Donald Richie: A legend who brought Japan to the world

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Donald Richie

An American who moved to Japan after World War II and stayed on there to become the most significant interpreter of Japanese culture and its cinema to the world outside, Donald Richie has just left this world that will remain beholden to him for “opening up” Japan more than half a century ago.

Author, filmmaker, as well as film critic, he wrote close to 40 books on Japan, its cinema, its culture, its past and its present. He has written travelogues, fiction and autobiographical notes in his brilliant Japan Journals that go back to 1947, when he “sneaked” into Japan and started reporting for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. In all these years, he went back to the United States just once, for a four-year term when he was curator of film at New York’s iconic Museum of Modern Art, where he exhibited a series of Japanese films, and then went back home to Japan, which had become “his” country.
“Why didn’t you get a Japanese passport?” I once asked him. “Look at me”, he responded. “If somebody asked me where I was from, and I said ‘Japan’, would they believe me?”
In his Journals, he wrote: “I may have rejected the USA where I was born, but I did not decide to be Japanese...” And then went on to say: “I decided to become a citizen of this most attractive, intensely democratic republic”. He quoted Rilke’s words: “We are born so to speak provisionally, it doesn’t matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin so that we may be born there retrospectively.”
Japan was his home, and he never wanted to leave it; breathing his last at a hospital in Tokyo a few days ago. His book The Inland Sea has been made into a film and shown everywhere, a film on him Sneaking In was made 10 years ago in Austria, the few films he himself made — in which he pulls no punches — have been shown worldwide, but it is the books he wrote that made him a legend. These range from one on Japanese Rock Gardens, to Three Modern Kyogen which was his version of the 14th-century comic drama that reflects his own self-deprecating but sharp wit and humour, and are yet a form of homage to an ancient tradition, to definitive books on internationally-recognised Japanese masters of cinema like Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, to the first-ever history in English of Japanese cinema, republished with an updated approach as A Hundred Years of Japanese Film in 2001, to his Japan Journals 1947-2004, dating back to his arrival in Tokyo and capturing the evolving face of the country over these 50-plus years.
I met him first in Hawaii at the film festival that was then one of the rare festivals where Asian films were foregrounded. It was there that I dreamt of creating a magazine on Asian Cinema.
A couple of years later I found myself on the jury with Donald and asked if he would be on the advisory board and also write for the magazine. He was all for it and wrote regularly for Cinemaya from almost the very beginning in 1988. In 2005 we gave him the award that I had dreamt up, for Best Writing on Cinema, at Osians-Cinefan — a small tribute to this towering figure.
We continued to meet over the years at a variety of festivals, and in Tokyo, where I last saw him two years ago at his flat near Ueno Park. By then he was already almost living in the hospital, but would come out whenever he wanted or needed to. We went to his favourite restaurant for dinner that memorable last night.
As we were leaving his apartment, he pointed to the shelf near the front door where he would place the books he did not want, and asked me to take whatever I felt like. He had been in the habit of doing that for years because he did not want to clutter up his life with possessions — including books.
He did not need them. He was writing his own and they came from within him, from his “true place of origin”, as he quoted from Rilke.
His was a life that has no parallels.