Donald Richie: the gay Lafcadio Hearn of our time
Over at the London Review of Books there is an incredibly wordy review of Donald Richie‘s lastest book ‘The Japan Journals: 1947-2004′. The book is a collection of stories from Richie’s life in Japan: he first came to Japan in 1947 and spend most of the second half of the 20th century as a Japanophilic scholar living in Japan. You’d probably expect his journals to be full of stories about how he came to appreciate Japans four seasons, the marvelous entertainment value of Noh theater and the wonderful taste of natto. However, the book (or perhaps just the reviewer) seems to have a focus on Donald Richie’s homosexuality:
There is another lucky side effect for many expatriates: personal alienation, the inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is cancelled out, or at least rendered invisible, by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin. This is the partial explanation for something else remarked on several times by Richie: as he shyly puts it, ‘the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists’. To be blunter, Richie and a seemingly disproportionate number of his friends and contemporaries – the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual.
Yep, that’s right, a lot of Japan scholars are homosexuals. In his journals, Richie nostalgically writes about his first sexual experience, being molested as at age 6 by a man in the park. In his later life, he enjoys seducing young men who have come to Japan to study:
As a lover, too, Richie is loyal and responsible, and becomes a lifelong ally to several of the younger, mostly heterosexual men whom he seduces – meeting their oblivious families, helping to put them through school, attending their weddings, investing in their businesses and becoming a friend to their wives and children. But here and there are hints of a wilder, less steady and more tormented personality.
Of course, like any hardcore Japanophile, Richie is absolutely disgusted when foreigners complain about any aspect of Japan. The reviewer notes that none of Richie’s works seem to paint Japan in a negative light. Until the Richie saw his precious Japan changing, that is:
The growing self-confidence and obnoxiousness of Japan coincide with his descent into the conservatism of old age. Richie wryly recognises the irony in all this, although he is never able to forgive Japanese youths for their disinclination to be seduced by him; their fecklessness, stupidity and philistinism are a recurring and rather tiresome theme in the second half of this book. Subtlety and complexity desert him as he ventures out from his base in old-fashioned Ueno to cast his fogeyish eye over the youthful ‘hordes’ in ‘noisome’ Shibuya and Roppongi. ‘They lurch and spill on the pavement and in a group sound like a herd of elephants . . . Young people with their Walkmen and manga, their portable phones – not only do they not know one flower from another, they do not even see them . . . this generation was taught nothing . . . the latest gadget satisfies it; it goes to see Star Wars.’ Even masturbation is not what it used to be, as a fellow regular at Richie’s local porn cinema comments: instead of lending one another a hand, young Japanese onanists ‘buy a tape, or rent it, and take it back home and lock the door’.
How dare they modernize their country! Reading manga instead of the Manyoushu?!! And the nerve of them, not engaging in gay handjobs at porno theaters anymore! What has this country come to! It appears that Richie is yet another foreigner obsessed with preserving “the real Japan.” The reviewer goes on, tearing at Richie:
‘These youthful herds await a deliverer, someone to organise them, and a country to give up everything for,’ he fulminates, in an especially barmy entry. ‘Someone like Mussolini or the Emperor Hirohito.’ Yet it was Richie’s generation, ‘that friendly, ragged, wily, beautiful, and hopeful crew’ of wartime Japanese with whom he fell in love, who submitted to fascism, who swarmed so murderously into China and South-East Asia, and who piloted the suicide planes. By almost any other standard, the young in Japan today are exemplary: a little glazed and indifferent from the outside, but politer, calmer and more law abiding than their contemporaries anywhere in the world. Richie may find it harder to seduce them as he circumambulates the park, but he is not going to be beaten up, robbed or murdered by them either.
Sadly, the reviewer notes that many of gay romance portions of the journals were edited out, to be used in a later work. Perhaps only then will we know how many boys he has ‘seduced’ or the full story of his relationship with Edward Seidensticker or Yukio Mishima. The final line of the review pretty much sums up the reviewer’s feelings about Richie:
In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature. Perhaps Donald Richie shows us why.
Ouch.
