31 May1997. On the way home I bought a Big Mac Juicy Double Burger and sat in the park to consume it. As I did so I was aware of being looked at. Glancing around I could see no one, and then noticed near me an inhabited cardboard box. In it was a man regarding me. He did nothing but look, did not lick his lips or hold out his hand. The homeless here never beg; they simply sit and slowly die. So I handed him my Big Mac Juicy Double Burger, one bite taken out of it, and he took it and retired into his box. And I suddenly remembered fifty years ago, in front of the Ginza Hattori Building, now  Wako, then the PX, making an identical gesture with a bitten hot dog. I was then twenty-something and he was about five. Now I am seventy something and he is in his fifties. Nothing has changed, except everything.

The transformation of Japan from postwar devastation to twenty-first-century economic and cultural powerhouse has been a remarkable spectacle. Donald Richie arrived in Tokyo on New Year’s Day 1947 and since then has been living there to witness and report on this change. For over fifty years Richie’s work — comprising dozens of books and hundreds of essays — has helped define modern Japan and Japanese culture for Western readers. Believing steadfastly that “the ostensible is the real,” Richie rarely chose to reveal his own inner workings, to ruminate on how he, too, along with Japan, has evolved, for the better and for the worse.

Now, having reached his celebratory eightieth year, this long-time observer of others has decided to open his private journals to public view. Spanning his entire time in Japan, Richie’s writings show a man who is still intellectually engaged and still passionately romantic.

In the 1940s Richie eagerly violated U.S. Occupation rules against “fraternization” to sneak into movie theaters and concerts. His early work as a reporter for Stars and Stripes in Tokyo led to a career as a writer and critic. Interested in film, books, art, and music, he got to meet (and write in his Journals about) scores of Japanese luminaries, among them authors Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima, Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki, composer Toru Takemitsu, Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando, and directors Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Nagisa Oshima.

 As Richie’s reputation grew (he was instrumental in introducing Japanese film to the West), he became the “go-to guy” for American and European artists passing through town. In the Journals are snippets of conversations from many of these encounters, portraying a whining Truman Capote, a self-absorbed Stephen Spender, a delightful Marguerite Yourcenar. Here, too, are examples of Richie’s famously deft travel sketches of landscapes, buildings, and the Japanese urban scene and sense of style.

Although large events loom over this chron-ology and there are many meetings with the famous and influential, the Journals are primarily about the details of ordinary life and people. Richie enjoyed Tokyo’s varied demimonde, and he counted taxi drivers, students, cops, hustlers, transvestites, and prostitutes among his acquaintance, not to mention his fellow expatriates. Several men and women he grew especially close to, falling in love and then into friendship over the decades.

Reading The Japan Journals, absorbing its details, is a bit like viewing a fast-moving world through another person’s eyes. Japan is changing rapidly and so, more slowly, is the observer, bit by bit coming to terms with his age and era, with what drew him to and keeps him in this foreign land. The later sections of The Japan Journals become more fragmented, dreamlike, and freshly drawn. There is some despair, even bitterness . . . so many funerals of old friends, so many neighborhoods gone . . . at how much Japan has lost since those early postwar years. Richie ambles about his favorite Ueno Park, thinking and observing. Gradually, his tone grows elegiac, turning The Japan Journals into an overwhelmingly poignant experience of a complicated life well lived and captivatingly told, by the only man who could tell it.

Donald Richie, ex-curator of film at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is best known as the leading Western authority on Japanese film, but he has also written on many other aspects of the country in books such as The Inland Sea and the collection released in 2001 as The Donald Richie Reader. During his more than fifty years residence in Japan, Richie kept a detailed record of his life there — The Japan Journals.

Leza Lowitz has written, co-edited, or co-translated eleven books on Japan and currently lives in Tokyo. Her most recent publication is Green Tea to Go, a collection of short stories.

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A DONALD RICHIE FILM ANTHOLOGY DVD (All Region) - 127 minutes Released 2004 $ 80 home use $125 institutional price Noted author and film critic Donald Richie made a series of highly personal short films in Japan in the 1960's which have only rarely been seen in North America. Recently released on DVD in Japan they are now available by special order from videos@martygrossfilms.com This DVD includes: WARGAMES  22 minutes 1962 ATAMI BLUES 20 minutes 1962 BOY WITH CAT 5 minutes 1967 DEAD YOUTH 13 minutes 1967 FIVE FILOSOPHICAL FABLES 47 minutes 1967 CYBELE 20 minutes 1968

Other titles of interest The Donald Richie Reader, ed. by Arturo Silva The Inland Sea by Donald Richie Tokyo Story: The Ozu Noda Screenplay, trans. by Donald Richie and Eric Klestadt A Lateral View, by Donald Richie The Broken Bridge, ed. by Suzanne Kamata, intro. by Donald Richie