Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ