Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Donald Richie’s visit

In the mid-eighties I stopped attending the Sydney Film Festival. The films had become increasingly earnest and didactic but the real reason was this: the audience made me ill. Smug, insular, awash with self-importance, they would cram into the beautiful old State Theater to gorge themselves on documentaries from Senegal and Ulan Bator and the latest piece of posturing from Peter Greenaway.

Years later, at a party, I insulted one of Natsuko’s friends—a Festival devotee—by saying that 80% of Sydney’s social problems could be solved by rigging the theater with plastic explosive one June and burying that audience in a pile of art-deco rubble.

But for two years, 1992 and 1994, I set aside my distaste and bought a Festival ticket. The critic and writer, Donald Richie, had curated two seasons of Japanese films.

In 1992, he presented ten post-war Japanese films including Yoshimura’s A Ball at the Anjo House, Kinoshita’s Morning for the Osone Family, Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums, and Toyoda’s Marital Relations. Two years later, Richie showed ten Ozu movies including Late Spring, Early Summer, Early Spring, Late Autumn, and —of course—Tokyo Story.

Donald Richie would briefly introduce the film then take questions from the audience for fifteen or twenty minutes at the end. These sessions must have been painful for Richie for, despite the de rigeur Festival sensitivity to “other cultures,” most of the questions laid bare a view of Japan and the Japanese that could only have been drawn from the crudest of cultural stereotypes.

Still, he answered each question with warmth and generosity, revealing in his responses a depth of understanding and sympathy for Japanese society that added layer upon layer of meaning onto the film we’d just seen.

It was in one of these sessions that Donald Richie told the story about Ozu’s reaction to Disney’s Fantasia, a story that—because it was grounded in something the audience could understand (an American animated film)—was well received. Another story had that same audience squirming helplessly with discomfort and, in some cases, barely-repressed anger.

In response to a question about Japanese sexual mores, Richie had given the usual standardized response: since Christianity has repeatedly failed to take root in Japan, the Japanese are not moralistic or racked with guilt and shame about sex, which is regarded as just one of many human pleasures… then he suddenly launched into an anecdote about how an American acquaintance, visiting Tokyo, had asked Richie to take him to a Soapland, or brothel.

Richie explained that Japanese bath-and-massage parlors used to be called toruko-buro (or toruko), loan words based on “Turkish bath.” But in 1985, after a campaign by a Turkish diplomat outraged by the implied insult to his country, the Japanese Bath Association held a competition to find a replacement name. The winner was sopurando, Soapland, and so the Turkish Baths closed down and immediately reopened as Soaplands.

To the increasing dismay of the audience—who were beginning to wonder where the distinguished guest was taking them—Richie said that although he’d not been to a Soapland, he felt an obligation to his visitor and had called a Japanese friend to obtain an introduction to an appropriate Soapland in Senzoku.

He and the visitor had probably taken the Yamanote line to Ueno and changed to the Hibiya line for the two-stop ride to Minowa. Five minutes later a cab deposited them at their destination. Richie, determined to give the outing a cultural gloss, had chosen the Senzoku district since, for over three hundred years until 1958, it had been the site of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the heartland of Japanese prostitution.

Inside the Soapland they discovered their arrival had been eagerly anticipated—perhaps his Japanese friend had mentioned that Richie was an important interpreter of Japanese culture to the West. The visiting American quickly chose a Soap-Lady, the pair disappeared upstairs, and Richie—who’d had no intention of partaking himself—sat down in the waiting room and began to watch TV.

However it soon became apparent that his reluctance was being misconstrued as disappointment or dissatisfaction and so, rather than risk insulting the owner and his staff and causing embarrassment to the friend who’d introduced him, Richie found himself in a large tiled bathroom handing his clothes to an attractive Soap-Lady.

At this point I became aware of a rift in my attention; for some time I had been simultaneously captivated by Richie’s anecdote and intrigued by the audience’s unmistakably hostile response. Even though, apart from mentioning that the Soap-Lady had commented favorably on his tie and that he felt like he’d been placed in the care of an exceptionally competent nurse, Richie refrained from revealing the specifics of his Soapland adventure.

But for the majority of his listeners he had already said far too much. The forced atmosphere seemed to choke off any further questions and soon the audience was filing out, a restrained silence replacing the excited chatter that followed most screenings.

At first I interpreted this incident as evidence of how completely Richie had internalized and adopted Japanese attitudes towards sex; that he’d been unconscious, to some degree at least, of the negativity radiating from the tight-lipped crowd.

But since Richie’s writing—about Japanese film and culture—displays an acute sensitivity to emotional nuance, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t picked up on their antagonism. Perhaps, I told myself, he’d decided there was no easy way to extricate himself and that he’d best press on.

Lately, however, I’ve started to wonder if his answer hadn’t been deliberate, sophisticated, and slyly malicious. I’d like to think he’d summed up his audience quite early in the season and that—following the old screenwriter’s adage of “show, don’t tell”—he’d taken advantage of their cramped moralism to demonstrate that the Japanese really are quite different. It’s just that the Festival crowd were too strait-laced, dogmatic, and stupid to understand.

As for me, I’d never been to a Soapland, but now I could hardly wait.

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