Viewed Sideways
WRITINGS ON CULTURE AND STYLE
IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN
Donald Richie
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by
Stone Bridge Press
P.O. Box 8208
Berkeley, CA 94707
TEL 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com
© 2011 Donald Richie.
See Acknowledgments for publication histories.
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Printed in the United States of America.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
[on file]
Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.
E.M. FORSTER
Introductory Note
This is the third collection of my essays on culture and style in contemporary Japan. The first was A Lateral View (Japan Times, Ltd., 1987 / Stone Bridge Press, 1992) and the second was Partial Views (Japan Times, Ltd., 1995). This third volume, Viewed Sideways, contains eleven essays from the earlier collections and twenty-six that have never before been collected. For this edition some of the essays have been edited and expanded or shortened. These thirty-seven essays are intended to offer a cross-section view of Japan’s enormous cultural variety.
DONALD RICHIE
Tokyo, Japan
2011
Intimacy and Distance: On Being a Foreigner in Japan
As Edward Said once wrote: “The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”
I have lived for well over half my life in—from my point of view—just such an alien culture; one, further, considered by both natives and visitors as more alien than most—Japan.
The visitor to mid-twentieth-century Japan, particularly if he was an American romantic, was often accompanied by an urge to intimacy that was tempered by the fact of distance: his voyage was not only inner discovery of what he had not already known, but escape from what he already knew. These differences were rendered dramatic in that so much appeared Western but was revealed as Western only in appearance. He found in the shoe store something he did not know could fit a foot; looking into the carpenter’s shop there were very few tools he could recognize; eating a Western meal he discovered that it was mainly Japanese—there were, for a time, even rice cakes in McDonald’s.
At the same time there was a new feeling of freedom. The visitor was no longer controlled by his own mores and could disregard Japan’s. Exceptions were made for the gaijin, who could be expected to know nothing. This freedom included the ultimate liberty of finding everything “other” than himself—just walking down the street he enjoyed the freedom of seeming manifestly different.
In Japan foreigners had been stared at for well over a century. The early accounts all mention it, and until the massive influx of foreigners in the 1980s, they still were. They became used to it and eventually irritation turned to need. No matter what the Japanese truly thought, you were treated like a star. When my wife—tall, blonde, blue eyed—went back to New York, one of the things she said she missed was being stared at on the streets.
Shortly, however, the travelers discover that Japan, at the same time, insists that they keep their distance. It is suggested that they live with their own kind, in expensive ghettos such as Tokyo’s Roppongi. The exceptions being made for the foreigner then began to be perceived as limitations. Though the travelers desired intimacy, Japan was gently teaching them to keep their distance. (And, if they were yellow or black instead of white or pink, the lesson would be harsher and the distance greater.)
Another country, says Alastair Reid, an authority on the subject, is another self. One is regarded as different and so one becomes different—two people at once. I was a native of Ohio who knew only the streets of little Lima, and I am also an expatriate who knows best the streets of Tokyo, largest city in the world. Consequently I can compare them. And since the act of comparison is the act of creation, I am able to learn about both.
In the process I am absolved from prejudices of class and caste. I cannot detect them and no one attempts to detect them in me since my foreignness is difference enough. 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, Oh. Or naruhodo, since I was learning Japanese.
Learning a language does indeed create a different person since words determine facts. When I first arrived I was an intelligence-impaired person since I could not communicate and had to, like a child or an animal, guess from gestures, from intent, from expression.
Language freed me from such elemental means of communication, but it taught me a lesson I would not otherwise have known. While it is humiliating to ideas of self to be reduced to what one says (nothing at all if one did not know Japanese), it teaches that there are avenues other than speech.
Just as seeing a foreign film without subtitles may not impart much about the story but it does teach something about filmmaking, so being in Japan with no knowledge of Japanese language teaches much about the process of communicating.
What I am describing here is what any traveler, expatriate or otherwise, knows, but the degree and the difference depends upon the place and its culture. Japan tends to give a strong jolt because the space between the distance kept and the intimacy implied is greater than in some other countries. Japan is still openly (rather than covertly) xenophobic, but at the same time it has need for the foreigner—or at least his goods. This creates an oscillating dialectic—one that affects the Japanese in regard to foreigners almost as much as it affects foreigners in regard to the Japanese.
From the Japanese point of view, the ideal arrangement is for the visitor to come, do his business, and go home. For one who elects to live here, the fact is cause for interest and concern. How often it is implied that I would do better to go back wherever I came from. This is not unkind, nor even inhospitable. People are reacting as they would were they in a foreign land themselves. Many Japanese want to return to Japan, do not travel well, need miso soup, etc. They do not think of others behaving differently in a like situation. “Where are you from?” asks the taxi driver. Told, he asks, “But you go home often, don’t you?” Assured that I do, he is mollified.
Given this imposed distance, the intimacy seemingly promised by many Japanese becomes doubly attractive. The promise is, I think, not intended. It is occasioned by a real desire to give the guest pleasure, an inability to say plainly no, and a concern for gain. This means that the foreigner is forever kept up in the air, be it in a business deal or a love affair. Sometimes the emotions in these situations are identical. I heard a frustrated merger specialist ironically complain about a failed deal with a metaphor: “There I was, open like a flower . . . ”
And the lone person, the person who does not speak the language well, he who never spent his childhood in the culture—precisely, this newcomer—is most in need of the intimacy that is often dangled before him and is always just around the corner.
That this need often takes sexual form is notorious. Travelers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people. Part of it is the freedom (“no one knows me here”), but most of it is the need to affirm self on the most basic level, the emotional. Also, sex