Donald Richie (1) (1924–2013)

One cannot enter the world of Japanese studies without hearing the name of Donald Richie, considered an expert in Japanese film and culture. Many wish to emulate his success and many more try to surpass him. This is his tale of his explorations of the Inland Sea of Japan to try and find what has been forgotten in Japan. The Inland Sea is located within the main island of Honshu (Japan is composed of 5 main islands) and Shikoku and is comprised of a series of tiny little islands that Donald show more Richie visits via boat over the course of a few months in the 70s. Reading the book was eerily mesmerizing as we are both horrified by some of his opinions, viewpoints and stories, while also entranced by his lovely opinions, viewpoints and stories.

Yes, reading the book is both painfully cringe-worthy and beautiful in the sense that Donald Richie is one of those men you would love to invite to dinner to introduce to your friends but you're also afraid of his words offending the majority of your guests. I tried to keep in mind that this book was written in the 70s but Donald Richie is certainly a man carrying rose-colored glasses when it comes to certain aspects of Japan. Japan can do no harm even when it he admits that it does. He praises its xenophobia while also asking to be wanted by the Japanese. Donald Richie feels like the middle child craving attention from his stern father who can do no wrong in his eyes. Let's not forget his experience with the 15 year old girl whom he tries to seduce despite being well into his 40s. (Worse for me, I have only the face of the 77 year old Donald Richie in my mind so that made the scene extra-cringeworthy.) Now, I'm not entirely against sex tourism (not paying for sex, but involving yourself in sexual adventures with "the locals"); it's true what they say that you can learn a lot about a language and a culture when in the arms of a lover. But please leave the 15 year olds alone, Mr. Richie. And stop trying to seduce the female owners of the local bars. Now you just sound desperate. But Mr. Richie does address his own faults (he provides an incredibly personal look at his failing marriage) and you do see that he really is trying to understand himself.

And within that, the trip he takes is really beautiful and he describes it quite eloquently. I cannot fault him for that and I actually say thanks. His anecdotes are humorous, many of his encounters are delightful and he adds additional notes on the history of the islands that is fantastic. All in all, a book worthy of reading. show less

As Richie explains in his preface, he has deliberately chosen to write A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics as a zuihitsu , the form in which many influential Japanese chose to address aesthetic matters. Such an essay is not logically organized, not linear, not deductive. The author is supposed to "follow the brush" (I suppose we must say follow the pen, though, now, are we to follow the keyboard?), follow his thoughts as they arise. To heighten this, for him necessary, nonlinearity, he show more juxtaposes alongside the main text further texts which enrich the reader's understanding but which he apparently felt that he could not work into the main text in a more organic manner.

I had no problem with this approach and regretted only that the book is so short. I wish Richie had further developed his sketch of how certain central aesthetic terms had evolved through time and had provided more of his aptly chosen examples to illustrate this evolution. I wish he had submitted the more secondary terms, whose existence he merely indicated, to the fuller treatment accorded to the primary terms. I further wish he had followed up the deliciously suggestive analogies between Japanese and Western aesthetics he so briefly drew. Please, sir, may I have more? show less

Six-word review: Painstaking contextualized explication of Japanese movies.

Extended review:

However little I may comprehend of Japanese cinema, it's a great deal more than it was two and a half months ago, which is when I started reading Donald Richie's book A Hundred Years of Japanese Film.

This was a very slow read for me, a few pages at a time, because that's about all I could take in at once. Some slight past exposure to the Japanese language was not enough to enable me to hold in mind a show more dense concentration of Japanese personal and place names, film titles (although all of them are translated), and theatre- and film-related terminology (despite an excellent glossary and a thorough index), most of which were new to me. I often felt overwhelmed by the foreignness of it, as well as having difficulty retaining enough information to follow detailed analytical comparisons among directors, genres, and movements.

Not surprisingly, this is often the way I feel when watching Japanese movies.

I persist in watching them, though, much as I persisted in reading this book, because even though I will never "get" the culture or its reflection in films, I know I will benefit from an enhanced appreciation. Being a lifelong-learner type, I regard this effort as part of my ongoing education and expect it to be rewarded in some small measure by being able to see things in both Japanese and Western films that I have missed before.

Luckily, I have apparently chosen an expert as my guide. In his foreword to the 2012 edition, Paul Schrader writes: "Whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie."

Richie's survey of a century of Japanese filmmaking sets a social, cultural, political, economic, and historic context for the work of Kurosawa, Ozu, and a host of less familiar directors, showing their influence on one another, the reciprocal effects of exposure to Western cinema, pervasive themes that are characteristically Japanese (for example, the individual in conflict with a highly structured traditional society), and especially Japan's involvement and defeat in World War II. His explicatory commentary on numerous specific films elucidates the narrative and aesthetic traditions to which they belong--even when they are rejecting them--as well as their degree of fidelity to the social milieu and the directors' widely varying visions of it.

It has been gratifying to me to find the mystifying and seemingly impenetrable elements of Japanese film gradually becoming less so as I have worked my way through this book, lengthening my Netflix queue with an assortment of titles found in Richie's selective guide to DVDs and videos in the back of the book. Having some background on the Edo period and conventions of samurai movies explains a lot. So does knowing that some directors frame shots in a certain way, choose certain camera angles, use color or water in characteristic patterns, employ certain traditional stage techniques, and sometimes even include images just because they are pretty and not because they necessarily mean anything. A Japanese treatment of a Shakespearean drama offers one kind of cultural perspective; a bloodthirsty tale of gang warfare that is billed as an action comedy offers another.

I've decided that I will have gone far enough with this exercise when I can make, or understand, or at least recognize one true generalization about Japanese film. This may never be possible, but it is at least a definable goal.

In the meantime, I am enjoying a lot of variety in my movie-viewing experience. show less

Six-word review: Great Japanese director's films expertly analyzed.

Extended review:

After reading Donald Richie's A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, I decided to take a closer look at the life's work of Akira Kurosawa as Richie reveals it. At that time I'd seen only a handful of the films of the man whom many had called Japan's greatest director and some had dubbed the greatest ever. So I put this book on my wish list for Christmas 2013, and my husband came through.

I set myself the goal of show more watching all the remaining films--thirty-one in total--in a year's time, and then reading the analysis of each in turn. Except for seeing the three films I couldn't get from Netflix, I've done it now, before the end of 2014, and that feels like a real achievement. In the process, I've gained a glimmer of understanding of what it was like to live through the wartime years in Japan and how the remnants of traditional culture survived in a radically altered, Westernized postwar society. For the most part, Kurosawa does not express his vision of Japanese life and society directly but through the allegorical use of samurai stories, marginalized antiheroes, and visual symbols.

I can't say that I loved all of the movies or even found all of them easy to sit through, but in every one there were compelling characterizations and images that stayed with me and enlarged my perceptions. The themes of hope and redemption persist through most of them and characterize the director's body of work as a whole. While acknowledging masterpieces such as The Seven Samurai, I found myself most affected by Ikiru, the story of a man who discovers at the last minute how to use his experience to give meaning to his life.

This is a book for anyone who's interested in Kurosawa, in Japanese cinema--for you can't talk about Japanese cinema without talking about Kurosawa--and in the history of moviemaking in the twentieth century. The influence between Western and Japanese films goes both ways. Richie's insight into Kurosawa the man as well as the films themselves illuminates his interpretation and gives dimensionality to his explication of themes. In particular, Richie's discussion of Kurosawa's use of sound and its integration with image helped me to see the movies with better awareness. I viewed them with English subtitles, knowing only a few words of Japanese but always wanting to hear the actors' own voices.

Each film is covered in a separate chapter, from Sanshiro Sugata (1943) to Madadayo (1993), with sections on story, treatment, characterization, production, sound and lighting, and other elements. Some include passages of dialogue, some place the films in a historical and political context, and all discuss them in relation to the director and the sum of his work.

This large-format compilation, with double-columned 10" x 10" pages set in 8-point type on heavy coated stock, is about twice as long as the page count implies. Nearly every page features at least one black-and-white photograph. There is a list of plates in the back naming everyone pictured in the photos, as well as a complete filmography listing casts and crews and an index. I expect to continue to use it both as a reference work and as a guide; now that I have a sense of the scope of Kurosawa's work, perhaps I'm ready to begin to see it. show less