easier, despite the strong Western influence of Scottish parents and an American school in Tokyo. I moved from one world to another the moment I stepped outside the gate of my home.

It was really we two-worlders who got the most out of the benshi . Even fairly early in my teens I became something of a benshi sampler, fascinated by those interpreters of one of my worlds to the other. And as I look back now, it is quite startling to realize just what a vital role these men played at a crucial period in Japan’s development. During English subtitles they were, of course, kept busy interpreting, leaping from voice to voice. But silent films were designed to cut out as much printed text as possible, and the periods between subtitles gave the benshi plenty of time for his own commentary. And when you remember that each of these men preached his sermons at least twenty-one times a week and that there were hundreds of them performing to audiences of millions, it is not stretching things to suggest that their influence on Japanese thinking was enormous. We didn’t just see Douglas Fairbanks slitting sails but heard him do it, and heard also a Japanese comment on what a stupid way that was to try to stop a ship, plus the fact that a galleon was a pretty cumbersome product of Western marine design anyway, nothing as sensible as a junk.

It was, of course, in the area of Western mores and social behavior that the benshi had his real field day. Japanese society perhaps values tidiness in living above all things. From Hollywood came these pictures of people who didn’t seem to know what tidiness Weis, who lived sprawling lives often on the verge of the criminal, and who associated with women whose home life seemed to consist of lying on tiger skins wearing nothing but an assortment of beads. There was no discernible pattern in all this, and to the Japanese, among whom even violence tends to be formalized by rules, the huge pictures presented an incomprehensible shambles that needed only a benshi ’s comment to make it seem totally repugnant.

I don’t suppose a single one of those benshi had ever traveled outside Japan. A few knew English reasonably well, others enough to translate from the text on the film, while the worst simply invented a commentary that made a rough fit with the visual story. All of them pandered to local prejudices, and too many of the films gave them splendid opportunities to do this.

The benshi at the Hogaku-Za was a conservative satirist: urbane, witty, a man of the Japanese world who saw its near-perfect order threatened by the alien civilizations beyond the sacred islands. With endless drafts of scorn and wit he worked to repel this invasion of

foreign ideas and manners. He got his best response from Western sex, reducing his houses to roars of laughter in those moments leading up to the big clinches. Not that we actually ever saw these; police censorship demanded that all kissing be sliced from the film, this particular Western practice being considered likely to undermine national morals in spite of the fact that a considerable percentage of the sixteenyear-old males in the audiences were already steady brothelgoers.

Suddenly, into all this, came the thunderbolt. Al JoIson arrived. I first experienced the new media at the HogakuZa, which was packed to the doors by the curious. It may have been faulty wiring, but the sound track incorporated a steady roaring that sounded like trains passing each other on an elevated railway. And when Al started to sing “Mammy,” it shattered the eardrums. The audience was stunned. If this was Western music, they didn’t want it. Neither did I. I searched the shadows beneath a ten-foot face. The box was empty.

Everyone was very upset. The papers were full of letters. A Japanese compromise was reached. The next sound offering, a prophetic oddity from Britain called Nineteen Forty , depicted a devastating war. But in Tokyo it wasn’t a noisy one: the management turned down the volume, and there was a voice again from the pulpit, the benshi back at work.

But he was a shaken man. He knew his days were numbered. That shadow in a box lasted a few months, and then came the first all-talking musical, with no place where the sound track could be mellowed to let in the voice of old Nippon.

Whatever happened to those redundant benshi ? I don’t know. Maybe they went into public relations, working for the militarists whose grim faces under shaved heads were starting to monopolize the picture pages in the newspapers.