Re-orientation/Part four

Incidentally, waiting one day for the bus to take me to the Lu Xun museum, I realized why there were so few museums. There was a splendid photo show at the bus stop. Don’t bring the people to the museum. Vice Versa. It’s something we in the “advanced” West could cogitate when we spend more public money on Gehry-esque Gargantua than on minimum wages for the poorer amongst us. The Red Chinese had that right from the start. Whether they can civilize their current booms? “Wo pu dong!” (“I not understand !”, the only three words I remember from my six weeks of Mandarin! That Chinese Airline Veep would had howled at his successful prediction of No Success.

My re-orientation included short stints in Manila, Seoul, Pusan and Taipeh, and longer serious visit to all parts of Japan. Which adventures I will next summarize. I went to Korea to try to understand the American occupation. I was surprised to find former Alabama Governor George Wallace there, on a trade mission. If there was one Devil in the American civil rights struggle, it was surely this “cracker” who threatened to stand in the doorways of every school to stop integration in its tracks. What a sleeper he turned out to be. He explained how he ran for office for the first time on a very liberal platform—and got creamed by a real segregationist.

He thus explained his slow conversion to integration on the grounds of a voting majority against it until after Lyndon Johnson’s traumatic Civil Rights legislation that has hobbled the Democrats until our own time. Wallace was one of the few blessings of that legislation, a born again integrationist. It was a turning point in my political education. Much more than meets the politically blind eye determines what goes on inside the voting booth.

I was impressed, as a former English professor, that the South Koreans had a national holiday to honor the man who invented the Korean alphabet. I visited the Americanists at the National University in Seoul, and was invited to talk to their graduate seminar about my recent visit to Faulkner Country, in Oxford, MS. They were pleasantly surprised to learn that the Ole Miss of James Meredith had morphed into the ultraliberal Center for Southern Culture, run by William Ferris, later President Clinton’s choice to run the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He had studied folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960’s, with a dissertation on Black Delta Blues. B.B.King has already promised them his archive. Bill and Judy Peiser had used TV at the PBS station in Jackson, MS to spread their agenda of preserving Southern Culture in all its richness, from writers like Eudora Welty to blue singers like James (“Fordson”—“Son”—for the tractor he used chopping cotton) Thomas.

Judy Peiser had invited me to a screening in Memphis of her new film on the Delta Blues. There was a black guy already there to see his pal in the film whom he missed a great deal. That was James “Son” Thomas. Judy had also introduced me to the greatest quilt maker of the time, Pecolia Warner, who lived with husband Sam in Yazoo City, MS. We had spent a visually rich afternoon with the Warners, oohing and aahing over her idiosyncratic quilts. So moved were we that we almost missed our flight on USAirways from Memphis North.

Those were the legendary days when the recently souped up Allegheny Airlines offered a Freedom Fare of $179 for three weeks of unlimited use of their routes. They lost money, big, on us, over those three fall weekends, Nashville, Memphis, and Tricities TN. And we risked temporary bankruptcy as well since we bought so many of her “tops”. I gave my collection to the University of Mississippi Art Museum in honor of Bill Ferris’s appointment as Director of the National Endowment of the Humanities. Bill works his magic now at Chapel Hill, NC.

Thomas had invited me and Andrea to his place in Leland, MS when we were introduced to him during breaks at the Memphis Folk Festival. We went to his favorite bar when we arrived in Leland, and caught our breath when the bouncer at the front door was brandishing a revolver on his big belly. Since I majored in Yellow at the University of Detroit with a minor in avoiding trouble, I was uncharacteristically speechless for a few nanoseconds.

Andrea, who was always summa cum laude in her Chutzpah, explained to the bouncer that we were looking for directions to “Son” Thomas’s house. He explained that, serendipitously, James’s son was standing just behind us.He cordially agreed to “granada” us there. (That verb turned out to be his current make of automobile!) It was our first visit to a legendary shotgun house, and as well our first time being serenaded by a great Delta blues singer. It topped our visit to Faulkner’s Oxford.

A favorite watering hole in Oxford was Smitty’s where young Ole Miss students and faculty often gathered for a traditional breakfast or a beer in the evening. After breakfast, I was whirling the paperback book rack to gauge their Faulkner choices. THERE WERE NONE AT ALL! I playfully chided the waitress about that lacuna, and she tartly replied, “Try the Rexall down the street!”

Rexall, indeed. The pharmacist on duty was a boyhood pal of Mister Bill’s nephew, and recalled, as if it had happened a few days, instead of decades, ago a Faulkner episode.. The novelist had just finished a section of his latest novel and wanted some fast feedback so he read the manuscript to these three nine-year olds! The pharmacist thumbed through a photo album of Faulkneriana and then told me to go across the street to the haberdashery shop if I wanted to know more about the local private press devoted to Faulkner’s work. The proprietor stopped briefly from measuring a pair of slacks a young man needed for the Saturday evening dance to tell us how he got it organized.

And then he passed us on to the local bookstore that began by transforming the town into a Faulkner pilgrimage experience and ended up dazzling the entire country by its intelligent promotion of Southern culture and Faulkner’s part in it. As well as getting behind the success of local writers like John Grisham and Bill Ferris. The day we visited Faulkner’s house, our guide had just finished his M.A. thesis on Faulkner’s joining the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. It’s a small village with international perspective.

The Army PR Office in Korea made it easy for journalists to visit the DMZ. It already seemed madness that the armistice that created the DMZ was over three decades old and still no peace treaty. (Indeed, it’s now going on six decades and still no treaty, but the dysfunctional North was stumbling from one dysfunctional fantasy to another.) And underneath the official “democracy” of South Korea, there were ominous contradictions.

I went from the DMZ to a national American Studies Conference serendipitously scheduled for my visit in Pusan. I had written a piece about the not so covert authoritarian tendencies I had observed as I moved around the country and offered it to an R&R-ing American soldier at the hotel for feedback. When I picked it back up at the registration desk, I was curtly informed that my cut rate privileges as a visiting scholar (my Ph.D. is in American Studies) had been revoked and that I would have to pay the cruelly high regular rate. My critical comments on the as yet fledgling democracy had suddenly made me a persona non grata. I was so pissed (especially by the craven academics running the conference who refused to stand by me) that I went straight to the airport and flew on the first possible flight to Fukuoka.

I was blessed by the serendipitous scheduling of one of the finest jazz concerts I have ever savored: Detroiter Tommy Flanagan was on piano! Compensation indeed for the Korean felony. I was in search of mingei, Japanese folk art, and it still flourished in the lower half of Japan, from Fukuoka to Kagoshima. I fully understood now why Christopher Dresser, that lost to history genius who designed mass produced Bauhaus-like objects in the 1870’s, half a century before Gropius founded the school that aspired to make such objects available. Dresser (1834-1901) had been a popular decorator before he went to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and lectured at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

He then spent several months in Japan. “I went over there a mere decorator,” he remembered,” and returned a designer!” Chinese design is too circusy to my eye, too flamboyant, too fussy. It not only doesn’t give me pleasure. It bugs me, visually. Unlike the Japanese art, both folk and professional and industrial. Indeed, I wrote my first piece for the Asahi Evening News on the annual Industrial Design Festival In Osaka, remarking that the Bauhaus Ideals (good design for the masses) seemed more in play there than design at home in America which was going through a Higher Goofy Ettore Sotsass/Phillipe Starck phase that my eye found regressive. I was elevated by a visit to the Toyota Factory floor where the PR guy was not only eager to palaver highly abstractly about esthetics and design, but the factory was so clean it looked ready for surgical procedures.

Perhaps my most fascinating encounter with Japanese art came from my interview with Yoshinobu Tokugawa, the current heir to the last Shogun. He was a banker by profession, but when his family museum in Nagoya needed a director, he started evening studies in art history at Tokyo University. He became convinced that after the Meiji revolution (which overthrow his grandfather, the last Shogun) that Japanese museology had made a fatal mistake. Aping western ways, they typically destroyed the relationships between ritual Buddhist objects by separating each genre into individual vitrines. I tried for the longest time to get an appointment with him, to better understand his Buddhist esthetic theory—to no avail.

Finally, on short notice, he agreed to a fifteen minute encounter at the Foreign Correspondents Club. He appeared in a black suit with a dour face and began with a hostile question,”What, Mr.Hazard, do you know about the Buddhist esthetic?” noticeably neglecting my honorific doctor, which I didn’t give a damn about, but knew they were besotted with such distinctions. I decided to play humble, and replied, “Not a damn thing, Mr. Tokigawa. That’s why I’ve come to learn from you.”

Our conversation grew more animated and friendly as he perceived I was following his intricate arguments. And two and a half hours later, his black suit was explained. “Dr. Hazard, I’ve truly enjoyed this conversation, but I have an appointment at a funeral.” With a now happy face, he accepted my invitation to a supper/lecture at the Foreign Correspondents Club the following week with the then most respected American interpreter of Japanese art.

There was one other encounter I remember because it reminds me of how inscrutable the Japanese can be, and how misinterpreting American novices like me are, complicating intercultural exchange. On the tram in Hokkaido, I asked a Japanese gentleman for directions to the local museum. In perfect English he said he was headed there himself and would be happy to show me the way. We did the museum together, and he was an expert tutor, very tactful in gaging how ignorant I was before expatiating. He asked me if I would have dinner with him. I began to suspect that he was making moves on me! Never been treated so generously by a stranger before, you see.

My budget was tight, and I knew I could derail any serious moves, so I accompanied him to a memorable sushi dinner. As I thanked him profusely for a stimulating day, he thanked me. “My father died a few months ago, and today is the day we honor our parents. Arrigato for being such a wonderful substitute. My father would have loved to meet you, as I have.”

Chastened, I sortied off to my Youth Hostel, vowing not to make such a facile snap judgment soon again.