Bridge for Passing (11 page)

I had, actually, a warmly comfortable feeling when I was alone in a Japanese crowd. This must have been a lingering memory of the atmosphere of my childhood when, accompanied by my Chinese nurse, I sat in a Chinese theater or out-of-doors on a village threshing floor or in a temple courtyard, to watch a play. The play was always the thing in China, and the star system was unknown, unless of course one went to Shanghai, or Peking, there to attend the performance of such a star as, for example, Mei Lan-fang, or Butterfly Wu. As a child I had no such privilege, but I enjoyed the miracle plays and the long historical dramas through which the Chinese everyday folk learned religion, philosophy and the history of their own people. They accepted me as a frequent member of the audience, and I lost myself, a fair-haired American child in the Asian multitude—a kindly multitude in those days and I was never held responsible for the sins of colonialism as all white folk are nowadays and by all Asians, it seems. I was conscious only of being surrounded by pleasant and humorous people. In Tokyo now I found the same people, though of a different nation and country, and they accepted me merely because they had become used to Americans as part of the world landscape. They know the best and the worst of us from the long years of the Occupation and we cannot surprise them any more, either by good or evil.

Tokyo has, of course, its darker aspects. There were streets in which I did not enjoy walking alone any more than I do in certain parts of New York and Philadelphia where I have learned that it is dangerous not only so to walk, but also even to ride with the doors of my car unlocked. Cities are cities and hooligans are to be found in all.

Those were the days, too, of the student riots in Tokyo, about which we North Americans had so much misinformation. I can only say that I was there, that I saw the crowds of young men and women, earnest, determined, informed. They were not anti-American. They were Japanese who liked their constitution although it had been engineered by Americans—at least by an American. They liked especially the part in which Japan as a nation promises never again to wage war. Now they, the Japanese, were being asked by Americans to take sides in case of war and with the West, although they were oriented toward Asia, and in the future must in common sense be a neutral people. With American bases on their soil they felt themselves forced to be partisan. It amounted to a situation which to them became unendurable in its confusion. The Japanese are a well-organized people, they have their different levels, they do not confuse their best selves with their worst. Whatever level they stand upon temporarily, it is that one and no other. Therefore they went on riot to proclaim their confusion, but they did not hate anybody. In confusion they are capable of assassination, not out of hatred necessarily, but merely to clear up confusion.

Students have always been an alarming and exciting and interesting part of my life. I do not mean the relatively placid students of North America, whose most active moments seem to demonstrate nothing more violent or even exciting than college pranks. I am accustomed to the students of Japan and India, Korea and Japan. In China the new age, whatever it was and we had new ages with bewildering and rapid change, was always announced by an uprising of students. The people respected these young men and women because they were persons who, if not learned, were nevertheless in pursuit of learning and therefore more privileged and presumably better informed than the average citizen who could not read or write. Books, the Asian peoples believe, are treasure houses of human wisdom and since students alone had access to books, the position of a student in Asia carried, and still carries, a prestige far out of proportion to age and class. They were a devoted group and risked death in every uprising. During the Nationalist regime in China I had seen many of them killed for being suspected of Communism. Doubtless some of them were Communists but most of them were simply dedicated young patriots, desperately desiring to better the conditions under which their people lived. They are the unnumbered and unnamed martyrs but they cannot be discounted, for all of that. If one wants to know what is about to happen in an Asian country, watch the students.

As for the picture, while all this was going on, we needed a tidal wave. Everything else we could find but the tidal wave could not be summoned at will. The story itself began in a tidal wave. Once, when I was spending a year in Japan on the island of Kyushu, I had become acquainted with a small and lovely fishing village on the southern tip of the coast. A dozen or so stone cottages were huddled together behind a stone sea wall. The houses had no doors, no windows, toward the sea. It was not that the fishing folk did not love the sea. They did indeed, for generations of the families had lived beside it and by it. Yet generations had known, too, the fury of those vast waves that rise out of earthquakes under the sea. Volcano and sea work together for death and I had seen them so work one bright September day. There had been premonitions. The water in the deep well, the fisherfolk told me, had been muddy for a few days. The well, dug in the beach, was only a few feet from the sea and at the foot of a high cliff, but the water was sweet. Thither the village women had walked, a mile each way, to carry all the fresh water the village used, and this for hundreds of years. When I suggested that this might be a hardship the men smiled incredulously. I must say the women did, too.

Earthquake, of course, comes first. The earthquake in Chile had sent a tidal wave rushing across the sea to northwest Japan, but usually the earthquake is in Japan, or under the sea nearby. Earthquake—I cannot even say the word to myself as I sit here upon the solid earth of my Pennsylvania farm home without a touch of that bottomless sickness of heart and body, that organic dismay, which falls upon a human being when the earth quakes beneath his feet. It is as if the very globe were dissolving into space. The one security we humans have is this earth which is our home, this globe to which we cling. Catastrophe befalls us, thunder and lightning roar and flash in the sky, winds come down from outer space, rain falls in torrents from the clouds, even the sea may rise in storm, but underneath everything we have the earth, or feel we have. We may have been spawned from the sea but we are land creatures now. When the land betrays us, when we cannot stand upon our feet, when the ground splits and swallows our homes and our people, then we are lost indeed. … Once in a violent earthquake in Japan the earth split and a running child fell into the chasm. The mother pursued her child and leaped in after him, and the earth closed again, leaving only her long black hair to lie like seaweed on the quivering surface. …

The second day after I came back to Tokyo, as I was writing at the desk in my hotel room, after midnight, I felt that deep troubled tremor of the earth and once more the old sickness rose in me. The quake was no more than a tremor and yet for that instant my hand went out of control, and the desk shook. Most of the people slept through it, but the morning newspaper reported a sharp tremor. Such tremors come often in Japan, hundreds, thousands of them in a year, on the average of four times a day, and each time it is a reminder to a courageous people that they live on dangerous islands. The effect on them of this eternal tension is obvious. They have extremes of temperament—an exaggerated gaiety, a profound and sometimes frenzied melancholy. A disciplined and studied surface, smiles and calm and casualness, is underlaid, without exception, I might say, by a dark sadness, born of the knowledge in child and adult that catastrophe is endemic in spite of the beauty of mountain and sea and the kindliness of life. This universal knowledge begets in them a consideration, a tender courtesy, as though to say that since the world may end at any moment, let us be kind to one another. When this inherent kindness has to be unlearned, as it does in times of war, when men must be taught to be brutal, they may be cruel beyond imagination … But I was speaking of earthquakes—and tidal waves.

We needed a tidal wave then. The earthquake we could reproduce by camera, but the tidal wave was beyond us. It was here that we had good fortune. Our Japanese co-producers had the finest special-effects studio in the country and, I was told, in the world. I did not know what special effects meant in film talk, but I discovered that it meant the reproduction, in miniature, of a scene in nature. The Japanese are supremely talented in such work and of all Japanese, Tsuburaya is the most talented. Fortunately Tsuburaya belonged to our Japanese co-producers and upon appointment we met him in their offices.

He is an artist and the first look at him revealed the fact. He wore work clothes, baggy pants, baggy shirt and a Japanese coat, and he greeted us with a charmingly natural courtesy. Yes, he said, he knew that we wanted a tidal wave and he had already make sketches to show us. They were startlingly accurate water colors of the rising horizon, the onrushing wave, and the towering crash of the crest. A tidal wave does not appear at first as a wave. Instead the horizon lifts, the sea mounts toward the sky in a smooth brimming line, it runs toward the land, a wall of water that may be two feet high or two hundred. A powerful suction gathers the sea into the wave, so that watching from a cliff, the bottom of the ocean beyond the beach is laid bare. Then the gigantic wave curls over its own base and overwhelms land, house and people.

I watched Tsuburaya’s face as he described the sequences he had painted. I wish I could paint this beautiful Japanese face, even in words. I say beautiful in the deep sense of the word. It was not handsome, in the superficial sense. It was worn with thought and concentration. It was as sensitive as a child’s face, a genius child, but not in the least childish. It was wise and gentle, yet fresh and strong and humorous, the face of an artist purified by the satisfaction of fulfillment through his art. We talked quietly. I listened while he described his plans. He would come to the fishing village with his cameraman and photograph everything. Then he would build the sets in the studio and recreate the scenes and adapt them to the film. This would be done later, when work was in progress. Meanwhile I had the private content of the writer who knows that work is understood and is about to be translated truthfully into another medium.

I have learned by experience that people who work in the theater are not to be judged by the standards applied to the rest of us. They are a group apart, by temperament, whatever their race, class or nationality. A Chinese actor, male or female, is like an American actor, and is like an actor of any other country because they are, first of all, actors. Directors are the same, whatever their age, color, religion, nationality, all prima donnas, without a single exception. I make this general observation as preliminary to our first real problem in making the picture. Everything had gone so pleasantly, so easily, that I might have expected, cheerful pessimist that I am, a storm on the horizon, a knot in the thread, a hitch in the machinery.

It came one hot summer morning when the air conditioning had broken down—in order to provide the proper temperature for coming storm, I suppose. The production manager approached me with an exaggerated courtesy. We were in his office as usual, the American director and I, and the production manager had been too cordial for safety. I should have known he had an idea. He ordered several pretty girls to bring us tea, and when the American said he preferred coffee, because this was the only place in Tokyo which had good coffee, the production manager shouted at another bevy of pretty girls to bring coffee. When we were all seated about the low round table, and after he had swabbed the perspiration from his well-nourished face and neck, he said, too casually, that since his firm’s reputation was also staked on our picture, they would like to supply a Japanese assistant director to the American.

I know that nothing in life is really casual. Hence when I saw a sudden alert in the American’s eyes, I made my reply casual. Of course, I said, we would welcome such aid. I wanted the picture to be true in every detail. It would be expected in my own country. The production manager mentioned even more casually the name of a director. I recognized it. It was the name of a famous Japanese film director now officially retired but still inexhaustibly a director.

“I would like to meet him,” the American director said also casually.

Everything seemed smooth and civilized, the production manager sighed happily and insisted on ginger ale in addition to the tea and coffee. He was a big man, tall and heavy, and he was temperamental. Indeed, I had been taken aside privately the day before we met and warned that he and the American director might not get on well, their natures not being in harmony. I inquired as to what this meant. It was explained to me in Japanese terms that the American was full of energy and determination, and so was the Japanese. The American did not easily yield on a point on which he considered himself right. Neither did the Japanese. Let us say bluntly that neither ever yielded. I had been disturbed by this, and now it occurred to me that a Japanese assistant director might act as a buffer.

When I mentioned this possibility to the American director, however, later in the day, he said shortly that he wanted no buffers. He liked the Japanese production manager because he was as frank as an American and so he could deal with him. I heard an edge in the American director’s voice, and I postponed further discussion. I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had taught me that.

Meanwhile the casting went on, no matter what else took place, a process not different in Tokyo or on Broadway. We sat by invitation behind the long table in the office and one by one actors or actresses appeared in turn. We had their photographs before us and studied them carefully for photogenic quality, while questions were asked.

English was the problem. There were many handsome young men and many, many pretty girls, and some older characters and their female counterparts. The questions were always the same:

“Your name?”

“How many pictures have you made?”