Kurt Groetsch @ OldTasty.com

I’m often asked what I liked about living in China and what I miss now that I’m back in the US. I don’t think I’ve done a very good job articulating it to date, but in talking about whether he still feels like a foreigner after 52 years in Japan, Donald Richie really nails it:

“Yes. I think if I didn’t feel like a foreigner, I wouldn’t be here. I’m here because I’m a foreigner, because I like being a foreigner. It’s so rewarding to not have to belong to things, to not be allowed to belong to things. It’s really so free. When I was in Ohio, taking things for granted, it never occurred to me that I could lead a life in which I set my own obligations and decided how I wanted to comport myself. If you never leave your own culture, you’re forever bound by it, and you’re bound without ever realizing it. If you ask a person in America or Japan about American or Japanese culture, it’s like asking a fish about water. What can they say? They inhabit it, they don’t know anything about it. When you come over here, or anyplace different, you get your eyes opened, and you can never get them shut again.”

I met Richie in 1989 while I was on Asian Quarter at Augustana College, but I was so jet lagged I didn’t pay close attention to his talk, and didn’t really understand the significance of his work on Japan until I got back to the US. Since then, his Inland Sea has become one of my favorite books, and I’ve read a number of his other works, including some of his books on Japanese cinema. If you have any interest in Japanese society and culture, you should really check out his catalog: