The Donald Richie Reader: 50 years of writing on Japan
07.06.2003
[xiv-xv] I knew nothing about Japan. The reasons I liked it here were emotional. I was ready to fall in love with whatever fell in my lap. I'd come from an industrial town in the northwest corner of Ohio - I never liked it very much - and my earliest ambition was to leave. If you grow up having those feelings, and then when you finally get to a place which is complicated and interesting and filled with promise, you're bound to have and emotional feeling. You've got all these feelings you haven't used. My roots descended, here, in this friendly loam.
[xxix] One of the things that I prized most was a kind of creative innocence on the part of the Japanese. We think of innocence as being an empty vehicle, a thing that has to be filled. But that's not it. It's got its own proportions, and it is a thing in inself, and so it's a positive and not a negative thing. Innocence is a force, and this innocence leads to things like an open mind, an inquiring disposition, certainly trust.
[5] I have learned to regard freedom as more important than belonging - this is what my years of expatriation have taught me. I have not yet graduated but Japan with its rigorous combination of invitation and exclusion has promised me a degree. For it I have adopted as motto a paragraph quoted by Said from the Didasclicon of Hugo of St. Victor: "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong, but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land."
[6] I wanted to leave. Looking past the catalpa tree, over the syringa bush, beyond the corner where the street ran straight into the future, I wanted to leave behind what I knew. What I wanted was what I didn't.
[28] When you look at naked people one of two things can occur. You become excited, feel sexy, view the nude as desirable. Or, you see the human race, finally, as it is: innocent, vulnerable, unknowing and beautiful in that general way which discourages possessiveness. Standing on those street corners I felt both, alternately - one at a time, since one cannot experience such disparities simultaneously.
[30] The girls wore dirndl skirts, then a rage from the U.S., with limp cotton tops and lots of wooden jewelry, bracelets, necklaces, all painted a cherry red. The hair was piled up or else frizzled in the popular 'cannibal' fashion of the day. On the feet were platform shoes with cork soles, and silk stockings were often painted on - very strong tea was used - with a perfectly drawn back seam on each leg.
[38] Yet if there is one thing that Japan teaches, it is to distrust the emotions. They are, after all, only ideas, like any other. You can change your moods as you can change your mind. I see people doing this every day. Japanese have a particularly taking way of doing so. After an emotional excess of some sort, they will shake their heads as though just waking up and say, well, that's enough of that now, and turn their minds to other things. It is not a question of ability - anyone is able to do this - it is a question of volition. Today i have decided to be unhappy just as I might have decided to spend the day in bed.
[65] It is when the hands stop moving, the knife remains poised, the peeling remains unfinished, it is when the father looks up with vacant eyes, that we know he is, after all, like us - that the present is now lost int the future with its hopes and its fears, that he is feeling his loneliness.
[69] Then the leave-taking: I am led from group to group to say goodbye. I bow, they bow, but I do not quite understand what is happening. After the last group there is nowhere for me to go. They are not going and I understand finally. It is I who am leaving. And since I am guest of honor I am royalty for a day and no one can leave until I do.
[72] --- you have had experiences you cannot describe because only film, not words, can describe them; you have seen a few small, unforgettable actions, beautiful because real. You are left with a feeling of sadness too, because you will see them no more. They are already gone.
[82] Life is a dream. This is a familiar Buddhist concept, radically updated. Originally the observation that the world is a mirage was meant to console the sufferer, but in Ozu's universe there is no afterlife. That life is a dream means one has had no life at all.
[126] As the days and weeks passed they daily met at the same place, same time. These meetings troubled him, delighted him, excited him, saddened him. She must be really stupid, he thought, not to notice. But the next day he decided that she must be of the most noble and trusting nature, wise in her refusal to acknowledge their growing love.
[127] But now it sat wet in his sweating palm, in the crush of the car, and he ached to put it in her purse and did not.
[145] Though she did not know it, she was meditating. One of the natures of meditation is to sit still though in terror, to breathe deeply though the heart is racing, to remain silent thought the cry is on the lips.
[146] And who was she? If anyone had asked so limited a question, she would have said that she was a woman sitting.
[184] The Japanese keep up appearances. Even the poorer are relatively well dressed. The best suit or dress is worn every day. the West in its more hypocritical moments has condemned this. Keeping up appearances is hypocritical. But to believe this is to disregard a great truth that all of Asia knows: appearances are the only reality. To wear your best suit daily implies a degree of self-respect but, more important, it also defines a reality that one chooses for oneself. If one looks like and acts like a certain kind of person - then one is that kind of person.
[184] The only way to get prosperous is to look and behave in a prosperous manner; the only way to get out of an emotional funk is to shake your head and think of something else. You become, as near as possible, what you think you ought to and would like to become.
[221] Then it occurred to me that this misuse of my language was not funny and further did not, as I then believed, show a comtempt for English by ignoring the integrity of the original. No contempt was involved, and no ignorance either. Writings in ads, on signs, on T-shirts, on shopping bags alike, were not intended to be English. They were Japanese-English, and this was not a subdivision of English but a subdividion of Japanese. It was a language directed only toward an uncritical audience for whom meaning had no importance, though the significance of the newly acquired did.
[223] The finest thing in life is its uncertainty.
