The Japan Journals

1947—2004

The Japan Journals begins with an evocation of early morning in Tokyo, 1947, not long after Richie‘s first arrival. It is based on early journal entries. Other sections of this early journal have appeared elsewhere, for example as the opening to Richie’s first novel, Where Are the Victors? (aka This Scorching Earth, 1955). The account of the destruction of Tokyo that follows this is taken from interviews and then given to one of the characters in the novel. For another memoir, In Between, Richie used pages about meeting a number of people. These are here reconstructed. There are also memoir reworkings of material that appears in different form in the Donald Richie Reader (2001).

winter 1947. Tokyo lies deep under a bank of clouds which move slowly out to sea as the sun climbs higher. Between the moving clouds are sections of the city: the raw gray of whole burned blocks spotted with the yellow of new-cut wood and the shining tile of recent roofs, the reds and browns of sections unburned, the dusty green of barely damaged parks, and the shallow blue of ornamental lakes. In the middle is the palace, moated and rectangular, gray outlined with green, the city stretching to the horizons all around it.

The smoke of early household hearths, of newly renovated factories, of the waiting, charcoal-burning taxis, rises and with it the freshness of late winter, the bitter yellow smoke of burning cedar shavings, the smell of breakfast: barley, sweet potato, roasted chestnuts. In the houses the bedding is folded into closets and tatami mats are swept.

Beneath the hanging pillars of the early rising smoke there is the morning rattling of night shutters thrust back into the narrow walls. Behind the banging of the shutters is the sound of wooden geta—the faint percussive sound of people walking—and the distant bronze boom of a temple bell. Jeeps explode into motion, and the tinny clang of the streetcars sound above the bleatings of the nearby fishing boats. Somewhere a phonograph is running down—Josephine Baker goes from contralto to baritone.

A distant radio militantly delivers the Japanese news of the day and a few MPs, still in pairs, roam the recently empty streets. A single woman, modest in bright red, knees together, maybe a geisha going home, hurries. Greer Garson luxuriates, her paper face half in the morning sun, and a man dressed like Charlie Chaplin, a placard on his shoulders, begins his daily advertising.

In the alleys, the empty pedicabs are lined up, and around the early alley fires the all-night drivers yawn and warm their hands while early farmers lead their laden horses into the city. An empty Occupation bus, with “Dallas” stenciled on both sides, makes its customary stops—the PX, the Commissary, the Motor Pool—but no riders are in it. Occupation women with khaki skirts, out early, try unsuccessfully to hail a passing U.S. 8th Army jeep.

The rising sun is now caught by the blank windows of the taller buildings and casts reflections—the silver flash of spectacles, a passing gold tooth, the dead white of a mouth-mask. The food shops open and the spicy bitterness of pickled radish mingles with the sweet stench of fish, mingles with the scents of the passing nightsoil carrier, his oxen and his cart.

The rolled metal shutters of the smaller shops are still locked but before the open entrances of larger buildings MPs stand and wait, their white-gloved hands behind their backs, their white helmets above their white faces. They stand in front of most of the Occupation buildings—the gray Dai Ichi Building, the square Meiji Building, the pale Taisho Building, the squat Yusen. To the south rises the box-like Radio Tokyo and, in all directions, the billets of the Occupation itself, the American flag floating above them.

The clouds drift out to sea and the city lies under the winter sun. The pedicab drivers go home, and the wives serve the morning soup. The sun and smoke rise into the air and the radios shout into the sky, while the streetcars rattle and the auto horns honk, and the fishing boats cry, and the railroads fill up the city.

The account of the destruction of Tokyo that follows is taken from interviews and then given to one of the characters in Richie’s novel Where Are the Victors?

Tokyo/Shinjuku, Winter, 1947. eighth army signal corps

He remembered the day. It was in a cool, sunny, unseasonably windy March [1945]. The children who had them still wore their furs. His two sisters, dressed alike in little fur hoods with cats’ heads embroidered on them, were sent off to school, and his father went to work next door at his lumberyard.

It was the third day of a leave from the Army. He had a new lieutenant’s uniform. His mother wanted him to stay near home and call on the neighbors. He wanted to walk around the city and show off his new uniform.

Their home was in Fukagawa, which was like no place else in Tokyo. The carpenters pulled their saws, and the logs floated in the canals. The factories blew smoke to the sky, and the dye from the chemical plants made the canals green as leaves. The Chinese ran restaurants and even the poor Koreans happily opened oysters all day long.

Some of Tokyo had already been bombed, but those few districts were far away, and the people in the rest of the city were not afraid. The radio said that the Americans dropped bombs indiscriminately and that there was no need to fear a mass attack as the radar would detect the intruders and give ample time for escape.

Just a year before Fukagawa had been bombed, but the damage had been slight. The bombs fell mostly into the countryside and people decided that the Americans were not very skilled in this important matter of bomb dropping. Fukagawa, in the suburbs, seemed as safe as Shinbashi, in the center.

[That evening] he heard the watchman at eleven when the call of the watch was interrupted by the air-raid sirens. Earlier in the afternoon, while at the movies, he had heard an alert, but the all clear had sounded immediately after.

Now he walked swiftly through Shinbashi Station and ran through the standing passengers, past the halted trains, to the top level of the station. He didn’t really expect to see anything. He only wanted to be soldierly.

He arrived just in time to see the sudden flare of massed incendiary bombs. It was Fukagawa. The planes were apparently traveling at great speed. It was impossible to say how many there were but it seemed hundreds.

A great ring of fire was spreading. The planes were so low he couldn’t see them and could tell where they had been only by the fires that sprang behind them. There was an enormous explosion, like August rockets on the Sumida River, and a great ball of fire fell back on the district. A chemical plant had been hit. Seconds later he felt the warm burst of air from the blast, miles away.

Later he heard that the planes had come in so low that they escaped the radar. The antiaircraft could do nothing against planes that near and that swift. The stiff March wind spread the flames and he later remembered thinking of the canals that cut through the section, and thought that people would at least find safety in the water. There would be water enough for everyone.

He didn’t remember how long he stood on the top platform of Shinbashi Station and watched the destruction of Fukagawa, Honjo, Asakusa, Ueno. But he remembered wondering why they were so selective—why not the Ginza, why not Shinbashi, why not he himself? He later remembered walking up the deserted streets past the closed motion picture house where he had been that afternoon. It was near dawn when he reached the bridge across the Sumida, the last pink of the fires replaced by the first pink of dawn.

There he saw those coming from Fukagawa. Most had been burned. They carried scorched bedding on their backs, or trundled bicycles with possessions strapped to them. They walked slowly and did not look at him as they passed. He wondered where they were all going and stopped an old man who told him that everything had been burned, and that everyone had been killed.

He walked across the bridge and finally reached Fukagawa. He could not believe what he saw. There was nothing. Nothing but black and smoking ruins as far as he could see. He had never known that so much could be destroyed in one night.

On the street he found a bicycle that belonged to no one and on it he started toward his home. But nothing looked the same. There were no streets any more. In cleared places were piles of burned bodies, as though a family had huddled beneath a roof that had now vanished. They seemed very small and looked like charcoal.

He peddled slowly along what had been a street. Long lines of quiet, burned people, all looking the same, came toward him. He didn’t know where to turn north to go to his father’s lumberyard. Nothing was familiar. He leaned his bicycle against a smoking factory wall and looked toward where his home should have been but wasn’t. The lines of the burned moved slowly by, and suddenly he began to cry.

After he had cried he looked at the people again and saw his younger brother coming toward him. They stood, looking at each other, amazed that such a thing could happen. His brother had spent the night at school because he had had to finish a war work project of some kind, and he had not heard about the raid until he woke up. Now he too had just arrived and didn’t know where their home was either. So in the growing light they began walking.

Troops had been brought in and were clearing the streets, or where they supposed streets had been. They shifted the bodies with large hooks and loaded them, one after the other, onto trucks. Often the burned flesh pulled apart, making the work more difficult.

[The brothers] walked on, past mothers holding burned babies to their breasts, past little children, boys and girls, all dead, crouched together as though for warmth. Once they passed an air-raid shelter and looked in. It was full of bodies, many of them still smoldering.

The next bridge was destroyed, so they decided to separate. His brother would go north and he south. It was the first time they had used these terms with each other. Usually they spoke of up by the elementary school or down by the chemical plant. His brother started crying and walked away, rubbing his eyes. They were to meet at their uncle’s house in Shinagawa.

He walked south to the factory sections. The chemical works had exploded and what little remained was too hot to get near. Some of the walls were standing, burned a bright green from the dye, the color of leaves. In a locomotive yard the engines were smoking, as though ready for a journey, the cars jammed together as in a railway accident.

There were some in the ruins still alive, burned or wounded. Those who couldn’t walk were patiently waiting for help by the side of the tracks. There was no sound but the moaning of an old woman. It sounded like a lullaby.

He saw only two ambulances. They were full of wounded, lying there as though dead. Farther on, prisoners of war were clearing the smoking ruins. They wore red uniforms and carried blankets to remove the dead.

Eventually he recognized the Susaki district. Yesterday it had been a pleasure center, with sidewalk stalls, music, women peeping from behind latticework screens. Now there was nothing. The houses, like all the decorations, had been made only of wood and paper and had burned almost at once. Now no one moved. He turned back.

The small bridges across the canals had been burned. He had to stay on the large island connected to Nihonbashi by the bridge across the Sumida. He looked across the canals and saw people still alive on the little, smoking islands. They shouted and waved, but there was nothing he could do, so he went on. Some were swimming across to the large island. They had to push aside others who floated there, face down.

In a burned primary school he saw the bodies of children who had run there, to their teachers, for protection. Later he learned that there were two thousand dead children in that school alone. They lay face down on the scorched concrete floor, as though asleep. The kimono of some still smoked. The teachers to whom they had fled lay among them.

It was past noon when, suddenly very tired, he walked back across the bridge to Nihonbashi where he took a trolley to Shinagawa. It stopped continually. It was filled with wounded. Others, less wounded, hung from the roof and the sides. He could have arrived sooner by walking.

At his uncle’s house he found his brother and, surprisingly, his uncle. The latter’s arm was badly burned. He had come home that afternoon, walking the entire distance. He told them about their family. They had been sitting at the table, his sister and himself. The younger girls had already gone to bed and his brother-in-law was at Susaki.

The first planes bombed around Fukagawa, and then closed the circle, making it smaller and smaller. It was hard to escape because it happened so fast. Almost instantly there was fire on all sides.

By the time the air-raid sirens had begun they heard the explosions, and flames were leaping up in the distance. The planes wheeled over them and the circle of fire was much nearer. They got the girls up, but by the time they were dressed the fire was only a block away. They tried to escape from the lumberyard but the little bridge that led to the Tokyo road was burning. So they climbed into the canal in back of the house.

Bombs were constantly dropping and finally one of them hit the neighborhood. The heat was terrible. Even the logs in the canal began to smoke. They watched the fire spread, in just a few seconds, to the storehouses and across the entire island. His mother and sisters held onto a log and began to cry.

Their uncle found a pan and dipped water over their heads and shoulders. The little fur hoods with cats embroidered on them helped protect the children for a while, but when the fur began smoking, he tore off the hoods and poured water directly on their hair. The half of the log above water cracked in the heat but he kept on pouring.

There he had remained until early morning. Around one, the fire burning around them just as fiercely as before, he became very tired. He tried to get a better grip on the log but found his arm so burned that it stuck to the wood. He was not able both to hold up his sister and nieces and at the same time continue to pour water on them.

They were very quiet and, he was sure, unconscious. His arm was so tired that he too must have lost consciousness. The pain of his arm’s slipping across the burning log woke him. The mother and two little girls were gone.

The next day he and his brother went again to Fukagawa. It was now filled with rescue workers. They found their canal and where their home had been. Everything was gone. Only the ground remained. They identified the house from its foundation stones. Near where the house had been they were removing bodies. He tried to find some of the neighbors but couldn’t—everyone there was a stranger. No one knew where his father’s workers were either. They had lived above the warehouse where the finished lumber had been stored.

Later he learned that thirty thousand people had been killed that night. Some said it was the unseasonable wind that had done the most damage. It spread the fire and heat. The explosions caused more wind until, about one in the morning, it blew through the flames at a mile a minute.

It was almost a week before the Emperor inspected the ruins. By this time the bodies had all been removed. Already the streets were being mapped and bright wooden bridges connected the islands. People said that the Army had delayed the Emperor’s arrival. They didn’t want him to see how terrible the fire had been. If he had, he would have stopped the war at once. But now, with a new week’s fighting begun, he could do nothing about it. It was the fault of the Army.

For the rest of the summer his brother lived with his uncle and he himself was sent to Tachikawa Air Base. Then it was August and the war was over. When he saw Fukagawa again people were living there once more. The main business was still lumber. Before the fire there had been over two thousand lumber dealers, but now there were only a little over a hundred. There were no chemical plants but the dye works had opened and the canals were green again. The Chinese restaurants were thriving as usual and even small Korean centers had sprung up. But now their old occupation—opening oysters—had been taken over the Japanese. It was about the only way to make a living in Fukagawa.

*

From the window of my billet, Kyobashi looks like Hiroshima—the same holes where whole buildings once were, the same odd empty spaces in what once was solid street. Further off there are more buildings standing, though separately, revealing that there was once something between.

At the Ginza crossing there are quite a few buildings standing. The Mitsu­koshi Department Store, gutted, hit by a firebomb, even the window frames twisted by the heat. Across the street is the white stone Hattori Building, its clock tower with its cornices and pediments much as it had been.

There is not much else left: the ruins of the burned-out Kabuki-za, the round, red, drum-like Nichigeki, undamaged. At Yurakucho, on the edge of the Ginza, are a few office buildings and the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater, now renamed the Ernie Pyle.

Otherwise, block after block of rubble, stretching to the horizon. Wooden buildings do not survive firestorms. Those that stand were made of stone or brick. Yet, already, among these ruins there is the yellow sheen of new wood. People are returning to the city.

*

I have some photos taken last year in the subway corridors of Ueno Station. There, sitting or lying on straw mats or the bare concrete, are some of the thousands of the hungry homeless. Men, women, a few children,

In one photo, they are being inspected by two bespectacled policemen wearing mouth masks. Many of the people are dirty, and all wear remnants of what they had owned during the war: cracked shoes, torn blouses, battered hats, buttonless shirts. But no one looks sad.

Tokyo/Ginza, Winter, 1947. eighth army signal corps

Everyone is smiling—everyone except the policemen, and maybe they are as well beneath their masks. Smiling for the camera, making a good impression, best foot forward. Even in the depths of national poverty everyone remembers this.

Up above, on the plaza, around the statue of Saigo Takamori, there are many more, sitting on benches and embankments—all of them waiting. Waiting, it seemed, for this too to pass so that they can get on with their lives.

Many have been and gone. The pedestal of Saigo’s statue is plastered with handwritten notices; I had someone look at the photo and read them to me. “Watanabe Nori­ko—Your Mother Waits Here Every Day from One to Five; Grandmother Kumagai—Shiro and Tetsu­ko Have Gone to Uncle Sato’s in Ao­mori—Please Come; Suzuki Tetsuro—Your Father Is Sitting on the Staircase to the Left—If You See This Please Come.”

The snows and rains have washed the older notices away and new ones are put up. They are like the votive messages left at shrines, invoking supernatural aid. Answered or not, they are left there until rained away or covered by notices of later misfortunes.

Though many entries were used in Where Are the Victors? (1956) and Public People, Private People (1987), a few unused pages remain. Among them are accounts of meeting the writer Kawabata Yasunari and the Zen scholar Suzuki Daisetz that are somewhat different from those in Public People, Private People and Zen Inklings. The continuations about Kawabata occur in their proper chronological places—9 January 1960 and 1 January 1973.

early spring 1947. The Sumida River, silver in the winter sun, glistened beneath us. We were on the roof of the Asakusa subway terminal tower, looking out over downtown Tokyo, still in ruins, still showing the conflagration of two years earlier, burned concrete black against the lemon yellow of new wood.

Ueno Subway Station, 1946. stars and stripes

This had been the amusement quarter of Tokyo. Around the great temple of Kannon, now a blackened, empty square, had grown a warren of bars, theaters, archery stalls, circus tents, peep shows, places where the all-girl opera sang and kicked, where the tattooed gamblers met and bet, where trained dogs walked on hind legs, and Japan’s fattest lady sat in state.

Now two years after all of this had gone up in flames, after so many of those who worked and played here had burned in the streets or boiled in the canals as the incendiary bombs fell and the B-29s thundered—now, the empty squares were again turning into lanes as tents, reed lean-tos, a few frame buildings began appearing. Girls in wedgies were sitting in front of new tearooms, but I saw no sign of the world’s fattest lady. Perhaps she had bubbled away in the fire.

Was that what he was thinking?—I wondered, looking at the avian profile of the middle-aged man standing beside me, outlined against the pale winter sky.

Ueno Plaza, 1946. stars and stripes

I had no way of knowing. He spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese. I did not know that Kawa­bata Yasunari was already famous and would become more famous yet. But I did know he was a writer because I had heard he had written about Asakusa and it was the place itself that interested me.

“Yumiko,” I said, pointing to the silver river beneath us. This was the name of the heroine of the novel, Asakusa Kurenaidan, which Kawabata had written when he—twenty years before, then about the same age I was, and as enraptured of the place as I was now—walked the labyrinth and saw, as he later wrote, the jazz reviews, the kiss-dances, the exhibitions of the White Russian girls, and the passing Japanese flappers with their rolled stockings. Yumiko had confronted the gangster, crushed an arsenic pill between her teeth, and then kissed him full on the lips.

Kawabata Yasunari. donald richie

Perhaps he was thinking of this scene from his novel and of the lost Yumiko, tough, muscled, beautiful. Or, looking over that blackened landscape, under this huge white winter sky, he was perhaps feeling a great sorrow. All those lives lost in that blazing, roaring conflagration beneath.

Imagining a sadness that I assumed that I in his place would be feeling, I looked at that birdlike profile. It did not seem sad. Rather, Kawabata smiled, looked over the parapet and indicated the river.

This was where, I knew, the insolent Yumiko, having given the kiss of death to the older man (who, it transpired, was the lover of the local madwoman who, it turned out, was really our heroine’s sister), leaped through the porthole of the waiting boat, and sped away just as the water police arrived.

I knew all this without knowing any Japanese because as a member of the Allied Occupation I had translators at my command and had ordered an English précis of the novel. Now, looking at the author leaning over the edge, as had Left-Handed Hiko as he spied the escaping Yumiko, I thought about Kawabata’s love for Asakusa.

He had begun his book with the intention “to write a long and curious story set in Asakusa . . . in which vulgar women predominate.” It had perhaps been for him as it was for me, a place that allowed anonymity, freedom, where life flowed on no matter what, where you could pick up pleasure, and where small rooms with paper flowers were rented by the hour.

Did he, I wonder, find freedom in flesh, as I had learned to? It was here, on the roof of the terminal, that Oharu had permitted herself to be kissed—and more—by members of the gang and had thus earned herself the title of Bride of the Eiffel Tower. It was here that the Akaobi-kan, that group of red-sashed girls who in the daytime worked in respectable department stores, boasted about the bad things they did at night. Here that Umekichi disclosed that he had been raped at the age of six by a forty-year-old woman.

I wondered at all of this but had no way of asking. And now, chilled by that great sky, we went down the steep stairs, companionable but inarticulate. I had given him an outing; he had given me his bird’s eye view of Asakusa.

early summer 1947—kita kamakura. I stood before the great gate at Engakuji. The naked guardians grimaced, the carved eaves stretched above me, the roof soared and touched the pines. I was about to enter the abode of the Buddha, the world of Daruma, the land of Zen. I said the word softly to myself—the cicada-like drone of the syllable, the sudden halt of the consonant.

As I did a soft summer breeze struck the overhead pines. The needles rustled and from them fell a fragrance I had known as a child. Looking up, deep into that glittering green, I felt a memory surface, then turn and disappear before I could recognize it. But its passing brought a tear—just one, but real.

Then I was walking through the gate and into the temple, only an hour from Tokyo but already another world to me. In the silence I looked around—the main temple, the graveyard, what I took to be the zendo, a number of vegetable patches.

Around in back I found the small tiled-roof house. There I waited, letter and gifts in hand, waited for my teacher. I had read that the Zen adept waited all day—all night too, through rain, through snow. None of this, however, proved necessary, for the man I had come to see, who had not known I was coming nor that he was my teacher, soon noticed the large foreigner standing in the cabbage patch and came out on the veranda.

Suzuki Daisetz. donald richie

Suzuki Daisetz was a small man with steel spectacles hooked behind his ears, long hairs in his eyebrows, several moles. He was in a rumpled kimono and he cocked his head to one side as he peered at the intruder. He looked like an older man just awakened, but to me he was the picture of Zen: the fuzzy eyebrows, the high forehead, the childlike gaze—my patriarch.

He read the letter of introduction from the wife of a colleague, deceased in New York. And he received my offerings—Ritz, Spam, Velveeta, all that the Army PX could contrive. These the patriarch bundled away and then returned with a cup of tepid cracked-wheat tea for me. And there I was, finally, sitting on a cane chair on the veranda of my teacher, inhaling the smell of the tea and the odor of temple—mildew, mice, old paper. Deeply I breathed in the scent of what I took to be sutras, moldering and holy. Now my learning would begin—I had found my roshi.

Only I had not. It was not that he refused to be my teacher but that he refused to be anyone’s teacher. He was, he insisted, no matter the priestly resemblance, a layman. If anything he was a learner too.

This was told me in English accented by years in London. Still, he added, sounding like a British don, as a learner he had learned a lot. Yet, though he knew about mountain climbing he had never climbed Mount Sumeru.

He then waited for me to catch up. I knew that this was a fabled Buddhist peak, the scaled summit of which, I hazarded, meant satori. So this statement I took to mean that he had not himself yet reached what I fancied to be the terminal of Zen Buddhism.

One of the things he did know, however, he said, was that one did not climb mountains by merely looking at them. All too many people, he maintained, thought that Zen was some sort of mysticism, concerned with visions of the eternal and the like, that you simply sat and looked at it. This was not so.

Dr. Suzuki I later learned often defined things by what they were not. His remarks on Zen—gleaned by me over a series of Sunday afternoons, outside the pines sighing in the summer winds, inside the still smell of mice droppings—were entirely negative. The only positive description I received was that mountain climbing was hard work.

This was given with a glance in my direction. It had been ascertained that I never worked. Further, it was understood between us that I never would. Our bond, in that we had one, was that he did not either. Not if you defined work as zazen.

But that was what I had come for so he introduced me into the zendo and I had indeed sat for a time on my folded legs, my mind busy with what I had done that morning, what I would do later that afternoon, and wondering in what form my illumination would arrive.

This—my believing I was practicing zazen—went on for a time. The others, all Japanese, paid no attention to the interloper. They sat properly, eyes unfocused, backs straight, minds empty. They were on their way—traveling at great speed sitting completely still.

I, on the other hand, was shortly complaining that my legs hurt. Also I had questions, wanted descriptions and assurances. Consequently, after a short time, while others sat in the lotus position in the zendo, I sat comfortably on the sofa with Dr. Suzuki.

There he talked and I listened, hoping that learning would somehow rub off. In a way it did, because Dr. Suzuki eventually gave me an appetite for something he knew I could never eat.

Every Sunday I would appear with my crackers and cheeses, canned meats, peanut clusters—offerings from the PX for my sensei. These he would graciously receive and carry off to the larder. In return I would be given my cup of tea and a talk. It was always about Zen and I never understood a word. Or, rather, it was the words alone I understood—and sometimes the sentences, but never the paragraphs. Still, I was learning.

Other discourses I had heard were rational, logical, but Dr. Suzuki’s were something else. The process seemed associative, one thought suggesting another, apparently at random. But, as one idea followed another, I saw the randomness was only apparent. Each was attached to the other by the linearity they formed.

And as I listened I understood that there were other means of structuring thought, ways of thinking different from those I had always known and believed unique.

This was really all I ever learned from my teacher but it was a lesson of the greatest importance. Dr. Suzuki never gave me satori in exchange for my Velveeta, but he gave me the priceless apprehension of other modes of thought.

He also initially gave me a koan—the one about Nansen’s cat. This eminent Zen master saw two monks quarreling over the animal. He held it up and said that if they could give an answer the cat would be saved—otherwise not. Not knowing what to answer, there being no apparent question, they were silent and Nansen cut the cat in two. Later he told another priest about the incident. This person removed a sandal, placed it on his head, and walked off. Nansen then said that had he been there the cat would have been saved.

It is typical of my disposition that the first and only reaction was a concern for the unfortunate feline. And, of course, I too came nowhere near a reply since I did not comprehend that an enquiry was concerned.

Dr. Suzuki was patient. Either he saw something in me to interest him or he really needed the cheese and crackers. And so we continued until one early summer day with the cicadas screaming—zen, zen, zen—he smiled and said that I need not come again.

I understood his reasons but felt rejected. This he saw, stood up, and took a picture from the wall. It was a seated Kannon, black ink on white paper, framed in wicker, an oval picture of great beauty that I had often seen and admired.

It was also a genuine Hakuin. He told me to take it home with me and live with it for a while. He did not tell me why or for how long, but I understood that I would eventually return it to him.

The blow softened, I held Kannon on my lap all the way back to Tokyo. And as the train pulled from the Kita-Kamakura station I seemed to smell again the pines, and thought about that vanishing thought that had surfaced and disappeared. No longer feeling sorry for myself, clear-eyed, I patted the picture.

Some months later, already autumn, I was again on a train—a streetcar, rounding the corner at Ueno Park. Suddenly I again smelled the great pines of Kamakura. The scent, strong as the smell of the sea, swooped upon me, and the forgotten memory lay there basking. It was the smell of bath salts, pine-scented, that were put in the tub if I had been a good boy.

That then was why I felt so young, as though the world was just beginning, when I stood, single tear on cheek, in front of the great gate of Engakuji. I told my companion.

“How very fascinating,” he said. Then, as he often did, he turned the experience into something of his own. “I often have had experiences like that,” he said. “I am very close to my childhood. Though with me it is cinnamon toast.”

And he brushed back his salt and pepper hair, cut in the loose and boyish fashion then favored by Englishmen of his age—not as old as my sensei but considerably older than I.

This was R. H. Blyth, a friend of Dr. Suzuki’s, whom I had met at Engakuji where he had regarded my efforts on the sofa with a silent but apparent amusement.

“Bath salts, eh? Perhaps you thought that Zen would be a hot bath? More like a cold shower, eh, what? Not that I know much about it.”

And he tossed his head as he usually did when he said this, always thus disassociating himself from the Zen that had appeared in the titles of several of his books. “No, no. Literature. I am all literature. Never knew anything about Zen. Fact is, you know, no one does.”

When I would bring up some Buddhist matter, he would answer with an affectionate scorn, “Oh, that stuff. That’s old Suzuki’s department, scarcely mine. Give me Wordsworth any day.”

Then he would quote something. He was a prodigious quoter, could go on for whole paragraphs, and never apparently make a mistake. Then, “What do you want to study that stuff for anyway?”

I told him that I didn’t study, not really, just listened to Dr. Suzuki.

“Well, that’s better,” he said, as though mollified. Then, “There is nothing the matter with it, you understand. It’s just that it’s not for study.” Then, “Suzuki’s a great talker.” This was presented as fact rather than opinion. We knew what that stuff was worth. It was worth a great deal. It was not worth all that much.

As I listened to Blyth, who was also a great talker, I sat back and appreciated the rationality, the logic. He usually expounded on Wordsworth or Blake or the haiku. And what he said seemed to me attractively vague after the rock-hard incomprehensibilities of Dr. Suzuki. And Blyth’s concept of revelation was quite different from that of my sensei. It was not the result of time and hard work. Wordsworthian revelation could occur just about any time, any place.

“It could occur even in bed. Oh, yes, seriously. Suddenly. In bed.”

Then he regarded me in an owlish manner and I remembered his having told me of a beautiful girl who was apparently a member of his large and attractively disordered household. I smiled, picturing him in a sudden state of satori, and at that moment my eyes opened, my smile faded, and I saw a connection—a real one, a bridge of living tissue between my faltering need for religion, my inclination for whatever I thought Zen was, and something I knew quite well: that inchoate bundle of needs, satisfactions and exhaustions which I called my sex life.

The pines of Ueno had long passed but now their fragrance returned. The bridge was there. Another means of thought had been revealed, and for the first time Zen seemed real to me.

Kannon was again sitting on my lap. I was returning her to Engakuji. The plum blossoms had passed, the cherry blossoms were budding, and it was raining. I had lived with Kannon for more than half a year, had derived comfort, pleasure, and pride—a Hakuin on my humble wall. Then, as is the way with pictures, or as is the way with me, I gradually forgot about it. Now, carefully wrapped, she rested on my knees. Going home.

Once there we sat in the now nostalgic odor of mice. Dr. Suzuki removed the wrapping, and held the picture at arm’s length as though to renew acquaintance. Then back she went on the wall.

I thanked him for everything and he smiled. Then, as though offering a further gift, “Not at all, Mr. Richie. You are, you know, very much of this world, very much of this flesh.”

He then smiled as though the smile were a way of shaking an understanding head at the ways of this world. And he was right about me. I nodded and as I admitted this to myself I understood—a kind of illumination it was—that I had no vocation and never would, not because anything was missing but because I would never summon up the necessary discipline. Not that it was impossible—nothing is impossible—merely that it was very unlikely.

I looked at Kannon, back on the wall and looking at home no matter what wall she was on, and at Dr. Suzuki, always a man in the present tense, and I thought of the slender but sturdy bridge that now connected me to my own reality.

Richie’s billet was the Continental Hotel, originally the main office of Ajinomoto KK until the Occupation moved in. There he roomed with Herschel Webb and Eugene Langston, who became Japanese scholars. For a memoir Richie reworked some of the 1947 journal entries that told how he met them.

summer 1947. I was late for breakfast and all the tables in the basement dining room were taken, so I asked a man reading a book if I could sit with him. He looked up and smiled, but so politely and so briefly that I was not tempted to begin a conversation. Until I saw what he was reading—then we had lots to talk about.

The book was Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the reader was named Gene Langston and though only a few years older than I, he had already met the author.

“What was she like?” I wanted to know.

“Well, let me see,” he began—a reasoned response which I soon learned was typical of him. “A bit abrupt, dark, not given to smiling, at least not with me. She was lesbian, of course.”

I marveled. Never had it occurred to me that authors might share attributes with their characters.

“Not that that is either here or there,” he said, a smile already apologizing for an observation which might have been misinterpreted as criticism. He did not criticize, the smile said.

Then, learning that I too had read the book, he became more interested—for it was unlikely that two members of the Allied Occupation of Japan were both reading Nightwood.

He also became more confiding and said that the character he liked best so far was the doctor. All I remembered about the doctor was his saying that what he wanted in life was to cook some good man’s potatoes. But perhaps my new acquaintance had not yet gotten that far in the book. In any event it was too early in our relationship for me to mention it.

Instead, I asked about his work. It was in ATIS, the translation section. Yes, he could read and write Japanese.

Tokyo/Hibiya Crossing, Dai-Ichi Building, 1947. eighth army signal corps

“And speak it too?” I wondered.

“Mo chotto bata o motte kite kudasai,” he politely asked the waiter, requesting that more butter be brought. The waiter, delighted to be spared English, smiled and further pats were produced.

I was impressed. I wanted to be able to speak too and couldn’t. Then he looked at my breakfast and asked how I could eat it. It was the customary contintental fare: gelid egg, frigid toast. Then I saw that his was the only Japanese breakfast in the room: rice with raw egg, miso soup, seaweed squares, and pickled plums. The butter had been thoughtfully ordered for me.

Thereafter, we always breakfasted together. He had read part of Proust, had braved a delinquency report to sneak into a Noh drama, believed that we should democratize the Japanese, and showed a healthy disrespect for authority.

“Shall we go see Jeanette?” he asked over a late breakfast. I was mystified. Jeanette who?

My wonder grew as we walked across to Ginza, past Yurakucho and—just in time—joined the throng in front of the Dai Ichi Building. I knew what was going to happen because the great local sight was neither Ginza nor Fuji, but an important event that occurred twice a day: once at lunchtime, once just before dinner.

An olive drab limousine pulled up to the curb. The MPs guarding the pillared façade directly across the moat from the Imperial Palace, smartly straightened. Snappy salutes were proffered and out from the portal sailed General Douglas MacArthur.

The performance was always the same. In the wings he had put on his famous hat, tilted it at the proper angle, adjusted his profile, and started off, this soldier whom some called with no irony at all “The New Emperor of Japan.”

A number thought so. Today, a country mother held up her child, pointing out the famous sight to the infant’s wondering eyes, an ex-soldier with one leg stood more sharply, and an old man gazed at the pavement in, perhaps, reverence.

And as the famous general sped past and stepped into his sedan, Gene turned to me and said: “There goes Jeanette.”

The mysterious reference was later explained. Singing film-star Jeanette MacDonald, dressed as a page, had, in one of those movies of hers, navigated a staircase in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, in just such an assured, even pert fashion. Struck by the resemblance between the performances, Gene occasionally came to enjoy it.

“Also,” he said, “you might say it is a kind of penance.” He said this with a smile that was already half a question, a slight invitation to partake, and at the same time indifference if I did not.

I had somewhere read that identity requires the presence of someone by whom one is known—someone who knows who you are, often before you yourself do. Gene observed my enthusiasm, shared some of my dislikes, but always put some distance between himself and these. Though I was beginning to find him a possible model in my relations with this country, he did nothing to encourage me.

He believed in a kind of perfection yet excused everyone from attaining it—except himself. We were talking about The New Yorker, a publication excluded from both commissary and PX after it ran John Hersey’s issue-long account of Hiroshima.

“It never contains a typographical error,” he said.

I, believing in unavoidable sloppiness, said that this was impossible.

“Oh no, it’s not,” he said mildly. “It is quite possible. All that is necessary is that every error is caught. I admire the editor.”

Perfection was possible, all one had to do was to take all possible care. I watched him doing so. When he practiced his calligraphy no mistake was made—the forming of the kanji, the width of the stroke, the pressure of the brush—everything was as it ought to be. Methodical, he built up, line upon line, his ideal world.

Eugene Langston. donald richie

And yet he was never solemn and could smile at the foibles (Jeanette) he found around him. He was serious without being earnest, and I had never met anyone like him. Yet, he was not a very good model for me. Besides that he would not have wanted to be; he was ascetic, which I certainly wasn’t.

Austere—he was not making a statement with his Japanese breakfasts; he had a liking for the acerbic—he was rigorous with himself and even seemed to enjoy the forbidden. Once when I was dreading our next worming, he said, “Oh, no, think of it as purification.”

“They have a right to live too,” I said, surprising myself.

He gave me a look of deep approval, “So they do, so they do.”

Herschel Webb. donald richie

It was then that I thought of penance and hazarded that the worming might be some sort of atonement. But for what, I wondered. Hiroshima? Jeanette? Being Occupiers? And if so, why? I certainly felt none of the compunctions I sensed in him. Healthily opportunistic, I never questioned a single opportunity and Gene seemed to be questioning them all. He was not, however, usable. I could not model myself on him. But the deeper I knew him the more I admired him.

*

Through Gene I met his roommate. Tall, inquisitive eyes, intelligent nose—this was Herschel Webb. I admired him as well. Even though there still were signs around that sternly mandated “No Fraternization with the Indigenous Personnel,” he had confounded the MPs and gone to the Noh drama.

“I saw Funa Benkei,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means ‘Benkei in the Boat,’ ” and it refers to one of the exploits of the strong bodyguard and friend of the rebel General Yoshitsune, as you will remember.”

I remembered nothing of the sort but Herschel always gave one credit for more learning than one had.

“And now we must have Denwa Benkei,” he continued, not even smiling, and it was some time before I discovered that this means “Benkei on the Telephone.”

Holloway Brown. donald richie

Herschel could also sing all of Bach’s forty-eight preludes and fugues, managing this through a series of mnemonic aids: “Oh, once there was a crocodile and he was sunning on the Nile.” He could sing opera in English as well. A favorite was from Il Trovatore. It went: “Oh! Oh! They’re burning her at the stake. Oh, how I quake. At the sight.”

Much as I liked him, he was also no model for me. Despite all the fun he was deeply shy. Every day one had to thaw him out before he could begin to respond. Often he helped himself with whiskey. Once thawed he was a delight, but it took time, during which he was polite but reserved, gave short answers if any. When I mentioned this to Gene he nodded and then said that if one wore a lot of armor it took a long time to take it all off.

Sometimes I invited them out for weekends. Across the valley from Engakuji, the temple where Dr. Suzuki lived, was a guest house, empty, which I was told I could use. Square and spartan, it was two rooms, a kitchen, and a view over the Kamakura hills. It had no running water, no gas, and the toilet was an outhouse over a pit. Ideal—so different from the American comforts with which I grew up and which were being imported into the billet where I was presently living.

Trying to boil water for tea over a charcoal hibachi, trying to battle the bees that had taken lodging in the benjo, I felt that I was truly living. Back in Tokyo I was, somehow, merely existing.

We brought food from the PX, and camped out in the two rooms. Gene took at once to its austerity. Like me he believed that the spare was the authentic. When he discovered that the Engakuji library was next door and that he might use it, he was even more contented and would disappear into it for hours.

Noh drama, with Herschel Webb, 1947. eugene langston

Herschel approved of the austere more on aesthetic than on ethical grounds. Also he regretted the absence of ice for the afternoon martini, saying sadly that a warm martini was like a Manhattan with an olive. And, though fearful of the bees in the benjo, and refusing to use it unless absolutely necessary, he admired the view and would sit on the veranda and look at it for hours.

We also amused ourselves in various ways. Once we decided to make a musical comedy out of Le Sacre du Printemps, and put words to the melodies. Those for the opening bassoon solo went: “Oh, baby, see the moon. Oh, baby, see the moon. Way up high, so high. Oh, baby, see the moon.”

Also, using the bedding—sleeved quilts—we put on a Noh drama. Gene was the waki, the character who always explains who he is and where he comes from: “I am an American scholar. I come from near Nihonbashi in Edo.” Herschel was the orchestra, expertly simulating the whistling, pops and groans. I was the shite, the protagonist given to protean change. Most often I was a monster.

We talked about an opera based on Proust. Odette was a mezzo and would have many sforzando markings. Swann would be a typically French tenor: lots of vibrato and a tendency to bleat. A first act aria contained: “O, seul, monotone, all alone by my telephone.”

We also cast a Warner Brothers’ Proust. Odette was, naturally, Bette Davis, and Joseph Cotton was Swann, for want of better. Sydney Greenstreet was, of course, Charlus, but who could Jupien be? “Peter Lorre,” said Herschel with a laugh that soon turned into a cough for he, like Proust, was asthmatic. He used to wheeze on the Ginza and later, after he had become a well-known Japanologist, he could visit the country no longer. “Oh, dear,” he used to say, “I’m allergic to my specialty.”

Evenings, the sun going behind us, flooding the roofs of Engakuji across the valley, we would grill our Spam on the hibachi, boil the wiener cocktail sausages, crunch the Ritz, guzzle the gin, and enjoy the luxury of our Japanese life.

Most of the other pages of this period have been previously used, particularly in Where Are the Victors? and in the unfinished memoir In Between. Here are some excerpts from the latter.

late summer 1947. Wandering in the city after work, smelling camellia hair oil, dusty long unaired kimono, the passing night soil wagon with its patient ox, listening to the incomprehensible murmur of conversation around me, looking into eyes suddenly averted, I try to make sense of what I see.

In a way it already makes sense—Tokyo in ruins still reveals something known from Chicago, New York and, during the war, Naples, Marseilles: the look of a big city just anywhere. In another way, however, I begin to apprehend alternatives to things as I already know them.

The way the buildings stand—those that still do—in relation to each other; the way the rooms—those few I have seen—with their tatami matting, their interior stages for scrolls and flower arrangements, divide space: this is different. The politeness—for so I read it—of people who might not be starving but who clearly do not have enough to eat: this too is unlike. And the acceptance, the shrugs, the smiles, the willingness to continue, to begin again, to look on the bright side of things—I wonder how my hometown would have reacted to a near annihilation.

Another country, I am discovering, is another self. I am regarded as different, and so I become different—two people at once. I am a native of Ohio who really knew only the streets of little Lima, and I am also a foreigner who is coming to know the streets of Tokyo, largest city in the world. Consequently I can compare them, and since comparison is creation, I am able to learn about both.

Already I am as absolved as I will ever be from prejudices of class and caste. I cannot detect them here and no one here can detect them in me, since my foreignness is difference enough. So, I remain in a state of surprise, and this leads to heightened interest and hence perception. Like a child with a puzzle, I am forever putting pieces together and saying: Of course.

Or, naruhodo, since I am trying somehow to learn Japanese. And knowing a language does indeed create a different person since words determine facts. Here, however, I am still an intelligence-impaired person since I cannot communicate and have, like a child or an animal, to intuit from gestures, from intent, from expression.

Language will perhaps eventually free me from such elemental means of communication but at the same time ignorance is teaching me a lesson I would not otherwise have learned. While it is humiliating to ideas of self to be reduced to what one says—nothing at all if one does not know Japanese—it teaches that there are avenues other than speech.

I knew a little about this. In Italy or France during the war, sitting through foreign films without English titles, I did not learn much about the film but I learned a lot about filmmaking. How the director and his writer and cameraman had thought about time and space, the assumptions they had made, the suppositions they had built upon, their apparently unthinking inferences. Now again, in a very different country, I am again beginning to understand the film without comprehending the plot.

I look at the janitor’s closet in the Kokubu Building where I work, see the box for shoes and otherwise the luxury of empty space; peer into the translator’s desk drawer and notice that she has classified differently—all long things are in one place, all round things in another; gaze at the mat-floored room where the ex-president once sat, and perceive the tokonoma, the stage-like space where sat time itself, in the shape of a seasonal scroll and an oft-changed arrangement where the flowers were always fresh and always looked the same—both renewed by an ancient secretary whom the war had left untouched though it had carried the president away. Trying to read things like this is like learning Braille, as though another sense is involved, where sensing becomes something like grammar.

After only a month, I see that I risk ignorance if I remain typing away in what I scornfully call Little America. My job, nine-to-five in an office that could have been anywhere; my home life at the Continental Hotel, all Spam and powdered potatoes and lumpy pillows; my recreations, the PX, a cheap made-in-America bazaar, the allowed entertainments, movies with the GIs and bingo night at the American Club, occasionally special Occupier-night, one performance only, at the Kokusai Gekijo All-Girl Dance Theater—all of this begins to appear more and more unreal to me.

Richie’s first feature in Stars and Stripes, 1947. stars and stripes

Unreal and unpleasant. Little America, try though it does to impart democracy and individualism, is also a territory where the Japanese are worried over, and are made objects of condescension. They are treated like blacks in the American south, or like the “natives” in Forster’s A Passage to India, a work I recently read. Or worse. Our two GI drivers call our janitor a gook. I soon see I will experience nothing, learn nothing if I stay within these commodious and American folds.

Thus when I learn that we, the Occupiers, are regularly wormed, I am somehow pleased. Back in Ohio worming was for animals or what we still called “poor white trash.” Here, however, our salads are cultivated with something called “night soil,” a fertilizer composed of the excrement of the Occupied. We consequently get whatever they have.

This is indeed an Occupation—our American bowels a nurturing home to native Japanese fauna. No matter our own sense of superiority, our manifest efforts to recreate our own civilization in these far islands, we are every three months reminded that we are merely human after all. This we ascertain by glancing into the bowl and then hurriedly flushing it. Going to the toilet after having taken worm medicine is a great leveler.

While never looking forward to the doses, I welcome the effect. Not only am I then worm-free for another three months, but also I am sharing something with the Occupied. In a situation where our people call their people gooks and where we are forbidden to make their social acquaintance, where they are held to be morally as well as socially inferior to us and are thus in need of purging, their worms seem positively friendly.

I look about the office of the Allied Cultural Property Division where I work. Stay I must in body, since I am here to work, but SCAP has little control over my ambitions. Therefore I long to fraternize with the forbidden indigenous personnel. Indeed such aggressive and self-conscious segregation—Japanese and Americans, Occupied and Occupiers, Them and Us, Gooks and Gentry—make me want to flout such authority. Abrogating arrogant and useless rules is attractive in itself, but a further reason is that these orders are the glass against which I press my longing face, no less than do the Japanese when, alien in their own country, they gaze packed and flat-faced at solitary me in my Allied-Only car on the Tokyo trains.

*

The offices of the Allied Cultural Property Division have a weekly mimeographed bulletin and I know the person who compiles it. She tells me they are looking for “human-interest” material and I decide to fill this need. Having read Nitobe Inazo on Bushido, Ruth Benedict on toilet training, R. H. Blyth on the haiku, I now want to write something myself.

I have the means. I can type—indeed, I have often thought that I became a writer simply because I know how to typewrite. First comes technique, then style; no typing prowess and I would have turned into something else. My problem in Japan is where to begin—there is too much to write about. But here, however, was something specific—human-interest.

I find some. Just upstream from our building just off Nihonbashi is this other bridge, smaller and so far as I know, nameless. A man lives under it, among the girders. Having moved in after the war, he there remains. Grizzled, he is often seen perched in his watery home. So I go to see him, taking with me the unwilling office interpreter.

She had said we would be bothering him. No, I said, we would be interviewing him, trying to make it sound as though this would be no bother. He is a poor man, she had said. We couldn’t pay him, I said, but we could give him something—maybe Spam, or cigarettes.

Cigarettes, she said, so we set out with pencil, pad, and a carton of Camels.

Our host, Iwasaki Kiyoshi, is appreciative of the cigarettes and loquacious in return. Shortly, our newsletter carries: “Man Under a Bridge—The Story of a Refugee from Ruin.” This refugee “though clothed in rags, maintained a venerable dignity,” as he told his uncomplicated story. “He answered questions courteously and simply but there was no hint of the obsequious in his manner.”

There was plenty in mine. I had written about the amenities of his dwelling using such phrases from far Ohio as “snug as a bug in a rug,” and observed that “the sight of the foreigner coming to visit apparently caused no alarm, though later he said he had at first thought that we were coming to take his home from him.”

My completed work excites some interest among the office staff—this kind of “coverage” is still rare. Some think the Japanese still somehow enemies. My kind of condescension is new. Consequently, it also attracts the notice of the feature desk of the Pacific Stars and Stripes, the Occupation newspaper. Summoned thither I am told by the editor that he guesses I have gotten myself a new job. I have, he says, the human touch.

This I much doubt, and even if I do have it, do not believe that my GI readers will be interested. Nonetheless, I am assured that my piece has human-interest and that human-interest fits in with the major aims of a democratic press. As such my man under the bridge qualifies and, consequently, so do I.

Eighth Army photographers are sent to capture Mr. Iwasaki in his watery lair and a rewritten version of my article becomes a cover story in the Stars and Stripes Weekly where it again excites some mild interest.

A year before it would have excited none—lots of people were living under bridges. But now they are few, there is creeping fraternization, and the Occupying stance is relaxing. The days of Japs and Gooks are numbered. We are now living with a fellow race. I have, despite or because of my patronization, indicated this. The newspaper authorizes my transfer, my grade is moved a step up, and I am feature writer and film reviewer.

Feeling guilty at having gotten so much from this penniless person, I take further cigarettes as well as a fifth of Four Roses to my benefactor under the bridge. He is, however, no longer there. My article has alerted the Japanese police, who have swiftly removed this unwelcome relic from the old days.

Having ruined the life of an affable old man, I find myself haunted by his ghost. In my new office at Stars and Stripes comes the shout: “Get Richie to do it. He’s good at human-interest.”

*

I, strangely, did not regard movies as human-interest stories. Perhaps because, as for so many of my generation—those who, like me, had profitably spent their youth in the dark—films had become sacerdotal, something so out-of-body that they were no longer quite human.

For me, as for so many, the movies were a preferable form of life. I knew nothing about films themselves—did not know how they were made, or why. And if I knew next to nothing about the movies of my own country, I knew nothing at all about Japanese films: did not understand the language, recognized neither stars nor directors, and knew little about Japan itself. From such beginnings knowledge of the Japanese cinema could only grow.

Though I was supposed to merely endure the latest Hollywood product in the comfort of the Signal Corps screening room, I defined my mission as otherwise. Coat collar turned up, eyes alert for the marauding MP, I bravely sneaked into Japanese motion pictures theaters all over the city, where I was forever getting sisters confused with wives and mistresses with mothers, and becoming lost in the labyrinths of the period film.

Dumbly I absorbed reel after reel, sitting in the summer heat of the Nikkatsu or the winter cold of the Hibiya Gekijo. Yet, in these uncomprehending viewings of one opaque picture after another, I was being aided by my ignorance. Undistracted by dialogue, undisturbed by story, I was able to attend to the intentions of the director, to notice his assumptions and to observe how he contrived his effects.

Though I understood little about cinema, I had seen a lot of it, and now I began to realize that space was used differently in Japanese films. There was a careful flatness, a reliance upon two dimensions which I knew from Japanese woodblock prints. And emptiness, I had already guessed, was distributed differently. Compositions seemed bottom-heavy, but then I realized that—as in the hanging scrolls I had seen—the empty space was there to define what was below: it had its own weight.

And there were also many fewer close-ups than I was accustomed to in American films. The camera seemed always further away from the actors—as though to show the space in between. A character was to be explained in long shot, his environment speaking for him. Sometimes I could not even make out his face, but I knew who he was by what surrounded him.

I also noticed the pace of the films of the period: slow, very slow. Time, lots of it—long scenes, long sequences—was necessary. Feelings flowed and flowered to what Ohio would have thought extravagant lengths. The screen was awash with undammed emotion. Yet, though allergic to the displays of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, I somehow did not mind the emotionality of women I later discovered to be Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko.

Wondering why I so willingly wept along with them, I decided that the very fact that they were so far away, and crying for such a long time, compelled my moving nearer, and hence feeling more. So different from the big and demanding close-ups of Joan and Bette, their nostrils large enough to drive trucks into. Being apparently asked for nothing I gave more. And so, sitting there, smelling the rice sweat and the camellia pomade, I was learning my early lessons in Japanese art.

I wonder which films taught me. 1947—one could have been Ozu Yasujiro’s Record of a Tenement Gentleman, released that May; another could have been Mizoguchi’s The Loves of Sumako (with Tanaka Kinuyo), released that August. Whatever I saw, I have forgotten, if I ever knew. I later looked at both the Ozu and the Mizoguchi but not a memory budged. The first Japanese film scene that I could identify was one I recognized only because I had watched it being made.

*

I was taken to the Toho Studios not because of my new critical position, but because I had met with the composer Hayasaka Fumio. He was a pale, spectacled man who having heard that I had some recordings of new music, wanted to meet me. Regulations on fraternization with the indigenous personnel having been relaxed, I could ask him to my billet, and escort him up in the front elevator. In my room we heard the Berg Violin Concerto, newly recorded and inexplicably on sale in the PX. He sat silent, lost in the music, and when the Bach chorale appeared his eyes filled with tears.

Hayasaka responded by inviting me to Toho to watch being filmed a movie for which he was doing the score. Setting out early to avoid the MPs, late risers all, we stood bouncing in the suburban train as it bumped and rattled through the new, raw countryside west of Tokyo.

The Toho Studios, large white barns, were in the midst of muddy paddies. Inside, the big, muffled prewar camera clunked by on metal rails and the mike was held aloft on a bamboo pole. Both of these were aimed at a carefully ruined set of buildings, meticulously constructed, every brick out of place, in back a dirty gray cyclorama with miniature ruins on the nearby horizon.

A whole blasted neighborhood had been built around a scummy-surfaced sump on the banks of which were a few new plywood buildings, their fronts festooned with neon. In the sump itself floated carefully placed garbage, a single shoe, a cardboard box, and a child’s lost doll. Yet what I was seeing was no different from what I had seen on my way there.

Ono Tadamaro performing Bugaku. stars and stripes

It had not occurred to me that film heightened reality. I had always thought of it as an alternate. Yet this—though different from Johnny Weissmuller’s lost city or from Norma Shearer’s Versailles—was still a movie set. Obviously so, yet, huge on the black and silver screen, it would look real.

There was the camera, there was the mike, and there were banks of lights. And there was the director, wearing a white floppy hat; there was someone I guessed was the star. He, in a loose Hawaii-shirt, a young actor with slicked back hair, was practicing menacing an older man with a beard and round-rimmed glasses.

The young man was supposed to walk along the sump toward the older man. This short scene was taken several times very swiftly, no stopping, apparently, for consideration. I wondered at the speed with which this reality was captured, having always thought that making films took an enormous amount of time.

And the noise. Shouting and clattering, things dropped. I had thought of the film studio as a kind of cathedral, filled with a hushed and reverent silence as the great arcs illuminated a famous profile. Instead, cacophony as one scene was finished and another was begun. It had never occurred to me before that movies were actually made.

For each of the walking scenes the doll in the sump had been repositioned. Now it sank. The director smiled, shook his head, waved his hand, and signaled for a break. Seeing Hayasaka he came over and I was introduced. Then the two actors came and I met them too. I could not speak Japanese and Hayasaka often mumbled, so I caught no names.

Later, Richie has elsewhere said, the composer took him to the Toho screening room to see the finished picture and he learned that the young man in the shirt was Mifune Toshiro; the man with the beard was Shimura Takeshi; the man in the floppy hat was Kurosawa Akira, and the film was Drunken Angel. Whenever he now sees this film and that sequence by the sump comes on, he looks to the right of the screen: “There I am, just a few feet off the edge, twenty-four years-old, watching a movie being made.” Otherwise, from the period 1947 to 1949 the only journals remaining in their original state are those below. The first of these appears in a different version in The Donald Richie Reader.

16 october 1948. This afternoon Meredith [Weatherby] and I went to a performance of Bugaku in Ueno Park. And this afternoon, watching Ono [Tadamaro] again dance, I felt that he had come to contain for me the beauty, grace, and dedication of Japan—as though he were an emblem of his country.

Meredith and I entered the small park behind the museum and came upon the small tent where the performers were already putting on their costumes, where the orchestra was already tuning or warming their instruments. I thought of the Heian period recaptured: the costumes of antiquity, the different flavor of everything Japanese. We passed the tent (for we could not stop and stare, so conscious were we of being foreigners—which attitude we conscientiously cultivated so as to be differentiated from other of our countrymen here); passed four little boys dressed in costumes of the eighth century court, with wings and little tails attached to them; passed the musicians already arranging their brocade and the dancers still taking off their street clothes; till we reached the red square lacquer platform with its copper railing and, before it, the empty seats for the audience.

Invitations apparently were given only to higher officers. Consular representatives were here, and Meredith saw many acquaintances. [Weatherby was at this time in the consular service. Later he was to create and head the publishing firm John Weatherhill, Inc.] The various missions were here as well, as were the more socially prominent in the Occupation. We were told that today was the elite party and tomorrow the plebeian. I had had no invitation at all to this one but found my press card acceptable.

Just before the musicians arrived Prince Takamatsu appeared—a tall thin man with a large nose and dark eyes. He never missed a social engagement—indeed, was probably not allowed to. Princess Takamatsu was less in the background than usual, wearing a pretty kimono and a smile, and they were soon surrounded by Allied friends.

Then the music began. “Celestial” is the word I always think of, and so it is since it does not seem of this world. The sound of the sho, that frail, dissonant noise floating into attending trees, disappearing into the clear blue sky; the curious double time, the apparently accidental syncopations, the stately stance of the music—surely this is celestial.

The dancing—maybe that is what makes the music celestial; the simple opening prelude, unchanged for a thousand years: the dancer with halberd, walking forward to kneel, then the slow turning of the head to the right until the profile shows against the sky, and the unexpected, mechanical quick movement which brings the profile to the left.

Ono appeared only in the last dance, a famous one I’d seen once before, in which four men performed in the costumes of the eighth century, covered with brocades and stiff gauzes, hats of lacquered wire, halberds of lacquered wood, only their heads and hands visible. As each of the four entered the platform from among the trees and emerged into the sun, the same choreographic formula was repeated, like a fugue or, more exactly, a four-part canon, repeating each other’s movements, a movement behind.

All four stood, each at a corner of the platform, and then began the dance—a war dance in which a stylized battle takes place. The two on the left precisely imitate those on the right. Swords are therefore held both toward and away from you at the same time and all movements are identical. The most beautiful moment comes when, the accompaniment of the music reaching that curious double beat, the dancers begin slowly moving around the inside of the square, each occupying, within two beats, the place left vacant by the man before him. The movement, the deliberate raising of the leg and bending of the foot and knee, the squat with hands on thighs as the dancers change position, the curious up and down motions as they bend their toes in their rounded lacquer boots. The prescribed, ritualistic movements of the hands, all in exact accord with the other. The studied expressionless faces and blank dark eyes which so ignore the three other dancers. The movements are like beautiful human machinery and the music soars to the sky.

The dance is finished and the dancers depart: all four describing a figure—one steps down, leaves three, steps down, leaves two, and finally Ono alone describes the figure. His back is to the audience but I still see his face. For, in this hour, he has embodied all that Japan holds for me.

Later I have Meredith take me to the tent, now shorn of its Heian associations: it is simply a garden tent where Japanese are replacing Western clothes, tying shoes, fixing worn neckties and putting back on black horn-rimmed spectacles. Ono is introduced to me. He is wearing a coat too small for him, a clean but worn white shirt, a dark necktie. In his lapel is one of the tiny red feathers which mean the wearer has contributed to the current Community Chest drive. He smiles, bows and then shakes hands.

Am I disappointed? Oh, no. How could I be disappointed with the Heian period? Meredith later said that Ono is not particularly attractive—and I suppose he’s not. Without his costume he becomes ordinary and on the street I shouldn’t notice him. But I have seen him wearing stiffened gauzes and salmon brocades, and I have seen his head surmounted with lacquered wire and the feathers from birds that ceased to live a thousand years ago. I have seen Japan in him.

17 october 1948. Like so many of these autumn days, this one began in clouds and damp mists and, looking from the window at six this morning, it seemed the day would not be fit for picture-taking.

Later in the morning Al [Raynor, a friend in the same billet] and I went to Kanda to buy books. This was arranged, put off, rearranged, and again scheduled several times before we actually left. The reason for this was Al. Originally he had wanted to go into the country today, for he revels in great open spaces and likes to shake from his heels not only the dust of the city, but also every place where he is acquainted and knows his way about. He often says he would be perfectly content traveling always, but I doubt it. He is too fond of study (his translation of a Noh we have been polishing these last two weeks) and too fond of comfort too (his attachment to his room and habitual three helpings at meals) to ever be more than mildly fond of the movable life.

This morning he was looking for Noh books and I was looking for the one on masques that I saw last summer and have been looking for ever since. I didn’t find it but did buy a 1922 number of Broom with half of Claudel’s Protée translated in it, and the Sacheveral Sitwell book on southern baroque art I’d been wanting for some time. Also I got several copies of this month’s Europa that has my article on Gide in it. While at the magazine stand I noticed a young student reading it and longed to declare myself the author. Also found an early Shakespeare Company edition of Ulysses, only the price was over two thousand yen and the proprietor knew its value. Al found a Noh picture book that pleased him.

It was now time to go again to the Bugaku. Al suddenly said he would rather go out in the country and was already regretting he had spent the time in Kanda. I began feeling sorry for myself, wondering what I should do if he wouldn’t go; he doubtless feeling I was using him—as I was naturally—and resenting the fact that he wasn’t out in the country. We drove for a long time in silence. He broke it once to ask me to stand up: we were going fast and I like to stand up in the roofless jeep when traveling fast, but I refused and he said no more for a time.

The silence continued and was then rent by his flatly stating in a tone of exclamation that he was going to the Bugaku and that we were going to stay all the way through, too—just as though I’d been disagreeing with him.

The crowd was much grander this afternoon, much smaller. When we arrived, about half an hour before the performance, the little tent was surrounded by Americans. Cameras were everywhere, from box cameras to big German models, from hand-wound motion picture cameras to large and expensive tripod battery-run affairs.

Ono appeared, this time in full costume, looking again like living Japanese history. He was polite, talked some with Al about the dance and then asked where we wanted to take the pictures. I drew him away from the crowd and posed him in the sunlight. Then, ashamed at being among the snappers, I took several pictures and had Al take my picture with him. Again, through Al, I asked Ono to visit me, and he, through Al, said that he would be pleased to. I told him that I would let him know the time and date. Exactly why I did that—why I invited him—I don’t know but I knew I didn’t want to lose what I had captured.

18 october 1948. In the afternoon I willfully stay in the [Stars and Stripes] office working over a synopsis of the vampire cat of Urashima for the paper. In the evening—while Holloway [Brown, his current roommate] entertains a Mr. Gunji and his younger brother—the elder Gunji absurdly good looking, noisy, and as American as possible, while the younger Gunji, not at all good looking, is reserved to the point of being incomprehensible—I work with Al, editing his translation of Sumidagawa. I don’t like the lines:

By the shores of Horie High above the busy boatmenAlways crying, always cryingAre seen miyako-dori.

I recite this Longfellow-like to the tune of Hiawatha, which irritates the translator. He likes his original, arguing that, after all, it is a quoted poem. I, in turn, state that no Japanese poem ever sounded like that. After half an hour of wrangling we straighten it out; but now, neither is satisfied.

By the shores of HoriegawaAlways crying as they flyHigh above the busy boatmenAre seen miyako-dori.

Any translation from Japanese to English, certainly including my neglected Asakusa Kurenaidan, [the Kawabata novel] contains the difficulty of connotation. Every Japanese knows that miyako-dori are seagulls and are mentioned in a famous poem by Inahara, and are called the capital bird because they are, for some reason, never seen in the old capital. You can’t say that in English and if you do the book is mostly footnotes. Al feels this is such a difficult point that we get no further on the subject.

19 october 1948. Sho [Kajima Shozo] in to see me this morning, wanting nothing in particular, just to talk. Small, eyes so big they look round, he is the only Japanese I have met whose English is so good that we can carry on conversations about things that matter to us. Particularly matter to him. Anything foreign, as though he has been starved for so long that he cannot get enough.

Now we discuss the possibilities of translating Camus into Japanese, and how the intellectuals here now shun Sartre. Sho blames it on Life magazine, just now discovering existentialism and hence degrading its current reputation in Japan.

With Ono Tadamaro. meredith weatherby

Sho understands the subtleties of this and can express them. In Japan, he tells me, everything is fashion and the opinion of others. This is not a good thing but it is so. Even Juliet Greco is no longer so popular now that Life has taken her up.

Conversely, I can talk about nothing Japanese since he is not interested and says he does not know. I ask him about brush painting. Doesn’t know. Ask about the difference between waka and tanka. Doesn’t know.

I am to write something for his magazine. I suggest something Japanese, and then I could learn something too. Oh, no, not that. He suggests André Gide, since I am reading the journals and since this author is now back in critical favor in Japan.

20 october 1948. Late, a soldier, Irish, appears and stays for three hours. We talk mostly about him. He has a problem—which of the two sexes he likes better. He’s had no actual experience with either and so the discussion is a bit academic.

But I like people who look one thing and think they are another. Irish looks like an ordinary GI but has what he thinks is this problem. I tell him that one needn’t make the choice and point out that I have, at great personal inconvenience, put it off for a number of years by never calling myself one thing or another, and that I have consequently had a great deal of pleasure with all kinds of people. In his longing for security, however, Irish rushes to the grand and unnecessary generalization.

All the time, however, I think this talk might not be the real reason for his visit. He keeps saying that he has to go back to the barracks but makes no move to do so. I don’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed. It is nothing to me, however, and so he eventually goes home after having heard my preferences. He hasn’t “gone in” for the Japanese, he says, which puts rather a gulf between us, since I certainly have.

Later to bed with—instead—Gide’s The Immoralist.

23 october 1948. Al and I read through our translation of Sumidagawa for the final time and when it was finished we were each ready to leap at the other’s throat. He took the tone a stern parent takes toward a naughty child when I lectured him on the habit of his overusing that most sensational of punctuation marks, the exclamation point—thus destroying its efficiency. Consequently, I slid into a hauteur that found me separating each syllable, affecting an English accent and behaving in a manner I considered exquisitely polite. I offered no more suggestions but had prepared many pretty phrases had it come to a head. It did not however. Gene came back, and later guests, so the day passed with no argument. I’m not sure this ill feeling affects him as much as it does me, but I think he dislikes it more. As the Noh play is finished, however, we’ll have no more fights

Received the pictures taken of Ono today. The ones of him alone are nice and show his costume well, but I wish they were in color. The one of me with him is no good. I am standing in a strange attitude and even though you can’t see them you can almost smell the aliens—colonels, majors and captains—-surrounding me and being partially responsible for my stilted stance.

25 october 1948. This afternoon I went for a luncheon engagement at the new subway hotel. I have no compunction about eating the fine food, all of it black market. The hotel people I eat with all went to Cornell before the war; all speak good English. They are also charming to me, for I am going to honor them with a page in Stars and Stripes, the only American paper in Japan.

Later the Stars and Stripes soldier photographer came. Turned out to be the one who I heard was gossiping about me. Not afraid of his insinuations, for as he puts them they are false, but I am curious to know why he made them. Then he said, “Seen Richie around lately?” He hadn’t recognized me, and later when he showed me his assignment slip my name was not there, instead, another of the men on the paper. But, couldn’t I have taken advantage of this happy mistake? Apparently not, for I said, “I am Richie.”

Bit my tongue the minute I said it, for I had had the chance to play a real role. I can imagine the conversation that might have ensued had I been less self-assured and more afraid. I would have intelligently drawn him further and further out, cut off one by one his chances for denial. How cleverly I would have turned the conversation to the suspicions themselves—he would doubtless have readily repeated them. And as he gossiped on, I would have had the rare opportunity of watching a man’s mind innocently working before I, with a mighty pounce, brought him up short—thrown off my invisible cloak—and witnessed him skidding to a panicked halt. But no. I spoiled it. What is the good of admiring [Gide’s] Lafcadio if I miss the chance to be him?

26 october 1948. Watanabe [Isamu], met at a construction site, comes over. Gene, supposed to go out, has come back by this time and Al has arrived. Watanabe brings along many interesting pictures, some of himself as a pilot during the war, and also part of his WWII propaganda collection. The American is the most subtle, the German is not—it is completely obvious—the British does nothing much and there is no Italian. I think that the American was most successful because it illustrated Japanese poems and famous plays, proverbs and sayings already in the mouths of every soldier. These are necessarily so erudite that, as Watanabe said, all were astonished when they picked them up after they’d been tossed from the plane. I had no idea that anything that intelligent was going on.

28 october 1948. I’m more than halfway through the second volume of the Gide journals. What impresses me most is his ability to put down precisely what he means. In reading over this journal of my own I see the difference. Gide lives close with himself; I live at a distance from myself. I only imply what I mean; Gide states.

His theory of literary construction (lengthy incubation) bothers me because I feel that I should not agree, but it fits too well with my laziness for me to object too strenuously. He says that things must grow within one, that yesterday’s blossom will wilt today and was therefore not worth the keeping, that the plant will prune itself and emerge, in time, effortlessly. But I remember another piece of advice—this from Bernard Shaw—which says that ideas are like ducks that fly by: you have to bag them at once for they’ll never fly by again.

I’ve not sufficiently made up my mind about either method. Perhaps both should be used, determined by the subject, or the nature, of the material. My novel on Tokyo [Where Are the Victors?] should use the Shavian duck-shooting method because it must deal with historical facts. If I were going to write another kind of novel however, like one by Gide, then it would have to hibernate. Gide says one shouldn’t force, yet he advocates daily writing.

How good to apply myself—yet I never do. What of the Tokyo novel? Daily I have thought of it. It stopped changing shape some time ago. I am counting on days and nights back in Ohio to put a quick end to this particular indecision.

29 october 1948. Most of the morning rewriting a letter beginning: “Dear Jesus. Usually I write Santa but this year I thought I would write you.” This is for the Christmas edition [of the Pacific Stars and Stripes]—for which, however, I’ve found some good Dürers, including a head of Christ by one of his pupils, that I must sandwich in somehow. The whole piece is preposterous in its stupidity. Worse, I could change it if I had the will. So much easier to obey orders and ask no questions. What could I do with it that would please me? Nothing.

In the evening I took Nomura [the room boy] to the ballet. Also along went Gene, Jimmy [Sekiguchi, Gene’s friend], and Al. It was Swan Lake, done in what is understood as the Russian tradition. The dancers all wear big blonde wigs, the boys wear makeup, the girls in the corps de ballet smile—the dental display is blinding.

While all of us were making fun of it, Nomura was quietly enjoying it. He was awed by the tinsel magnificence, appreciative of the efforts shown on the stage, and kind when obvious mistakes were made. In the end he laughed with us but it was plain that he enjoyed it and was but being polite. He was particularly taken with the dance of the little swans.

Later we all came back to the room. I typed Nomura a letter to the Sugi­nami Police Station where they are holding clothes that I gave him—and which I said I did in the letter—but, oddly, they are not holding him.

Nice turn for the novel if I were to get picked up by the CID for giving the clothes to him. This in turn would reveal something, then more would be revealed and finally the novel would end for lack of characters still remaining in Japan, all having been sent back. Particularly ironic because Nomura is honest, I am honest, and we would be blamed and punished for something of which we were not guilty.

While we were writing the letter I saw a white figure behind me in the room and, at the same time, a sudden expression of dismay on the face of Nomura. Turning about I found myself faced with a lady of indeterminate age in a long white dress, with necklace and bracelets and wiry hair. Advancing into the room with heavy stride, she asked me, in a deep and familiar voice, if I knew where Bruce [Rogers] was. Then I recognized him. It was the sergeant acquaintance of Bruce’s whom I’d seen only once before—in uniform.

The transformation was complete. Pancake make-up, lipstick, mascara, wig and a long skirt that he kept kicking. I asked him what he had underneath. He obligingly lifted his skirts and displayed panties and garter belt as well as silk hose. Then I asked about his breasts and felt them. They were cleverly made of cotton.

Nomura remained dismayed and I realized that he still thought it was an extremely forward woman and was growing afraid of her friendly mascara-fringed glances. I introduced them and, once Nomura had understood that this was a man, he became even more terrified.

Al meantime, having glimpsed the soldier in the elevator coming up, had gotten interested, thinking her a loose colored lady. He was all affability until he was introduced to the sergeant. He looked closely and his face went quite blank; smiling tightly he left.

Sarge, it being near Halloween, had gotten himself up, and all over Tokyo traveled with other soldier friends, going to the rough Club Ichiban, enjoying the feels the other soldiers gave him; went to the Dai Ichi Grill and passed as an interesting person of color. He was having a good time, getting away with it, and sat down in the big chair as he told us all about it.

Later Al and I had a conversation about why people did things like this. He thought it might be to solicit young men but I pointed out that, so far as I knew, that almost never happened. If it had it would have been better somehow because some definite purpose would have been served—but instead, to merely go about acting female could only result in a trip into the mirror.

30 october 1948. To Hibiya Hall for the premiere of Hayasaka’s piano concerto. He gave me two tickets, but I went alone. What a nice piece of music, particularly the rondo with a Chinese-sounding tune that always comes back, looking different each time. The concerto was sandwiched between William Schuman’s American Festival Overture and Aaron Copland’s El Salon Mexico. CIE [Civil Information and Education] pushes things American. At the same time, however, the Japanese have not heard much modern music since before the war. Here is an elegant and nourishing sandwich for them. A big audience, and a young one.

31 october 1948. Not a cloud in the sky, all a brilliant blue and the air cool. There is a sharpness, an invigoration of the senses. Japan—mountains beautiful in the fog, forests in the rain—is even more beautiful when with such clearness every pebble is seen.

I notice again that nothing now is actually incongruous in Japan. Everything fits. The period may be a bastard one, like rococo, but everything is harmonious. Temple boys in full costumes on motor scooters and neon signs on the Kamakura Kannon are no more incongruous than is Fuji at sunset.

Al and I took advantage of the weather and drove out to the Emperor Taisho’s tomb. When there is no reason for disagreeing we get along well, like today when we anticipated each other’s words, laughed at the same things and made wide allowance for each other’s whims. We do a number of things that put the trip in the category of an adventure. We drink beer and take pictures in a secluded glade of the mausoleum, shout to all the little children we see, and carry back to his house from the bottom of a hill he could never have climbed, a very old and very drunk gentleman. We arrived home late, half frozen.

1 november 1948. Saw Meredith briefly and asked about Ono. I had merely, it seems, desired to photograph him. Meredith says a meeting can be arranged now at anytime but I hang back. I have often noticed that it is quite sufficient for me to know that something is within my grasp for me to lose interest. When I know that something I want is possible, finally, after weeks of attention, I cease to want it. I don’t thereby want it to go away, however. I don’t want to lose ground, but I am satisfied that I can have it if I want it. Its immediacy and its availability both conspire to afford me more satisfaction than, possibly, the thing itself. All of this, of course, without one thought about the feelings of the object.

2 november 1948. The afternoon spent in gathering pictures for the Christmas Edition: “I want pictures of hungry babies—of poor starved mothers and hungry babies—of sick babies, poor families,” says the editor. I search the morgue, our modest picture collection, and find none. Do not want to. Would if I could have believed that this would do starved mothers and hungry babes any good, but it won’t.

I will always remember with pain last month when I had to go with the photographer and get pictures of butt sniping in Tokyo. I hated it from the first but it wasn’t until later that I hated myself. I had to plant the cigarette—smoke it half way and then throw it down—in Ueno—and the hidden photographer would snap as the next person stooped to pick it up.

With Stars and Stripes staff, 1948. stars and stripes

But none of this happened. I had to go under the arcades and implore an old woman to pick up the cigarette, to pose with it. She was frightened and wouldn’t. A ring of people, wondering faces, surrounded me. Finally I had to stop a poor young boy. Showed him what I wanted him to do. Held him until the photographer was ready and them make him stop in the humiliating position while the picture was taken. I wanted to give him every cigarette I had, but the minute he felt my hand leave him he ran into the crowd, afraid probably I’d attempt to retake the cigarette he’d just picked up. Yes, I did that. Now, I would never do that again—I would quit first.

The unpublished In Between contains further scenes taken from the original Journals. These, below, now indicate a chronology that the journal remnants themselves do not.

Japan—I was continuing to learn about my new land by writing about it: bonsai, ikebana, Japanese dance, festivals—all in my rage for knowledge I inflicted on my GI readers. Here I am on the Kabuki, an Allied-only night when the Occupiers gathered at the Tokyo Theater, just up the street from the ruins of the Kabuki-za. “Japan’s most refined art . . . receives boost into former favor when wartime banned classic employs services of the two greatest Kabuki actors.” (Don Richie, Staff Writer).

The banned classic was Sesshu Gappo ga Tsuji and the actors were Nakamura Kichiemon who impersonated old Gappo and Nakamura Baigyoku who played his young daughter, O-Tsuji. It was she who, married, had fallen in love with her stepson.

This had led to the play being banned a number of times including during WWII. Now, however, continues shameless Don Richie: “with the freedom brought by SCAP, the play has been revived for the first time in seven years.”

Also, for the first time since the Occupation had begun, SCAP did not find it necessary to powder the seats and sets with DDT. The actors were thus spared—though earlier artists had made their entrances coughing and wheezing.

The TokyoTheater, now officially bugless, was filled that evening—brass in the front, government issue and civilians in the rear—all attentive before culture as only Americans can be. Me too, seeing all this for the first time. Seeing it with emotions that, as the play progressed, slowly became mixed. Though I was much in favor of it because it was Japanese, because it had been banned, because I had a small part in publicizing it, I now became aware that I was also disapproving of it.

So long as I thought Tsuji loved the stripling, I nodded at true romance and sided against the adamant father. But when it turned out that she was merely some kind of Japanese Camille dying for the beloved’s own unwitting good, I began to disapprove.

I still do. Warriors who cut off the heads of their young to spare those of the lord, mothers who stab daughters to save their betters social embarrassment—these continue to repel, and these are mainly what Kabuki seems to be about. At the same time I knew my feeling was foolish. It would make equal sense to take seriously the dramaturgy of Donizetti.

But disapproval was not all I felt. As an appreciative if baffled audience drifted out of the Tokyo Theater and into waiting sedans, jeeps, and buses, I (looking back at the striped curtain—deep green, terracotta, black, colors I had never before seen in this combination) remember thinking again of what I had seen.

Amid the feudal remains had stood something that made me believe in a kind of reality I had not known before, an impossible authenticity, a false actuality. For I had seen a seventy-three-year-old man turn into a nineteen-year-old woman.

As Baigyoku made his way along the hanamichi, dead white tabi gliding, white showing at the sleeves and hem of the black kimono, hands and face as white as the socks, I saw merely an old male dressed as a female.

Then, as he continued, the shuffle became a delicate walk, the hands were not those of an old man clamped together but those of a young woman modestly folded, and by the time the actor had reached the stage proper, Baigyoku had become that young woman—all alone, frightened, brave.

Where I had come from such a spectacle would have been an impossibility. In Ohio old men do not turn into young girls. Yet I had seen this and, despite the moral imbecility of the plot, I believed it.

After the audience had left, after all the green military sedans and jeeps had moved off, after the big army bus filled with lower-rated civilians had gone, after the theater was dark, I loitered on, standing under the willows which then stood there, and looked at the lights of Higashi-Ginza reflected in the broad canal that then flowed there.

It is, I suppose, typical that I should remember all this and yet not recall that during this same summer a general strike had been planned, one that would have indicated a real protest—one further that was patterned upon those in the homeland, the U.S.A. Japanese were uniting to strike against abuses that were continuing from the war years. One might have thought that SCAP, so eager to root out feudal remnants, would have supported such a movement, but in fact MacArthur banned the strike before it had even begun.

Nor did I realize that this marked the beginning of a change in the aims of SCAP itself. Earlier the objective was not merely to get rid of Imperial Japan, nor to make certain that the Japanese never again waged war. A major ambition also was to rebuild Japan in the American image—Little America was seriously envisioned. Already a year and a half into the Occupation many Japanese had begun to believe in what they were being taught: individualism, group effort, unionized fronts, and democracy.

Yet now when these were for the first time attempted it was SCAP itself that prevented them—first by order and later by the threat of troops. Consequently many Japanese felt betrayed and Allied efforts began to be regarded with skepticism. Maybe the new model was not really any better than the old one.

I felt nothing because I noticed nothing, had no idea that the Occupation had changed direction, that its reforms were now seen as leftist, that the New Deal now read “Red.” Japan was no longer the latest convert to American-style democracy—it had become a part of the Western defense system, a “bastion of freedom.”

Mishima Yukio, 1953.

I must have read 1947 U.S. headlines: “Has the Job Been Bungled?”—meaning that the Occupying attitude had not until now noticed the Russian menace. I ought, being a part of it, to have heard about the Occupation taking a “reverse course” against the “excesses of democracy”; should have seen that by 1948 industrial complexes were being unofficially built up; but it was not until the 1949 purgings (now of communists rather than fascists) that I finally caught on.

In the spring of 1949 Richie left Japan and went to New York to go to Columbia University. There he continued his journal; a number of pages are extant. Among them is his account, written up after the event, of the first time he met the novelist Mishima Yukio.

early winter 1952. Meredith [Weatherby], now at Harvard, called to ask me to look after a young Japanese author who had just arrived in New York and one of whose books he was translating. The book was Confessions of a Mask, and the author was Mishima Yukio.

Specifically, I was asked to show Mishima the city so that he could write about it for the Asahi Shinbun, whose “special correspondent” he had become, a position that allowed him to travel—otherwise difficult because the Allied Occupation forces were still occupying his country and Japanese could leave it only if accredited.

His accounts of life abroad (“The Far-Sighted Traveler,” “On Not Falling in Love with Paris”) were published and later collected, but he saw much more than he wrote about. Indeed, his earliest use for me was to show him something other than the usual tourist sites.

I knew no Japanese then and his English was not yet as idiomatic as it later became. Nonetheless, we managed to communicate well enough for me to understand his wishes. He wanted to visit every Saint Sebastian hanging in New York, to see the Strauss Salome at the Met, and to experience a real gay bar. He gave as reason for this last that he was halfway through his next novel, Forbidden Colors, which contained scenes in several such locales, and he wished to compare, evaluate, and capture local color.

There were several such in Greenwich Village, I had heard, and so we set out and eventually located one called Mary’s. There we sat over our drinks and watched middle-aged men talk like women. This was something neither of us had expected and it was not very interesting.

Nonetheless he gravely thanked me and on our next outing we hunted down Saint Sebastian. Though we did not find him, Mishima remained convinced that his saint was somehow hiding in the Metropolitan Museum, and so we searched wing after wing. In the bookstore he finally found a reproduction of the one by Guido Reni, a portrait he already knew intimately. This he purchased.

I remember the search, disappointing though it had been, because during it I was impressed both by Mishima’s invariable courtesy—he had the finest social manners of anyone I had ever met—and by his conviction of the importance of what we were doing.

With Mishima one became objective, saw oneself dispassionately. It was he who created this heightened atmosphere because of an inner consistency upon which he insisted. To be with Mishima was to take part in a drama.

Perhaps consequently there was little spontaneity, a quality that he seemed both to distrust and to dislike, perhaps because it was inconsistent. And there was also little humor, for Mishima’s mirth was always serious. But, as though in compensation, there was a sense of high intelligence, a feeling that one was engaged in something important—in short, a sense of theater.

A result of all this theater was a kind of formality. One always tried to be at one’s best with Mishima—up to his level, as it were, attempt to emulate that ideal, which he himself represented, of being true to one’s own self. This is difficult if, like myself, you do not know who you are, and have to settle for some daily invention. Mishima, however, seemed to have no such doubts.

Next time we met I mentioned our fruitless Greenwich Village quest, ready to smile at the memory, but I discovered that he had already rendered it epic, me as Virgil to his Dante, both dangerously descending into the maelstrom of Sodom. It was no longer a simple single excursion into the pathetic Mary’s, but a perilous quest somehow successfully accomplished. And, indeed, details would be, he told me, incorporated into the continuation of that serious and responsible study, Forbidden Colors.

A Saint Sebastian postcard, this depicting one by Il Sodoma, later arrived from Rome, and on the back Mishima wrote that Greece had filled him with “classical aspirations.” I later learned that he had read Longus at the Parthenon and been given the idea of writing his own Daphnis and Chloe. This became The Sound of Waves, a novella he began once back in Japan, a country he would shortly return to, several years before me to be sure, but we would certainly often meet again. Most sincerely yours, Yukio.

In early 1954 Richie returned to Japan, began studying the language, and supported himself by teaching at Waseda University, correcting correspondence for the newly formed Japan Air Lines and becoming film critic for the Japan Times.

26 april 1954. I was hoping to get to review Seven Samurai—but the senior critic, the otherwise supportive Saisho Fumi, wanted it. I got, however, to go to the premiere today.

It was at the big Nichigeki, Toho’s best house. Kurosawa had so gone over the budget that the company decided it must exploit the picture and this included a big star-filled gala premiere, but later someone told me the company would cut the picture for other local screenings. I was thus a member of that favored audience who got to see the complete picture—a single showing.

It is probably just as well that I was prevented from reviewing it. My Japanese is not nearly good enough to handle period language. I went to one of Daiei Studio’s samurai films and was baffled by the many stately injunctions to go to the toilet. The toilet? asked the queried publicity person, incredulous. Yes, I quoted—Benjo e mairo. No, no, no, he said: Not benjo but (an old term for the palace court) denjo.

Meredith Weatherby’s home, 1954. japan architect

Even though I could not follow the language of Seven Samurai, it made little difference to my appreciation (as separate from my understanding) of the film. I have seen Alexander Dovzhenko now, and John Ford, and I was able to understand the accomplishment of Kurosawa and to recognize in that final reel one of the great feats of editing, and to see in the final scene one of cinema’s great moral statements.

And there, as though in long shot on the Nichigeki stage, was Kurosawa, without the floppy hat, and my friend Hayasaka, ill I hear, standing solemn in his round horn-rimmed glasses, but still shyly smiling.

In Tokyo Richie was living in the home of Meredith Weatherby. This was a large farmhouse, a minka, that had been moved from the mountains of Okutama and re-erected in what was then the quiet residential district of Roppongi. The extant entries are largely about Mishima Yukio. This is because any others were used elsewhere, but these were collected for a projected book about the author, one never written.

5 may 1954. Meredith and I drive out to Jiyugaoka to watch Mishima take part in a local festival. He is already beside the portable shrine that he, with the others, will carry aloft, jostling the happy deity presumed inside. He is also already in costume, like the rest of the neighborhood youths—a short coat, a headband, straw sandals, no pants, just a tight loin cloth that hides the sex and cleaves the butt. Already the drums have begun their thumping and soon the neighborhood procession will begin. Yukio is only a year younger than I am—that makes him twenty-nine, but he looks nine at the most. Frail, with a narrow childish chest, he is right now grinning with excitement.

With Meredith Weatherby, 1953.

What so excites him, I wonder. If I had to run around naked in straw sandals bearing those beams until my shoulders ran blood, I would not be grinning with excitement. Then I see that all the boys are being matey with each other, that there is much good-natured joshing, and that there will be lots of touching when they push aloft the shrine. But it is not, I think, the tactile, that excites these groups; it is that what they are doing they are doing together.

Mishima, so solitary, so alone, so isolated—and this is what he always writes about—can for an hour or two be a part of society in which there are no individuals, only sets of arms and pairs of legs. What freedom he must feel. No wonder he grins.

The boys all squat down, take the great beams gratefully onto their shoulders, then stand, staggering, as the drums pound and the flute purls and this strange creature, part man, part god, begins its unsteady way down the road and Yukio grins and shouts as he passes.

1 june 1954. Mishima came over this afternoon. Meredith is translating The Sound of Waves and Yukio’s English has gotten so good that he can help. Later he often comes upstairs to where the silkworms were kept when this was a farmhouse, which is where I live.

As always, so polite that he is at the beginning distant, and yet always determined. This is because he has uses for us all. Yukio is not only a dramatist but also a practicing stage director. For the drama of his life, he has cast us in our various roles, those demanded by the rigor of the script. Each of us has his or her purpose—or else we would not have seen him at all.

Meredith is an important translator and so his relationship with Mishima is literary and concerned with the translations. I, however, am of no literary use and my role is more indeterminate. I am cast as a kind of confidante, and after he had studied the translation with Meredith downstairs he often relaxes upstairs.

Today he wanted to know more about Suetonius—was captivated by those suspicious accounts of Tiberius and Nero. I told him about Dio Cassius and together we looked into Heliogabalus, an emperor whose excesses interested him. Mishima today said that he felt separated from the things he really liked. He said he thought that some time in Rome under Tiberius would have been interesting—or maybe Diocletian—he was thinking of Sebastian. He toyed with the idea of reincarnation—not seriously, but as a kind of hopeful possibility, wondered if he hadn’t been a Persian slave boy in an earlier life, or an indulgent emperor.

We also talked about Sanya, the working-class district of Japan where I sometimes go; about the bar run by Abe Sada, the woman who, having accidentally killed her lover, cut off his penis and carried it around with her until she was apprehended. Mishima has often told me how much he would like to go to the place—Hoshikikusui, Star Chrysanthemum Water is its name—and how he regrets he cannot.

Here the barrier is spatial, not temporal. He cannot go because of who he has already become. Thanks to the publicity he so courts, he would have been recognized. His reaction to fame is to both desire it and to deplore it. When we are out together and people recognize him he is uncomfortable. Though they do not directly approach—this is not the Japanese way—people do move closer, and keep glancing, if not staring. He will then hail a taxi. Yet, at the same time he keeps on doing things—acting, singing, carrying on—that ensure just this troublesome kind of renown.

undated, 1955. Today as we sat on my sofa and the late afternoon sun lay great horizontal rays across us, I again noticed Yukio’s strong resemblance to the young André Gide: the same narrow temples, against which authors put a finger when having their pictures taken, the flat and virginal temples of the thinker, the face held like a book between those pale, flat bookends.

Also Gide-like the jaw line, long, lean, pushing the chin into an aggressive angle that seems to lead the face. These two create a strain, pull against each other—the jawbone, strong as that of a horse, leading against the restraint of the cloistered temples.

And the dichotomy continues: above, the eyes dark, even in mirth, the gaze of a divinity student; beneath, the mouth full, struggling to hold itself in. In Gide the mouth makes me think of a pomegranate; in Mishima, a flower. Not so much a rose as something more exotic—a hibiscus, perhaps.

This is a mouth that has tasted good things, but has learned not to smack its lips. It is an abstemious mouth, the kind that learns to nibble. Still, Mishima is not a French Protestant, but a Japanese with leanings toward folk-festival Shinto. The dichotomy is there, but different.

When I first met him again last year I was rereading Gide’s Journals and had just finished the part where he, reading Stendhal’s Journals, had come upon Napoleon’s smile, “. . . in which the teeth are shown but the eyes do not smile.” Mishima and Napoleon—not a bad comparison.

undated, 1955. Yukio is a dandy, in the sense that Gide, like Baudelaire, was a dandy. There is nothing openly ostentatious about, say, his clothes. But if you look closely you will see that the cut is superior, that the material is the best. He’s like those Tokugawa merchants who wore sober kimonos, the linings of which cost much more. For them it was governmental authority that denied display. For Mishima it is an even stricter self-denial.

A man is a dandy as a man is an epicure. With self so precious, dandyism becomes (the words are Baudelaire’s) “. . . nothing but a form of gymnastics designed to fortify the will and discipline the spirit.” But one may dandify the body as well as the wardrobe. Mishima tries to form himself into the image he desires, all fat, all excess melted away: spirit and body become one—a lean, hard mind in a lean, hard body.

A dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often thought to be, is really a strict conformist. He is beating the world at its own game. If the world says be neat, then he will astonish it by being immaculate. This is not because he himself thinks neatness a virtue. It is because the world thinks so, or says it does. To beat the world at its own game is to purposely display through excess.

But the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is so tolerant of dandies. They are not dangerous, since they too, in their own way, conform. This is because the dandy is not really concerned with the outside world. He is concerned only with the image he projects and—in turn—receives. Sometimes he creates a multiplicity of images through which he confounds, but only in order to dazzle himself.

There are, to be sure, intellectual dandies who push conventional ideas to extremes. This Mishima does not, cannot do. He reminds us of the dandies of an earlier time because he is so concerned with his mirror-like image of himself—stern with puritan eyes, and a full, rich mouth, often used for laughing since the eyes don’t, can’t laugh.

undated, 1955. Mishima takes us out to a new restaurant he has discovered—French. Over the terrine he tells me that he is going to change his style, that he now admires Mori Ogai and is writing an essay on him. Mori’s style is strong, sound, heavy, and will be quite different from the decorative style which Meredith assures me is Yukio’s.

Meredith thinks he knows the reason for the change of style and later tells me. It is that Ishihara Shintaro and his brand new bestseller Taiyo no Kisetsu [Season of the Sun] have captured the attention of the young all over Japan—something that Yukio thought he had.

During dinner he talks about a topical novel—something to appeal to a wider audience—he is writing about the monk who burned down the Golden Pavilion. It will presumably be in the strong, sound, heavy style. It is now almost finished, he says, and adds that and he is going to celebrate by doing something about his body. He says he is determined to begin boxing lessons at the Nihon University Boxing Club.

During this dinner I realize that I am witnessing part of an ongoing process—the continual transformation of Yukio’s life, his constant redoing of himself. And behind the still-frail framework I see the bulky inspiration It is still Omi, the early beloved, the older classmate in Confessions of a Mask. When I come back home I look up the passage, in Meredith’s translation: “Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect.”

In addition to his Tokyo journals, Richie also kept travel diaries. The first covers an extended 1954–55 visit to the Kansai beginning with a day-long trip that the bullet train now accomplishes in three hours. Following this there were trips to Sado and to Kyu­shu. As in his wartime journals, he was evolving a form that could accommodate both what he saw and how he felt. These culminated in his best-known work, The Inland Sea (1971).

27 december 1954. I buy a pot of barley tea from my window, and as the train slides out of Tokyo Station I look down at the familiar scenes from above. This is where I have many times walked, but now I am riding. I sip my tea and quietly enjoy the thought of travel.

From my moving window I watch a man climb a smokestack, both man and chimney black against the blue of this winter sky. Children play New Year’s games along the streets, and workers on the far tracks chant as their hammers simultaneously stop in midair, then crash down.

Sunlight, and Tokyo’s winter colors: blue, white, black, gray. I look out at the passing city, so crossed with wires—telegraph, telephone, streetcar—that it looks like an etching.

From Yokohama the country begins—abruptly. You leave the station and you are in the fields. Buildings change, too. The roofs become thatch, and under these architecture becomes visible.

And with the farmhouses, hills and forests—forests one would not dream of in Tokyo—not a hill without its thick crest of trees. Not that the hand of man is invisible. These fields are decorated—there is neither a valley nor a hill without its advertisement. Everywhere, singers loud in the landscape. But for me, illiterate, they are welcome bits of color in the dun vocabulary of winter. Japan is particularly beautiful for those of us who cannot read.

At Ofuna, to contrast with all the beauty, there is the concrete Kannon, molded by some prewar millionaire. Enormous as it is, however, it is not pretentious. There is indeed something winning about its colossal plainness. One can become fond of the tasteless as one can of bad manners. The Ofuna Kannon, like public urination, seems to speak of some natural state beyond good taste.

Lots of people in the ugly station. People are my preferred scenery. Their presence for me informs the landscape. I know that under the thatched roof or the concrete ceiling is someone I would want to know. But we start—the platform is snatched away.

The mountains are so near. The long black, snow-covered hills close about us. Then, from behind, sliding out suddenly, is Fuji, an apparition, an impossible white. This mountain never looks real because it never looks natural. The shape is so perfect it could not but be artificial. Easy to believe it was thought sacred, even now when it is thought not—except by foreigners.

Suddenly, the sea—a blinding silver in the sun. The land drops, fields patched as in a quilt, roll down to the rocks. And, opposite, Fuji steps out like a tenor, flank forward, head in the clouds. Below, touches of color, mandarin oranges ripening on their trees. Semi-tropical, Izu at hand, the warm black current coursing along beside the tracks. Just an hour from Tokyo and I am buying from my window iced tangerines, five of them like orange snowballs.

History begins outside this Kanto Plain I am leaving. There is still room for it here. Our train track parallels the old highway, the Tokaido. I can see it swaying, closer and further, as it wobbles around our straight track, always recognizable by the double rows of cryptomeria that border it. Suddenly it turns and we do not, and I see in instant perspective the twin lanes of trees, the white road in-between. From the window of my express I am seeing what Hiroshige saw.

Odawara, a city hemmed between sea and mountain, a city trying to be as modern as Tokyo. But it cannot. History lies too heavily upon the land and Fuji rears above it like an ancestor. Odawara’s shiny new electrical plant hasn’t a chance.

Atami, blinding in the sun, has more successfully escaped, perhaps because the Tokaido goes elsewhere. A pleasure resort, a toy city of terraced hotels, clinging to cliffs and marching down to the flat sea. Great favorite with honeymooners—hot springs, a few lonely looking palms, strangers in a strange land. It is a nowhere city, with frivolous strings of lanterns and flags decorating the empty daytime streets.

Behind the mountains climb up and hide a stern Fuji, hanging high, invisible but felt. I look at the city below turning like a carousel as the train goes round the last curve before the tunnel, and I finish my final tangerine.

Mishima, close to cloud-covered Fuji, which still hangs above the landscape, defining it. I look at the people from my window. They seem to feel the weight. The open look of Tokyo, the pragmatic set of the mouth, the inquiring eye—there is little of this. These are the faces of those who live on the Fuji plain. Pale, eyes wary, mouths cautious, as though expecting the mountain to fall upon them. Fuji, now invisible, hangs there above the lion-colored hills.

Numazu, and we leave behind the mountains. I write this in the dining car, and at the next table are a group of Japanese ex-soldiers. One still has his cropped hair, after all these years. He also has the wary eyes of the district. He seems to know the country, covertly points out sights to the others as they pass. To me, too, it seems unfamiliar. I have not seen this land for seven years; saw it last from the window of the Allied Car in the occupied days.

Above are the hills leading back to Atami and ocean. I remember best a view of Numazu, the bay, the sea, and Fuji, spread out before me like an illuminated map, a view I remember from near a decade ago now—seen from those very hills, through the windshield of an Army jeep.

Just then the clouds shift and Fuji emerges, huge, dwarfing the towns and villages spread upward on its apron. As I write, the crown slowly parts the clouds. Now it is free, an impossibly perfect cone, floating upon the clouds, some great triangle escaped from geometry itself. At the top, snow in the crevasses, making it look old, wrinkled, the way that Hokusai shows it. But he only had a piece of paper and Fuji has an entire hemisphere. It is huge. The absurd perfection seen from a distance has vanished. Something this large can only be dangerous.

The train turns and Fuji looms then drops behind. Ahead the black hills part and I see distant icy peaks, like a row of teeth: the Japan Alps, the spine of the island itself.

At Shimizu, brilliant sun, the radishes hung to dry in the trees look like tropical fruit. Here are the real tropics. Atami is merely Florida—Shimizu is South America. The sea extends along one side, a curving bay. The water looks warm enough to swim in, and in Tokyo this morning it was freezing.

Shizuoka, one tall building, Venetian rococo it seems, and right beside it a Shinto shrine, all ancient lacquer. In the station, electric clocks painted apple green and in front of them men sweeping the floors wearing twelfth-century hats. No one finds this novel or charming or incongruous except me.

In the passing freight car, lumber from the mountains, great shaggy logs covered with thick bark and thin snow. A party boards, very drunk, and begins singing folk songs in steady voices while Fuji, now demoted to a hill, solemnly waves at us as we round a bend. In front of it a single red advertising balloon hangs like a long-stemmed cherry—all that is left of Shizuoka.

Bentenjima, halfway to Kyoto. I stopped overnight many years ago but now recognize nothing, nor does the train, which rushes by without looking. But it is a pretty town—a country village by the sea or a seaside hamlet in the fields. The ocean has invaded the town on one side, and a mountain river presses against it on the other. Caught between the two, little Bentenjima makes the best of it.

I go to the end of the car and stand hanging out of the doorway as the wind rushes past and the town dwindles. Even on the smallest railways where I came from in America, you can’t do this. You’re too well taken care of. You can’t even open the train windows any more. But not here. Life is cheap. Anyone who wishes may lean from the doorway of the moving train. Those who care to fall out may do so.

Back in my seat I eat the grass-green caramels I bought at Hamamatsu, bought mainly to enjoy the illicit delights of buying through an open window. They taste like the sickly waxen taffy I chewed when very young. Japan is the land where all penny-candy should come from.

Much colder now as we leave the sea and turn to the mountains. No more citron, only piles of lemon-colored rice straw and the light green of the radish tops against the brown soil—these are country colors. And at Ozaki a country train boy in the platform house across the track is drinking tea, staring straight head, does not see me, and seems to be thinking. Absurdly, I want him to see me. The train jerks. He does not.

Travel in Japan gives a sense of accomplishment. I have just looked at my map and discovered that if I had gone in a line straight west of Tokyo I would now be far out in the Japan Sea, having crossed the entire island.

Yet Japan does not seem small. It is a full-sized country, larger than England. Its earlier reputation of being tiny, dainty, delicate, comes from imagination alone. Japan is a big country but one that does not lie down on you, like America or Australia. It is the right size for human habitation.

Nagoya, more barley tea from the window, but the pot is different. No longer is it the squat Kanto shape but now, already, the graceful and impractical spouted pot from the Kansai. Even the embossed logos are different—here a little fan. Kanto and Kansai are much more different than just East and West. I look out of the window and see passing me the tiled roofs of the city—itself a pottery center. They are blacker and heavier-seeming than those of Tokyo. Here Osaka is already felt.

Owari-Ichinomiya—late afternoon sun, the browns become reddish, the greens deepen into black, and the playing children in the passing shrine cast long shadows behind them like capes. The silhouette of the train and its smoke races along the bank, then suddenly rears and rolls—a terrible wreck—as the bank turns to a wall, a station, a crossing. In the distance, russet mountains, the houses all black, still too early for the supper lights.

Gifu, a mountain of stained wood, black tiled roofs and barred windows. Directly beyond it are miniature mountains, arranged in the steep, impossible shapes of mountains in Chinese scrolls. The late afternoon sun turns the water red, then black. I look for cormorants on the oily evening river, but see none.

Across the aisle a middle-aged pair are entertaining each other. From the window he has endlessly bought beer, chocolate, rice cakes, tangerines, gumdrops. These he feeds her. They laugh too much, are having too good a time to be married. When he gets up—the toilet doubtless—I glance up and she stares boldly back. They are enjoying themselves.

Sekigahara—a plain where a barrier stands, you might translate it. Here is where Ieyasu fought—and won. It is much colder, the glass pane frosts, and the train is traveling more slowly, as though winded. We are on a high plateau with round, snow-covered mountains on either side. The dim sun still reaches the clouds and they turn a cold pink. But down here in the high valley it is dark and the houses are lighted.

A fine, light snow is falling and the window is cold. I pass a small boy playing with his dog in the snow. Then we enter a short tunnel. Two minutes later I see another boy playing with his dog in the snow. The two boys will never meet, nor will the dogs—a whole mountain lies between them.

It grows darker and the pines are black. The pink clouds have faded to gray, like dying embers. The smoke from the engine turns white as spume and catches in the limbs of the black pines. In the distance, lights. It is suppertime all over the land and families are gathering. As we chug by I try to look into the passing houses to glimpse the families illuminated, caught forever with ladle in the pot, spoon in the soup.

Now it is dark, and yet, in the faint light from the dying sky I see one old man. He is still working in a snowy field, turning the soil. The work is finished but for this small corner. This is what the old man has done while I have been traveling from Tokyo.

Then Maibara, now quite dark, the station lighted. There is a winter feeling to this early darkness, and I have the taste of cinders in my mouth and the air is chill. Somewhere before long, Lake Biwa, but we will not see it.

Kyoto. Here it has been raining, and I sit in the Nara train waiting for it to leave. Kyoto is black and silent under the heavy sky. Few people about. I look at those who are. It is difficult to describe the Kansai face, but I think its difference lies in its shape. There is a fullness, a roundness which in Kyoto is called full-moon beauty in both men and women. In men too, perhaps a slightly lighter complexion, slightly thinner features, something in the curve of the cheek. The young man across the aisle from me, for example. Were this Tokyo I would still guess Kyoto.

And behind him sit the couple from the Tokyo train. It is quiet enough now that I can overhear. She is saying that it is too bad it was so dark going through Hachiman for she was unable to make anything of it. She also is calling him sensei. This is an important clue but at the same time a confusing one. Is he really her teacher? Is she actually his student? Or is it simply being used in an honorary sense—in which case he can be anything at all. She raises her arm a bit coquettishly for a student and her kimono sleeve falls back. I gaze into her armpit but she doesn’t look back.

Now a friend of the boy across the way has come and they are talking and I realize that I cannot understand one word of what is being said. A girl joins them and that makes things a bit more comprehensible. She is talking about her sueta [sweater], otherwise it is all thick, heavy Kansai accent. I wonder if I will be able to understand anything down here. They, thanks to radio and movies, will be able to understand me.

In what other country, I wonder, could eight hours of travel make this much difference? If I traveled eight more I would reach Kyushu, where even a Japanese from somewhere else is linguistically lost?

Nara—the mistress of the inn is busy making me feel at home. I can understand her, but then she is, as she tells me, from Shizuoka. We like to talk in Shizuoka, she says. Says she is happy she can understand me.

She goes to see about the bath and I look around. A large celadon rabbit in the alcove, and the scroll is a Nara scene. The same thing is outside the window, the famous pond. No celluloid kewpie in the alcove, I am happy to see. And not only for aesthetic reasons. Celluloid kewpies mean a certain kind of half-baked, hopefully-Western way of thinking that repulses romantic me.

In the bath more conversation, this about what I am going to have for supper. The real purpose of the talk is her perfectly natural desire to see a naked foreigner. This desire is divorced from any erotic intent. She is merely curious. Satisfied, we agree that I am to have sashimi and tempura. She says she is happy at the choice.

Back in the room, there she is again. This time with a modest request. She wants to know how to say kutsu o nuide kudasai in English. I tell her: please take off your shoes. Says she is happy. This is to be used on foreigners who would otherwise walk her mats in their footwear. We are a troublesome lot, it is true. As I left the bath I noticed that the maid ran in at once to ascertain that I had not, indeed, used the soap in it.

The mistress herself serves my supper and then sits to watch me eat it, talking the while. She assumes that I know more Japanese than I do and I consequently understand less and less. Fortunately, however, she knows little English—merely one phrase that, oddly, is: I am happy.

28 december 1954. At a way station in the forests above Kasuga Shrine. From where I sit, the path, mossy even in winter, disappears around a bend, lost among the great trees of these park-like woods. The pines shut out the winter sun but the forest floor is dappled. It is yet early and, hanging in the higher branches, the morning mist still rises. It is cold and my breath too rises to the rafters of this deserted hut in which I sit.

I have just left Kasuga Shrine itself, vermilion in the early morning sun, the priests moving, dim and white, through the dark and polished corridors. It is an open shrine, more like a pavilion in the woods, and its colors are red and white against the evergreen of the trees and the blue of the morning winter sky.

Below, in the park, the deer wander through the groves. Their coats are shaggy because it is winter and their horns are short because they are cut in the fall. They look at me with their Asiatic eyes and are not afraid. Then one turns, flicks his tail, and they bound over the frosted moss to disappear into the furthest fringe of the forest.

An old woman with a tray came by offering cakes to feed the deer. They hear her and return, looking expectantly at me. Now, high in the forest, I can see them still, wandering below, but the old woman has gone. The sun shines but it is not warm. There is a silence broken only by the cry of a winter bird.

By a pond near the Shosoin. The birds call and the deer bark, and the stagnant pond lies brown and mottled, reflecting the great roof of the Dai­bu­tsuden. The sun has gone and a cold wind ruffles the surface. The upside-down temple shudders.

Kofukuji. Across a narrow reflecting pond is the five-storied pagoda. As I gaze up at it I hear two women behind me talking. One is saying that it is not really the best, not that old. I look it up in my guidebook and, sure enough, it is a reconstruction. But then what isn’t—the original was ninth century. Then I read more carefully. This recent copy was made about fifty years before America was discovered.

Having descended into town, I drink coffee in a small shop made hideous with advertisements of something in CinemaScope. Nara the city is banal; Nara, the ancient capital, the park, is—well—sublime. And sitting here sipping my mocha, I suddenly understand why.

Nature—nature roams the park, and the works of man have either vanished or exist but in fragments. Like the deer, nature does as it will, and the shrines above are where it rests. And this modern and stifling little coffee shop is only fifteen minutes by foot from the depths of the forest where I was this morning.

Later, I meet some Tokyo students feeding the deer and ask if they know of a cheap inn. They suggest theirs, very near the park and very cheap. So now I have moved from the most expensive place in Nara to the least. The other was a thousand five hundred yen a night with two meals. This one is four hundred with one.

The tatami is dusty, the windows leak cold air, and no one brings me tea, but I like it better. My new landlady regards me with such suspicion that she leaves me entirely alone. I did not again see the talkative mistress from my prior inn but I imagine she is not happy at the loss of a customer. The taxi driver who carried me and my bag from one domicile to the other was astonished. The economic shift I had made was enormous and the only thing that would have surprised him more would have been if it had been in the opposite direction.

The new landlady has just brought tea, after all. She is still suspicious but now more curious. She keeps turning her head to one side as she regards me—like one of the deer. Now I sit in a restaurant near the station having wandered about trying to find the office of the Yamato Times. Taking many a wrong turning I have consequently seen most of the city.

Nara is smaller than I thought. It took about an hour to walk around it. Once off the main avenues the streets turn narrow and the houses hang over the traffic. Like a lot of Kansai, the place looks more like China than anything in Tokyo does. If I look down one of these cluttered black perspectives and smell the charcoal burning, I can be back in Shanghai in the winter.

With Tani Hiroaki. Nara, 1954.

These streets keep leading me back to the lake and park. I come across a small pagoda, three stories, unpretentious, a dusty red. I admire it. For so large a building it seems to weigh little. The structure is apparent and the space under and around the eaves balances that of the bulk. I stay and admire until the deer find me. So I buy them some cakes. Trying these myself I wonder at their enthusiasm. No taste at all—dry, hard, empty.

Having written this, I look up and see a student sitting at the next table. His name, I am to learn, is Tani Hiroaki, and he is kind enough to help me find the Yamato Times. Big, boisterous, very polite, he stays with me while I talk with the editor who gives me, in addition to his time, a map of the city, and expresses a polite interest in my newspaper, the Japan Times, in the distant capital. After that Tani has to go home but we are to meet again this evening.

Rest of the afternoon spent trying find a place to go to the toilet. This is always a problem in Japan and even if a place is found it never has any paper. The Japanese wisely carry their own. Since I do not, I tramped the streets and finally retreated to my inn, where I hoped they had some.

They didn’t, so I had to ask for some. At once the serving girl set up a merry noise. The spectacle of a foreigner in a Japanese toilet is a happy one and it is even better to be informed of it in advance. My simple request brought gurgles of delight. Of course her pleasure had a point. The Japanese toilet is supposed difficult for Westerns to manage. Strange that these people who willingly relinquish traditional underwear and phallic worship should cling to their toilets. Even now I can hear the maids chattering of the event. I have made their day interesting, memorable, and worthwhile.

29 december 1954. Late in the morning. We overslept and Tani is now down washing. The breakfast is on the table and as I wait for him I write, this page cold against my hand.

Last night he took me on a tour of the brothels of Nara. They are nothing like what Tokyo offers. Rather, they are low, black, Naniwa-style, with wide front entrances, like brightly lighted stables. And, on either side of the gate-like door, two old women huddled over braziers and called out to the passersby. Just inside, as though on stage, sit the girls, some in kimono, some in dresses. They read, talk, and warm themselves. The customers step into the entryway and stare at them. It is like a waxworks, a tableau vivant. Except that the girls talk, make jokes, and stare back.

I ask Tani where they come from and he says probably from the country. In one place he asks and she says she is from Tokyo. He tells me that they all say they are from Tokyo. We look a lot, then go out and have more sake.

He is now returned from the bath and we eat breakfast—miso soup, seaweed, egg to put on the rice, pickles, and tea. Sometimes I have trouble with the Japanese breakfast—want my coffee, my toast, my jam. With the smiling Tani opposite me I happily slurp my soup.

He was born and raised in Nara but now goes to school in Tokyo. Is home for the holidays. His hair and eyebrows are very black and his teeth are very white; his hands are chapped and red, knuckles are big and flat. He is a member of the boxing team at university. Is just twenty-one.

We are in the train but still at the station—Nara Station, which seeks, outside at any rate, to suggest ninth-century architecture. Inside, however, it is all done in Ordinary Railway Station—tiles, fluorescent light, benches. Tani wants to know what I am writing. I do not know how to say journal. So I say Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Since he receives the enormous smattering that all Japanese students get, he nods and is now convinced I am writing my confessions. Which, in a way, I suppose I am. Ah, the bells are ringing and the orange and candy sellers gather around the windows. We are off for Horyuji.

Horyuji. We walk through the paddies for almost half an hour before seeing it—a walled compound, half hidden in pine, the pagoda bristling above the trees. Just as we mount the steps leading to the great gate the sun appears for the first time today.

The Kondo is a square, intricately wrought building, dragons flying at all angles, the inner eaves supported by patient lions. The building is square and flat as a Quaker meeting hall, and inside stand the statues, dimly gleaming, as though testifying.

Outside the compound we sit and smoke. Tani has just gone over to examine one of the trees that flank the court. It is a shell, hollowed out by the years until it looks like a large ebony carving. The sky is visible through its holes and yet it lives—from the top green leaves appear. Tani has asked the local photographer its name. He doesn’t know. So he asks him to take our pictures.

We visit the Daihozoden, a museum turned into a church by the offerings left in front of the art works. An idea we might well emulate. I would leave mine in front of Vermeer, Chardin.

Then, around a corner, I come upon the Kudara Kannon, whose picture I have often seen. But photographs have not prepared me for the effect. It is frightening—the cry of a large bird or the sudden appearance of a giant nursemaid. The face is feathered with verdigris—and she is eight feet tall and from Korea. Also she is a thousand years old.

Walking along we come across the Yumendo, the octagonal building I have often seen. It was in a volume of the Book of Knowledge that I gazed at as a child. It is also on the reverse side of the thousand yen bill. We stand, Tani, the priest in charge, and me, just such a bill in hand, and solemnly compare. See, it is just the same.

Tani is full of questions. Is that kind of wood expensive? How much did that gilt cost? He properly pays no attention to the beauty of the work, only its value. Others also ask questions. An elderly couple turns to one another. “It is very old,” says one. “Maybe one hundred years,” ventures the other. “No,” says the priest, “more like a thousand.” “Oh,” they say, “very old.”