Dear Jim,
I am fascinated and absorbed.
You write in a unique gripping style.
I hope that I can hold your interest with my life moments.
Did you receive them as attached – I am writing as I remember and dating each time I write.
Yes, here is more to frame and I will share some of my notes.
This will be a replenishing of spirit through recollection of memory.
To have you to talk with through the air is a thread and a lifeline.
You have returned at the right time.
In autumn of 1979, when I was in living in the apartment building behind the National Theatre in Tokyo,
One entered the building by going across the grounds of the Hirakawa Tenmangu Jinja.
I lived on floor seven and an elevator took one up or down.
In this little apartment, Minoru came to visit and would stay overnight.
He came one night when I had a visitor from Smith College, Susan Waltner.
Susan and I had been classmates at U of Wisconsin and she became Director of Dance at Smith
and continues to teach there.
Early the next morning, Minoru and I were in the midst of starting to engage our passion
after much drunken affection and the telephone rang and I let it ring.
This was the first of the odd telephone calls.
Susan opened the shoji to alert me to answer the phone, and one of the most precious moments of my
time with Minoru was lost forever.
He became embarrassed and soon took leave, and I followed him across the perspective of the temple garden.
This was in 1979, when I was on the Japan Foundation Fellowship
and completing my degree in Classical Japanese Dance.
The telephone continued to ring on odd occasion and I would have a conversation
with a stranger who knew many things about me and some how had received my telephone number.
The calls over a six week time increased and became most curious with details of my appearance,
or my being seen about Tokyo, or my clothes at a sighting.
Finally I told the caller to never call again or to meet me.
An agreement to meet was made.
It was decided that the place would be in the front of Wako department store in Ginza at 6 pm on a Saturday,
and that each of us would wear an object of the color Yellow.
I wore my yellow aviator glasses.
He wore a yellow windbreaker jacket that was turned inside out with a red lining on the outside.
At first I did not spot him as he sat very still in front of the corner window on the ledge.
After about 15 minutes of my waiting, he slowly removed the jacket and turned the yellow side out
as he displayed a magnificent hewn torso and put the jacket back on with the red to his body.
Then we approached each other in slow motion – greeted – went to have a drink on a side street –
and another drink at another bar – and finally touched hands at a sushi stand.
It was electric as I felt the calluses form his hard work in the Gym and from gripping the handles of his motorcycle.
This was Kohtaro Yamamoto. He was Kohtaro Yamamoto and we visited Minoru at the shop in Kamakura.
We became a partnership of passion and experiences for the rest of 1979 and into 1983 when he visited me
in Seoul Korea while teaching on my 3rd Fulbright.
I last saw him in Japan in 1995 (high in the mountains of Ouda Hazama) where he visited me at the temple where John Toler was the abbot and eventually died.
On occasion I called to him, he worked for the city of Yokohama.
He never came to the states.
I pierced his nipples and genitals.
When we last visited his hair was grey and he had a scar the length of his abdomen from too much drink.
He was still a magnificent specimen of age and debauchery and endurance.
He knew Minoru and Yugi and that was how he learned of and found the contact to call me.
It took from 1979 up to 1995 for him to reveal to me how he first called when Minoru was in my arms
on the fated morning the shoji was opened by Susan as the phone rang.
I think of him often and wonder of him and lost a bit of my being to his passion and ever-kind watchful eyes.
How little I knew then of how I would value his memory and the sanctuary he provided in the wildness of our exploding youth.
Entry of response letter to James Freeman –
August 18, 2007
