Filming: Part II

On Thursday, July 2nd, Shinya still hadn't gotten in contact with Okuyama-san, so I was genuinely freaking out. I decided to arrange another interview myself since we really needed to talk to a person who could provide us insight into the history of Golden Gai's history. I decided to contact Donald Richie; in the beginning of the project, I had considered contacting him, but I was somewhat intimidated. Anyhow, I talked to Dr. Cleveland, who told me Mr. Richie would be attending an event at Super Deluxe in Roppongi Saturday, July 4th. Dr. Cleveland called Mr. Richie, who agreed to talk to us from 6-6:30, so I canceled my prior plans and checked out equipment. Shinya had work, and I couldn't get a hold of Tony at first, but thankfully I ran into him on my way to Roppongi on Saturday!

Anyhow, we went to Super Deluxe, and Mr. Richie was waiting outside. He told us that he hadn't eaten dinner, so we headed over to Roppongi Hills. At first we went to Starbucks, but there were no seats, so we went to a soup place instead. I bought him dinner and chatted with him about film and whatnot while setting up the camera. Unfortunately, in a moment of mental abstraction, I forgot how to use the wireless microphone (I frantically explained to Mr. Richie that I am accustomed to making silent experimental films and that I had never used the wireless microphone before, which is true). Tony, having skipped the workshop, was of no help in the matter, and since we were running out of time, I took a deep breath and shot with the ambient microphone. The sound was sub-par, since the restaurant was quite crowded, and workers were playing music/clanging dishes. However, the content of the interview was great. I gave Mr. Richie my contact information and he gave me his, saying that I should call if I wanted to do any re-takes. I called him on Tuesday and left a message, but as he has not returned my call, I think perhaps he had only given my his phone number out of courtesy instead of an actual desire to redo the interview. The footage is still salvageable, though, so I will be using it anyhow. Instead of the question/answer format of most interviews, Mr. Richie actually gave a rather eloquent speech. This will make editing easier because he contextualizes what he's talking about (i.e., he doesn't answer with only a few words). Here's the transcription of the interview:


Golden Gai is a section of Shinjuku, which is a section of the old night city of Tokyo, which has a very interesting reputation. It has over the years turned into a sort of an artist’s haven, a sort of the [something] enclave. It wasn’t always that way. Originally after the war, it was sort of a very large black-market area. Then it turned into the whore district, then half of it turned the gay district, and now it's turned into a very specialized bar district. It is a warren (it used to be a lot larger than it is now). It is a warren now of six or seven alleys, two story buildings, all of them post-war, and all of them rather flimsily made. This is where a number of bars have sprung up. These bars originally were known as cheap places to have a drink, or pick up a girl or take a friend, or something. But over the years, as I say, being in Shinjuku, it’s received an enormous amount of impetus, by the fact that Shinjuku is having its own history at this time. Shinjuku had sort of a renaissance in the 1960’s. This is where it was all coming from – Shinjuku. Shinjuku was the home of the counter-culture. This is where all the dissidence went. If you wanted to smoke pot in public, you did it in front of the [something] of Shinjuku Station. If you wanted to play the guitar, that’s where you did it. At the same time, more serious things were happening. This is where a lot of the new aesthetics came from, where a lot of the avant garde came from. This is where Terayama Shuji had his first theatre, where Kara Juro had his first theatre. This is where Hijikata Tatsumi invented Butoh modern dance. All of these were post-war expression of a new Japanese ethos. What is left of these, which has not been commercialized has been subsumed in Golden Gai, and so you get a feeling of the period. By going to Golden Gai, you see the reason it’s so popular. People who are interested in avant-garde film, for example, always go to a very small bar called La Jetée, which is named after Chris Marker’s film, in which all the young directors go there. It’s nice to go there and have a drink or two. So it still has some sort of validity. It’s grown very fast, of course, since Tokyo changes faster than any other city in the world I think. Actually, Golden Gai has been bought. It’s been bought by the people who own Parco-Seibu Department stores. But they bought it at a time when their [something] was such that they were not really able to do anything with it. They never built anything on top of it, but they own the land, but they’ve never been able to afford to tear down the buildings, so it’s living on borrowed land. It’s still there - it’s sort of a mummy, a petrified period piece of the time. Still quite visible, still quite experiential. It won’t last very much longer. As soon as Japan hits the next boom, all of that land is going to be raised, all those bars will go, and of course, all sorts of new high rises – it will start to look like Roppongi. So what’s left of the past – and it’s very precious, this past, because the past that is still alive is very difficult to find, particularly in volatile Tokyo. You can find it in downtown Tokyo, you can find it in Asakusa, in Ueno, in little corners that no one else wants, where the culture has managed to survive. In certain of parts around Shinjuku, it’s been mainly Golden Gai and Shomben Yokocho, the Piss Alley, which is right next to it. When they go, that is an entire section of Tokyo history, of Japanese history, of Japanese anthropology, of Japanese aesthetic history [that] will go as well.