Читать книгу Viewed Sideways - Donald Richie - Страница 11

When I came to Japan in a cold January in 1947 the first thing that I noticed was change. It was dramatic. Tokyo, like most Japanese cities, had been nearly destroyed during WWII. People were living in the subway tunnels, there was not enough food, and yet already on this burned plane of black ash was rising the lemon yellow of all the new buildings as the odor of burned wood gave way to the smell of fresh-cut lumber.

Every day I saw roads being made and canals being filled as the new city burgeoned. Watching the carpenters at work—sawing through the new wood—I saw that their tools cut as they were pulled, not pushed as they were back in the United States.

I noticed this with understanding—this was something I recognized. For years I had heard that Japan was a kind of topsy-turvy land where everything was done backwards. This had been among the earliest accountings of the country—a model created by early visitors, which had finally reached the snow-covered plains of Ohio, where I had heard of it. So here was something else I could relate to besides all the change: a paradigm for Japan, a model through which I could grasp the metamorphosing place.

Seemingly different, Japan has always seemed to demand a working model for comprehension, as though the place needed an articulated map, or a working metaphor. Here I was, brand new, and already searching around for one.

My viewpoint was that of unchanging Ohio, from whence I, just twenty-one, had come. Topsy-turvy land fit my needs quite well. When fellow Occupiers, looking at the carpenters sawing backwards, smiled and said, “These people have got a long way to go,” I agreed.

That was because these people were by definition trying to catch up with the West. They had been at this for some time now, nearly a century, and taken many a wrong turn. But now, thanks to us, they were finally on the right road.

This is what I thought as I stood at the Ginza crossing looking at the kimono and old army uniforms, hearing the geta and watching Hokusai’s Fuji being blocked out by all the new buildings. They might lose a view, I philosophized, but they were gaining a city.

This was something we Occupiers could understand. The old Japanese military model had proved faulty and the new American economic model seemed to work a lot better. Finding something familiar in an attitude that estimated everything solely by its practical bearing on current interests, we Occupiers worked hard to help put these reversed folks right. There was land reform, the big business cartels were broken up, democracy was introduced, and individuality was being governmentally promoted.

And as I looked at the city of Tokyo growing taller around me, at the Japanese around growing healthier and wealthier every day, I saw that my topsy-turvy paradigm was itself upside down. I had found them reversed only because I came from the other side of the earth. But if I thought about it, at this very instant the people of Ohio were standing on their heads. And, as for my belief that They were catching up with Us: They already had.

*

I left Japan in 1949 to go back to school at Columbia University, and when I returned to Japan in 1954 the Occupation was three years in the past. Land reform was over, the big business cartels were more or less back in place, democracy was being digested away. I saw so much had changed that I did not recognize the place.

What I saw as new was now even more interestingly mingled with what wasn’t. Old Shinto shrines on the top of new high-rises, white-robed acolytes on motorbikes, and ancient zaibatsu executives reclined in their new steel-and-glass headquarters.

On the streets I still saw some kimono but this traditional dress was overpowered by copies of Dior’s New Look. Geta were still seen, and heard, but Western-style shoes predominated, getting ready for the Gucci tsunami to come. And standing on the Ginza crossing I saw that Fuji-san had now entirely disappeared, covered by layer after layer of new buildings. And I remembered my earlier model, the now-vanished topsy-turvy land, as I gazed at the backward people who were rapidly becoming forward.

Looking about, 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.

*

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 whom meaning had no importance, though this significance of the newly acquired did.

Tradition was judged by the same rule. If it could be turned into the pragmatically useful it remained. This usually meant becoming a new product. Kimono and geta had all but disappeared, yet some remained as new signifiers: a girl in a kimono meant Traditional Type, going about her ikebana or her koto lesson; a boy in geta meant either Traditional Tradesman or Traditional Student Rightist, probably going to Takushoku University. And the despised Hanako was revived as the trendy and self-mocking title for a new magazine, which told all the young people what to buy.

The kimono itself was subsumed in the wrappings of Issey Miyake; the architectural tradition turned into the eclectic Japanesque of Arata Isozaki; Edo-mura became a local tourist draw; and the Japan Travel Bureau began urging a trip to Kyoto as time travel to the picturesque Orient, while I sat and watched my traditional Japan turn into Japanland.

“Trad but mod” said a slogan of the 1980s, and it said this about the new. (“Established in 1988” one read, carved in stone, in 1989.) From abroad poured in the products Japan thought Japan wanted as the traditional was being sliced into bite-sized pieces.

I felt I was living in a museum that was now being swiftly destroyed. The wreckers were at work and—oh, there goes a room I thought never would; oh, there goes a whole wing of what I thought was the permanent display.

And there I was in the shambles without a map, minus even a model, because eventually my two-cylinder paradigm could not begin to cope with change this great.

*

Then I remembered something that fine scholar and good friend Edward Seidensticker had once written: “The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change is itself a tradition.”

I had, of course, long been aware of Japanese consciousness of change. For example, the fuss made about the seasons. Japan has four separate and distinct seasons, I was forever being told. Well, so does Ohio, I was tempted to answer, and then I remembered that there we only mentioned the seasons to complain about them, that we rarely celebrated them for their own transient sakes.

Yet even now in contemporary Japan with its vast hydroponic farms and its enormous distribution circuits, flowers and food in season were still made something of, and this seemed so because it gave some excuse for celebrating transience. Certainly the annual cherry-viewing orgies all over the country were such. Particularly, I was told, evanescence is celebrated when the petals are floating to the ground and change was at its most palpable—the death of the blossom. There was even an exclamation for appreciation of natural change: ah, aware.

And I remembered my classical readings. For example the famous opening line of Kamo no Chomei’s Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut (here given in Burton Watson’s translation): “The river flows unceasingly on, but the water is never the same water as before.”

I had thought that in looking at the stream Kamo was affirming the reassuring fact that the body of water was, after all, permanent. But now I saw that what he was indicating was, instead, the fact that the water itself changed, was always different.

I remembered the shrine at Ise. This single wooden edifice is replaced every twenty years. It is torn down and an identical replica is constructed. This has been going on for centuries. And it had seemed to me obvious that this exemplary structure celebrated tradition. It was the core holding.

But now I was not so certain. Ise surely satisfied the claims of eternity and the hopes of immortality—though in a way quite different from that of, say, the Pyramids. But at the same time it celebrated transience. It accepted change and incorporated it. It did so by accommodating it, by building evanescence into the structure of the Ise shrine itself.

Every culture copes with change but how many, I wondered, had made it a moving part? Lots of nostalgia for the good old days to be sure, lots of bad-mouthing the new bad ones, just like everywhere else, but in addition to this, an accommodation to the evanescent, an acceptance of this fact of life. Shikata ga nai (It can’t be helped), that bleat which so irritates the foreign resident, could now be seen as a graceful acquiescence to the great principle of change itself. After all, that there is nothing one can do about it really means, Let us rather get on with life.

Change is in Japan put to use in the most pragmatic of manners. It alone is permanent and hence a steady source of power. It is perpetual motion, the dream of the physicists come true. And I saw that during all my decades in the country Japan had not changed in its attitude toward change. It was always hands-on and still is. Any respect for the integrity of any original becomes beside the point when it is change itself that is being accommodated.

For example, the traditional landscape gardener moved this rock over a couple of feet, shifted that bamboo grove back a yard or two, and swiped the view of the mountain in the process. The result was the natural garden, a product of change. Ikebana, classical flower arrangement, changes venue and placement, and only then calls itself “living flowers” though they are of course no longer quite that, being cut.

The difference that I thought I had noticed in Japan’s attitude toward nature was then but one of degree. When the daimyo built himself a landscape garden his need was aesthetic because such labor-intensive work as this would otherwise not have been so ostentatiously indicative of his social standing. When it is money itself, rather than aesthetics and art appreciation, that satisfies the demands of social standing, however, then forests are cut down for golf courses and ancestral tombs are trashed for hotels. But the difference is only in degree—now, famously, money must make more money. The demand is no longer aesthetic—it is economic. Yet the mechanism is the same. Everything changes. Though there may be amber-like blocks of permanence within this moving magma they remain only because they are for the time being useful. Like now, for example.

The irresistible force has met what has seemed an immovable object. We have in Japan the System, the way things are done, the bloated bureaucracy, the Bank of Japan, the Ministry of Finance, those organizations concerned only with their own propagation. Yet they are now structurally irrelevant. As the pressure for change grows, they will slowly give way. They have already—lifetime employment, the effortless escalator to the top, the golden parachute jump into cushy retirement—all of this is now of the past. And more, much more, will change.

What is important, and what is eventually defining, I decided, is this genius for the harnessing of change. Having decided this I looked at my new, small, metaphor of the country—it lies here in my palm, a whirling gyroscope.

This dynamo might become a model elsewhere, I thought. Not as a slogan (“Japan as Number One” had misled practically everyone)—but as a paradigm. As a system of thought that welcomes and celebrates that very change that so transforms us and our world, that accepts death and taxes as well. If there is no mortality there is no life, let alone aesthetics.

And over the hum of my gyroscope I heard the words of the priest Kenko who now nearly seven hundred years ago wrote: “What if man lingered on . . . how things would then fail to move us. The finest thing in life is its uncertainty.”

—1994