Donald Richie: Japanophile non-pareil
Donald Richie is called, almost by media fiat, the foremost Western authority on Japanese films.
Donald Richie is called, almost by media fiat, the foremost Western authority on Japanese films (though some journalists add 'culture' or substitute 'Kurosawa'). When I started reading everything I could find by Richie, in the mid-1970s as a young Japanophile, this tag seemed almost boringly self-evident. Together with Joseph Anderson, Richie had written a seminal 1959 book, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry that was the core English-language text on Japanese cinema. He had also published, in 1965, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, a landmark study of Kurosawa's work that further solidified his reputation as the leading Japanese film scholar in the West.
His other film-related work includes reviews (for The Japan Times early on, more recently for The International Herald Tribune), books (including a new edition of his survey A Hundred Years of Japanese Film), essays, subtitles and DVD commentary (see Criterion's catalogue of Ozu and Kurosawa films, for examples).
Starting in the 1940s as a boy in Lima, Ohio, Richie also made his own films, including experimental shorts on sex, death and social taboos (cannibalism among them) that made him a leader in Japan's 1960s avant-garde. These films have recently been released on DVD.
But as impressive as this achievement is - and it represents only a fraction of his vast output, including novels (Kumagai), travelogues (The Inland Sea) and a photo book on Japanese tattoos, his title of 'foremost Western authority' is something of a burden and misnomer.
First, it has made him an object of envy among academics who have mastered more post-modern theory, or buffs who have seen more anime, and deride Richie for his humanism and elitism, respectively (while wishing they were getting his press interviews, festival invitations and honours).
Second, it calls up an image of a fact-and-film-hoovering expert that is antithetical to Richie's essential stance. His involvement with film, as with his other interests, is passionate, personal and selective (though he can be as rigorous in his analysis as a chess master). He is open, as few in their ninth decade are, to new talents and ideas, but balks at following fashions, whether from the academy or Internet fan sites. He has read deeply and widely in the field, as his weekly book reviews for The Japan Times from 1972 on testify, but proudly wears the title 'dilettante', as one who belongs to no school or clique, who writes about film from interest and conviction, not careerist necessity or calculation.
He has also known Japanese films and filmmakers, from the early postwar days on, directly and in real-time, as a self-described 'outsider' who has studied the language and closely observed the culture since his youth, in Japan and among the Japanese. And his style, both literary and personal, is a model of eloquence and grace. There is no one else like him - and there never will be again.
(Author, film critic for Japan Times in Tokyo since 1989 and a regular contributor to Osian's-Cinemaya.)
