Turning Japanese: An Interview with Donald Richie



 
 

In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people.
    --Oscar Wilde
BARNETT:  You're bringing out a new book on Japanese cinema and, although it's unfair to ask you to discuss something that requires detailed examination in such an impromptu context, I was wondering if you could just try to characterize what distinguishes Japanese film from those of other national traditions (and perhaps why in the context of reawakened interest in Asian film in the America, Japan seems to be attracting less attention).
RICHIE:  One is often asked to make this kind of differentiation. When Joe Anderson and I did our first book we were asked to cobble together a kind of answer to this, which I guess still works.   If the American film is mainly--with many exceptions--about action of some kind; and if the European film--with many exceptions--is mainly about character and character development, then what you could say is that the Japanese film is in the same sense about atmosphere, about the social extensions and physical extensions that define a person, the idea of an environment being responsible for the character and the action which is created, the idea of something social or natural, or something supra-human, which is shown on the film (one can think any number of examples). This is the beginning of some sort of differentiation of what makes Japanese film Japanese.  I extend this argument in my new book, which is A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History and a Selective Guide.  There the main structural device is a rather careful delineation of the distinction between the presentational and the representational.  We in the West have just accepted representationalism, which is realism, as the only possible style in which to make films.  And we don't realize that the realist style is one style among many.  Other film cultures realize this, among them the Japanese, which has a very hands-on attitude to whatever it takes up.  So it has an idea of film as a presentational thing, or drama as a presentational thing--an example of this is Noh, where the chorus tells you what to think; or the Kabuki, where the joruri tells you what to feel; the bunraku, where the gidayu tells you; the early movies, where the benshi tells you what to think. Even in contemporary film a voice over will often tell you what to think.  The presentational can take visual form.  Japanese films are still expressionist to the extent that narrative through composition is very common.  All of this argues for a very different take on film than say that of American film, which likes to pretend it's all about let-it-all-hang-out realism.  Of course, it's not.  But this is the stance that's assumed.  That's one of the differences.
 The reason for the interest in non-Japanese Asian film is that these are countries we haven't heard anything from in a while.  China, Thailand, Hong Kong are suddenly turning out films.  This captures Western attention, as it ought to.  But Japan, and India as well, are being short-changed, because it's not the new product.  The press is going to be interested in Thai film because they're all of a sudden releasing very interesting films.  If the Japanese are ignored, it's probably for two reasons.  One, the Americans have this been-there-done-that attitude.  Two, the standard product here is pretty much just what you'd expect.  The standard company product has an independent gloss to it since there are no more studios.  So it has an independent look to it, but inside it's just  a genre film.  It's gothic horror brought up to date or the latest manga.   That's another good reason for ignoring the product.
BARNETT:  You've suggested that anime may be the quintessential Japanese art form.  I was wondering if you could expand on that.
RICHIE:  Quintessential because it is designed to the extent that it's completely presentational.  In other words, reality never touches it.  In amime there is no point where reality is seen.  Everything is designed.  Everything goes through the Japanese eye, the Japanese mind, the Japanese hand.  We are never distracted by the essentials of reality.  Everything is controlled.  That is what I meant. Japan tends to control everything.  It controls nature and calls it a garden; it controls flower arrangement and calls it ikebana--"living flowers," even though they're already dead.  Everything is controlled to a point that is noticeable to a culture that makes a fetish out of apparently leaving things to chance, or apparently letting everyone have his voice.  Or given to the laissez-faire culture that America pretends to have.  It's quite different.
BARNETT:  I'm thinking of Princess Mononoke, which was a phenomenon in Japan . . .
RICHIE:  But we're not saying it was a realist phenomenon.
BARNETT:  But one could argue that one could read something allegorical in it, that one could in turn relate to the Japanese situation and reality.
RICHIE: Oh, it's got a lot of that.
BARNETT:  We see animal gods fighting . . . .
RICHIE: Yes, the Japanese are affirming the nihojin-ron aspect of the film.  In that case, the film is a little late.  Its ecological message--which it certainly had--is a little too early for consumption.  And all the Shinto ritual pollution came too late, because the kids know nothing about it.  And you know, it wasn't the kids so much who went to see the movie, it was overwhelmingly a mature adult audience that made that film the success that it was.  So I would argue that these are mature people who know a little bit about this, who are filled with nostalgia for a Japan that no longer exists.  Alex Kerr talks about this in Lost Japan.  Miyazaki has a new film opening now, which is called Spirited Away. It's about this girl who goes into this land that's inhabited by monsters from the past--but very reassuring and child-friendly monsters.  I think the message is: look what we've lost.  But so cleverly packaged and merchandized that the essential negativity of the message is not appreciable so much as the glorious japonesque quality of it, the action--that sort of thing.
BARNETT:  I was just traveling to Takayama by train, through what are called the Japanese Alps.  And I was struck that very often one saw sides of mountains clear cut.  There are images in Princess Mononokethat look exactly like this, where they're razing the forest.  So I can't help wondering whether it's not just nostalgia but a connection to the present reality, whether the film is also saying: we're doing this now and we could do something about it.
RICHIE:  Certainly this was Miyazaki's intent.   He is a known ecologist.  And he is known to deplore what is occurring.  So this is one of his messages.  And I do believe it got through.  The acceleration of the destruction of Japan of the last ten to fifteen years has been so extraordinary that it would be hard to ignore by anybody.
BARNETT:  I was wondering if you could discuss the Japanese relation to nature.  On the one hand, it seems central to the Japanese tradition, from Shinto to the gardens.  Yet, traveling around Japan, it's easy to be shocked at the paving over of the countryside, the haphazard urban and suburban topography, the lack of any notion of zoning.  It is possible to reconcile these things?
RICHIE:  I think it is.  I think the attitude towards nature in Japan has been always the same, before and now.  I think what has changed has been the agenda.  For example, before the attitude toward nature was appropriation in a more benign way because they didn't have the tools to do anything else.  So a daimyo, or a samurai, or a rich merchant could improve his social ambitions, or his image in the neighborhood, by doing a classical garden.  By forming nature in some particular way that announced that it was his own.  That's one agenda.  Now we've got all sort of machines and lots more money than we ever did before.  It's very easy for politicians and financiers to make their mark.   They're not concerned so much with nature as with their peers.  And they want to make their mark by doing things like shaping the country in the same way that the earlier gardeners shaped the landscape.   It's simply that we find the latter aesthetically lacking.  Because aestheticism has not been included in the agenda.  Efficiency has.   Nonetheless, the power behind it is the same.  That's why I say that the attitude has not changed at all but the agenda has.  The attitude is that it's a very hands-on, controlled environment.   However, the way in which we do it is tempered by our agenda.  It gets highly complicated when prefectures have to spend budgets because otherwise they won't get that much next year.  So you have many hungry construction companies backed by the yakuza that have to be satisfied and have to be assured that they'll make money.  There is no more nature in Japan.  All the picturesqueness you see on the way to Takayama is on mountainsides that are probably too difficult and expensive to get at.  That's why it's still there.
BARNETT:  One constantly hears and reads that there is this sense of Japanese identity.  And I can't help comparing this to Europe, particularly Germany.  There's a lot of regulation going on so that it all looks "German."  That's why I'm struck, in looking around Japan, that there doesn't seem to be this sense that things need to be made to look "Japanese."
RICHIE:  But your idea--or anyone's idea--of what is Japanese isn't anything a Japanese would share.  A German might come here and look at a pagoda and think of that as Japanese.  I don't think a Japanese would.
BARNETT:  But I'm thinking more of the urban fabric--or the lack of any fabric.  It all seems a jumble.
RICHIE:  I think that's what the Japanese quite willingly accept as Japanese.  It lacks order; it's very postmodern.  The Japanese invented modernism and they invented postmodernism--this idea of cannibalism and going wild in styles, of wanting to pile one thing on top of another.  Yes, I think they would accept that.  See, what we see of an ordered Japanese style is the product of a social class that doesn't exist any more.  Official Japan--the people who gave us the tea ceremony, the Noh, Mizoguchi, Ozu--doesn't exist any more.  Instead, we have something much more economically sound perhaps, but which is much closer to the rent-warren, rabbit hutch ideals of the ordinary Japanese citizen. There's no over-arching style.  You don't have that kind of people in charge any more.  It's not a democracy.  We don't have an age of Pericles to tell you how to build the Parthenon, or Medicis to tell you how to build Florence.
BARNETT:  So the orderliness is an historical effect?
RICHIE:  Yes.  It meant that things could be read, that the architecture meant something.  But this has its presumptions in a ruling class.  We had this in the Meiji period; we had it until the beginnings of Showa.  It doesn't mean that the democratic masses have come up.  It simply means that there's been a continual lack of communication going on in the strands of the upper class.  And there isn't any upper class any more.
BARNETT:  Could you comment on the roles of American culture and the English language in Japan?  On the one hand, it does seem that we're witnessing the Americanization of Japan.  On the other hand, it seems that one could argue it has always been profoundly Japanese to adopt and adapt foreign cultures.  For instance, probably every American traveler is struck by the blithe equanimity with which English is appropriated and which seems to inhabit a space somewhere between Finnegans Wake and "Jabberwocky."  One can't help feeling they're the ones doing the cultural poaching.
RICHIE:  Yes, they are.  But then, they always have.  I know you're not complaining, but when people do complain about it, you have to point out that English as used in Japan is not a subdivision of English.  It's a subdivision of Japanese.  And it works perfectly well.  I have a whole article that gives a possible grammar for this.  And it works.  It does not have to articulate; it does not have to resonate.  It doesn't have to have innate connections with any of its other parts.  It doesn't have to make sense.  It doesn't have to do anything.  It's there only for its ostensible purpose, which is to indicate that I am cool, I am smart, I know the ways of the world.  All these submessages are subsumed into this English and that's its true function.  Being grammatical is beside the point.  But then poaching is what we do as human beings, isn't it?  It's called progress.
BARNETT:  So English is a purely postmodern language in Japan?  It's pure surface?
RICHIE:  That's right.  That doesn't mean the Japanese don't look for the meanings.  But usually they take the surface and then they will dimple the surface later on.  Which is what they've done with Western fashions.  Western fashions are now completely Japanofied.  They've done it with language and they've already started it with appearance.  The reason that manga is so well thought of and that all the people in manga have wide, blue eyes and long limbs is that it's much easier to morph into a Westerner in manga than it is in real life.  Nonetheless, people try.  Last summer, everyone was walking around on stilts.  In Shibuya they would wear high, elevated sandals.  They dye their hair or sun tan.  They accentuate their eyes.  These are fake foreigners.  Not that they are wannabes.   They are the avant-gardes of appropriation, which is working its way through everything.  Everything has to be taken.  This is a myth that the Japanese don't take in or import.  The Japanese are always bringing things in.
BARNETT:  Your writing often reminds me of Roland Barthes.  Do you think of yourself as dismantling the mythologies of Japan?  And what do you make of Empire of Signs?
RICHIE:  I've been much influenced by Barthes.  I admire Barthes.  I don't share his disciplines.  But I admire the freedom with which he entered the field and the fact that he would join together all sort of disciplines that had been separated from one another.  I like his amateurism.  I think that a lot of Empire of Signs is a lot of guff.  On the other hand, there's no doubt that this freedom allowed him to have insights that no one else had.  Yes, I admire Barthes.  One of the things I regret is that I didn't meet him when he came.  I was here and I knew the guy he was staying with.  But I didn't . . . I don't why.  He didn’t know who I was then, but later on when he started writing, he wanted to meet me.  Particularly when he discovered I listed L'Empire des signes as one of the best books on Japan.  But, unfortunately, that laundry truck took him away from us.  So we never even corresponded.  So, yes, I admire Barthes.  But also that entire school.  Baudrillard, for example, I read with the same degree of pleasure.  And people who are tangential to it and easier to read, like Susan Sontag.  Susan sends me her stuff; I'm her friend.  So she's influenced me.  That kind of critic has influenced me.
BARNETT:  Exactly.  Your writing reminds me of Barthes, yet without that French rhetorical and theoretical armature.  Nonetheless, the clarity of the writing is couple with a slyness that allows you to raise and wrestle with many of the same issues.
RICHIE:  I was surprised at how much of this I do.  I was looking at my new book, The Donald Richie Reader, which gave me an opportunity to look through the whole thing.
BARNETT:  Maybe that's why I brought up Barthes too--there is this wonderful and refreshing sense of "to hell with the specialists."  You're very much a public intellectual.
RICHIE:  I'm fortunate in that I'm not an academic.  I may be a scholar, but I'm not an academic.  So I don't have to go through all the nonsense they have to.  So I can have my freedom to be a dilettante and a flaneur.  I can do all things I couldn't do if I were respectable.  I mean, I teach here, but it's scarcely respectable.
BARNETT:  In one sense, Japanese aesthetics points at the limitedness of Western aesthetics, which focuses for the most part on the autonomous work of art.  The Japanese aesthetic seems more linked with movements like William Morris's arts and crafts movement or Bauhaus.  Hence the emphasis on design and utility.  Given the tendency to announce the death of art in the West, do you think the Japanese aesthetic--like the film Blade Runner--shows us the future of Western culture?
RICHIE:  Ridley Scott came here and looked at Shinjuku and came up with Blade Runner.  As to your question in general, I'm not sure.  I do know that the emphasis on the work of art in the West depend upon assumptions that do not exist here.  One of these is the assumption that there's something very real under all of this stuff.  That the real me really exists there.  You hear Westerners say: this isn't the real me.  In other words, it isn't the real me you've just been talking to.  The Japanese don't believe in soul.  They don't believe in God.  There's no superstructure that can support the integrity of a work of art.  So, with William Morris, you're right on.  It’s all crafts.  There wasn't any word for art until one was made up in 1858.  The only term for it meant both art and craft.  The idea that artists made buildings points to something we only know in Europe from the medieval guilds.  And when they built cathedrals, they didn't sign their names.  The attitude is very much like that of the Japanese--long has been, and still is.
        So the idea of autonomous art is really a Romantic idea.  It didn't really come until the end of the seventeenth century.  And then all of a sudden there was the artist standing there in front of us.  And we're still in a Romantic period in the West.  It's very decayed but nevertheless Romantic.  Japan never went through that.  With Japan it's very hands-on crafts.  Nowadays they've learned that the West puts people's names on as labels and they do this too, but I don't think it means that much.  I think everything is through group effort in the true medieval sense.
BARNETT:  In the West you could say we're caught between what we thought was art--which has been totally commodified--and this institutional context that provides this strange framework for people to attempt to debunk the very notion of art.  One thinks of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons and their attempts to put one over on the museum culture.
RICHIE:  The effort is incomplete, is in a bind, because that's how they make their money.  Have you noticed the prices?  We're scraping the bottom of the barrel.  And these two tendencies are quite untenable.  That doesn't mean it won't continue forever.
BARNETT:  In the gulf between these two tendencies is the Japanese aesthetic, which I think actually is arising in America.  Time magazine called it the triumph of design.  Indeed, the success of the iMac and the Chrysler PT Cruiser were triumphs of design.  So these things that are filling our day-to-day lives are becoming sleeker and more elegant.
RICHIE:  Right.  The Eames chairs turn out to have been a harbinger.  Bauhaus turns out to have been a harbinger.  Of course, Bauhaus comes from Japan.  Here art does not exist except as commodification.  It doesn't exist except as a way of making money.
BARNETT:  I think lurking in the Japanese aesthetic is a possible solution to the dilemma in the West--some people have called this avant pop.  That is, the avant-garde in a popular medium.  So it's art that draws energy from the avant-garde, but is popular and readily consumable.  Princess Mononoke might be an example.  Or Jeff Koons's "Puppy"--people just love that thing.  It's avant and pop.
RICHIE:  Yes, you get a mix of both.  This goes on in Japan as well. Here, it's mainly a scam.  It's a way to make money.  People talking about art as if it meant anything the way they do in America is very rare.  It's never been necessary to talk about it as a definite concern.
BARNETT:  To follow up on the last question, it strikes me that the intersection of Western and Japanese art takes place in the gradual dissolution of the work of art in the twentieth century in the West.  The shift from mimesis to the very materiality of the art work seems to bring Western art into proximity with Japanese art.  The movement from Kandinsky and Pollock on through artists like Serra and Kiefer reveals a growing awareness of the materiality of the art work, which one can see was always the case in Japanese pottery and textiles.  That's the optimistic reading, I guess.   One could argue that the true point of contact is in kitsch, the hyperreal, and the postmodern flux of signs.  What's your reading of this point of contact, this intersection?
RICHIE:  Both, I would imagine.  I can think of examples of both.  Japanese kitsch is finding its greatest market in America.  On the juvenile level, there's Hello Kitty and Pokemon.  But then we have all sorts of examples of amusing, cute combinations from Japan--which is how we read them.  Before Americans were frightened of the people making automobiles and now they're amusing us to death with Pokemon.  And I think it's true that Japan has officially changed its message.  But, again, to give art the amount of importance that the West gives it--and the West does talk quite seriously about it and as if it still had standards to which Jeff Koons cannot reach--this singularity is something that Japan has been spared.  Art in Japan is to be enjoyed, or endured, or endorsed; but it's not to be believed in in this very strange Christian way the West has.  Now that God has been dead for some time, what has taken its place?  Some people believe art has taken its place in Europe and America.  That, when everything else fails, there's always Vermeer, or Chardin, or whomever you choose.  I think that's true.  I think over the years, Japan has gotten used to not having a God; they're so used to it, nobody remarks about this.  If you've got a country where you dunk the kid in Shinto when he's born and you dunk him in Buddhism when he's dead, and you dabble with a Christian wedding in between, this doesn't argue for a strong feeling of religion.  I think the only Japanese religion is being Japanese.  This has the same amount of awe connected with it, the amount of the unspeakable.  One of the strongest reprimands a Japanese can give another Japanese is "that's not like a Japanese."  It's treated with a degree of respect and awe that we reserve for religious things.
BARNETT:  What is this sense of being Japanese?
RICHIE:  Well, you could say that it's communal; it includes everybody.  Also, it means that you work to sustain it.  Just as religion has to have a devil in order to create a God--God doesn't know who he is unless he looks at the devil and says that's who I'm not--the Japanese need somebody else.  Hence the elaborate paraphernalia of the gaijin.  The fangs, the teeth.  Or the gentler, kinder version.  But nevertheless the idea is that there's someone out there who's absolutely and utterly not us.  And is used quite consciously to tell us who we are.  This is racism.  This is xenophobia.  Xenophobia is always based upon this, I believe--the idea that you must always have somebody else to define.   Look at Palestine and Israel; it's a basket case.  But that's the problem there.  I think this is one of the things Japan feels very strongly.  America historically does not.  America historically says we're all mongrel and we all came on different boats and we're all in it together.  And I don't care if your grandmother was a slave; it makes no difference to me.  We're a populist place.  Naturally, this is a stance too that doesn't hold up very well.  You have pockets in America of really deep-rooted redneck prejudice.  But at least we give voice to these things.  This is our part in world history.  The Japanese don't have that at all.   They have being Japanese.  It's an existential problem.  Sartre is wonderful on this--although, it's not about Japan.  But about the necessity of constructing the self . . .
BARNETT: . . . via the Other . . .
RICHIE: Yes.  He has a wonderful thing called "Childhood of a Leader," which is about how a man becomes an anti-Semite in order to protect himself.
BARNETT:  But why are they so polite to the gaijin?  That's what I don't get.
RICHIE:  They can afford to be.  I think a lot of people quite understand this.
BARNETT:  It's a very gracious culture.
RICHIE:  Yes.  As long as their Japaneseness is not threatened.  On the other hand, you'll find many, many people who would happily give it up for a day or a month--or a year.  They go abroad and do all sorts of things in very unJapanese ways.  But you often find this parabola that drags them back to the country.  This happened to Tanizaki; this happened to Mishima.  Mishima went about as far as you can go and came back and did the most conventional thing you can think of.  No, it's not like living with Texan rednecks.  It's really not.  But it's like living with extremely cultured, cultivated Texan rednecks.
BARNETT:  As you yourself have suggested, the constant in Japan is change.  So what anchors that sense of being Japanese?
RICHIE:  Necessity, don't you think?  What makes nations?  Why is the United Nations necessary?  Why can't we all be Eleanor Roosevelt?  Why can't this be one world?  Why can't the global people go to Genoa and make it possible for all of us to work together?  I think the need for nationalization, the need for the smaller unit, is endemic to being human.  We do not exist alone.  No one has successfully adopted a true castaway, a Robinson Crusoe.  They remain intellectual conundrums to us.  I think this is something we all suffer from.  But in Japan the suffering is so much more theatrical, so much more visible than it is in other countries.  And it is unrestrained by what in Christian countries would be called unchristian.  Or what in countries that were influenced by the Renaissance would be called uncultured.  Japan remained free of all that nonsense.  They don't have to pay attention to that.  So we have a degree of naturalness here about things we've agreed not to be natural about in the West.  When they do occur, the Japanese have no idea what to do with them.  They have no idea what to do with their atrocities in the war.  They literally have no idea.  They sweep them under the carpet.
     But it makes the place endlessly fascinating.  I think it's the most interesting place in the world.  It's convoluted; it's complicated.  Every day is a wonderful brain scramble.  Coupled with an emotional nature, which I like very, very much.
BARNETT:  I wanted to ask about emotions in the culture.  When you look at a classic novel like Kokoro, it seems like a theater of emotional self-restraint.  But then you'll have Chikamatsu, which just seems over-the-top in terms of emotional display.  So it seems you have this counter-balancing going on.  On the one hand, you have affective restraint . . . .
RICHIE:  That's the drama.  The way in which the constrained person is made to come out at the end.  That's almost the essence of classical drama.
BARNETT:  Looking at Japanese pop culture, especially TV, I get the sense that there's almost an affective modernization going on.  That a lot of these weird shows, which seem aimed at the youth, emphasize hysterical exuberance.  Are the Japanese youth entering a different psychological, affective space than is traditionally Japanese?
RICHIE:  I don’t know.  But you could say that the very fact that they are so extraordinarily hysterical indicates the degree of regimentation, which demands--
BARNETT:  a Mardi Gras.
RICHIE:  Right.  Exactly.  Every day there's Saturnalia on the tube.  But constraint at home.  That's always been true.  The same thing went on in eighteenth-century Edo.  The eijanaika phenomenon at the end of the Tokugowa period.  Sheer Dionysius erupting.  I would consider that to be--maybe perhaps more extended now--but nonetheless one of the givens of Japanese history.  Under the repression, there's the explosion.
BARNETT:  It's a safety valve.
RICHIE:  Indeed, it's a safety valve.  Yet it's one thing to have an eijanaika and it's another to be on a talk show and pull your hair.  The loss of quality has been considerable.  In actuality, youth is so constrained now; they can barely talk to one another.  They can only talk through the cell phone.  You'll see a couple on a date, and they'll each be on the phone with someone else.

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