October 2nd - 8th 2006
Sunday Donald Richie
Saturday Night Bus
Friday Arse
Thursday Night Bus
Wednesday Simon Sainsbury
Tuesday Watney Market
Monday Gay life
Sunday 8th October
Over sixty years in Japan, [Donald Richie] has been a reporter, tour guide, cinema critic, film director, print-maker, novelist, travel writer, editor, teacher, subtitler, public speaker and actor. No one has written with more concentration about the peculiar quality of exile enjoyed by the gaijin, the foreigner in Japan...
This is the partial explanation for something else remarked on several times by Richie: as he shyly puts it, 'the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists'.
To be blunter, Richie and a seemingly disproportionate number of his friends and contemporaries - the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation - are homosexual.
It is like one of those fairytale undersea realms where the simple fisherman follows his water nymph, only to realise after a few years of bliss that he can never return to the air. Plenty of gaijin males discover with a jolt that they have become incapable of getting laid anywhere else.
By day and in the evenings, [Richie] has moved among artists, writers and academics in the circuit of seminars, dinner parties and museum receptions. By night, in parks, on street corners, in 'accompanied' coffee shops, in sex theatres, porno cinemas and the 'boy brothels of Shinjuku', he has picked up builders, scaffolders, boxers, students, cooks and soldiers.
'Even now,' he wrote at the age of 71, 'I still go around looking into tidal pools and turning over rocks, trying to find someone (preferably young, unformed and handsome) who can stand for Japan.'
By 1988, 'one of the reasons for spending my old age here is gone, never to return.
'This is the possibility of meeting a stranger and making a friend. Right there, right then. Forever...'It is because we are not needed any more. No one has any use for us. They do not see trips abroad in our eyes. These trips are something they can themselves afford. And there are so many of us. We have become common...'
A gay foreign friend abandons Japan for the less affluent pastures of Thailand. 'He's too late,' Richie observes. 'We'll both end up in a Dayak long house and even there it will be too late.'
'I have become like those pandas that will eat only one kind of bamboo, a commodity that they have now eaten all up. Soon they will be extinct, done in by specialisation.
'Concerned friends counsel me to the jungle-like swamps of the sauna, or the conversation pits of the bars, or the strict and narrow confines of the public conveniences, but this is not for me. Only the street, the corner, the park is authentic to me. Only that which is fortuitously found is real.'
The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil.
In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature. Perhaps Donald Richie shows us why.
- a (savagely butchered) extract from Richard Lloyd Parry's lengthy LRB review of The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie
Saturday 7th October
Night Bus, Autumn 2006
Friday 6th October
There's a long list of things that I shall miss following our office's long-heralded move away from the marbled halls of Canary Wharf, but that list emphatically does not include sharing a work-space with our Sports department.
Oh, they're a nice enough bunch, in their hearty prankish way - but, by God, they don't half like their television.
Television? At a newspaper? Well, yes: you'll find that almost any paper worth its salt has hundreds of TVs scattered amongst its staff - how else are they supposed to know what's going on in the world?
Mostly, these sets have the volume turned very low; it's only the younger generations of journalists who have been subliminally trained, whilst they were students, in the art of being able to write and listen to television simultaneously.
Arguably, our own dear sweatsters do have a genuine need to watch - and listen to - each and every football match that features on any channel anywhere throughout the night.
But I can't help feeling there's a leetle more than professional commitment going on here - especially when you find a sizeable proportion of our own, non-sport-responsible, staff pinned to the sets when there's a big match on.
And, of course, the bigger the match, the louder the volume.
I have problem enough with the unrelenting testosterone-charged tone of most match commentaries - in which Everything. Is. Absolutely. Incredible! - but it's the noise relayed from the crowd that really gives me gip.Especially the air-horns.
And, of course, shrinking violet that I am, I've always been at pains to refrain from making my distaste known. Not.
So my colleagues know all too well my aversion to their addiction (not least from my habit of walking into the office and exclaining "Oh, goody: football!" most evenings during the season).
Imagine their bemusement on walking past my desk a week or so ago and finding my own TV tuned, accidentally, to the latest muddy match.
"Enjoying the football?" asked one, with a less-than-artfully raised eyebrow.
"Yes, indeed," I was delighted to reply, "Some young player has just been kind enough to show us his arse."
And it was true. An evening that had already been enlivened by shots of Amir Khan and Robin van Persie had just ricocheted to surprising new heights with (an albeit heavily pixellated) sequence of Evertonian Joey Barton pulling down his shorts in response to taunts from the crowd.
Over the following days, there was more to come.
Predictably enough, a titter of subs got to work on the story: "Bare-faced cheek costs Barton", "FA criticised over Barton's bum deal", "FA not over Barton's moon", and, my favourite, Police to probe Barton's backside (a headline which, inexplicably?, shows up only on a Google search).
And then, just when you thought It.Can't.Get.Any.Better! comes a last-minute equaliser from Portsmouth manager Ian Holloway, opining on the Beeb, that Barton's bum looked "very pert".
Our new office manager will, apparently, be issuing headsets to all staff who need to watch TV. Great.
Like I said, it's the noise I can't stand; I have no problem with the visuals...
Thursday 5th October
Night Bus, Autumn 2006
Wednesday 4th October
Obituary Watch: Simon Sainsbury
Simon Sainsbury was part of a remarkable fourth generation that transformed a medium-sized family business, based in the South-East of England, into a public company that became the most profitable retailer in Britain. The personal wealth that resulted from the rapid expansion of Sainsbury's in the 1980s and early 1990s enabled him to become one of the country's most generous and thoughtful philanthropists.
In 1965, Sainsbury set up the Monument Trust [which] took a lead in many areas: for instance, providing essential funding for the development of services for those diagnosed with HIV/Aids before statutory funding became available.
He supported many institutions from the British Museum, Royal Academy, Tate Modern and V&A to the Council for the Protection of (now Campaign to Protect) Rural England, the Landmark Trust and Christ Church, Spitalfields, with which he was closely involved.
For 40 years Sainsbury shared his life with Stewart Grimshaw, a successful restaurateur and, later, bookseller. Together they leased a Georgian house from the National Trust, restored it to its full glory and created a beautiful garden in its surroundings.
Urbane and often funny, Sainsbury was also very private. He accepted no honours or high-profile jobs, though there were rumours that he had been offered both. Characteristically, he had no listing in Who's Who.
Earlier this year he celebrated his civil partnership with Grimshaw in a ceremony which, considering the enormous shift in the law during the time they had known one another, was powerful and affecting.
Tuesday 3rd October
Watney Market, Autumn 2005
Monday 2nd October
Life with the Gays - update
Possibly not the most romantic words ever spoken - but a friend of mine, on a rare Thursday night off, betook himself to a late-club-night of louche repute and spent an enjoyable couple of hours sampling the wide variety of goods on offer, only to be pleasantly surprised to find someone he'd met earlier seeking him out at the end of the evening, with the memorable salutation; "I want you to finish me off."
Speaking at length to another friend of mine, the original Mispent Youth, our conversation touched lightly, as it should, on the question of him getting a proper job. "I mean. I've sent proper resumays and such. I've even got myself an email account so I could put my address on the bottom!" Ah, I asked, and what is that? "blanche.fury@xxmail.com..."
Have you, as I have, been reading about the terrible fuss being made over the 'inappropriate' emails sent by a closeted (Republican!) congressman Mark Foley to his former page, and wondering just what it was that he said? Well rest easy: you can download a .doc of some of the correspondence (courtesy of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) here. (Clue:"with a towel you can just wipe off....and go"); of course, for analysis you can respect, you'll know to go to Andrew Sullivan...
......previous week
