An Expat Life
The Japan Journals: 1947–2004 by Donald Richie, ed. Leza Lowitz
Reviewed by Corrie Pikul
The Brooklyn Rail, February 2005

Trips to Japan turn tourists into scribes. Americans are usually so baffled by a culture that both rejects and appropriates our own that talking out their confusion on paper is the only way they can make it through the day. While these journals are necessary for the writer, they’re usually insufferably boring for anyone else. Every American in Japan seems to think that their brand of foreign bewilderment is uniquely entertaining.

However, cultural critic Donald Richie, author of over forty books about Japan, is one expat who can always be counted on to produce fresh, insightful commentary, even if he’s simply recounting a trip to the theater or a stroll around the park. Edited by his friend, the writer Leza Lowitz, The Japan Journals is a thick compilation that spans Richie’s fifty years abroad. Due to Richie’s keen powers of observation, witty prose, and knack for selecting anecdotes, The Japan Journals is the definitive account of the foreigner in Japan. It is also a touching personal story of the life of a brilliant man.

In 1946, Richie heard that the U.S. Civil Service was accepting appointments to Japan, and, desperate to get far away from Ohio, he applied. Richie was originally brought to Tokyo as a typist, but, despite no initial knowledge of Japanese, Japan, or film, he was soon hired as a human-interest reporter and movie critic at the Occupation newspaper. Over the next fifty years, the boy from Ohio would become one of Japan’s premiere intellectuals, and the world’s foremost authority on Japanese film.

Richie was the go-to guy for foreign artists and intellectuals visiting Japan, and his social record reads like an international Who’s Who. In his journals, Richie casually describes sightseeing with Truman Capote, Alberto Moravia, and Angus Wilson; attending Kabuki performances with Igor Stravinsky; an outing to a sex theater with Richard Avedon, and later, coffee and intense conversation with Susan Sontag; and parties and meetings with every bold-face name in Japanese film.

In person, Richie liked to ask provocative questions and catch people off guard, and he can sometimes come off as obnoxious. However, his personal writing also shows a generous, sensitive man who cares deeply about his friends, and who can be moved to tears by something as simple as his new apartment’s expansive view of Tokyo. Getting to know Richie, we can see how he would come to be regarded as a father figure to three different Japanese ex-boyfriends. (While he has never wanted to be classified as homosexual, Richie writes openly in his journals about sex with straight men. With its obsessive separation of private life from public, twentieth-century Japan provided fertile ground for this way of life, and Richie was very rarely lonely.) We can also see why a nineteen-year-old Sophia Coppola would choose to latch onto Richie at a party, “for protection,” he writes. She had “looked around and decided I was the least threat.”

At one point in his journal, Richie expresses frustration with those who ask him when he first fell in love with Japan. “I never did,” he writes. “I liked the place from the first, but I fell in love with other places.”
It’s a good thing, too; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to comment on it objectively. Like most foreigners, he feels a sinking in his heart as he watches Japan become more Western, and frustration with the pervasive groupthink and the national refutation of the individual self. Yet Richie understands that his outsider position made him the critic and thinker he is today. In March of 1992 he wrote, “I am at home in Japan precisely because I am an alien body. I am no longer a member over there [in America], and cannot become a member over here—this defines my perfectly satisfactory positions. One does not have to be a member of something.”

As a septuagenarian, Richie is given to lamenting the passage of time. When he huffs that cell phones, Walkmans, and Palm Pilots obviate the need for human interaction and socialization, the staunch individualist suddenly and undoubtedly joins an international legion of those who are adjusting to changes in their world.

There is a moment towards the end of The Japan Journals where we think Richie is about to draw things to a close. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and Richie is walking with friends to a shrine when they encounter a group of boisterous teenagers, and they exchange New Year’s blessings. He writes, “For this one moment everything returns—it is the new millennium, but my fifty years have not passed. They have been for this time returned to me.”

Indeed, Lowitz tells us that Richie had intended for this to be the last entry of The Japan Journals, and that he wrote no more for several years. However, Lowitz says that Richie “came to miss the daily record,” and that for him, “living seemed to have less meaning when it went un-chronicled.” One hopes that Donald Richie, now eighty, will continue to chronicle his impressions of a changing Japan, and of a changing world.

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Copyright 2005 Brooklyn Rail