Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (15 page)

I had seen some of these pictures. In the earlier ones (DeMille's
The Cheat
, for example) he was a wily Jap, but before long he had become an Oriental William S. Hart, always steely-eyed, brave, strong, different from the others only in that he had Asiatic eyes. He was not playing a Japanese there; he was playing a Japanese playing an American. Perhaps that accounted for his popularity. Perhaps it also accounted for his lack of any interest in that amazing career. Oh, that, he said, when I mentioned it. He did not want to talk about it.

What he did want to discuss was his new career as a Japanese actor. Though he had returned to play yet another foreigner, Jean Valjean, in an expensive local version of
Les Misérables
, he was soon doing Japanese parts: the wartime hero, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and the camp commandant in
The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Unfortunately, however, this new Japanese career of his was not successful. The post-WWII Japanese audience, unlike the post-WWI American one, did not take to him. It wasn't that it had forgotten about his American success; the problem was that it hadn't. This often happens. Somebody goes abroad, is successful, and finds himself resented at home. One of ours has deserted us.

Was this, I wondered, why Hayakawa was now so assiduously Japanese? Perhaps, but at the same time one knows it is part of a pattern for a person when young to go away, go abroad, and then, later in life, to return, and turn into his father. In this Hayakawa was no different from others. I thought of Tanizaki, of Kawabata, of Yukio Mishima, all of whom had noticeably "returned" to Japan.

- No, I won't see seventy again, he repeated: By the way, did you ever see a certain film of Eizo Tanaka's? It was called
The Kyoya Collar Shop.

The conversation invariably took this turn. He always wanted to talk about Japanese movies, those made at the very time that he was making his American films. This was, I think, why he invited me out for drinks or dinner—I knew more about Japanese film history than he did.

I said that I hadn't seen it, that perhaps a print no longer existed—that it was the first of the films in the new realistic mode.

- Yes, he said, 1922—not even remembering that his own
Night Life in Hollywood
was made in the same year.

I, in turn, wanted to hear about those Hollywood days when he drove a gold-plated Pierce Arrow and lost a million dollars one night at the casino in Monte Carlo, and to hear him explain—as he had once done, with traditional modesty—how his enormous social success was due to his having bought a carload of whiskey just before Prohibition. But now he was only interested in what Japanese directors had been up to when he was young and a matinée idol in a distant land.

- I'm sure you've seen
Souls on the Road
, he continued, mentioning another early Japanese film.

I said I had.

- Remarkable film, simply remarkable—a picture well ahead of its time, I think you'll agree.

I agreed, and we talked on into the evening, myself and the once-famous actor, he ignoring his own career, his own past.

And now the Imperial Hotel is gone, though that bar is preserved— after a fashion, stuck into one of the corners of the enormous new glass and steel structure. And Hayakawa is gone as well, though the National Film Center recently acquired a copy of
The Red Lantern
and there he is, intrepid, saving the day again.

Given his appearance alone, he would have had no other recourse than to embrace Zen. With his high forehead, his fuzzy eyebrows, his moles, his childlike smile, he looked like one of those acolytes—Jittoku, for example—who in many a scroll and screen laugh and cavort as they sweep the garden or bait the
roshi.
Always in kimono, always the same one, he looked like a young disciple suddenly become a patriarch. Behind the eyes of the attentive priest playfully peered the child.

But, however strong the priestly resemblance, he was a layman. This he would insist upon. He was a teacher but not a
roshi.
He said once that while he knew all about mountain climbing he had never climbed Mt. Sumera. But he did know that one did not climb mountains merely by looking at them. All too many, he said, thought that Zen was a mysticism concerned with visions of the eternal. This was not so.

Dr. Suzuki often defined things by what they were not. His descriptions of Zen were almost entirely negative. The only positive description I ever heard him give was that climbing mountains was hard work. This was said with a glance in my direction.

I had never worked in that sense, and it was, I gathered, understood between us that I never would. Our bond, in that we had one, was that he hadn't either, not if you consider
zazen
meditation as work. Though he had sat often enough and continued to do so from time to time, he awaited no illumination, defining his duty and his own hard work as elsewhere. Specifically this consisted in explaining what Zen was and wasn't—particularly the latter. He was a lay teacher.

Thus, while others sat in the lotus position in the meditation hall, I sat comfortably on the sofa with him. There he talked and I listened, hoping that learning would somehow rub off. In the end he gave me a definite taste for something he knew I could never eat.

This was in 1946 at Engakuji in Kamakura. He was then seventy-six and had established his Zen library across the valley. He also occasionally tended a small vegetable garden which helped feed him. I, a member of the forces then occupying his country, would appear from Tokyo every Sunday with soda crackers, processed cheese, peanut clusters—things that the PX could contrive in the way of offerings to my
sensei.

Sensei
would receive these graciously and then disappear with them into the back of the house. Upon his reappearance I was given a cup of tea and a
koan
riddle, the "answer" to which I was eventually to present. It was always the same cup and always the same
koan
—the one about Nansen's cat.

Then we would talk. Or rather, he would talk and I would listen. It was always about Zen, and I never understood a word. Or rather, it was the words alone I understood. Each word, even each sentence, made sense, but none of the paragraphs did.

Other discourses I had heard were rational enough, but Dr. Suzuki's were something else. The process seemed associative. As I listened I understood that there were modes of thought different from the ones I had always known and considered true. I learned—important discovery—that logic was a creation of the mind and only one of many possibilities.

I got nowhere with my
koan
, of course. Nansen saw two monks quarreling over a cat. He held it up and said if they had an answer the cat would be saved, otherwise not. They could not answer and Nansen cut the cat in two. Later he told another priest about the incident. This priest took off his sandal, put it on his head, and walked out. Nansen then said that if he had been there, he could have saved the cat. It is typical of my disposition that my first and only reaction was concern for the unfortunate feline.

Our conversations went on for a number of Sundays. I had grown used to the train ride, had grown fond of my walk through the towering cryptomeria of the temple, had become addicted to the weekly talks. Then, on one of these Sundays, Dr. Suzuki decided that we should part.

I understood the probable reasons for this but still felt bereft. I had thought I was a disciple. He stood up, a small man with steel-rimmed spectacles and long hairs in his eyebrows, and took a picture from the wall. It was of a seated Kannon, black ink on paper, framed in wicker, an oval picture of great beauty. It was also a genuine Hakuin. He told me to take it with me and live with it for a while.

He did not tell me why, nor for how long—he never talked about things like that. I understood that he was loaning me the Hakuin and that I was eventually to return it. Happily I took it home, put it up on the wall and, as is the way with things, grew used to it, forgot it.

My year of visits was over. I had been going there waiting for something to happen to me, convinced that mere attendance was enough. Here, after all, was Buddhism, Zen at its best—the meditation hall, floorboards gleaming, the smell of incense, the quiet, the stillness. Benefits would accrue if I simply attended.

Dr. Suzuki understood all this, of course. He was well practiced in talking about Zen to those who had no aptitude for it. It was, in a way, a quality he shared with those with whom he talked. He had written about his experience of
kensho
, that first glimpse of enlightenment, but he had never made any claims to a full
satori.

Then, after half a year or so, I returned one Sunday, carrying the Hakuin. Again we sat. My teacup was there, though Nansen's cat failed to make an appearance.

- You are very much of this world, very much of this flesh, my
sensei
remarked mildly. Then he smiled. That smile was a way of shaking an understanding head at the ways of the world. And before I left he gave me an invitation to a wedding reception.

He himself had been married, to Beatrice Lane, a close collaborator in his work, who died in 1939. They had adopted a child in 1916, Alan Masaru. It was he who was being married.

I looked forward to this simple ceremony, held in the venerable shadows of the cryptomeria, a Shinto priest perhaps imported for the occasion, the sound of the ceremonial
sho,
and the frugal Buddhist repast at its subdued conclusion.

But on presenting myself at Engakuji that evening, great was my surprise. There were kleig lights illuminating the tall stand of trees and sound trucks making the night hideous with their bellowings. And there was the press, held in place by ropes, pushed back against the meditation hall but ready with flashbulbs and magnesium flares.

The bride, it transpired, was a popular singing star, and her recording company had thought that a wedding extravaganza at an ancient Zen temple would do her career no harm. There stood the happy couple, under the great gate (1285), he in striped trousers and waistcoat, she in full Western bridal finery, veil, train. They stood and posed while the flashbulbs popped and the magnesium flared. Then a sound truck bawled out Wagner and the great temple bell (1301, a national treasure) tolled, as the kleig lights under the high branches of the mighty cryptomeria played over the façade of the
shariden
(1290) in close imitation of a Hollywood premiere.

I was, of course, furious. Part of this emotion was sheer territorial imperative. I had thought all this somehow mine, and here it was being invaded by what I had left the West to escape. Another part, however, was simple outrage—that something this venerable should be so demeaned by rank commercialism, by media hype. And yet another was indignant pity for poor Dr. Suzuki and what they were doing to him.

All of these various reactions were quite wasted. It was not a cabal of wicked worldly priests that had arranged this; it was Dr. Suzuki himself. He had gone to get permission from the temple authorities. He had approved the kleig lights and the sound trucks. He had asked that the young couple be photographed under the great gate. This is what they seemed to want, his son and new daughter-in-law.

And why not? I only saw him once on that glittering evening and he was smiling—perhaps shaking an understanding head at the ways of the world. I did not think so then, but I think so now.

The reason is that, long after this, long after his death, I read a posthumous publication of his, an edition of verses composed by one of the
myokonin.
These were lay people, usually of humble origin, often illiterate, who displayed in what they wrote (or said) a profound experiential understanding of the workings of the Amida Buddha.

In the Jodo Shin sect of Buddhism—one far from the subtleties of Zen—these laymen repeated one prayer over and over again, always the same one, giving thanks for Buddha's birth in the Pure Land. And these Buddhist Baptists, as it were, won Dr. Suzuki's unstinting admiration. They had, he said, a position of great importance in Japanese religious history. In these unlettered and simple believers he discovered profound expressions of enlightenment.

Thinking back to the kleig lights and the sound trucks and bride and groom under the great gate, I began to understand. My feelings of outrage and pity, these were merely representative of one way of thinking. The same events could and did produce feelings quite different and equally justified. There were indeed modes of thought different from the ones I had always known and considered true.

To remember the 1960s in Tokyo is to remember Tadanori Yokoo, the artist whose style epitomized that era: a hard-edged cartoon line, bright kindergarten colors, and the popular idioms of long before—the frivolity of the early 1920s. Hanafuda playing cards, the Hinomaru and Rising Sun flags, Momotaro's big pink peach; Buster Brown, Betty Boop, Lion Toothpaste, Golden Bat cigarettes. And even further back, the cherry blossoms and
torii
gates of Hiroshige.

What we see—rendered small and intricate like a city viewed through the wrong end of a telescope—is not anything Yokoo ever saw directly for himself. He was not born when Betty Boop adorned the screen. A postwar child, he was still in his early twenties when he began creating the post-atomic Golden Bat. It is through a retrospective telescope that he shows us the wonderful world of prewar Japan, back when Japan still knew what it was and everything was going to be all right.