Murray Sayle, who died last weekend, wrote regularly for The Spectator. Here is an edited extract from his column of 13 May 1989.
Aikawa, near Tokyo
The night of 19 December last was cold and starry. Our house stood in a clearing in a pine forest halfway up a mountainside, and the flames could be seen a good
ten miles away, down by the Nissan factory. Some of them even downed tools for a moment or two, we heard, wondering what the bright light was.
Not that fires are unusual in Japan. Before the days of concrete cliffs they were called ‘The Flowers of Edo’, the old name of Tokyo. Traditional Japanese houses are built of massive
wooden beams to sway with earthquakes, with two-inch-thick straw mats on the floors, papered room dividers, thatched roofs and wooden shutters to keep out the rain.
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