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Lost Japan
Reading Alex Kerr's Lost Japan, a book someone gave me almost a decade ago. (Time works different after 50. It bothers me more than I can say.)
The book irks me less this time than it did when I first tried it. Then, I think, my problem was that it was *so* different from westerners' books about Japan that I couldn't deal with it. Kerr wrote it in Japanese and someone else translated it, and it read like translated-from-the-Japanese normally does, which is flat and a little... off. IME English and Japanese do different things, as languages per se, and stuff that we unthinkingly expect to find in English isn't there in Japanese. This is fine as long as one is reading in Japanese, because the resonance comes from other things, but put it into English and it's a little like having all the tenses missing, or the articles. Something very basic just isn't there.
Now I find what's missing to be, mh, default western male attitudes to writing about oneself, and especially oneself in other cultures. It's utterly refreshing. Prior to this the only travel books about Japan I could take were written by women, because (I warn for stereotypes) the women were looking at the Japanese people they met and the men were looking at themselves. The Anglo male default is IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, LOOK AT ME!!!!! LOOK AT ME TALK TO THIS GEISHA, THIS BUSINESSMAN, THIS CUTE YOUNG GIRL. Not much concern with what's going on the heads of these people and a lot of concern about 'will they screw me? why won't they screw me? screw them for not screwing me' when it's not 'look at these strange people who aren't us, aren't they strange when they're not us, HYUK HYUK HYUK funny people who aren't us.'
This gets tiresome.
Kerr doesn't do that. Or doesn't do the 'will they screw me' and 'aren't they strange' bits. But I begin to suspect he's just being a lot more subtle about the 'all about me.' Because, mmh, it's either that, or the man has been incredibly lucky, and I'm still not sure which.
I have no money so an American friend and I go to the Kabuki and sit in the upper balconies. Fine; we've all done that. Then we go to a Kyoto teahouse and the master of the teahouse asks what did you think of the performance (Err- he does? Do the masters of teahouses always come and talk to clients?) and Kerr says Amazing, this 60 year old actor is so sensuous as the courtesan Wossname, and the master of the teahouse says Look, this guy here is going off to see that actor right now, you go with him. And Kerr does, and gets to know the famous onnagata, and then becomes friends with Tamasaburou Bando and spends the next five years backstage at kabuki theatres.
This sort of stuff doesn't happen, though I can see very well how it might have happened to Kerr. Bref: it's the 1970s, gaijin are rare, and prized as a rare species is. I heard echoes from people here and there about this golden age when it was fashionable to know foreigners and the Japanese would bend over backwards to accommodate us. Recall a newspaper article in the Japan Times pointing out that the days when the Japanese would translate everything for their English speaking friends were long over, and don't expect that level of convenience any more, learn a little Japanese for heaven's sake. From which you may conclude that gaijin who spoke fluent Japanese were even rarer. Along comes a red-haired! gaijin (helps if you look like people's conceptions) who can actually talk to you, of course you invite him in.
With Tamasaburou, Kerr himself says that the actor was just back from a tour in Europe and looking for someone to talk international culture with, and here's a Japanese-fluent Oxford-educated American navy brat whose first language was Italian, from being born during an Italian posting, and who learned chinese characters at his first grade school. That would do as a qualification, I'd say, and no need for Kerr's self-effacing 'he seemed to think I fit those requirements.'
But then again-- Kerr hears of an American collector somewhere, goes off to see him (apparently without an introduction, but maybe he just didn't mention it), and then stays at the house for three days, staying up all night with the night owl collector talking antiquities. And one sort of understands that there wer or might have been other people around as well, maybe, but these people are never identified, so maybe it was Kerr and collector tete-a-tete all the time, passionately discussing something Kerr was the rankest of amateurs at. (See what I mean by English and Japanese doing different things? English rather demands more detail-- are there other people staying here, who are they, does the collector hold a kind of open house for any gaijin wandering by, *how come* Kerr is asked to stay on just like that, isn't this all a bit odd or is it just the way things were done among expats at the time? Explanations: we expect them. The sum effect of the Japanese elisions, if you really want to know, leads this western reader to the conclusion that Kerr is gay (he's certainly not married) and so is the collector, and the instant rapport arises from a different kind of instant rapport.)
Kerr also does something that always annoys me a bit, the 'you missed the best times and now they're gone forever' song and dance routine. He wrote the book in 1994, when I was there, and spends a lot of time moaning that the country has gone to the dogs and everything is lost and the old ways that still survived when *he* first came to the country are vanished forever. I can take that from people who're talking about the good ol' days for expats. Yeah, it was a free lunch for decades and about time it got over with, guys. But Kerr is talking about the country country-- the forests vanished, no more straw raincoats in the mountain villages, young people don't know the meaning of the traditional kabuki props any more, fans and such and even kimono, oh how could they throw their culture away like that?
This would be more affecting if Lafcadio Hearn hadn't said exactly the same thing a century earlier, and Tanizaki fifty years after that. The old Japan, traditional Japan, is always vanishing, rather the way Oxford is, I think. Somehow it just never goes. It'd help if Kerr maybe did a little thinking about the forces that prompted the trend to discard tradition. Push to shove, Kerr is still a westerner, from the country whose simple existence as a marketing force and cultural entity has made any number of countries abandon their old ways. He's not a native Japanese entitled to moan about the direction the country chooses to take, and I think it a touch uppity of him to do so. And I'm getting a faint unlovely hint of that ugly American, Donald Richie, in The Inland Sea, about to hear a young woman play in a small town in Shikoku somewhere, happily expecting to hear old folk airs or lost songs, and being all gakkari when she played Faure's Pavane instead. Oh la vache! The Japanese are failing to be picturesque!
However, that's by the way. The restraint imposed on Kerr by the langauge he chose to write in (and the fact that he could write in that language *and* get a literary prize for it) makes this actually a very pleasant read all told. I shall take it as a snapshot of a period that is indeed gone, the marvellous 70s, as it might be the Parisian 20s; from the pov of someone capable of seeing a bit from the inside and not wholly from the out.
The book irks me less this time than it did when I first tried it. Then, I think, my problem was that it was *so* different from westerners' books about Japan that I couldn't deal with it. Kerr wrote it in Japanese and someone else translated it, and it read like translated-from-the-Japanese normally does, which is flat and a little... off. IME English and Japanese do different things, as languages per se, and stuff that we unthinkingly expect to find in English isn't there in Japanese. This is fine as long as one is reading in Japanese, because the resonance comes from other things, but put it into English and it's a little like having all the tenses missing, or the articles. Something very basic just isn't there.
Now I find what's missing to be, mh, default western male attitudes to writing about oneself, and especially oneself in other cultures. It's utterly refreshing. Prior to this the only travel books about Japan I could take were written by women, because (I warn for stereotypes) the women were looking at the Japanese people they met and the men were looking at themselves. The Anglo male default is IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, LOOK AT ME!!!!! LOOK AT ME TALK TO THIS GEISHA, THIS BUSINESSMAN, THIS CUTE YOUNG GIRL. Not much concern with what's going on the heads of these people and a lot of concern about 'will they screw me? why won't they screw me? screw them for not screwing me' when it's not 'look at these strange people who aren't us, aren't they strange when they're not us, HYUK HYUK HYUK funny people who aren't us.'
This gets tiresome.
Kerr doesn't do that. Or doesn't do the 'will they screw me' and 'aren't they strange' bits. But I begin to suspect he's just being a lot more subtle about the 'all about me.' Because, mmh, it's either that, or the man has been incredibly lucky, and I'm still not sure which.
I have no money so an American friend and I go to the Kabuki and sit in the upper balconies. Fine; we've all done that. Then we go to a Kyoto teahouse and the master of the teahouse asks what did you think of the performance (Err- he does? Do the masters of teahouses always come and talk to clients?) and Kerr says Amazing, this 60 year old actor is so sensuous as the courtesan Wossname, and the master of the teahouse says Look, this guy here is going off to see that actor right now, you go with him. And Kerr does, and gets to know the famous onnagata, and then becomes friends with Tamasaburou Bando and spends the next five years backstage at kabuki theatres.
This sort of stuff doesn't happen, though I can see very well how it might have happened to Kerr. Bref: it's the 1970s, gaijin are rare, and prized as a rare species is. I heard echoes from people here and there about this golden age when it was fashionable to know foreigners and the Japanese would bend over backwards to accommodate us. Recall a newspaper article in the Japan Times pointing out that the days when the Japanese would translate everything for their English speaking friends were long over, and don't expect that level of convenience any more, learn a little Japanese for heaven's sake. From which you may conclude that gaijin who spoke fluent Japanese were even rarer. Along comes a red-haired! gaijin (helps if you look like people's conceptions) who can actually talk to you, of course you invite him in.
With Tamasaburou, Kerr himself says that the actor was just back from a tour in Europe and looking for someone to talk international culture with, and here's a Japanese-fluent Oxford-educated American navy brat whose first language was Italian, from being born during an Italian posting, and who learned chinese characters at his first grade school. That would do as a qualification, I'd say, and no need for Kerr's self-effacing 'he seemed to think I fit those requirements.'
But then again-- Kerr hears of an American collector somewhere, goes off to see him (apparently without an introduction, but maybe he just didn't mention it), and then stays at the house for three days, staying up all night with the night owl collector talking antiquities. And one sort of understands that there wer or might have been other people around as well, maybe, but these people are never identified, so maybe it was Kerr and collector tete-a-tete all the time, passionately discussing something Kerr was the rankest of amateurs at. (See what I mean by English and Japanese doing different things? English rather demands more detail-- are there other people staying here, who are they, does the collector hold a kind of open house for any gaijin wandering by, *how come* Kerr is asked to stay on just like that, isn't this all a bit odd or is it just the way things were done among expats at the time? Explanations: we expect them. The sum effect of the Japanese elisions, if you really want to know, leads this western reader to the conclusion that Kerr is gay (he's certainly not married) and so is the collector, and the instant rapport arises from a different kind of instant rapport.)
Kerr also does something that always annoys me a bit, the 'you missed the best times and now they're gone forever' song and dance routine. He wrote the book in 1994, when I was there, and spends a lot of time moaning that the country has gone to the dogs and everything is lost and the old ways that still survived when *he* first came to the country are vanished forever. I can take that from people who're talking about the good ol' days for expats. Yeah, it was a free lunch for decades and about time it got over with, guys. But Kerr is talking about the country country-- the forests vanished, no more straw raincoats in the mountain villages, young people don't know the meaning of the traditional kabuki props any more, fans and such and even kimono, oh how could they throw their culture away like that?
This would be more affecting if Lafcadio Hearn hadn't said exactly the same thing a century earlier, and Tanizaki fifty years after that. The old Japan, traditional Japan, is always vanishing, rather the way Oxford is, I think. Somehow it just never goes. It'd help if Kerr maybe did a little thinking about the forces that prompted the trend to discard tradition. Push to shove, Kerr is still a westerner, from the country whose simple existence as a marketing force and cultural entity has made any number of countries abandon their old ways. He's not a native Japanese entitled to moan about the direction the country chooses to take, and I think it a touch uppity of him to do so. And I'm getting a faint unlovely hint of that ugly American, Donald Richie, in The Inland Sea, about to hear a young woman play in a small town in Shikoku somewhere, happily expecting to hear old folk airs or lost songs, and being all gakkari when she played Faure's Pavane instead. Oh la vache! The Japanese are failing to be picturesque!
However, that's by the way. The restraint imposed on Kerr by the langauge he chose to write in (and the fact that he could write in that language *and* get a literary prize for it) makes this actually a very pleasant read all told. I shall take it as a snapshot of a period that is indeed gone, the marvellous 70s, as it might be the Parisian 20s; from the pov of someone capable of seeing a bit from the inside and not wholly from the out.
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One of those books one is never quite sure about! Has its merits as well as it's downsides.
But nevertheless a good read!
Are you reading it in the original or are you reading a translated version.
Hmmm maybe I should go and see if the library has it. ^__^ thank you for sharing.
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LOL!!! When I hear people talking about how lovely it is in South America and isn't it a shame the villagers are getting electricity and modern medicine and plastics and being totally ruined by modern western culture I always want to say "good for them!"
It's not just the ugly tourist, though. Younger's friend S does that about Korean stuff. S's has no interest in Korean anything, but is fiercely proprietary and offended when anyone not-Korean expresses any interest in anything Korean. Too bad for her, Younger and Japanese friend are heavily into Korean boy bands and K-dramas, so these days S spends most of her time being offended by the friends she's hanging out with. LOL!
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His complaints in Dogs and Demons concerning 茶道 and Kyoto Station expand the theme, but what really brought it into focus for me was his famous farmhouse in Shikoku. He harps on it and the soon-to-be-lost wonders of the traditional Japanese rural lifestyle but spends most of his time in Japan's metropolises and Bangkok...because the pre-modern Japanese lifestyle sucks when it's an actual lifestyle, not quaint vacation two weeks out of the year.
So while I liked Lost Japan for its snapshot into the post-occupation bubble era and Dogs and Demons for its criticisms of the country's economic and environmental policies, Kerr's overall take on "The Way Japan Should Be" does not sit well with this reader.
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(Me, of course, I'm inclined to sniffle over the loss of pre-War keigo graduations. Not that I'd ever master them if they still existed, any more than I can judge when to use the truncated keigo forms I know now.)
But after the fifth iteration in four chapters I'm getting a little tired of it. It's becoming less a heart-felt emotion and more a hobby-horse that he rides in the teeth of the facts. 'All other major countries bury their electric wires! Only Japan keeps their tangling aloft!' (looks out window) Well, fifteen years later I'm still waiting for Toronto to get around to it, guy.
the pre-modern Japanese lifestyle sucks when it's an actual lifestyle, not quaint vacation two weeks out of the year
Yes, precisely. The picturesque in Japan is rarely comfortable or practical. Those lovely high ceilings and open spaces of the traditional farmhouse must have been damned cold unless a very large extended family and possibly a few animals were adding their body heat to it.
I'm also getting a little tired of his repeated 'the young people don't know/ can't read/ don't understand any of their marvellous heritage.' That other western reflex when approaching Japan, the sweeping generalization, raises its ugly head. And boy does it make him sound a grumpy and calcified seventy, instead of the forty-odd he actually was.
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One has to wonder if it ever /did/ exist, or was it just a fiction woven from bits and pieces that took their fancy. I mean, Hearn in the 1890s was living in the country whose passing Kerr mourns for in the 1990s, but both of them are all about the loss of 'old Japan.'
This happens when you pick and choose arbitrarily from a country's culture and make your image out of the most congenial elements. Ohh the old (starving) Kyoto aristocracy, gone, oh those (inefficient) straw raincoats-- people still wore them in the 70s but now it's all plastic; kabuki, chado, all becoming centralized and tidy, and no more marvellous antiques showing up on the market for a song because the Japanese don't value their past. 'It was wonderful once'-- well, one wonders, how do you know that?
The past is happening now, as someone must have said. The present is never a complete disjunct from what was, even when there's been a violent upheaval in a society. You may not see the particular soil in which the potato in front of you grew (or at any rate, you'd better not) but that doesn't mean the potato didn't grow in the soil.
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Both ancestral cultural sides of me finds this inconceivable. But obviously the world is in love with our beautiful French culture and wishes to know it more; whereas the glories of England speak for themselves-- you don't need to learn about them, their mark is everywhere in modern civilization. Which we invented.
The Canadian me OTOH... is obscurely offended at Americans who come and major in Canlit. 'Look, Canadian literature is a lightweight yawnful joke, it's not the big-bang razzamatazz of your stuff, we HAVE no major writers, stop saying it's all so wonderful and fascinating and why don't we appreciate it more. We're CANADIANS, you fool. We don't DO that. This stuff is ours, not yours, and we'll slam it in our own natural God-given Canuck fashion. Go home and write your thesis on Phillip Roth, why don't you. (Who's every bit as unlikable and boring as Mordechai Richler, but you don't know it and we do.)'
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Exactly, we might not read/sing waka(和歌）with seasonal words, but our fast food chain stores like MacDonald's and KFC carries "seasonal specials." Well, not really a good example but I hope you understand what I mean. We still enjoy the season and celebrate them as we did in Heian period,albeit not exatly the same way but still.
plastic raincoats
I'm pretty sure the Japanese don't regret plastic raincoats either.
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IME even the gardening English don't have this kind of public awareness and celebration of various flowers coming out in turn; and the other markers here attach to specific holidays (Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en, Christmas, Easter) and not the season itself. Season matters in Japan, now as much as in Heian.