{"id":3973,"date":"2017-05-03T22:40:45","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T05:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3973"},"modified":"2017-05-03T22:46:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T05:46:38","slug":"from-my-interview-archive-japanologist-and-yukio-mishima-kenzaburo-oe-translator-john-nathan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3973","title":{"rendered":"From my interview archive: Japanologist and Yukio Mishima, Kenzabur\u014d \u014ce translator John Nathan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

This year, I’m listening again\u00a0to\u00a0selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program\u00a0<\/em>The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast\u00a0<\/em>Notebook on Cities and Culture\u00a0between 2007 and 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

A few years before I ever set foot in Asia, I read John Nathan’s memoir\u00a0Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere<\/em>, the story of his growing up as a Jewish New Yorker in Arizona, studying the Japanese language in college, moving to Japan soon after graduation in the early 1960s, and quickly falling in with such Japanese literary and cinema\u00a0luminaries as\u00a0Mishima Yukio, \u014ce Kenzabur\u014d, Abe Kobo, and\u00a0Teshigahara Hiroshi. The book contains many more stories from subsequent chapters of Nathan’s career on both sides of the Pacific, but the sections on Japan inspired me to seek out the memoirs of other Westerners who’d lived there as well: Donald Keene’s\u00a0On Familiar Terms<\/em>, Donald Richie’s\u00a0The Japan Journals<\/em>, Edwin Seidensticker’s\u00a0Tokyo Central<\/em>, or more obscure \u2014 but to me, no less fascinating \u2014 volumes like Peregrine Hodson’s\u00a0A Circle Round the Sun<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Originally, though, I’d simply read Nathan’s book as preparation for an interview with him on\u00a0The Marketplace of Ideas<\/em>. He then held, and I believe still holds, the title of Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, where I went to college and at\u00a0whose campus radio station I started\u00a0the show after graduating. I’d up to that point recorded all the show’s\u00a0conversations over the phone, so talking to this professor about his just-published memoir provided me the opportunity to get some face-to-face interviewing experience. It also, so I may not have realized at the time, provided me the opportunity to exhume my own long-buried interest in not just Japan but Japan’s part of the world, and not just that of\u00a0a distant observer.<\/p>\n

Nathan, by the time of my own undergraduate years at\u00a0UCSB, had become something of a celebrity\u00a0among that school’s students of Japanese: a highly entertaining orator full of stories about the Japan of bygone decades (many of them involving first-hand encounters with the writers and other artists whose work\u00a0stoked the students’ own interest in Japan), but who could also come off \u2014 if I recall the RateMyProfessor comments correctly \u2014 as brash and lordly. I suspect I would have taken that attitude as an invigorating antidote to the simpering inoffensiveness\u00a0found elsewhere in the humanities, but regrettably, I never took any of Nathan’s\u00a0classes in college myself because I didn’t want to know\u00a0about Japan in college: after having taught myself some basic written Japanese in middle school, I came to regard an interest in the language and the culture as the province, at least in my generation, of the sloppy, socially inept nerd, and only later, through gradual re-introduction to its less animation- and video-game-oriented fruits \u2014 such as the dark, surreal novels of Nathan’s friend Abe \u2014 could I kindle it again.<\/p>\n

I even began studying Japanese properly, though I came to it through my interest in the Korean language, which I’d started teaching\u00a0myself not long before launching\u00a0The Marketplace of Ideas<\/em>. With no Korean classes easily available to take around Santa Barbara (and with my having been sternly told to graduate after accruing too many credits at UCSB already), I enrolled in a Japanese class at Santa Barbara City College, having heard about the two languages’ (somewhat overstated) similarity of grammar and vocabulary and hoping to meet a Korean classmate or two with whom to practice the Asian language I really wanted to learn. That did happen, but in the process I also realized that I’d never really killed my desire to immerse myself in more things\u00a0Japanese, and the example of Nathan \u2014 and Keene and Richie and Seidensticker and Hodson and many other East-going Westerners besides \u2014 led me to the realization that I could actually go to Japan, too.<\/p>\n

My interview with Nathan, in\u00a0addition to being the first\u00a0I ever recorded in person, also turned out to be the first\u00a0I had to air in two parts. I’d brought several question-filled notebook pages into the studio (this being so early in my interviewing career that I still felt I needed the crutch of notes), but in the event got so caught up in the conversation that I could simply let it flow naturally, and at length. Nathan, a true storyteller with his life experiences presumably fresh in his mind from having just written the book, happily obliged me with detailed answers that steered\u00a0the conversation in\u00a0a host of unexpected directions. I took great satisfaction from the pleasure Nathan expressed at the interview after (and even while) we recorded it, but looking back \u2014 from my current life, living in Korea, frequently visiting Japan, and writing, reading, and thinking more than ever about both of them \u2014 I wonder whether he could sense\u00a0what\u00a0the encounter would, a decade later, inspire me to do.<\/p>\n