Embracing Western culture

It’s five o’clock on a November evening, and I’m leaning over a balcony watching a pipe band parading in the concourse below. But it’s not the chill of a Scottish autumn I’m feeling, rather the mildness of autumn in Japan — and the pipers are not Scots, but Japanese members of the Tokyo Piping Society welcoming a touring exhibition of French and Scottish 19th-century paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland to the Bunkamura Museum in downtown Shibuya.

If you think London is multicultural, you should try Tokyo — the main difference being that, whereas we British rely on others for our multi-culture, the Japanese are happy to do it for themselves. Having made up their minds in 1868 to admit Western culture, they have embraced it in all its manifestations, from Starbucks and McDo’s to Scottish pipe bands and the Mississippi paddle steamer plying the waters of Lake Ashi beneath Mt Fuji.