Seen from afar: An outside view of the 'real' Japan

It’s almost impossible for the English-language reader with an abiding interest in Japan to avoid Donald Richie.

You may find him in print through his copious newspaper columns and reviews, his several wide-ranging books on Japan, assaying subjects as seemingly disparate as film, gardens, Zen and the Inland Sea, or his forays into fiction.

If you live or stay in Tokyo for a stretch, you may also find him in the flesh. Last time I checked, the 87-year-old Richie was still very much a man-about-town, appearing frequently to give readings and talks at foreigner-friendly venues in the heart of the city.

Little wonder: Richie has been living in Tokyo since the late 1940s and writing about Japan for nearly as long. You’d be hard-pressed to find an expat writer in town with greater seniority.

Fuzziness encroaching?

But seniority takes its toll, of course, and not just physically.

When I attended one of Richie’s Tokyo readings from his last major publication, “The Japan Journals: 1947-2004,” I couldn’t ignore an unnerving discrepancy: the prose in his more recent entries lacked the force, clarity and sheer frisson of his earlier writing, as if the Japan of the now had somehow wilted for him, grown fuzzy and indistinct.

At the time, I was about to publish my own book, “Japanamerica,” about the abundant color and creativity in contemporary Japan and the enthusiasm it had triggered in the West.

Were we living in the same country? Or was I, as a much younger expat writer, simply more sensitive to and excited by what I was seeing?

Richie nearly answers the latter question in a 2003 interview for the Japan cinephile website, “Midnight Eye.”

“I think in any country if you're an expatriate, the first five to 10 years are the most exciting,” he writes. “This is when you are learning the most, and when you're most open to things that are new and are putting things together.”

Points of view

So what are we to make of a Japan rendered by an aging yet experienced and deeply knowledgeable expat author delineating its culture -- the slippery, fast-evolving and often ambiguous topic that Richie has engaged for six decades?

“Viewed Sideways,” Richie’s latest collection of often very short writings (many only a few pages long -- mere musings), due out later this month, at least partly answers the question.

A compact, commuter-friendly paperback, it contains 11 essays previously published in the books, “A Lateral View” and “Partial Views” (including one dating back to 1972), but mostly focuses on 26 uncollected writings from the 1990s and 2000s -- sort of a quickie Richie update.

The book begins with Richie’s personal declaration: an American from Ohio’s rationale for spending two-thirds of his life living in and writing about Japan.

Beyond cultural observation, historical record and aesthetic insight, the deeper subject of Richie’s work is rooted in his own self-imposed predicament -- that of being a perpetual outsider in a nation of resolute insiders.

Foreigners in Japan, Richie writes, are more foreign than they would be in other non-native nations because “the major religion is perhaps neither Buddhism nor Shintoism but, rather, simply being Japanese.”

Since foreigners cannot become Japanese through sheer will, study, conversion or citizenship, they are kept at bay, in the distance, forever ghettoized regardless of residency or, the term used by Richie, “intimacy.”