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The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan
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No one has written more, or more artfully, about Japan and Japanese culture than Donald Richie. Richie moved to Tokyo just after World War II. And he is still there, still writing. This book is the first compilation of the best of Richie's writings on Japan, with excerpts from his critical work on film (Richie helped introduce Japanese film to the West in the late 1950s) a
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The greatest gaijin? Famous for introducing Japan's cinema to the West, but actually fewer than half of his thoughts are anything to do with that. Richie has an eC20th directness about describing other peoples - think Martha Gellhorn or Kipling - their 'pure skin', their atrocity-enabling 'innocence', their circuitousness and tribalism. (It is now sometimes inappropriate, sometimes oppressive to emphasise differences so.)
I cannot imagine Plato thriving here [Japan], with all his absolutes (“the...more
This was my introduction to Donald Richie, an expert on Japanese film and supposedly on Japanese culture and people. I discovered I did not like this person. In the Foreword, Arturo Silva says Richie is "an expert but with no pretense of being one" despite living in Japan for 50 years so far, but I found Richie made plenty of statements, some quite insulting, as though they were the truth about all Japanese people. He loved old Japan, did not like the "ugly" modern Japan rising from the ashes of
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Donald Richie has lived in Japan since the aftermath of WWII and the reconstruction period. He is well known for his expertise on Japanese film. His descriptions of ancient Japanese ceremonies and customs are fascinating. My favorite was his account of participating in the mysterious Fuchu Festival of Darkness. A late summer festival, thousands of scantily-clad young men march throughout the night, crammed together chanting and swaying as one. Richie notes that his original panic of being trampl
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I must have bought this damned near a decade ago. It's good, but I'm a completist of sorts, so every time I picked it up and enjoyed a piece, that was followed by my buying the full book that that piece had come from...
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Full Review on Blog:
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An excellent introduction to the writing of Donald Ritchie, and a perhaps perfect starting point for anyone unaware of this brilliantly original and versatile author. Yet it is only a starting point—highlights only of Richie’s more than half century of writing in and about Japan, that will surely leave you hungry to read more.
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Donald Richie is an American-born author who has written about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema. Although he considers himself only a writer, Richie has directed many experimental films, the first when he was 17. Although Richie speaks Japanese fluently, he can neither read nor write it.
During World War II, he served aboard Liberty ships as a purser and medical officer. By then he had alrea ...more
During World War II, he served aboard Liberty ships as a purser and medical officer. By then he had alrea ...more
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“When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.”
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“What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.”
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