An Extraordinary Life

DONALD RICHIE

APRIL 17, 1924 — FEBRUARY 19, 2013 

‘Winter 1947… Tokyo lies deep under a bank of clouds which move slowly out to sea as the sun climbs higher. Between the moving clouds are sections of the city: the raw gray of whole burned blocks with the yellow of new cut wood and the shining tile of recent roofs, the reds and browns of sections unburned, the dusty green of barely damaged parks, and the shallow blue of ornamental lakes. In the middle is the palace, moated and rectangular, gray outlined with green, the city stretching to the horizons all around it.

The smoke of early household hearths, of newly renovated factories, of the waiting, charcoal burning taxis, rises and with it the freshness of late winter, the bitter yellow smoke of burning cedar shavings, the smell of breakfast: barley, sweet potato, roasted chestnuts. In the houses the bedding is folded into closets and tatami mats are swept.

18 April 2004… I wander into the future—Roppongi Hills, an enormous complex of high-rise buildings, including a mighty tower near where I used to live. This is the new Japan—gargantuan, expensive, and wasteful. There are, to be sure, concessions to tradition (trad but mod) in the transplantations of zelkova and gingko trees, all of them expensively mature, and in such touches of the Japanesque as a pocket garden here and a teahouse there. But Keyakizaka Street is lined with Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Gucci, Bulgari, and other high-priced merchants. These are matched by the kind of restaurants now called cutting-edge, which are far too expensive to eat in. People who work in the tower complain that they have to leave the Hills and walk far away to find a place to have an affordable lunch.’                                  — Donald Richie, The Japan Journals 1947-2004

During almost thirty years in Japan one of the greatest influences on my understanding of the country and its people came from another American who devoted more than a half-century to living in and writing about the country. Beginning on January 1, 1947 and continuing over the next sixty-six years, Donald Ritchie’s voice and eye penetrated every aspect of the Japanese experience. From the homeless and destitute to the honored and privileged elite, Mr Ritchie’s observations and insights penetrated everything from art to film and literature, on down to back alley porno shops and ten dollar prostitutes. As much as conversation with the celebrated Kurosawa Akira and Mishima Yukio, he was just as happy to sit on a park bench and talk with someone living in a cardboard box who never rose above the drudgery of manual labor.   

Donald Richie was born in Lima, Ohio in 1924. After graduating from high school he traveled to New Orleans where he was working at the time of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. He was spared the Army by entering an officer training program with the US Maritime Service where he served as an ensign-purser and medical officer during the war years. In 1946 he found work with the US Civil Service and on January 1, 1947 arrived in Japan. For the twenty-two year-old neophyte it was love at first sight.

Except for the years spent at Columbia University from 1949-53, and another four years in New York as Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art from 1969 to 1972, Richie spent the remainder of his life in Japan. His writing on Japan includes books, articles and stories too numerous to count. There would be little exaggeration in calling Mr Richie Japan’s single greatest cultural bridge to the west.

In his 1971 landmark book, The Inland Sea, the writer observes early in his travels…

‘A journey is always something of a flight. You go to reach, but you also go to escape. I am going to see the islands and all that they seem to promise, but, at the same time, I am going to escape the mainland and all that I already know it contains. I find less fault with Japan than with the century that is destroying this country along with all the others. Now, to escape is no sentimental gesture, it is survival.’

Standouts among the more than forty books by Donald Richie

Three Donald Richie Books

E. coli & Your Smartphone

At last, the ultimate accessory!

Some, perhaps many are aware that E. coli is a common bacterium found in the intestines of all humans. Normally harmless, rare strains of this nasty little bugger can cause severe food poisoning. Now, Takara Tomy, a Japanese toymaker has me wondering if those dangerous and rarer strains of E. coli have discovered an environment more inviting than the human intestines. So, between programming my iPhone to turn on the coffeemaker and start the washing machine, I have to worry that digital age E. coli has taken up residence on the touch screens of both my iPhone and iPad. Sound crazy? Not too crazy for Takara Tomy who has come up with a health threat advertising ploy to stir enthusiasm for their new product. 

For some time now we’ve had to rely upon small microfiber cloths to quickly buff the fingerprints, E. coli bacterium and anthrax spores off our smartphones and tablets, finding some comfort in knowing that ninety-nine percent of those frightful nasties have at least been transferred to the little cloth we carry around in a pocket. 

March 28 will see the release of Japan’s giant toymaker Takara Tomy’s answer to the E. coli threat and the backbreaking work of cleaning our gadgets with a mere cloth. Their small, palm-sized AutoMee S will take off on its own battery power to buff away the dust, fingerprints and other smears by wandering around your smartphone or tablet screen spinning its brushes and ricocheting off the edges until the entire surface is clean. 

Coming in white, orange, pink and blue, the AutoMee S weighs less than three ounces, measures 2.75 inches in diameter and runs on a single AA battery that will keep it going for three hours. The price is listed at ¥1,575, or about $17.00. Granted, most can clean their devices by hand in a couple of seconds, but there is always the risk of inflaming a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome, and that’s no fun. If you are willing to sit back and relax, the AutoMee S will do the job on your smartphone in four minutes, your tablet in eight.

Way back in 1986 Takara Tomy produced a small cleaning robot called the Dustbot that featured a built-in vacuum cleaner. It also had sensors to prevent it from falling off a table, but the most memorable feature was its tiny arms that swept a tiny broom back and forth as it moved. Somewhat larger than the company’s latest invention, the Dustbot was designed to clean desks and tabletops. Another impractical gadget but one that captured the imagination of those looking for cute, clever and oddball.

People of Whistle Stop

“One day Cleo was going out the door and he pointed up to where all the old blackbirds were sitting on a telephone wire in front of our house, and he’d say, ‘Be careful what you say on the phone today, Ninny, you know they’re up there listening to what you say. They can hear through their feet.’”

A couple of days after Christmas a friend and I spent a day in New Orleans browsing the bookstores, pawing through countless dusty shelves looking for the hidden treasure that suddenly peeps out from a dark hiding place between two run-of the-mill titles. If you’re lucky, three or four rare finds make their way to the light over the course of a day and the hour after hour bending, reaching, standing and crouching becomes worthwhile. A long time back—around 1990 or so—I read a cheap little paperback book that grabbed me so solidly I was unable to get out of my chair, moving over the course of several hours only to turn on the lamp as the sun faded. Obviously, the book was what some reviewers are quick to call ‘a page-turner.’ What a bland description for a book so rich in story and character, one that prompts laughter on one page and tears on the next. The book that captured me so completely that day was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, published in 1987 by Random House. On that recent book browsing day in New Orleans one of the treasures that came into my hands was a first edition hardback copy in almost mint condition.

Though the author of six books, most of us remember Fannie Flagg as co-host of television’s Candid Camera with Allen Funt back in the 1970s. She has enjoyed a long career as not just a writer, but as a performer on Broadway, television and in film. Flagg used the small town of Irondale, a suburb of her hometown Birmingham, Alabama as a model for the 1987 book that spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.

The story of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe revolves around the people of tiny Whistle Stop, Alabama, mainly the Threadgoode family and the people who eat at the cafe, but as the characters move in out and around their small town, the setting follows their movement. The main thrust of the tale is seen (and told) from the perspective and reminiscences of Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly member of the Threadgoode family residing in the Rose Terrace Nursing Home and talking to her new friend, Evelyn Couch, a Birmingham housewife. Oddities and tidbits about Whistle Stop are also shown through regular offerings from post office clerk Dot Weems writing in the town’s weekly bulletin. The book’s major focus is Idgie Threadgoode and her lifelong friend and companion, Ruth Jamison, the two women who open the Whistle Stop Cafe in 1929. But their lives and the cafe are intertwined with a host of more than a dozen characters that give the book its color and multiplicity of themes. First there is the issue of two women living together as a couple—Idgie the lifelong tomboy and Ruth, the gentle beauty escaping a drunk and abusive husband. The life and condition of southern blacks during the period from the 1920s through the ’80s is another of Flagg’s main themes, as is aging, death and acceptance. Then there is the question of whether murder can be justified under extreme conditions. And naturally, since much of the action takes place in a cafe, food and eating is another of the book's prominent motifs. (The last pages of the book are a collection of recipes from the Whistle Stop’s old black cook, Sipsey.)

One of the more enjoyable qualities of this small journey over time is the collection of individual voices created for the characters. Hard perhaps to find another character in literature that colors language like Idgie Threadgoode, one minute irreverent, the next gentle and understanding, at all times a fount of southern idiom, most of it masculine. Testifying in court she calls the prosecutor a “…gump-faced, blowed up, baboon-assed bastard.” Harper Lee once described Idgie as a woman Huck Finn would have tried to marry. Her friend Ruth is given the gentle vocal rhythms of a Sunday school teacher, a twentieth century Melanie Wilkes from Gone with the Wind. The elderly Ninny, who at times unknowingly wears her dress inside out, describes the girl in the beauty shop, saying, “Oh, she was a full-grown woman, only she was tiny, she had to stand on a box while she did my hair. I’d say she was about two inches away from being a midget. Of course, I don’t let any handicap like that bother me, and I love a midget…I wonder what ever happened to that little midget that sold cigarettes on the radio and TV. I used to get the biggest kick out of him…always wished he’d come to Whistle Stop so I could sit him on my lap and play with him.”

In these days when most news headlines scream of death and carnage, shootings and stabbings, when events all seem shaped out of remnants from the Dark Ages, it is comforting to stumble upon stories of a gentler time when people didn’t offer insult and abuse on every corner, when there was never a need to lock doors or lose yourself in small screens and earphones. In her book about Idgie Threadgoode and Whistle Stop, Alabama Fannie Flagg coaxes us back to that time before, bringing to her readers equal portions of delight and anguish, the daily turnings that made up life for a different kind of townsfolk.

Feline Watchmen

During this time of visiting friends in Baton Rouge, staying in their home I have shared space with a couple of furry friends named Gumbo and Memphis. A little standoffish the first week or so, they have gradually come to trust me. In the pictures below the two of them wait out a rainy day, looking every which way for the sunshine and a chance to get outside. 

Mo-Tel

Memories with much detail are hard to dredge up about many of the times in childhood that we all piled in the family car, a black 1948 Chevrolet and headed out for several days on the road aiming for the homes of distant relatives or joining the tourists to gawk at the mysteries of Mammoth Cave or the grandeur of Pike’s Peak. The most endurable memories of those times are the Burma Shave signs, the ever-present Stuckey’s around the next curve and the car games we played, making words from the letters glimpsed on fleeting roadside signs and billboards. Certainly we stayed nights in motels along the way, but mental pictures of those temporary stops have all but disappeared. We never stayed in any of the wigwam-style rooms, but in one place Daddy chose a log cabin court under flashing neon where at dinner the friendly and helpful waitress took the story about my fondness for rice and gravy to heart. Dessert included a bowl of raisin-studded rice pudding with a slosh of chicken gravy on top—just for me.

The Writer’s Almanac recently carried an interesting tidbit about the world’s first motel, planting the word in my head and nagging me to pursue this ‘first motel’ story farther. 

The Milestone Mo-Tel opened in San Luis Obispo, California in 1925, brainchild of California architect Arthur Heineman and the first roadside accommodation for travelers in the world. Heineman wasn't exactly going out on a limb with his venture. 1925 was a time when cars and road trips were enjoying new popularity and overnight rest options were limited; people either slept in their car or stopped at one of the few campsites or auto camps. Heineman decided to build a group of one-story bungalows 200 miles north of Los Angeles, each bungalow set around a tree shaded courtyard and allowing guests their own small garage. The price for a one-night stay was $1.25. The motel was built in an ornate Spanish mission style with white pillars and a three-tiered bell tower at a cost of $80,000, not more than fifty feet from Highway 101 skirting the California coast. Amenities included a restaurant famous for its steak and pretty young waitresses in Spanish outfits and big vaquero hats. Marcella Faust, one of the motel’s first employees described her days at the Milestone this way: “My sister and I and a girlfriend all worked there. My mother, she wanted me to finish school. But I wanted to work. She had eight kids and I told her there were enough legs under her kitchen table. And oh, it was wonderful to work. They trained us to fold the white linen napkins, to polish the silverware. In those days, there really was service. We were paid a dollar a day.”

The Depression years were hard ones for Heineman and his plan to open a string of motels up and down the California coast was never realized. There were also other developers who saw the sense in Heineman’s vision and imitators weren’t long in cropping up along America's highways. 

Today the Milestone Mo-Tel is a sad site of crumbling plaster and old furniture piled up in a dusty lobby. Many of the buildings were torn down in 2006 and only two fragments of the original buildings remain, including the bell tower. The motel closed in 1991 and is now used as an administrative building by a next door business.

Another example of Arthur Heineman’s work is the Fuller House in Los Angeles, sitting on almost three-quarters of an acre near Runyon Canyon off Franklin Avenue, the house was built in 1916 for a Hollywood developer named Fuller. It was designed by Arthur Heineman, who with his brother Alfred, designed several mansions and bungalows in the area. Samuel Goldwyn moved into the house with his second wife in 1925. It includes seven bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, a dining room with butler’s pantry, a screening room, sunroom, breakfast room, tile fireplaces, a guesthouse, pool and outdoor living room.

On Familiar Terms

Can’t claim the title above as my own, but on this afternoon in early December the words seemed just right and a tiny borrowing is harmless enough. Among his many books, Donald Keene wrote in 1996 one called On Familiar Terms, a series of essays describing a few of the people and experiences of his time in Japan. Far from Japan and back again on home ground in Louisiana, everything is once more familiar and to large extent an overflow of sensory impressions. Sights and sounds, southern voices overheard, their rhythm and drawl calling up memories of remembered aunts and uncles playing cards at the kitchen table; conversation with friends so enduring that words take on a meaning enriched by time and place and the Christmas table holds promise of not sugar plums and a gingerbread house, but of crawfish pie, po-boys and oyster stew.

Hard to remember the last Christmas I passed in Baton Rouge, but something tells me it was before the invention of ballpoint pens and color television. One Louisiana Christmas that for no special reason sticks in memory calls up images of an ugly brown suit and too much bourbon-laced eggnog. And here I am back again for Christmas with the friend who stood beside me singing carols, had no ugly brown suit but loved the eggnog as much as I. Back for Christmas with the girl I dated but the one that eggnog-loving friend married. With or without the eggnog, Christmas or otherwise, a season with Raymond & Dee is living life grand.

On most mornings my feet find a path along stretches of Florida sand, but this morning it was a different walk along familiar streets with ribbon-wrapped trees and pudgy snowmen decorating the homes of Old Goodwood. The nine months since my last visit have brought some change to those streets and houses. Landscapers have reshaped yards and contractors have both spruced up and added on, but the splendor of huge old oak trees overhanging streets and drooping their branches low over sidewalks is unchanged. Reading David Mitchell’s book Black Swan Green the other day, these words jumped off the page: “Trees’re always a relief, after people.”

Memory Paintings

She is often referred to as the black Grandma Moses, but the ‘Americana’ of Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter is a strong reflection of African influences with its use of bold color, pattern, stylized imagery, and stacked perspective. The artist called her works memory paintings because they depict scenes of everyday life around the plantation and her church. Asked the title of a painting she would describe instead what it was about, rarely thinking in terms of a name. The titles we see given to her paintings were most often applied by her white patrons.

Clementine Hunter (she pronounced it Clementeen) was born in 1886 on a cotton plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. At the age of five her family moved to another plantation in the Cane River area of Natchitoches Parish, where she first attended school. Clementine never liked school, often failing to attend until her parents gave up on sending her. When she was fourteen the family moved again, this time to Melrose Plantation, another Cane River plantation dating from the late 1700s. The owners of Melrose hoped to preserve the arts and crafts of the Cane River area, and as a result the plantation became over the years a haven for artists and writers. Clementine and her family worked in the cotton fields and the pecan groves, but when she reached the age of forty-two Clementine moved from field work to house work.

Gone Fishing, 1950s; a day on Cane River with everybody fishing in their Sunday best.

Several years later a man named Francois Mignon joined the Melrose family as a literary assistant to the owner. He recognized the creativity of Clementine, offering daily encouragement. When a New Orleans artist visited the plantation to paint magnolias, she left behind several tubes of paint. Finding the paints, Clementine approached Mignon saying she could “mark” a picture of her own, and he gave her an old window shade, some brushes and turpentine. The very next morning, she brought him a picture. In the years following, she painted whenever she had time, on anything she could find—from cardboard boxes, brown paper bags, lumber, to plastic milk cartons and wine bottles. 

Cotton Crucifixion, 1970; oil on paper

Over the next forty plus years she produced 4000 paintings, each one telling in a simple, straightforward way a story of life as she saw it. Though illiterate, her paintings are a storybook of everyday life on and around the plantation. The artist died on New Year’s Day, 1988 and was buried near Melrose Plantation in a spot close to Francois Mignon, the man who believed so strongly in her talent.

Zinnias in a Pot, 1965; return to a favorite theme first seen in 1939

Milking Time, 1940s; asked why the cow had only three legs, the artist reasoned that the milking stool only needed three legs, so the cow only needed three legs.

The painting at the top is a large mural titled Baptism, done in 1955 and now in African House on the grounds of Melrose Plantation.