Pearl Buck: Bridge for Passing

The little secretary was at my elbow again.

“We have time to go to the old Meiji shrine before you must go to the office and I want you to see it, please, first,” she told me. “Tokyo is too new, because of bombing, but Meiji shrine is old and you will feel better to see it.”

She summoned a cab and we were whisked through the city, so changed that I would not have known it, new and busy and not beautiful. The palace, however, remained as it was, untouched, and I saw its curved roofs rising, as of old, behind the moated stone walls. Then we entered the Meiji shrine and into the ancient peace. I wandered about the paths, Sumiko tactfully quiet at my side, and came to rest beside the lake. It is as it was when I was a child standing there with my Japanese nurse. The same fat carp, enormous in size, moved lazily among the water lilies, and I told Sumiko this.

“Not the same, please,” she said in reply. “In the war many hungry people coming here by night to catch carp and eat them.”

I maintained however that some of them were the same. Otherwise even in many years they could not have grown so big.

“Perhaps,” she said politely. “Anyhow it is time we will be going, office waiting, doubtless.”

We walked to the gate and entered another breakneck taxicab and were whirled to the offices of the big Japanese motion picture company.

Here I pause for a brief interlude.

The most astonishing aspect of new Japan is the Japanese woman. My first Japanese friend was the wife of an Englishman, who lived in a big house on the mountainside near my childhood home in China. I must have known other Japanese women in our goings to and comings from Japan, but none made as deep an impression upon my memory as the lady in the Englishman’s house, and this, I think, because I saw her only as she passed by in her sedan chair, borne by four uniformed bearers. She wore kimono always, and her hair was brushed in the high lacquered coiffeur of the ladies of ancient Japan. Her face was powdered white, and her onyx eyes gazed blankly ahead of her until she saw me standing in the dust of the road. In summer she held a small parasol, white silk painted with cherry blossoms, and in winter she wore a brocaded coat over her kimono. We exchanged looks, hers sad and incurious until she smiled at me, and mine wide with wonder and admiration because she was beautiful. A beautiful woman, a handsome man, a pretty child, are sources of joy, merely for the eyes, if for nothing else. It was as this that I remembered her, and because of the smile, somehow as my friend.

In later years I knew more intimately as friend an occasional Japanese woman. She seemed, whoever she was, always remote, somewhat sad, overburdened with duty, and this was true whether she was the wife of a farmer, or of a man of wealth and position. One had always to cross a barrier, disappointment with life, it might be, if not a personal sorrow, before one could reach the inner woman. Perhaps she was never to be reached. Her voice soft and gentle, her demeanor modest and considerate of others, she wore silence as a garment and unless addressed directly she seemed to merge herself with the background.

None of this is true now. The old-fashioned woman, or so it seems to me, has simply disappeared from Japan. Men are very little changed either in appearance or behavior. But women? I cannot describe in one day or one place the extraordinary differences I found in Japanese women. Let me approach the subject gradually, through the individual women I came to know while we made the picture.

Therefore we had no sooner stepped into the offices of the big Japanese motion picture company than I was astounded by what I saw. In other years I would have been greeted by a young man, secretary and assistant to those above. The office would have been staffed by young men. Now, however, it was staffed by young women, all in smart western clothes, and several of them speaking good English. I had the impression, too, that all of them were efficient and pretty. One of them came forward when we appeared and she was certainly very pretty. Her hair was cut short and curled — and let me say here and now, and say again and again, probably, how I deplore the permanent wave in Japan. The smooth straight black hair which was once the glory of Japanese women is now usually cut short and tortured into tightly curled wiglike shapes. Worst of all, it is fashionable, especially for actresses as I was to discover, to dye the black hair a rusty brown. The natural sheen is lost and the muddy color dulls the light cream of the complexion, once so beautiful. Somehow that rusty brown makes the dark eyes ineffective, too, although the Japanese women have the latest in eye make-up and face-powders, liquid or dry or paste.

These modern looks are nothing, however, compared to the modern behavior. Gone is the modest downcast gaze, gone the delicate reserve, gone the indirect approach to men. Instead bold looks, frank speech, a frankly sexual attack on any available man, with preference for the too susceptible American, is the rule of the day.

I am getting ahead of my story. I did not learn all this at once when I entered the offices of the big Japanese film company. What I saw was a bevy of pretty women, neat, composed, efficient, outgoing and apparently indestructibly young, and one of them led us to the inner office. I confess that it was reassuring to see my special friend sitting behind a very modern desk, to be sure, but dressed in a silver gray silk kimono and a pale pink obi. She rose to meet us, bowing deeply with all the old-fashioned grace. Her English is perfect, and I knew she spoke French and German and Italian as well, for part of her work is travel in European countries for Japanese films. There is really nothing old-fashioned about her except her dress. She has a full partnership with her husband and two other associates, both men, in the business. They defer to her wisdom and efficiency and judgment, although I did hear occasional subterranean grumbles from the production manager, to the effect that she was “getting very high these days.” Since he was a bachelor, however, in itself reprehensible in Japan for a man over fifty, I did not take him seriously.

The office was a handsome one, modern to the last chair, but a fine old painting hung on the wall and some excellent calligraphy. My friend invited us to be seated, and two or three of the pretty young women brought green tea in Japanese bowls. We sipped and made small talk. She invited me to come and spend a weekend at her country home in Kamakura. I accepted, and of that I shall tell more later. We did not stay long, for it is never good manners in Japan to stay too long on a first call. In fifteen minutes or so, the pretty young woman directed us to the office of the head of the company, a handsome tall man, neither young nor old.

He sat behind his desk and when we entered he rose, bowed and invited us to be seated around a wide long table. He did not speak much English, and his secretary, another pretty young woman, translated for him and for us. He was an intelligent man, as one could see from his fine cultivated face, and a man of the world, assured, self-confident, courteous. The room, as are most offices and business rooms in Japan, was well-designed and sparely but excellently furnished with modern furniture, calm in atmosphere. We sat down at the table in comfortable leather chairs and another pretty girl or two brought us fresh tea. While the men talked through the pretty girl interpreter, I examined the room. On the wall near us, at the end of the room, hung three impressive oil portraits, founders of the company, I was told. These were the only pictures except that, on the opposite walls, as I next observed, there hung a large calendar, whereon was imprinted in poster style the lively form of a bathing beauty in full color, an engaging object upon which the eyes of the three solemn gentlemen, though deceased, still seemed to be fixed. I wondered, laughing inwardly, if one of the neat and pretty girls had hung her counterpart there with humorous intent.