Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie
I discovered a new model already in place: Japan, land of contrasts, the new and the old living equitably together. Under the modern veneer, there persevered this ageless core. I found supportive paradigms everywhere.
My neighborhood, little Tansumachi, had its named changed to Roppongi 4-chome, and was then flattened to make room for a new high-rise. There went the egg-lady and the chicken-man, there went the fruit-shop boys. And yet when the high-rise was completed, I found that the fruit boys had a new shop in its depths, one now named Boutique des Fruits.
Change within continuity—that is what my new model of the country allowed and accounted for. When the manga cartoon craze began and trashy comic books started to proliferate, I was thus able to explain it away by being of the opinion that, after all, Hokusai had himself been a kind of cartoonist, now hadn’t he? That there had also been a considerable loss in quality did not disturb me because, probably optimistically looking about at the changed country, I thought that my having Occupied it might have had something to do with its present prosperity.
Nor was I alone in my complacency. Ten years after the Occupation was over, the United States was gazing across the Pacific like a fond parent leaning over a crib. That infant economic nimbleness, now so deplored in what is left of the trade talks, was originally approved by the proud parents.
This perceived Japanese pragmatism, this going for what worked regardless of all other considerations, was, we thought, an American gene happily at work in fecund Japan. The country was our younger sibling—a smart kid with growing pains. And, for so long as it fit, Japan took to the kid-brother role. It fit Dr. Takeo Doi’s dictates about amaeru—that confident leaning upon another for support. It was also quite economical for the country: the money saved on national defense alone was considerable.
Also, it was a better role than that of big brother, for Japan well remembered (even if it didn’t much talk about) just where treating the rest of Asia as little brown brothers had gotten it. Dependent, this sibling now looked up to his protectors. This perceived difference we had all gotten used to in the Occupation. I enjoyed being but rarely contradicted to my face and being accorded what I thought was special treatment.
That I was also being marginalized, and often ghettoized as well (Lovely Roppongi, Home of the Foreigner), did not occur to me. After all, even though that golden age of opportunity, the Allied Occupation, was over, not a few of us still managed to get ahead in Japan almost entirely because of our nationality, our skin color, and because we were the people from whom lessons could still be learned. We were the obvious pragmatic choice for a model, and our favored status would last just as long as did our usefulness.
In 1968 I again left Japan, this time to take up a position in New York. If I had stayed in Ohio I would perhaps have been a salesman in Sill’s Shoe Store, but I had come to Japan and so I was returning to my country as Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
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I saw upon my return to Japan in 1974 that so much further change had occurred that my earlier ideas on the grand role of living tradition in Japan now seemed inadequate. Tradition apparently covered much less territory than I had originally estimated.
An example occurred when I went house hunting. During my first stay the rule for houses had been that the rooms were all Japanese—that is, all tatami—except for one Western (hard-floor) room. During my second stay, the rule was all Western except for one Japanese room. And now, during my third stay, all Western, no tatami, and in one place I saw that the hot-water heater had been put in the tokonoma, the traditional alcove for flower arrangements. Also—further indication of change—it was difficult to find anyone to rent to me. I had to have a sponsor, had to put down a sizable amount as a deposit. It slowly became apparent that I—though a very white American—was no longer looked up to.
Perhaps it had been already noticed that the U.S. model was not as successful as originally expected. And as more and more poor white foreigners came to work in rich Japan—as long-legged L.A. girls came to serve in the clubs, as Ohio boys came to labor as doormen—it finally became impossible to slide by simply by being white. Of a consequence we, native Occupier and newcomer alike, found Japan “changed.” The Japanese, we said, were becoming “arrogant.”
An interesting word choice because it indicates a change from what was perceived as tractable and compliant. Independence is always viewed as arrogance by those being replaced, and though the United States had not actually intended a postwar colonization of Japan, it still did not like the idea of the natives getting uppity.
And as for change, it was all very well, we thought, so long as it proceeded along the lines of the approved model: the surface changeable, the core inviolate. But now—beginning in the 1970s and growing increasingly more apparent in the following decades—a new model was becoming necessary.
Among the more attractive was one that invoked stratification. Japanese culture was composed of successive layers: the new merely piled on top of the old. The Shinkansen now ran faster than all other trains but the carpenters still pulled their saws. People named their girl children Aya and Misaki and thought the common Hanako unspeakably old fashioned—yet somewhere in the provinces a new Hanako was born.
This geological correlation was attractive but as a working model it somehow reminded of Donald Keene’s precise metaphor for the place. The onion: you remove layer after layer and finally you get to its core, which is . . . empty.
Another model was a complicated structural affair in which the country was seen as moving through such polarities as uchi and soto (inside vs. outside), ninjo and giri (one’s own feelings vs. society’s), and one that exhibited many other moving parts as well. This made Japan seem a unique place and was consequently a popular model with the Japanese themselves as well as the interested foreigner. It was a solid stage, however, and impervious to change. Perhaps for that reason I never found much use for this model. It could not prepare us for what was occurring. It lived in the past, and, as was becoming more apparent, as the economy bubbled, Japan lived in an eternal present.
I, who sort of believed in ancestor worship, even if the Japanese did not, was thus surprised when I saw the Shiba Tokugawa tombs razed to make way for the Prince Hotel. And I, who thought that a cozy symbiotic relationship existed between Japan and nature, reacted with alarm when I saw the coastline being concreted over, forests cut down to accommodate golf courses, and national park land given over to developers.
More was to come. Later on I saw that lifetime employment, a Japanese tradition if there ever was one, was there no longer; that the upward-bound escalator—just stay on, don’t bother to work, and you will be safely carried to the top of your bureaucratic profession—had stopped; and that the national diet had changed: coffee and toast became the easy-to-make national breakfast with difficult gohan and miso soup reserved for Sunday, maybe. And finger-licking-good American junk for in between.
And that wasn’t all. My former models had all made room for the idea of defenseless little Japan inundated by ruthless Western imports. These poured into the country and thus diluted tradition—that was how my paradigm worked. Now I saw that it was not that way at all.
Japan reached out and dragged in. Anything it wanted it got, anything it didn’t was kept out. A discerning shopper, the country willingly opened to what was useful, and snapped shut to what was not. Well, so did Ohio, I supposed, but with nothing like the scale, the openness, the panache. This simplified bivalve exemplar of the country did not have the elegance of former miniatures but it seemed to have the virtue of accuracy, at least for the present. It explained a lot.
For example, the true use of English in the country. For decades now the Japanese had been getting it all wrong. We chuckled over it (We Play for General MacArthur’s Erection). Then it occurred to me that this misuse of my language was not funny and further did not, as I then believed, show a contempt for English by ignoring the integrity of the original.
No contempt was involved, and no ignorance either. Writings in ads, on signs, over T-shirts and on shopping bags alike were not intended to be “English.” They were Japanese-English and this was not a subdivision of English but a subdivision of Japanese—a language directed only toward an uncritical audience for