Original subtitles

To travel deeper and deeper into the Inland Sea

is like traveling deeper and deeper into time -

into yesterday... and the day before that.

A journey is always something of a flight.

You go to reach out, but you also go to escape.

I'm going to see the islands and all they seem to promise,

but, at the same time, I am going to escape the mainland

and all that I know it contains.

I find less fault with Japan than with the century that is destroying this country

along with all the others.

Escaping makes me a romantic,

but to be a romantic now is to be realistic.

Perhaps that is why I chose Japan in which to live.

In Japan, for the moment, the past lives on.

My search is for the real Japanese, the originals.

Somewhere near the sea, I believe, I will find them -

the people the Japanese ought to be,

the people they once were.

The Inland Sea...

a lakelike body of water bounded by three of Japan's four major islands.

By Japanese standards, it is big - or at least long.

Stretched elsewhere, it would reach from Little Rock to Dallas.

And it's narrow - like Japan - more a large river than a small sea.

The Japanese call it Setonaikai-

a sea within straits.

It's long been just that, a mercantile route.

Goods from Kyushu, the southern island,

coming up to Osaka at the northern end of this sea.

Goods from Tokyo shipped down to these island shores.

The beauty of this inland sea is famous but disregarded.

It has always been something to get across rather than merely to enjoy.

It's been called the Aegean of the East, but there are differences.

A castaway, given the choice between a Greek island and a Japanese island,

would choose the latter.

It looks like it would be a nice place to live.

This islanded sea is extraordinarily beautiful.

And part of its beauty is that it is passing.

The modern mainland reaches out and converts each captured island into waste.

Already fish, once so abundant,

are leaving their annual paths - maintained for centuries -

and are seeking clearer depths.

The great bridges that will inundate all the islands with buses and motorcars

are still only on the drawing boards.

But in a few decades, the ruin will be complete.

But not quite yet.

This temple is one of the oldest of its kind.

It was built 240 years ago, and next year it will be rebuilt.

In order to repair the temple, it will cost almost 100 million yen.

If we spend the same amount, we can tear it down and rebuild it.

Suppose we destroy the temple.

It's common in Japan for a big machine to come in and,

in one day, destroy everything.

That's much cheaper than to have a human being climb on the roof

and save each tile.

Workmen would prefer to demolish everything,

rather than to take the time to preserve one thing.

Preservation costs too much.

So now I'm worried about which way to go.

Growing up, I was influenced by my older sister, who loved movies.

Audrey Hepburn was very popular then, and I saw about ten of her films.

Funny Face, The Nun's Story, Green Mansions.

Around that time, I also saw From Here to Eternity,

about Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

After that, I became a great fan of Frank Sinatra.

I used to listen to "South of the Border" on the radio.

I like standards the best - "Yesterdays," "My Way."

I like the older numbers.

♪ The nightingale told its fairy tale ♪

♪ Of paradise where roses grew ♪

♪ Though I dream in vain ♪

♪ In my heart It always will remain ♪

♪ My stardust melody ♪

♪ The memory of love's refrain ♪

♪ Do-do, do-do, do ♪

I ask a girl if the local shrine is old.

Oh, this she doesn't know.

Naturally polite, she improves on nature.

One should not be too knowing.

The well-brought-up young maiden insists on this.

I, too, insist.

- Did she ever go there? - "Oh, yes, often."

Since this question is about herself and not about the dangerous outside world,

she feels quite free to answer.

"It's just over there, on the hill.

And take care of the big crabs!"

Shrines lie on heights.

You go, up, up, up to worship.

The steps lead into the sky and are always steep.

The faithful must arrive puffing, gasping, senses reeling.

This is as it should be.

One arrives as though newborn - helpless, vulnerable.

A shrine is quiet, quieter than a church.

A church is hushed because one is made to be quiet.

A shrine is simply quiet.

Shrine prayer is not communal prayer. It is solitary and spontaneous.

No one says when to begin or when to stop.

You choose your own time.

You speak to the gods as you might greet your hosts at a party.

Gods like offerings. The Shinto gods prefer money.

Also, Shinto is nature.

Or perhaps animism.

Shinto is the only formal animistic religion left,

and it's a true religion.

It has roots deep in all of us.

It inspires that feeling children know

when the wind or a rock is made god for a week or a day.

Its essence is unknown and unknowable.

Yet this unknown does not exclude us because we, too, are unknown.

One of the charms of Shikoku's Takamatsu,

to which the boat from Shodo has now brought me,

is that trees have been planted and there is a plaza for sauntering.

One rarely finds such a plaza in Japan.

The general idea is that we Japanese are so busy

that we have no time for strolling.

In the same way, bars and coffee shops close at midnight

because we Japanese are such early risers.

In point of fact, the Japanese are almost Turkish

in their love of a leisurely and aimless walk.

And, in the cities, they also rise later than any other people I know,

and no one is ready for business until 10:00 in the morning.

Takamatsu is different only in that it admits the Japanese fondness for strolling.

And there are the coffee shops - great harbingers of modern culture.

Here is where one first glimpses the foreign innovation

that will shortly become Japanese.

In the musical coffee shops, you first heard Schoenberg.

In the artistic coffee shops, you first saw a picture of a Giacometti.

Copies of the latest Vogue, the latest Evergreen Review,

lie scattered in coffee shops all over Japan.

There is no attempt at discrimination,

but many of the pieces of various foreign cultures are lying there,

all brand new and ready to be put together

like pieces of some giant and scattered puzzle.

The boat has rounded the spit.

There, on the other side, is a tiny island - high, a rockery,

the kind of rocks one sees in Chinese Sung paintings.

At the very top, surrounded by wind-bent pines,

a small shrine.

The prospect is beautiful.

The scene is made of so little -

the horizon, some rocks, a pine or two, the sky.

If I had a picture of it, I would have said it was "pretty" -

a postcard view, typical Japan.

But coming upon it in a boat under a summer morning sky,

I was startled into beholding its simplicity.

It's difficult to believe or remember or admit

that the greatest beauty is always accidental.

And this accidental quality is to be captured only if the full context is shown.

Japanese scenery is like Japanese poetry.

Both its meaning and its beauty depend upon a context.

One observes a relationship that has hitherto escaped notice

but one which, once seen, becomes inevitable.

Travelers from the fragmented West

are ravished by a vision of such wholeness, such natural inclusion.

I sit in the boat, rest against the warm wood, the sun raining upon me,

and I am happier than I have been for weeks or months.

I'm happy because I am suddenly whole and I know who I am.

I'm a man sitting in a boat and looking at a landscape.

The next day, I decide to go and see Yashima.

Here, toward the end of the 12th century,

was fought one of the many battles between the Heike and the Genji clans,

two enormous families that seem to have spent a third of the century

chasing each other about in the complexities of Japanese history.

They fought along the beaches below these cliffs.

The killings must have been dreadful, but, all the same,

I imagine that the massacres were held according to rules.

The enemy must not get too far from sight.

Battle lines must be drawn up.

If women and babes in arms are to be slaughtered,

this must be agreed upon ahead of time.

I cannot imagine the Japanese fighting otherwise - not among themselves -

just as they cannot drink a simple cup of tea without an elaborate etiquette.

Ever since my childhood, I've liked to write characters.

Of course, you can improve your style with practice,

but some people are born with a talent for it.

Like singing, for example. Some can practice forever

and still never be able to carry a tune.

Others are born with - how do you call it? A gift.

Well, the same is true for calligraphy.

The characters take on my style through practice.

First I just copy.

Naturally, it becomes mine through my mind, then through my hand.

I don't have to do this for a living.

I do as I please because I have plenty of time up here.

Always in Japan,

a little scratching under the asphalt highway or the concrete high-rise apartment house

brings history bubbling to the surface.

One little port advertises something called Thumb Mountain.

And there it is.

Another has an Eight-Man Rock.

This is where, as indicated,

a rock under which eight men were somehow or other buried.

And somewhere else, Kobo Daishi came

and, since it was windy, put up a screen break of rocks -

a titanic windbreak.

Or back in Yashima, where its shape suggests its name - Flat-Roofed Island.

In the waters surrounding Japan, there are 38 islands named Oshima.

The man who counted them was a priest with apparently nothing better to do.

He had only a small map.

If he had had a larger one, he would have found more.

"Oshima" means "big island," though most of them are quite small.

The one toward which my boat was carrying me was one of the smallest.

I missed the boat I wanted to take

and made the one I did not want and unwittingly took.

So I arrived on an island not on any map.

It was the Oshima National Leprosarium.

From far off, I heard the music.

A concert? A festival?

No.

This was music piped 'round the island

to guide those whom the disease had blinded.

Lepers are sent to beautiful, but inaccessible places like this

as if in compensation.

Or perhaps, being sent so far away,

they naturally live where man has not yet completely destroyed natural beauty.

Several years ago, there were trees here, weakened by pollution

and infested by pine tree worms.

When the pine trees were dug up from their roots,

a Japanese sword was excavated.

The Genji and the Heike clans fought in the place called Yashima.

They mourned their fallen warriors, right here,

and buried them under the pine trees.

And so, this area is called Pine Tree Tombs.

We see the lights of Takamatsu every evening.

It's beautiful at night.

My family's been cultivating seaweed since my grandpa's time.

I am going to make this my life's work.

Since I was a child, I've had freedom here,

although, because it's the countryside,

there's nothing going on.

I'm happy because I do whatever I like in this job,

and I don't have to answer to anyone in a big company.

The Japanese are really a sea people.

They are truly islanders.

To see them hedged in their enormous cities is to see them unnatural.

The sea - flat, a line between air and water.

This is the true heritage of the Japanese.

Not the ancient castle, not the modern city.

Old travel journals imply the Japanese were a rough and lively,

lusty, impatient, enthusiastic,

open, loving, hating people.

And so to an extent, they still are, but history has changed them.

The longest-lasting totalitarian state in history

turned the people into something more circumspect,

something more suspicious.

It inculcated in them perhaps more civilized,

but certainly more stultifying virtues.

I recognize in my city friends both that earlier and later people -

flashes of enthusiasm, bursts of generosity.

This is the quality I seek and, when I find it, admire.

It is more a Mediterranean than an Asian characteristic,

but it exists in places in Japan

and must have once existed everywhere in these islands.

The people of the Inland Sea have been called backward,

and so they are.

Living in island towns, cut off from each other and the mainland,

they know much of their own island and nothing of the next,

though it is framed daily in their bay.

A good catch of fish, the spring festival -

such events evoke a feeling and response

with which the mainland city dweller in Japan is now largely unfamiliar.

Setoda is the main town on the pleasant little island of Ikuchi.

Its location makes it a favorite stopping place

for most of the traffic on this western Inland Sea.

Its cultural importance, however, is considered greater than its maritime.

For here, every year, some 500,000 tourists

tramp the single lanelike street leading inland to the massive gate of the new temple.

Here at Setoda, in 1936,

a large hill was leveled by a munitions manufacturer named Kozo Kanemoto

to make room for a temple.

Mr. Kanemoto's mother had recently died at the age of 69,

and he had resigned the presidency of his large company,

let his hair grow long and become a priest in his own temple

dedicated to the memory of his sainted mother.

His idea - one worthy of a Frederick the Great, of a Hearst -

was that people had to go too far to see the treasures of Japan.

Since he could not get the originals,

he would rebuild them on a smaller scale, but in full detail.

Since the originals were dilapidated,

he would restore them to their original brilliance.

Rich as this holy man is, however,

he cannot possibly command the craftsmen necessary for his ventures.

Consequently, there are a few compromises.

The Nikko gate, for example, is fabricated from plywood, plaster, paint, stencils.

But from a distance, it dazzles, and this is all that's necessary.

When kitsch becomes this grand, it becomes art.

Like the Albert Memorial,

it transcends its own triviality through its size and intentions.

One of these is obviously to make money.

Though the upkeep is expensive, the intake is equally big.

Further, since this is an accredited temple, it is tax free.

Another intention is equally evident.

It is that the old man wanted to make something beautiful.

He has created a world of his own, a cosmos -

he no less than Michelangelo, Velázquez, Tintoretto.

The difference is merely one of quality.

His work, like theirs, obeys its own internal rules.

The old man, quite apart from reasons of money and mother,

had the true and superb presumption of the artist.

He has forced the world to recognize his vision.

He has created, and he has done so as a Japanese.

He has brought together in unlikely proximity,

he has combined,

and he has made different - very different.

At times, one becomes lonely.

Usually, I make a distinction between being alone and being lonesome -

a distinction Japan both fosters and observes.

Today, however, I welcome loneliness.

At such times, one feels very much the foreigner in Japan.

I could have spoken to any number of people

and been again assured of my being alive.

Rather I am silent, do not answer stares,

give way to my emotions.

I want to be unhappy and, naturally, I am.

Yet, if there is one thing that Japan teaches,

it is to distrust the emotions.

They are, after all, ideas like any other.

You can change your mood as you change your mind.

There's never enough to do when you travel.

This must be one of the reasons why travelers all over the world

are known for their attempts to pick up other people.

It is not that they want sex so much as it is that they want something

to fill the emptiness that their very freedom has created.

And what else can you do after the coffee shops,

the zoos, the museums and the libraries are rifled?

Another factor - there is no more personal undertaking.

One is resolutely oneself, the person one otherwise left at home.

At the same time, there are few better ways of learning the language,

of taking the temperature of the land,

of measuring the inner state of its inhabitants.

Also, there are few more attractive memories to take home.

Sex makes, in its own way, the ideal souvenir.

I hadn't really enjoyed much sex on my journey,

but I was thinking of it in a way common to tired travelers.

I wanted to have had sex.

I once met a group of girls.

They were 15 or so, that age when they are both adults and children.

And shy.

If all girls this age are shy, then Japanese girls are often more shy.

I asked one what she'd do when she grew up.

"Oh, I'll get married."

I smiled and said it sounded romantic.

"No, it isn't romantic. It was decided last year.

The boy's father came to my father. It didn't even take 15 minutes."

"Do you like him?"

She nodded, looking out at the sea.

"He nice boy. He works hard."

In another ten years, she would look like her mother,

would have had several children.

She would no longer be what she is now.

She seems to have abdicated already,

just now she's begun to discover what kind of person she is.

She's abdicated, but she's not yet forgotten.

She's still whole.

But she will be forced to forget.

She will be only the okasama -

the wife and mother, the person inside or the person around in the back,

however you translate it.

Her husband will do whatever he likes,

and so will her children if they are boys.

And she will think that this is somehow right

and that it is always somehow right

that she never gets to do anything she herself wants

and never again meets the person she is now.

And soon she will make herself forget

what it was like to be 15 with the whole world inviting.

I came to this island as a bride in 1937.

Three from here went to war, but only my husband wound up dead.

Towards the end of the war, they held an investigation to try to find him.

And, yes, I went up there and let them investigate.

I finally found out in 1944 that he was killed in 1943.

After that, I had to feed two children. I've always had a hard time.

I've been delivering papers for 53 years.

You know, I'd be carrying my child,

then going out to sell fish up in the mountains.

Carrying my baby on my back, carrying the fish, going up and down,

and back and forth, and back and forth again if I couldn't unload it.

I've spent my entire life like that.

Because I don't have a man, you know.

To a Western eye, a landscape this artful appearing

does not seem quite real.

We speak of postcard views.

It seems, literally, too good to be true.

It's not to the taste of all travelers.

Byron, with his taste for crags and tarns, would have passed through without a glance.

You either love Japan or you loathe it.

Like Lafcadio Hearn, you gasp and press it to your heart, for a time at any rate.

Or else, like Bernard Shaw,

the place rubs you so wrong that you even forget your manners

and refuse to take off your shoes while treading the tatami mats.

One can imagine, with more pleasure,

what a Henry Fielding or a Jane Austen would have made of the country.

Both would have criticized.

He would have exposed, in the midst of laughter,

the most awful discrepancies.

And she would have observed, with her loving but cutting irony,

many an abyss between intention and fact.

Is this a poem?

This? Oh, no. It's a sign for the restaurant.

"Seating at the Discretion of the Management."

They know that only in appearances lies the true reality.

They would have seen through the picturesque.

Kure. I awake cold...

the sheet - too hot last night - icy.

I sit up, look out of the inn window.

Autumn has come

with the appalling suddenness that is its way in Japan.

Those summer insects that sang beneath my window last night

are now stretched on the underside of leaves

trying to escape from the cold earth with feeble claws.

The hot, long summer is over.

You wake up and have winter as though you awoke and had pneumonia.

My boat moves slowly from one tiny island to the next, away from Kure.

Some of these islands were once submarine bases,

cruiser slips, lighthouse stations, bunkers,

and now they're not often visited.

The boat stops at one.

Ruins. New ruins.

Some of these islands are warrens of tunnels and stone-ridged cave,

with alleys like trenches and sunken stone rooms now empty

and so deep they are cold.

It's difficult to imagine that all of this once had a purpose.

But it did, and the purpose was war.

Here's a bunker for a machine gun.

Once these tunnels led somewhere, and they were filled with running troops.

Now in ruins, they lie half open.

They're like a pleasure maze, like the ruins of Knossos.

And there are the names scratched over the decades.

"Yamamoto Ichiro" - a name like John Smith - who was a private first class.

"Watanabe Sumire," a postwar schoolgirl.

Some sergeant who came from Council Bluffs. June 25, 1946.

There are other marks on the walls too.

Here an explosion has torn away the plaster, exposing the brick.

There is a large red stain, but not blood.

No one has that much blood. Must have been chemicals.

Some of the walls are marked with fire, others with boredom.

In some of the rooms, there is seaweed,

now dried, crisp, powdering underfoot.

"Was the water ever this high?" I wonder.

The seaweed festoons the walls.

An underwater ballroom,

the first-class lounge of some great and sunken liner.

Hiroshima has other things to think about.

The park, the museum,

the memorial statuary, the ruined Promotion Hall -

they're all there.

But the city is, after all, the largest in southern Honshu.

It is too important to be merely a museum and memorial.

It is now many things to many people,

and few indeed must be those to whom it is just the city

where the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb.

Life, as the typically Japanese phrase has it, goes on.

This is also one of the facts of death - that one forgets it.

One may disapprove of oneself for forgetting,

may have wanted to keep the fact green, tended it like a grave.

But it's impossible. Life is too strong.

Death loses on every occasion except one.

I suddenly, and for no apparent reason, thought of Lafcadio Hearn -

dying, penning a few last bitter pages.

The book was called Japan: An Interpretation,

but he, like all of us who come to this land -

attractive, mysterious and impenetrable as a mirror -

was writing about himself.

The tender, myopic, beauty-loving Lafcadio was being finally interpreted.

This disillusioned end I would be spared, I thought. I hoped.

I would never find them, the real Japanese, because they were always around me,

and they were always real.

But I might at least decide what my own real self was and, hence, create it.

Japan allows me to keep my freedom.

It makes no demands on me.

All of us are considered too much the outsider,

a distinction we owe mainly to our skin, our eyes, our hair.

I become a one-member society, consistent only to myself

and forever different from those who surround me.

Our basic agreement permits me an amount of approval, some of it mutual.

Our basic difference allows me to comprehend, finally,

that the only true responsibility a man has is toward himself.

But not quite yet.

A respite.

In a few days, Indian summer - false and lovely.

Perhaps lovely because it is false.

At the Itsukushima Shrine in Miyajima, there is no general view.

One can never see it all because it was not designed to be viewed from outside.

It's like - like Venice, of which it somehow reminds.

It's not a view. It's an experience.

One is meant to wander,

turning at random along those straight and open corridors.

There are no walls.

One looks through the shrine as though through a forest of lacquered trunks.

It is at the end of the Inland Sea, and it is, of course, very old.

The plan was first laid in the ninth century was added to in the 12th,

and its purpose remains this gesture to the sea...

this metaphor of faith.

Japan is truly a sea country.

Many of its most beautiful shrines face the ocean,

and this, the most beautiful, opens directly upon it.

More. It goes to meet it.

It stretches out like a waiting hand, both inviting and accepting.

It is like a mudra, one of the positions of the hand of the Buddha,

himself but one of the gods.

The seaborne pilgrim is welcomed and enfolded.

Just by turning west and south, away from Tokyo,

away from the snowbound province of Ohio,

I could continue forever, following the summer south.

It has now been 30 years since these words were written.

What is left of the Inland Sea, you've just seen.

There's been some selective framing, a bit of shooting around,

but not as much as might have been expected.

And the things you feel rather than see are still there.

In only a decade or so,

the Japanese sense of difference will have perhaps disappeared

and with it will disappear - along with much that is jingoistic,

insular and certainly xenophobic -

other precious Japanese qualities.

One world is becoming a hideous possibility,

and I wish to celebrate our differences for as long as possible.

So I can still say, as I said then - but not quite yet.

Still...

"I hear they are building a bridge To the island of Tsu.

Alas...

To what now Shall I compare myself?"