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The Ogre

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi exerting efforts for Confrontation, Utter Devastation, and Imposing All Kinds of Sanctions including Economic Sanctions against Myanmar - If she declares to give them up, the Senior General will personally meet her.

Headline in The New Light of Myanmar, the government-controlled newspaper, 5th October 2007.

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man.

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

W.H Auden, August 1968

Hot News

It's very hot in Japan, in fact it has literally never been hotter. Today in the otherwise obscure municipality of Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture, a temperature of 40.9 degrees centigrade was measured, higher than the Japan Meteorological Agency's previous record of 40.8 C (Yamagata, 1933).

Steeping outside into the sun you feel as if you have been boffed on the head by a large, sweaty, sand-filled sock. It's not just the heat and humidity so much as the thought of the solar radiation beating down around and into you. You can almost feel it cooking your insides, like a plastic container of curry rice in a convenience store microwave.

No wonder, then, that so many people are seeking relief in swimming pools like the one at Tokyo Summerland, pictured above.

Yes, underneath the rubber rings, trunks and congealing Ambre Solaire, that's a swimming pool.

The funniest thing of all is when they switch on the wave machine. Click here to see what happens.

(Clip by CScout Japan, via Plastic Bamboo.)

Man City boss: is he evil?

Until a few weeks ago months ago, when I wrote stories about Thaksin Shinawatra, I identified him with the simple formula "deposed prime minister of Thailand" and filed them to the Foreign Editor. Since then he has risen to become something much more important than a foreign head of government - the owner of a Premiership football team. These days in The Times, he is "Man City boss", first and foremost; my story in today's paper ran in the Sports pages.

Since Thaksin's footie acquisition, there's been a lot written about him in the British papers, a lot more than when he was merely one of the richest and most powerful men in south-east Asia. But no consensus has really emerged on what to make of him. Reduced to its essentials the question seems to be: is this man evil? or, put with a little more sophistication, is he fit for the honour of running one of our venerable Association Football clubs? Is he a classic Asian despot who has fled to our shores after being driven out by his brave people, and who is now sinking his blood-soaked talons into one a prized sporting institution? Or a brilliant businessman and visionary leader who has been shamefully tumbled from power by a clique of unelected generals?

It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. But here is my stab at Thaksin-in-a-nutshell.

Flying Seoul-o

Writing about foreign stereotypes last week, I made sceptical reference to the popular notion of Japan as a land awash in bizarre pornography, where every other salarymen spends his lunch break hunched over rape manga, downloading bukkake videos, and purchasing schoolgirls' underwear from his office vending machine. Japanese smut is certainly distinctive, I acknowledged, but if it really is more widely consumed than in the rest of the world - show us the evidence.

Committed Asia Exile reader Joseh Miller has taken up the challenge by sending me a link to this fascinating page on the website Internet Filter Review. It goes some way towards answering a profound question: who are the world's biggest wankers?

The answers will amaze and appal you.

You have much to learn, Grasshopper

The observation that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of characters meaning "danger" and "opportunity" has always struck me as an especially irritating example of Low-Cal Asian Wisdom. "A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this . . . formulation," as Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, observes. "A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references . . .  It appears, often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for "thinking outside of the box," and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. This catchy expression (Crisis = Danger + Opportunity) has rapidly become nearly as ubiquitous as The Tao of Pooh and Sun Zi's Art of War for the Board / Bed / Bath / Whichever Room."

Hilarious, then, to discover that it is simply not true. The Chinese word for crisis - wēijī - actually means . . . crisis.

Full of beans?

Madame Sosostris, the congested clairvoyant, and this blog's resident supernatural oracle, has got off to a cracking start with her New Year Predictions. Her prophecy for February, of harsh weather and a new humanitarian crisis in North Korea, has come to pass already, as decribed in this grim piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph.

Natto rotted soybeans are in danger of becoming the new daikon (giant radish) of this blog, so I will try not to go on excessively about them. But I would be delinquent if I failed to provide two links.

The first is The Natto Project, a blog written by two friends who hate natto but forced themselves to eat it for breakfast every day. They began last April, and the blog abruptly breaks off without a word of explanation in late May, suggesting that the two may even have died as a result of their experiment.

The second is this thought-provoking rant by a Christian fundamentalist gentleman named Jim Rutz (oh yes!), arguing that soybeans in all their forms make you gay. "There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture," warns Jim, whose latest book is entitled The Meaning of Life. "Most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products." (Thanks to the always interesting What Japan Thinks finding this).

Having the slime of their lives

Below is my piece in this morning's paper about the ongoing natto boom.

For the record, I like natto quite a lot.

Ars Amoris Nipponica

Nowhere else in Tokyo do Japanese and foreigners interact so intensely as in that great cosmopolitan melting pot known as Roppongi. Lotus-eating paradise to some, to others a pathetic pick-up strip, Roppongi is the place where J-Girls and foreign Charisma Men congregate every weekend to find one another. It's an erotic jungle, as hazard-strewn as Borneo, New Guinea or the Upper Amazon. But finally, a Japanese publisher has come up with a Baedeker to guide the first timer through Roppongi's elaborate mating rituals.

It's called Roppongi English and it has been fully scanned in by the excellent Japan Probe blog. No young Japanese lady on the pull can afford not to read it, immediately.

Farewell to Groom-Tossing

We have known for long enough, of course, about the potential effects of climate change. But it only really strikes home when it effects something close to you, a place or a tradition which will never be the same again. Such examples seem to arise every day, most recently in Tokamachi in Niigata Prefecture, where global warming is threatening a hallowed custom - the Bridegroom-Tossing of Matsunoyama Onsen

The Inexorable Logic of Late Capitalism

[From today's Mainichi.18.9 million yen is £82,641.14.]

World's most expensive Hello Kitty figure to go on sale in Tokyo

Stuck for a Christmas present for that very special someone? Those with enough cash and a sufficiently heightened sense of cute might wish to splurge on a figurine of Sanrio's popular character Hello Kitty up for sale this month -- for 18.9 million yen.

The Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo has announced that it will sell one Hello Kitty figure made of pure platinum. Priced at 18.9 million yen, it is reportedly the most expensive Hello Kitty figure ever produced. It will go on sale on Tuesday.

The shiny figure is 5.6 centimeters high and weighs 590 grams. Its owner can attach seven different ribbons made of diamonds, rubies, and other precious gems to the figure and use it as a pendant.

The department store has put the figure on display in its special Christmas section. The buyer will be able to take the unique piece home on Dec. 21 -- albeit with a much lighter wallet.

Why I wish it had been a girl

The mother and child are reported to be healthy and in good spirits. The happiness of the well wishers outside the Imperial Palace was unfeigned, and the pregnancy even brought about a huge spike in the share price of manufacturers of baby-related goods. But for one reason, and one reason only, the birth of a baby boy to Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko yesterday was a disappointment – the fact that the 2.6kg, 49cm baby boy turned out to be a boy in the first place.

Japan was on the verge of a huge symbolic change – the change, after centuries of male succession, to a system in which a female member of the imperial family could reign as an empress. The country’s outgoing prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was in favour of it. A government appointed panel of eminent persons had presented in detail their reasons for supporting the reform. Public support for the move was as high as 80 per cent, and opposition was limited to a minority of – admittedly vocal – traditionalists and right wingers. But yesterday, thanks to an accident of chromosomes, the noisy minority won.

Watashi wa minai. Watashi wa ... kawanai*

One of the pleasures of Japanese cinemas, apart from the deep comfy seats, the abundant booze and Ladies' Night (females pay just Y1000 on the first Wednesday of the month) is the world's most hyperbolic public information broadcast. It begins with the face of a young Japanese woman who looks as if she has just received extremely bad news - perhaps her chihuahua has died, or the Japanese football team has lost one-nil to Saudi Arabia or, at the very least, her husband has run off with a member of Morning Musume.

Doomy music is playing. Tears began to roll down her bonny cheeks. And - horror of horrors - they are black!

Help! Gurgle!

'So why am I leaving?'

An old friend of mine, Laura Holland, recently left Japan after fifteen years as a student, journalist, editor, publisher, and promoter of Sailor Moon, the cartoon schoolgirl with the disturbingly shapely hips. At her sayonara party, instead of the conventional speech of valediction she handed out a written statement. It will ring true with anyone who has ever asked themselves the crucial question, 'Have I been in Japan too long?' With Laura's permission I reproduce it here, lightly bowdlerised and glossed for readers unfamiliar with Japan, Japanese and the world of the gaijin (foreigner in Japan).

So why am I leaving?

Imagine a nice comfy armchair. You know you should go jogging, but it's cold and wet outside. The armchair is Japan. The cold wet jog is England.

You know which one is better for you long term but it's hard to leave the present comfort of the armchair.

• I was feeling lazy and uninspired
• I missed unconditional, lifelong relationships with old friends and family
• I wanted more work responsibility and respect than I was getting here
• I didn’t want to end up a bitter old gaijin trout moaning down the pub about not getting laid.

Smilingly Excluded: an essay on Donald Richie

[This piece appears in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. A taster is attached below: to read the full review click here.]

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie ed. Leza Lowitz · Stone Bridge, 494 pp, £13.99

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents, chief among them the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a reporter, tour guide, cinema critic, film director, print-maker, novelist, travel writer, editor, teacher, subtitler, public speaker and actor. Apart from fiction, both short and long, and countless newspaper columns and reviews, he has published books about film, art, Zen, history, tattoos, gardens, temples, phallic symbols, food and bonsai. He has been a friend to famous and talented foreigners and to a cross-section of the most interesting Japanese of the second half of the 20th century. The index to The Japan Journals consists of a list of Richie’s acquaintances, followed by their professions. The first page alone includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author).

He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been incinerated by American bombs; he is still going strong today, as the Japanese nervously brace themselves for their third period of postwar economic growth. Hardly a month passes in Tokyo without a public appearance by Donald, implausibly spry and dapper at 82, reading from his new book of criticism at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club or introducing a season of Ozu films at International House. Why then – outside Japan, at least – should he be so little known?

Read on . . .

Let squeaking commence

Thanks to the committed, but anonymous, reader of Asia Exile who sent the following Morning Musume video clip link which, if anything, surpasses the first.

It shows the gruesome toothsomes featured in my last post in confrontation with a large, angry, neo-dinosaur. (Is it a Komodo dragon?)

There are even subtitles.

Click here. And click on the picture for an enlarged Raquel Welch.

Nightwork, fieldwork

Among the smaller, but more intriguing, sub-genres of writing on Japan are books by foreign authors who have worked in the mizu shobai – the ‘water trade’ or Japanese night time entertainment business. Since the death of Lucie Blackman, the young British woman allegedly killed in 2000 by a man she met while working as a club hostess, it’s reasonable to guess that there won’t be many more of these. But three or four of the most interesting books on my Japan bookshelf fall into the category, plus a couple more I haven’t yet got round to reading.

Most of these, naturally enough, are by women, because women occupy the central place in the mizu shobai. John David Morley’s autobiographical novel Pictures from the Water Trade is a fine and underrated book, but it is about a visitor, rather than a worker, in the Floating World. The first, and the best, account I know of is Angela Carter’s essay ‘Poor Butterfly’ in her non-fiction collection Nothing Sacred. The crime novelist Mo Hayder worked as a hostess in Roppongi to research her luridly packaged novel Tokyo (which I haven’t yet read), and even the extravagantly bespectacled Sarah Dunant, post-modernist’s crumpet, late of BBC2’s Late Show, did a stint in a Ginza hostess club. (She wrote an interesting piece about for The Times after the discovery of Lucie Blackman’s body in 2001 which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be on line.)

I have just read the book which, as a far as I know, is the only academic treatment of the modern mizu shobai (excluding writing about the world of the geisha). Anne Allison is a professor at Duke University who spent four months in 1981 working in ‘Bijo”, the pseudonym she gives to an up market hostess club in Roppongi. In 1994, she published Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, an anthropological study of girls who light cigarettes, pour whisky, and flirt for a living, and the men who pay them to do it.

Meaning of the madness in Memphis

[UPDATE: Moving images of Zany 'Zumi's Graceland antics can be viewed here, on the Channel 4 website. The report includes bowel-melting archive footage of David Owen and other Liberals chortling along to Elvis at their 1983 party conference.]

I can't make up my mind about the true meaning of Junichiro Koizumi's Elvis pilgrimage to Graceland with Bush, Laura and the Presley women yesterday (drolly reported by my colleague Time Reid here). I don't know whether to blush or to cheer, to punch the air or bury my face in my hands. As I see it, there are two opposite, but equally arguable interpretations of the extraordinary events in Memphis.

Interpretation Number One:

It was a disaster, a well intended self-humiliation by Koizumi, which will have the effect of obscuring his many achievements - as well as his disastrous failures.

I applaud Jun-chan for his unselfconsciousness and his passion for life outside the world of politics. On the whole, with his upright demeanour, well cut grey suits and air of mysterious detachment, he is a very dignified character. But yesterday - well, even Lisa Marie and Priscilla looked embarrassed.

From an extremely full account in the Washington Post:

By the time he got to the Jungle Room, decorated after Elvis's memory of Hawaii, Koizumi was ready to perform.

He smiled at Lisa Marie, her brown hair streaked with blond.

"You look like Elvis," he told her.

A mode of style, an exquisite fancy

Years ago I came across a quotation from Oscar Wilde to the effect that the Japanese do not exist - they are "an exquisite fancy of art". I've been on the look out for the source ever since. Now, of course, it is just a Google away.

It turns out to be from an 1889 essay of Oscar's called The Decay of Lying: An Observation. It's in the form of a dialogue between two typically irritating aesthetes named Cyril and Vivian. It begins thus:

A DIALOGUE

Persons: Cyril and Vivian
Scene: the Library of a country house in Nottinghamshire

CYRIL: [coming in through the open window from the terrace] My dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN: Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her . . . blah, blah, blahedy-blah . . .

Vivian is a chap, by the way.

It takes a bit of getting used to but, as usual with Oscar, perseverance is quickly rewarded. The passage on Japan comes towards the end. When I first saw the quotation from it years ago, I took it to be an example of what has become known as Orientalism, the distancing and exoticising of a foreign culture,a habit to which the imperial British over the years have been particularly prone. In fact, the opposite is true.

Here is the passage (it's Vivian speaking, as usual):

The King of Mt Merapi and the Queen of the Southern Seas

It's less than a fortnight since the Java earthquake, but two or three generations of news have already been and gone - the "terror" arrests in Canada, death of al-Zarqawi in Iraq, and soon the maelstrom of the World Cup. I arrived there late on the day after the Saturday quake, and left the following Thursday.For the purposes of a daily newspaper, there wasn't anything very new left to say.

Day One: describe the immediate impact of the disaster, and recount the stories of survivors. Day Two: the terrible scramble for those trapped beneath the rubble. Then on Days Three and Four you concentrate on the aid effort, inevitably rather shambolic at first, but increasing in efficiency and effectiveness. On Day Five you might write a more general story about the region. But after that competition from more rapidly changing situations in other parts of the world edges the story out of the news pages. It makes me a little sad, and causes me to wonder whether I have become cynical. At this stage after the disaster, of course, the vastly more catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami was still ain important headline. But, given its smaller scale and the relative competence of the aid effort, it's not surprising that attention should have turned elsewhere.

And now, of course, Mt Merapi, the turbulent volcano which overlooks the earthquake zone, looks as if it is brewing a major eruption.

Smorgasbord of the Vanities

From this morning's newspaper ... (A far more serious and reverent account of the Tapas Molecular Bar can be read here.)

The whiff of truffle on tissue paper: a sure sign that the glory days are back

TOKYO NOTEBOOK by Richard Lloyd Parry

FOR THOSE of us who were just too young to experience them as adults, the boom years of the late 1980s have a glittering, almost mystical, allure. That was the era of Wall Street and the yuppie, of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Martin Amis’s Money. To work in London or Manhattan, if the myths are to be believed, was like living in a 24-hour Duran Duran music video, complete with champagne, yachts and an excess of hair gel. And nowhere was the consumption more gross and conspicuous than in Japan.

Old timers sigh wistfully about the delicious excesses of Bubble-era Tokyo even now — the night clubs staffed by beauties from across the planet, with gold-leaf sprinkled on the cocktails and mink covers on the lavatory seats. Back then, they say, the sushi was not considered edible unless it was eaten off the naked body of a young beauty queen. But then the Bubble burst, and those of us who arrived here late found ourselves in a pallid and uneasy city, struggling with the funk of recession and unemployment. Finally, though, I have incontrovertible evidence that the glory days are back.

A twinkling in every lung

As I wheezed on the treadmill in the gym (Gold's Gym on Omotesando Avenue in Tokyo, the one above the big branch of Zara), the randomly shuffling iPod plucked out a track I hadn't listened to for a while: Breathing by Kate Bush.

It is a creepily disturbing song about an in utero foetus whose mother is exposed to a nuclear explosion. Remarkable that she was 21 when it was released and still younger when she wrote it. If foetuses could sing then I am sure that they would sound like Kate Bush at this stage in her career, with a voice between that of a little girl and Mrs Thatcher at her most indignant:

Camera in the jungle

For thousands of years, our of the plants, trees and animals of the forest, the Iban people of Borneo have created a beautiful and delicate art. Rattan vines from the jungle are woven into strong, supple baskets with geometric patterns. The bony casque of the hornbill bird is carved into tiny sculptures of men and creatures. Softwoods are shaped into the famous Iban war shields with their symmetrical designs of Iban heroes. But last week, on a visit to an Iban longhouse in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, I discovered a new accomplishment of these remarkable people: Iban photography.

Christmas in Borneo

The Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, where I passed a relaxing and tranquil Christmas Day, is the least conventionally festive country in the world.

Climatically, it is as far from Lapland as it is possible to get – a small humid enclave between the tropical rain forests of northern Borneo and the South China Sea, where reindeer, or anyone dressed in a thick red overcoat with white fur trimmings, would quickly collapse of heat exhaustion to die slowly of dehydration within a few hours. Its religion is orthodox and faithfully observed Islam – in the capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, most of the women wear head scarves, and the city is dominated by two huge and opulently beautiful mosques. But one thing above all militates against the traditional British Christmas –

If you are hungry, eat my face

Conscientious students of Asian affairs will remember the important story which I broke a month ago about Dokonjo Daikon, a Japanese giant radish, who warmed the cockles of a nation by pushing his way up through a layer of solid asphalt. (Too complicated to summarise in a sentence, but read about it here).

Sadly, he was murdered a few weeks ago, but daikon fans can solace themselves with a new toy which is prominent in Japanese toy shops this Christmas: a cuddly giant radish. The soft daikon comes in various sizes, from key ring fob to giant cuddly comforter, and is depicted with an austere and melancholy expression. I can’t find a link for this (be in touch if you know one), but the daikon are on sale on the ground floor of Kiddy Land on Omotesando Avenue in Tokyo.

Go to the third floor for my second Christmas present tip, a range of goods featuring that enigmatic figure of Japanese popular culture: Anpanman.

Anpanman is a bit difficult to explain, but here goes:

Blogs of Innocence and Experience

I was a hesitant recruit to blogging, but after a week and a half I am enjoying this. It is one more demand on time, of which there is never enough in the day anyway. I like to polish and worry over what I write, whereas a blog is, or should be, fifty per cent spontaneous. But perhaps it will suit me, for I am a show off, if a shy one. And then there is the novelty of working in this unfamiliar, marginal writing space, unconstrained by word count, time and the wisdom or folly of editors.

A newspaper article is an artefact, fixed and finished as soon as it is printed, but a weblog is provisional, a work-in-progress; almost alive. It can be constantly refined and updated. Errors of fact and lapses of style can be corrected at a stroke. And then there are images and moving pictures, and sound files, and links... It feels like the birth of a new literary medium, which doesn’t happen many times in a lifetime, and it’s exciting to get stuck in before the conventions become fixed and the hierarchies established.

Thomas Nashe would have had a weblog, if he’d been born 400 years later, and so would Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. William Blake would have had an extravagant multi-media website, complete with audio files recording his conversations with angels, and George Orwell would have been a furious blogger, although clueless about the technical aspects. Who else?

Some of what I will write about here will fall under the category of ‘Current Affairs’, but not all. Much of it will be about Japan, where I live, but also about Korea and south-east Asia, the other places I am paid to worry about, as well as the conflicts I am sent to cover from time to time, such as Iraq. Perhaps I’ll also write about this strange, untethered life I lead: in Asia, but not of it, looking out at the world from inside a soap bubble floating one floor up above west-central Tokyo.

I’ll try to post something most days. Comments, criticism, ideas and links are welcome.

Battleship Turkey

Last week I went to a preview of Otokotachi no Yamato, the glossy new film from the Toei film studio about the kamikaze mission of the great wartime battleship Yamato. The film opens in Japan next Saturday, so few people in Japan have seen it. But there is already trepidation among pacifists and others on the left that the film will contribute to what many of them regard as a dangerous lurch in the direction of right-wing nationalism. (See my piece in yesterday's Times, and Colin Joyce’s earlier one for the Telegraph).

I’m undecided about the nature or significance of this fancied lurch (Has there been a genuine shift, or is it just the appearance of one caused by the decline of the Japanese left? And if there has, is it any more important or alarming than the kind of political shifts which have occurred repeatedly in most other democracies since the war?) For what they’re worth, here are a few observations on Otokotachi no Yamato (which means Men’s Yamato and which I translate rather freely as Everyman’s Yamato).