My friend’s house is a large one, a combination of ancient and modern Japanese architecture, set in a huge garden and surrounded by a stone wall. As we entered I caught a glimpse of a big living room furnished with western chairs and couches and next to it a room in the Japanese manner. It was too late to linger, however, and I was taken to an upstairs room where a mattress and spotless sheet and pillow were laid on tatami on the floor. She showed me the private bath, felt of a thermos teapot to see if it were hot, and bade me a kind good night.
When we had parted I slid back the shoji and found beyond it a wide veranda overlooking the beautiful garden, just now drenched in golden light from the moon, a light so brilliant that it dimmed the lamps in the stone lanterns. The scene was one of ineffable and eternal peace, the moon riding high over the treetops as it had for unnumbered years. God send that we may watch it ride the same path across the sky for centuries ahead! And yet I was reminded that it was the same moon which only recently had all but led our world to final catastrophe. A great radar, set to catch the slightest unusual outburst of energy anywhere in the world, reported one night that such an outburst was taking place. Alerts flew around the globe. Distance is no problem to transmission, and in two seconds retaliation orders could have been sent and received. Just in time there came a frantic message for delay. What had happened? The full moon had risen and somewhere a bemused young man had neglected to record its rise and thus explain the outburst of energy. Just in time the orders were not sent and the human race was saved.
I turned from the moon and went to bed. The ancient lanterns burned in the gardens all night and the crickets sang while I slept.
In the morning my friend declared that I must see the famous Kamakura shrine. We left the house after a late breakfast and were driven to this ancient shrine, built in the period of the Meiji, some hundred and fifty years ago. It was Sunday and a crowd of sightseers was already there. Young Japan sauntered about, boy and girl, hand in hand, to my astonishment — shades of old Japan! — or side by side, with lunch baskets. Country folk had come into town and the elders walked sedately, here woman still a few paces behind man.
When we approached the great entrance pavilion of fine cedar wood, however, we found a commotion. A television film was in the process of being made. Men dressed in the ancient garb of shogun and daimyo were fencing and fighting in an historical play. We joined the watching crowd. Just as the director, a harried young man wearing dark glasses in the best Hollywood style, had shouted “Action!”—just as the cameras were about to click — action stopped. Into the medieval scene a youth on a bicycle came wheeling down the hill from the shrine. There were loud yells from the director, frantic also in the best Hollywood style, as he warned the young cyclist to take to the woods. The boy obeyed in alarm, and the warriors took their places again and plunged into battle. Alas, at this moment a horde of school children burst into view. Yells again, the children were pushed into the woods, and once more we returned to the past. So it went. There was something symbolic about it, old and new, and one felt the combination everywhere in Japan — new wine in old bottles.
The big living room in that beautiful Japanese house, furnished in western style, is for the family, I discovered when we returned. The Japanese living room was for my friend’s mother, now eighty years old. She sat on the floor upon a cushion, her legs folded flat beneath her. Upon a low table before her were her precious possessions, her books, a vase of flowers, her little green parrot in a cage. She could herself have stepped out of centuries past. Yet she was entirely happy in the comfortable modern Japanese home. She was in the family, the center of it, welcome and warm, but she herself was old Japan. Something old and something new again!
The day spent itself in pleasant peace, in conversation and explanation of the garden and library. I rode back to Tokyo alone in the evening in the comfortable, air-conditioned, made-in-Japan car and reflected upon the weekend. One small incident stayed above all others in my mind. In the quiet luxurious house there was a younger sister, gentle and unobtrusive and no longer young. I had refrained from asking questions about her. It was none of my business why she was there. She was helpful, she was content. But my inveterate, uncontrollable, insatiable novelist’s curiosity got the better of me just before I left. I really am on terms of good friendship with this Japanese family, but I felt compelled to begin with an apology.
“I am ashamed to ask so many questions,” I told my friend. “Yet if I do not ask, how shall I know?”
“Ask whatever you like,” she told me kindly.
I asked, “Please, has your younger sister never married? It is so unusual.”
There was an instant’s hesitation on that calm older sister’s face. Then she answered. “She did marry once, twenty years ago. He was a good man — an old friend … Four days after the wedding she came home.”
I waited and hoped that I would not ask another question. But no, it came rushing to my lips. “Why did she come home?”
The elder sister answered quite simply. “We don’t know. We have never liked to ask.”
I asked no more questions. Twenty years and they do not like to ask! The answer revealed the exquisite reticence of an entire people … No, not new wine in old bottles. Reverse the metaphor — old wine in new bottles. The difference is subtle but profound.
The next morning we met by appointment the production manager. He is an important figure in any film company, but in that Japanese company he held the position of prime minister. Everything was referred to him, miracles were expected, and all yeas and nays from the top came through him.
On Monday morning, then, very hot, we were ushered into his office by a pretty girl. We beheld a huge Japanese man in shirt sleeves with wild hair, wild eyes, heavy jowls, a pursed mouth, a loud voice. He was bellowing into one telephone while three other telephones in various parts of the room were occupied by three pretty girls, each speaking from his dictation but in soft pretty voices. He rolled his huge fiery eyes at us but did not acknowledge us otherwise, except by an imperious wave of his enormous hand bidding us to be seated. We sat down in low chairs around a low table and a pretty girl served tea while we waited. He broke off the conversation at last with a fierce bellow and came to greet us, all cordiality and kindness and impatience and a certain air of desperation, which later we learned was his habitual mood.
He put aside formalities and spoke with apparent frankness — certainly frankness of the moment. I make this qualification, for I have learned even in my own country that the charming and disarming frankness of the permanent citizens of the theater world does not necessarily convey what is commonly called truth. Truth in the theater may be strictly momentary and confined within the limits of hope, expectation, or even possibly, intention. The production manager therefore belonged strictly to the theater world. He spoke in Japanese, his interpreter one of the pretty young women educated in the United States, who softened what he said without destroying its force. She was very skillful. But we did not yet really know him. That day he merely said, looking harassed, that he would do everything he could to help us, asking us only one favor. We were to allow him to arrange financial matters with the cast. Japanese film companies, he told us, were not very favorable to co-producing American pictures. Americans paid absurd salaries and made actors discontented and unruly afterward when dealing with their own Japanese companies. He banged his big fist on the table. Witness, he roared, what had happened in Italy! It must not happen in Japan! We promised, and took our leave.