Article content continued

Just about everyone who loves films and Japan has learned from Richie but he also looked far beyond the cinema. In his twenties, he settled down to the expatriate life in Tokyo, where he would stay till his death in 2013 at the age of 88. He was always, and gladly, an outsider and a foreigner, studying Japan as a phenomenon among the nations. A film critic of the Japan Times for a while, he eventually wrote for that English-language paper on anything that engaged him.

To the outsider Japan presents an array of unique traditions accumulated over the centuries and never abandoned. At various times Richie’s books dealt with Kabuki theatre, Zen parables, Kyoto’s temples, Japanese tattoos and Ikebana flower arrangements. Like the Japanese, Richie saw the shared values of art and craft. “I remain in a state of surprise, and this leads to heightened interest and perception,” he wrote as his career began. “Like a child with a puzzle, I am forever putting pieces together and saying: Of course.”

He was always, and gladly, an outsider and a foreigner, studying Japan as a phenomenon among the nations.

Richie was openly bisexual, and sometimes said that Japan’s relatively tolerant view of gay love was one reason he settled there. A vivid, skillful and highly personal writer, he entwined his own life with the special quality of Japan. To him, Japan was a convenient mirror: “We can see the land and the people clearly but we can also see ourselves.” He expressed himself most directly in The Inland Sea (Stone Bridge Press), which was first published in 1971 and has recently re-appeared in a handsome illustrated version from a California publisher. It’s based on diaries he kept while touring the Inland Sea, a relatively sheltered and relatively isolated group of islands surrounded by the three big islands of Japan.