Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
my father
essay
by RICK OWENS
At the end of World War II, my father was stationed in Japan as a mail carrier for the Allied troops. He later met my mother in Mexico and brought her to California to marry her. By the time I arrived, he was working as a social worker in a small conservative town, determining whether people were eligible for social benefits, which I believe ended up making him cynical, mistrustful, and somewhat bitter. The father I knew was racist, bigoted, and smugly judgmental. He did want to help people, but only on his own strict terms.
But at the back of his closet was a weathered wooden trunk, brought back from his time in Japan, that was like his secret soft spot. It contained padded, softly colored silk kimonos held together with intricately braided cords; sandalwood incense; and shantung-bound albums containing photos of my father as a pleasure-seeking young man in army uniform with his buddies at work or play. There were also photos of my father dressed in a traditional kimono alongside beautiful Japanese girls, also in kimonos, walking through a garden under an umbrella or standing on a bridge under falling blossoms. It was hard to imagine the father who sneered at my sissy flights of fantasy indulging in some glamorous exoticism of his own. Among his philosophy and theology books in his basement library were old books of Japanese watercolor landscape paintings, which were such a departure from the pedantic, morally superior character I was used to. These watercolors were all about dreamy, abstract ambiguity, as well as a tolerant point of view that seemed at odds with the man I knew.
As the main subject of his judgement, I ended up judging his judgement with some pretty harsh judgements of my own. I am always a bit conscious of my own tendency toward disapproval and perhaps over-correct myself by avoiding strong opinions and always trying to give the benefit of the doubt. I sense my father’s need for order and control in my own character, which descends directly from his. But I also thank him for instilling poetry and mystery in my life — in the reassurance of a dreamy watercolor, centuries old, of what might be a misty mountain landscape, open to interpretation…
