Book Info: The Japan Journals Edited by Leza Lowitz Stone Bridge Press; Berkley CA; 2004; pp. 267
	Sight, Sound, Mind In His Voice Sight and Sound Top Ten Works Stars and Stripes

We are all individuals
By: Annika A. Culver*

“…how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right—I can see t he peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.”
(Donald Richie, September 27, 1999, p. 425).

Donald Richie’s latest book, a collection of sketches from his journals, begins with an aerial view of post-war Tokyo in 1947 of the city slowly awakening to the morning mist. The last glimpse of Richie is another sketch of Tokyo, but one of a post-modern landscape in Roppongi Hills that has devoured all traces of the past and which predicts a homogenous future without cultural markers. These two visions of Tokyo juxtapose the dawn of the god-like conquering hero rebuilding the center of an occupied nation with the endpoint of a global capitalism that diminishes the human. Sandwiched in between are intriguing impressions of a life spent in constant critical observation. Potential weak-points of this otherwise valuable work are in its clumsy organization and lack of a chronology to orient readers without previous familiarity with Richie’s work. Owing to excisions of sensitive passages and deletions of text unrelated to Japan, the editor Leza Lowitz enters and exits in uneven demarcations in Richie’s narrative spanning over forty-seven years. Instead of adding short explanations of background information or judiciously providing endnotes, the editor urges us to turn to specific works by the author. Despite these minor detractions, in its astute observations of Japanese society over a period of almost five decades, Richie’s text is important in that it reveals the problematic nature of reading (or even editing) a journal as a historical work by a living writer.

Richie gained his niche in Japan through the Occupation newspaper Stars and Stripes, after his human-interest article on a homeless man under a bridge garnered the attention of its editor. He has since made his living as a journalist, film critic, English teacher at Waseda University, essayist, and director, while writing over six books and other unpublished manuscripts. Influenced by the journals of James Boswell, Saint-Simon, the Goncourt brothers, John Cheever, Alan Bennett, and most of all, Andre Gide, Richie searches for a deeper personal and social truth in noting his observations. Richie, along with his close friend Edward Seidensticker, maintains a continuing interest in the works of Gide, whose self-critical reveries are reflected in his passages.

Memorable sketches of Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Frances Ford Coppola, Oshima Nagisa and others abound in the early entries of a journal Richie often mined for literary materials. One can easily sense these snapshots were meant to fill later essays. Indeed, when Richie is hard at work on a translation project, book, or other endeavor, he neglects his journal while devoting his full attention to the current task. As he himself notes, “I am the empty places in my books.” (p. 474). In the late eighties, Richie’s tone becomes even more introspective as he begins to use the journals more as records for himself rather than as source materials for other works.

As the observer of a foreign culture as well as the eternally observed foreigner, Richie’s reflections oscillate between the maintenance of a critical distance, and, in his earlier days, the desire for an intimacy where subject and object are destroyed. From the very beginning of his time in Japan, he flouts Occupation rules forbidding fraternization with the natives. As a member of a wealthy, victorious nation, Richie easily makes personal conquests of his own, describing his intimate encounters with men of various working-class professions, and later, with those of his own milieu. Friendships with his lovers often continue for decades as they became his surrogate family punctuating his history with key life events such as marriages, births, funerals, and chance meetings. Though Richie describes homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships in his journal, he objects to “coming out” as a potentially limiting political statement that could lead to exclusivity. A chronic non-joiner, he writes critically of his position between the US and Japan: “I am at home in Japan precisely because I am an alien body. I am no longer a member over there, and cannot become a member over here—this defines my perfectly satisfactory position. One does not have to be a member of something.” (p. 275)

Richie’s pervasive “sense of them and us” (p. 259) allows him the privileged position of a man apart from society similar to that of a bunjin, or literati figure in Japanese history. As a self-styled fin-de-siecle bunjin and “talented dilettante,” he searches for a truth where “art is a moral force…” (p. 454) that can lead him towards an understanding of self and society. His Baudelairean accounts of walks around Ueno Park and the shitamachi (“low city”) area around Asakusa are filled with descriptions of the proletarian under-class, the homeless, and the destitute--marginal types who echo his own position as outsider. Yet, his standpoint is that of the privileged observer in self-imposed exile from a wealthy, super-power nation. Half-jokingly castigating himself as an “imperialist predator,” Richie views his gout de la boue, or “taste for mud,” as the will to only accept the low as the real (p. 437). Not intimidated by society’s cast-offs, he searches out encounters with the powerless who lack the self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie. His conversations with bar hops, transvestite prostitutes, eccentric expatriates, taxi drivers, and other colorful characters reveal an intense curiosity for the unusual along with the commonality of desire for human companionship.

In the eighties in Japan, Richie perceives that the attitude to foreigners has begun to change, with fewer possibilities of a fortuitous encounter with a stranger that might lead to friendship. Fearful of the diminishing opportunities for personal interaction, he observes young Japanese playing virtual reality games in an arcade as an expression of the future of an increasingly distrustful society. Richie’s refusal of the internet and his tirades against cell phones all reflect his disgust at how others insulate themselves against direct interaction. Though his words betray the irate tone of an older person railing against the excesses of the young, he also reveals a more insidious concern, that of the diminishing importance of the individual as a sociable entity in human relations. When one follows Richie’s growth in his journals, it becomes more and more apparent how his sense of self is enmeshed in his interactions with others. Time cannot erase his youthful desire to know others: “I am still young, at least while I am here in Japan, sheltered from the great, racing wing of time… So I am there a child of the fifties instead of, as here, a part of the late nineties. And here people can see me, and there, being a ghost, I am invisible.” (p. 423-4). For Richie, to recognize humanity with empathy and to be recognized as human is what truly defines the self regardless of national distinctions or social categories.