“A New Other — Cuba”
“Cuba loomed that large for me because it ties into the problem between me and ‘America,’ too. For me, the relationship with ‘America’ was something so big it showed up in all kinds of my work. ‘America’ had been an influence so deep that it refused criticism or any accurate judgment. I think, really, all postwar Japanese were like this — but I was born in Sasebo, a town with a U.S. military base, and I grew up in an environment where, right next door to my house, an officer’s ‘only’ was living; so I think I was in a position where it was easier to see.
The way negotiations are carried out between the Japanese prime minister and the American president without any proper dialogue seems to me to show the Japan–U.S. relationship symbolically — it’s a state of slavery to their values, you might say. The biggest reason it turned out that way, I think, is that we never fought the decisive battle on the home soil. Of course it was better not to have fought it — it would have been catastrophic if we had. But because we didn’t, the enemy we’d been fighting grew vague. Worse, this time we took America’s values and lifestyle as our model, wholesale. As if to say, they were supposed to be the enemy, but when we met them they weren’t such bad people after all. …It’s a kind of lack of principle — before we knew it, ‘America is cool’ had become the rule.
In that state of slavery to values, there are only two ways: mock America and reject it, or yearn for America and talk like a DJ from over there. For a long time I thought that was all there was. I used to put on airs about ‘walking the waterline between nationalist and traitor,’ but in reality, in the end, I couldn’t do anything.
Then, when I came to know Cuba and its music and culture, I felt as if I were becoming tremendously free from America. So at first I praised Cuba almost to the point of overheating: ‘Until now I was deceived — by dark music like jazz…’ No — now that I’ve cooled down, jazz has its good points, its good things, too. It’s just that back then I was tearing jazz to pieces. I’d thought that to stand against the classics there was only jazz, only rock; but the country called Cuba had another means altogether.“
— Ryu Murakami, from The Trajectory of KYOKO: The Film That God Put to the Test (Gentosha)
America as Other
Pride that is not immutable
I was born in a base town, in the seventh year after the last great war ended. Now, as I do the shooting and editing of the film “KYOKO” in America, staying in a small old hotel in West Hollywood and writing this manuscript for a Japanese newspaper, I am strongly conscious of having been born in a town with a U.S. military base. What meaning the defeat, the subsequent occupation by the U.S. military, and the survival of the bases under the Security Treaty held for the nation of Japan — that kind of question is not very important to me. In a town with a U.S. base, there were things the Japanese communal control could not reach; from the very start, something stood exposed. A foreign army stationed there, occupying part of the national land — that situation was, when you think about it, the first such since the dawn of history. Next door to the house where I was born and raised lived an “only” of a U.S. military officer (mostly women under contract as prostitutes; among them were some who had married G.I.s). I am of the first generation to have witnessed, as a child, a woman of my own country being “kept” by a foreigner, the stronger party. This does not mean that my pride as a member of the Japanese people is therefore thin. Nor does it mean that I leaned, body and soul, toward America as the stronger party.
I only came to know that the pride of a people is not something that towers permanently and immutably somewhere; it is something that can be taken away all too easily, or, conversely, taken from others.
Won over twenty years
In both the film and the novel, Kyoko, the heroine I built up, is a woman set free from the Japanese communal order by the personal physicality of dance, and by traveling the American East Coast alone, she impresses upon the American minority people around her the attractive qualities of a Japanese woman. The structure of that story is something I was only able to win after twenty years had passed since my debut. In my relationship with America, I had until now been intensely Japanese. I used to put on airs about walking the narrow waterline between nationalist and traitor, but in reality I could do nothing. There were only two extreme attitudes: become a slave to American values, or hysterically reject anything American. Those two attitudes are common to everyone — from the women called “yellow cabs” and the boys in black-rapper fashion, to successive governments, including the appearance of a book like “The Japan That Can Say No.”
We must not forget the simple but usually invisible truth: that what showed the high level of Japanese baseball was Nomo, who leapt out of the Japanese baseball world. As long as you stay inside the comfortable Japanese communal order, you cannot show the pride of the Japanese people. In making the film in America, since everyone except the lead actress and me was almost entirely American, every single thing about me was put to the test. The reality of the screenplay, film technique, physical stamina, humanity, even what kind of smile I made — all of it was tested. I was lonely, but I had never had such an enjoyable experience, and I could feel my own store of information rising by an extraordinary degree. I am not so simple as to think that, in order to be free of the Japanese communal order, one must blindly go out into the world. The Japanese communal order is now built by Japanese people all over the world, and of course not all of it is bad.
The Cuban music used in the film moved many of the American staff. Cuban music and dance supported my film and novel, and made my relationship with America objective. Through Cuba, I was able to grasp, calmly, both the power that America holds and its fundamental loneliness. It is in our involvement with an Other that we come to know ourselves, and through yet another, new Other, the relationships up to then become objective. And unless you understand the highest priority within yourself, you cannot meet an Other. In “KYOKO,” I learned these things.
— Ryu Murakami (December 3, 1995, Nishinippon Shimbun)
The basic thing has not changed at all since the days I walked beside the barbed wire as a child. But now, the “barbed wire” that had always been in my heart has disappeared.
— Kyoko (from the novel)
