there is very little emphasis placed on this aspect of his lifestyle. This contributes to Richie's inability to attach, or fall in love with just one thing or person.

Most telling are his views on being an American expatriate. There are several discussions that he has with his close friend such as Ed Seidensticker (who did a translation of Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji). They talk about what drew them to Japan in the first place. At first, Richie offers the vague explanation of the basic desire to travel, coupled with a fondness for Japan in particular, but as he ages along with the country itself, he rethinks this motivation. In a particularly insightful entry for January 25th, 2004 he explains in a very personal and profound way, the puzzling ironies inherent in the act people devoting themselves to a country that they were not born in, "But I never devoted myself. What I have done is to describe myself through Japan. People who do not read carefully still ask when I first fell in love with Japan. I never did. I liked the place from the first, but I fell in love with other places-Greece, for example; Morocco, for example. What I have done is to draw and redraw my portrait in front of the backdrop of Japan. I have exemplified what Helen Mears devoted Japan, Mirror for Americans to. You look into this country and find yourself reflected." And so, in a 2004 interview, a young Japanese graduate seems to understand this explanation when she summarizes his relationship with Japan as such, "I now understand. You discovered the virtues of being an outsider. And you would not have had you not been excluded. It was the benefits of stigma that you discovered here." Apart from his varied wealth of writings on Japanese art, Donald Richie has made his own life into a human masterpiece; a sad and moving account of a distant observer who is now closing in on his last days in a land that he can finally consider home.

*Literally translated as "the pathos of things", or empathy toward things". This concept was originally coined by the eighteenth century literary and linguistic scholar Norinaga Motoori. Mono no aware basically implies an acceptance of the transient nature of being. Richie most likely was introduced to it, and became fond of it, through his exposure to, and appreciation of, the films of Ozu Yasujiro because this concept permeates almost every Ozu film.