Japan

Thursday

Gary Dexter

Mixed blessings | 13 July 2017

Japan is the only developed country where people openly espouse two distinct and incompatible religions at the same time — Buddhism and Shinto. The Japanese go to Shinto shrines for weddings and children’s celebrations. They go to Buddhist temples for funerals. Shinto shrines are sometimes found within the precincts of Buddhist temples, and vice versa, so it’s possible to beseech Buddha and the fox god in the same ten minutes. To confuse the picture still further, Japan is one of the most secular places on Earth: atheism is practised simultaneously with the other mutually incompatible religions. My Japanese wife, for example, visits and prays at temples and shrines, but in

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Is the EU-Japan ‘trade deal’ real – or just a stunt?

There is much celebration in Brussels today about what’s being described as a EU-Japan trade deal, but for political rather than economic reasons. Donald Trump has arrived in Hamburg for the G20 summit where he finds himself cast as a wicked protectionist, at odds with a pro-free trade global order. To hammer home this point, the EU is claiming to have agreed a trade “deal” with Japan, with whom Mr Trump pulled out of talks when he abandoned Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. At this stage, Tokyo gave precedence to Brussels – and today’s, erm, political agreement is the result. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, is already trying to use this to taunt Trump.

Thursday

James Walton

Mad about the girls

It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are separated by safety barriers, as the glow sticks wave and the band’s name is excitedly chanted. But in Storyville: Tokyo Girls (BBC4, Tuesday), there was one fairly major twist: the teenage girls were the band, and the middle-aged men their swooning fans. As this jaw-dropping documentary explained, the girls in question are known in Japan as ‘idols’. Their songs tend to be about how demure and innocent they are; and to prove it, they often perform in school uniforms — although with skirts a lot shorter, I suspect, than is

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Making waves | 25 May 2017

The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much to see. So much he had not painted. On his deathbed, Hokusai, attended by his doctor, said a prayer. ‘If heaven will extend my life by ten more years…’. He paused and made a private calculation. ‘If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I’ll manage to become a true artist.’ He may have been 90, but he wasn’t done yet. In life, Hokusai (1760–1849) painted dragons, creatures of long life, by the dozen. He has them disappear in puffs of inky smoke, then reappear across the

Thursday

Gary Dexter

Found in translation

Buririggu deshita. Suraibi tōbu Wēbu de gairu to gimburu shite, Nante mimuji na borogōbu, Mōmu rassu autoguraibimashita ne. If this looks familiar, it’s not surprising. This is the first verse of ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, translated into Japanese by Noriko Watanabe. Ms Watanabe is a translator of children’s books living in Sendai, in the north of Japan, and she is working on a new translation of the two Alice books. I met her in a bar called Come Here. Is translating Lewis Carroll, which is already nonsense, into another language, a near-impossible task? I asked her. ‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘Actually it’s easy because Japanese is about 15

Thursday

Harriet Sergeant

Home is where the art is

The house in which I lived in Tokyo was built by my landlady, a former geisha. It stood on a plot of land given to her by her last lover. It was small, full of light and positioned to enjoy the large ginkgo tree in the garden next door. It was easily the best designed house I have ever lived in. Nostalgia for that house and my former life in Tokyo overwhelmed me as I wandered through the new exhibition at the Barbican — The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945. Exhibitions on architecture are notoriously hard to pull off but this succeeds triumphantly. Japanese domestic architecture has consistently

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Major to minor

Ghost in the Shell is the Hollywood live-action remake of the 1995 Japanese anime of the same name and it’s set at a time in the future when, it would appear, the world is populated by blandly one-dimensional characters. Evil is perpetrated by our old friend, Corporate Evil Man — yes, still — and everyone communicates via dialogue so stilted and ham-fisted it makes you die inside a little. That said, at the media screening I attended we were all given a free bag of high-end crisps, so it wasn’t two hours totally wasted. (I do really like crisps, high-end or otherwise.) The film stars Scarlett Johansson, who looked liked

Thursday

Will Heaven

Cherry blossom

In what I like to think of as The Spectator’s back garden — most people call it St James’s Park — the cherry trees are in blossom. There’s a group of six or seven of them, clouds of bright pink, in the corner nearest 22 Old Queen Street. They’re worth a look, even if you think blossom’s a bit of a girlie interest. There are more dotted around. A little grove of white cherries on the south side of the lake is ranked among the best in London, according to one website: ‘A simple point-and-shoot photo of these trees somehow transforms itself into an impressionist painting.’ But we shouldn’t rank

Thursday

Taki

High life | 23 February 2017

From my chalet high up above the village, I look up at the immense, glistening mountain range of the Alps, and my spirit soars. Even youthful memories receding into sepia cannot bring me down from the high. Mountains, more than seas, can be exhilarating for the soul. Then I open the newspapers and the downer is as swift as the onset of an Alpine blizzard. Television is even more of a bummer. Last week I saw Piers Morgan tell an American TV personality — a big-time Trump hater — whose face looks exactly like a penis how strange he found it that two people like Bush and Blair, who lied

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Long suffering

Silence is Martin Scorsese’s film about Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan whose faith is sorely tested, just as your patience will be sorely tested too. There are moments of grandeur. The landscape is lush, and often mistily beautiful. The torture porn is spectacularly inventive. But its commercial compromises may drive you to distraction (the casting, the language choices), it is punishingly repetitive and, at nearly three hours, sooooooo, sooooooo long. My own patience was sorely tested to the point that I might have taken a little bit of a nap. If I did I never sensed I missed anything of note, but then it is that kind of film. This

Thursday

Bryan Appleyard

The descent of man

Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must only be a matter of time before we submit to the machine ascendancy. So far, it has been a subtle, incremental process that conceals any wider significance. Take satellite navigation. This was first introduced in the 1980s and is now more or less universal. Maps have become quaint. As a result, we walk or drive

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Japan Notebook | 20 October 2016

Tokyo is visual chaos everywhere, the antithesis of the Japanese interior. It is a multilevel jumble of overpasses, neon signs, electric pylons, railway lines and traffic lights. The pavements are empty, not a pedestrian human in sight. And the leader of North Korea is still lobbing ballistic missiles right over Japan and cackling away about his collection of nuclear warheads. Drinking beer in a sushi bar in Ginza on our first night, I ask my neighbour whether people are worried by the behaviour of the lunatic child across the water. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I am far more frightened by our prime minister. He really is dangerous.’ Shinzo Abe is proposing to repeal

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Thoroughly bewitching

Angela Carter was a seminal, a watershed novelist: perhaps one of the last generation of novelists to change both the art she practised and the world. Reading this splendid biography, it is hard to avoid the false conclusion that she always knew exactly what she was doing. Her life, in its swerves and unexpected corners, always turns out to be contributing to her work; how clever of her, one starts to think, to get a job on a local news-paper, to go to Japan, to have an array of dotty, oppressive or plain witchy aunts, mother and grandmother…. Of course it was not like that. Carter’s life seems rich and

Thursday

Taki

High life | 15 September 2016

I’m jittery and fragile but free of plaster and in the dojo, slowly turning lean and muscular. Never listen to your doctor is my message. Instead of two months in a cast I spent only five weeks, and I’ve just finished a brutal three-day course of karate with both the leg and elbow still intact. Yippee! The message was loud and clear. If you’re drinking vodka at 4.30 a.m., don’t lean backwards while sitting on a ledge. When the doctors sew you up and place you in a cast, don’t listen to them; take it off early. You have nothing to lose but the plaster. And the moment you’re free,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Mrs May the ‘Student Killer’ should count the cost of her visa crackdown

In the post-Brexit landscape whose shape was barely glimpsed in G20 discussions at Hangzhou, one thing is clear: soon we’ll have to stop waffling about trade deals and start pushing British products the world wants to buy. One such is education, at our universities, independent schools and English-language colleges — an export sector calculated in 2011 by the now defunct Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to be worth £17.5 billion. Not only does this sector attract foreign exchange, plug funding gaps for cash-strapped universities and support thousands of jobs, it also lays the ground for future relationships with students who return home to embark on business careers. And as

Monday

Ross Clark

G20 leaders have fallen for Project Fear

So, last week’s sharp rise in the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing wasn’t a freak. This morning its twin, the PMI for the much larger services sector, also showed a huge rebound to 52.9, more than reversing the fall to 47.4 in July and putting it marginally ahead of PMI for the Eurozone, which stands at 52.8. The combined PMI was 53.2 in August. Anything above 50 suggests that the economy in expanding while anything below 50 suggests contraction. Just like last week’s manufacturing figure, this morning’s news seems to have caught forecasters unaware: the consensus was for PMI in services to be 50.0. It is a reminder of just

Thursday

Liam Halligan

The Bank of Wonderland

What should we think about negative interest rates? What kind of Alice in Wonderland world are we living in when companies and households are paid to borrow and charged if they save? Seemingly crazy, negative interest rates are spreading nonetheless. Implemented by central banks in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, they now apply in countries accounting for a quarter of the global economy. Should we be worried? Could we see negative rates in Britain? Earlier this month, the Bank of England cut interest rates for the first time in seven years, from 0.5 per cent to a new record low of 0.25 per cent. Quantitative easing was also restarted, with the

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 August 2016

The end of an emperor — 82-year-old Emperor Akihito of Japan has announced that he wants to abdicate, partly, he said, because he doesn’t want Japan to come to a standstill in the event of him falling ill, as with previous emperors. — When Emperor Hirohito was diagnosed with duodenal cancer in 1987, the news was not reported; nor, it is said, was the emperor told. But within a year it became clear that he was seriously ill, because he had to cancel appearances. TV reporters camped outside the palace; weddings and autumn festivals were cancelled. When Hirohito died on 7 January 1989, aged 87, there were 48 days of

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 4 August 2016

Japanese housewives are so convinced of the value of office work that they get angry if their husbands come home early in the evenings; and this is why many Japanese husbands, fearing assault by the rolling pin, spend long periods at the pub before heading home very late. Japanese wives are deluded, however, if they believe that offices are places in which much work is done; on the contrary, they are places in which time is constantly being wasted. Offices are not conducive to long and concentrated effort; they offer far too many distractions. You aren’t alone in an office, but amid people with whom to converse and to intrigue,

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 July 2016

Home The collapse of BHS after Sir Philip Green had extracted large sums and left the business on ‘life support’, with a £571 million pension deficit, was ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism,’ said a report by the Business and the Work and Pensions select committees of the House of Commons. The British economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the quarter ending in June. A man was shot dead at a commercial pool party in Headley, Surrey, organised by Summerlyn Farquharson, known as the Female Boss Krissy, and the Jamaican reggae artist Jason White, known as Braintear Spookie. HMS Ambush, a Royal Navy Astute-class nuclear-powered submarine, was in a ‘glancing collision’ with