Donald Richie was my friend and mentor for more than 20 years and my inspiration before that. When I was preparing to come to Japan for the first time in 1975, I read many books about the place, but Donald's masterpiece "The Inland Sea" was the one that entranced me. My first long trip after my arrival was to — where else? — the Inland Sea, with the woman who would become my wife.
I didn't meet Donald until 1991, however. I had been writing film reviews for The Japan Times for about two years, with him very much in mind, when he sent me a complimentary note about one — my first-ever fan letter. I was over the moon: My hero had validated me, though he was similarly generous with many other younger film writers and scholars, I was later to realize. Donald was hardly a saint, but territoriality and the competitiveness that goes with it were foreign to his makeup. (What did the writer of "The Films of Akira Kurosawa" and "Ozu: His Life and Films," as well as other seminal texts on Japanese cinema, have to fear from the latest successor to his old reviewing gig?)
Not long after, we shared a bullet train from Tokyo to Odawara: The then editor of The Japan Times Weekly had invited us to his apartment there for a contributors' party. The thought of boring the author of "The Inland Sea" on a long train ride terrified me, but Donald immediately put me at ease and I found, to my relief and delight, that we shared more than a thing for Kurosawa and Ozu (he rated the latter higher than the former; I at the time, the opposite). We were both from small-town Ohio (he Lima, me Zaneville), were both left-handed (though he had been "corrected" out of it as a child, to his regret) and, more importantly, could make each other laugh with wisecracks, though his came out sounding like epigrams.