{"id":2165,"date":"2014-03-29T07:27:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-29T14:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2165"},"modified":"2014-03-29T07:27:21","modified_gmt":"2014-03-29T14:27:21","slug":"outsider-donald-richie-in-japan-1947-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2165","title":{"rendered":"Outsider: Donald Richie in Japan, 1947-2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Richie\" src=\"http:\/\/larb.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Richie-Donald.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"229\" height=\"290\" \/><\/p>\n<p>PITY THE WESTERN JAPANOPHILE who longs to become Japanese. He either takes on every trapping he can manage of what he imagines as the Japanese existence, going as native as possible and in the process turning into a grotesque, or, having collided with one too many of the invisible barriers honeycombing his adopted homeland, throws up his hands and returns, filled with obscure frustration, to his actual one. Donald Richie, though known as a critic, novelist, curator, and filmmaker, had one real life\u2019s work: to solve that problem, in a life lived almost entirely in Japan since service with the American occupation brought him there on New Year\u2019s Eve, 1946, until his death one year ago. In his observations of, explorations in, and engagements with Japan, he exemplified how to place oneself advantageously in a land and culture not one\u2019s own, a process begun by accepting, then embracing, how adamantly it will remain precisely that: not one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe white man who goes native in Samoa or Marrakech,\u201d Richie writes in his best-known work, 1971\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Inland Sea<\/em>, \u201cthe Japanese who goes native in New York or Paris \u2014 this is possible, but it is, I think, impossible for anyone but a Japanese to go Japanese.\u201d Nominally an Ohioan, he stayed in Japan for about 60 years, except for two stretches in New York \u2014 first for an English degree at Columbia University, then to curate the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s film program. In this time, he wrote some 40 books on his second, ever-strange country of residence: histories of Japanese film; Japanese travelogues like\u00a0<em>The Inland Sea<\/em>; coffee-table books introducing Japan, its cuisine, its cities, its traditions, and its tattoos; novels set in ancient and modern Japan; and the 510-page\u00a0<em>Japan Journals<\/em>, a collection, first intended for posthumous publication, of diary entries chronicling 57 years of his daily movement through Japanese society at all levels. What fascinated him throughout is its otherness. \u201cIf I were Japanese,\u201d he liked to say of Japan, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t stay here ten minutes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing at <a href=\"http:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/essay\/outsider-donald-richie-japan-1947-2013\">the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PITY THE WESTERN JAPANOPHILE who longs to become Japanese. He either takes on every trapping he can manage of what he imagines as the Japanese existence, going as native as possible and in the process turning into a grotesque, or, having collided with one too many of the invisible barriers honeycombing his adopted homeland, throws [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-los-angeles-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2165"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2167,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165\/revisions\/2167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}