One Man’s View

Not one who can be counted among soccer fans, more often than not soccer news, World Cup or otherwise doesn’t color my day. But I saw in the news this morning that Japan lost to Paraguay in the best sixteen series of the World Cup. Can’t really say that such news brought me down, but it did make me wish the result had been different. Seems I’m on another missing Japan low and waxing nostalgic about most things of my longtime home.

With my mind on ‘the good old days’ I spent a few minutes looking through one of my books illustrating and describing the Japan of old. It might have been better had my hand fallen on a different book, because in looking again at The Japan Diaries of Richard Gordon Smith, I opened it to a page that immediately raised my ire. The back flap of the book’s cover makes no pretense of hiding the author’s attitudes toward his host country and states, ‘His views may be chauvinistic, even racist at times, but he was a man of his time, proud to be British and not afraid to express strong opinions.’ You have to read a little deeper to learn that as a young man he failed his exams and was forced to derive his income from the family’s business investments, and though not actually rich, never had to work for a living. This left him free to pursue his real interests—fishing and shooting.

Gordon Smith first arrived in Japan in late December of 1898. He returned to England several times, but spent most of his days in Japan until spring of 1907. There is little doubt that his “Ill-Spelled Diaries” offer a wealth of fascinating observations and odd facts about the country, and his name deserves to be remembered as one of Japan’s early archivists. There were few places he was reluctant to go, few experiences he was afraid of at least sampling. The problem with travelers of Gordon Smith’s time, and this is perhaps especially true of the British, was the superior mind-set engendered by colonialism. Everything in his upbringing and world view told him he was superior to the Japanese. This attitude supplied the palette of colors through which Gordon Smith described Japan and his time there.

The photo shown here of the fisherman includes partial comments about an experience on May 29, 1900. ‘I got up in a bad humour ordering five boatloads of fishermen, who surrounded the yacht, to clear off at once; I had a quick shot at one boatload who did not, and had them told that I did so because they were the ugliest men I had ever seen (and so they were). Their idiotic and insolent staring is at times most insulting. They think nothing of laughing at you yet they, themselves, have positively diabolically ugly heads and are more vulgarly clad than the naked savages of the tropics. A blue shirt comes only to their hips leaving bare all that is supposed to be covered; it is almost impossible to imagine what low looking beasts they appear.’

In the photograph of Gordon Smith with two of his house staff, you can read his somewhat demeaning label, ‘My two smallest servants, Egawa and O-Miyo-san.’

We have to comfort ourselves with one of his reflections upon returning to England when he found the contrast with the East thoroughly distasteful: the people, the climate and culture had all become unpalatable.

Then and Now

21 Days…

Going about the business of making ready to leave Japan, my thoughts seesaw with images and memories of now versus then, the ‘then’ in this case being my early years in this country. It doesn’t matter where you are, Timbuktu or Tokyo, New York or London, the landscape, the people and the customs change, sometimes greatly over the passage of years. In that light, there are aspects about the Japan of 2010 that are almost unrecognizable when held up against my memory of scenery and customs in 1982.

In those days I saw most things Japanese through rose colored glasses, and was ready to argue that little fault could be found in the far eastern world I had come to. Very probably, for the first three years here I walked about in a state of cultural intoxication, wide-eyed and willing about things I would later come to look askance at. It didn’t bother me then that the Japanese were not as quiet and reserved, or as spiritual as books had taught, or led me to believe. It didn’t disturb me that many drank to the point of throwing up on streets and train platforms, or that half the people, children and adults read comic books voraciously. I saw all friendliness, harmony, public safety, a deep well of colorful tradition, and in most people an appealing curiosity about Americans like myself. I was passing through, living in what I could only call heaven.

Sure, in time I came to notice things that fogged, or jostled the prettiness of my rosy view, but it was becoming clear to me that these people, these Japanese, had—for all the warts and past sins—built a stable and comfortable society where thoughts of others were always in mind. And it didn’t take me long to learn that as a foreigner, I enjoyed exemptions from the norm, that my misspoken Japanese or faulty manners were excused as natural for non-Japanese. (It took a few years more for me to learn that this was in fact a kind of discrimination, and included a faint whiff of superiority.)

Things change, as I said. Ask me now and looking around at this society in 2010, I would tell you that the Japanese thoughtfulness I once admired is gone, and that the younger Japanese could teach college courses in how to be selfish without the least thought of others. I could be wrong, could be harsh in my view of things modern, but I lament the loss of history and tradition, the stripping away of older appreciations and understanding of their own cultural values. Perhaps that’s why I describe myself as a person looking for the lost.

I’ve been fortunate to have friends here who were willing to indulge me in my old-fashioned Japanese enthusiasms, to guide, lead or show me the things I sought, and to overlook the frequent faux pax, or my often silly pursuits. Sad now to think that a few of these friends have been lost, or put out of reach, much like the old and faint shadows of Japanese culture we sought together. Where are they now?

Photo: Facing pages from the 1898-1907 Japan Diaries of Richard Gordon Smith