Back in April this year, Japan abolished restrictions that previously limited military equipment transfers to five nonlethal categories: rescue, transport, warning, surveillance and mine-sweeping.

In future, countries with which Japan has a defence equipment and technology transfer agreement – a roster of 17 nations that includes the US, UK and Australia – will be able to avail themselves of Japanese-made missiles, rockets, drones, jets, frigates and eventually electromagnetic rail-guns and laser weapons, which are currently in development.

Lasers, of the type tested in recent weeks aboard the experimental vessel Asuka, are seen as the holy grail of cost-efficient defence against cheap drones.

Artist’s rendering of Lockheed Martin’s HELIOS system. Japan is developing a similar weapon

Japan is also part of a collaborative project - involving the UK and Italy, and potentially extending to other countries besides – to build a next-generation fighter aircraft. It is due to come into service around 2035. Who knows what East Asia, and indeed the wider world, may look like by then.

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An historic shift appears to be underway, from Japan as a beacon of postwar pacifism to something new, whose nature isn’t yet clear. China often raises the spectre of Japanese ‘remilitarisation.’ And yet what’s happening looks more like the building of ever-deeper links with countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia. This is not a return to a dark past - but it’s not without risks either.

People who worry about Takaichi’s latest move ought to worry less about unreconstructed samurai toting laser weapons and take an interest instead in the steady erosion of Japanese civil society across the 1920s and early 1930s.

One of the most important forces launching Japan down the road to true militarism back then was a perceived threat from abroad – the US, China, the Soviet Union – allied to the combined clout in the country’s politics of industrialists, military men, an unaccountable police force, a partially-corrupt judiciary, fearful journalists and weak parliamentarians.

Bit by bit, and under the rhetorical cover of doing what had to be done to save their country, they squeezed the life out of Japan’s fledgling democracy.

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Now look at how Prime Minister Takaichi has instituted her new policy on lethal weapons. Not in her manifesto. Not put before parliament. Decided instead at cabinet level – albeit flagged back in 2025 as something Takaichi wanted to do.

The question for the next few years is probably not going to be whether Japan ought to build up its military-industrial base and steadily give its armed forces more legal leeway. It will likely do both – the strategic climate seems to be pointing in this direction. The question is whether Japan’s democracy is robust enough to manage these things in a way that people, in Japan and around Asia, can trust.

An Imperial Japanese Navy honour guard, 1928

Worth watching is what happens with Takaichi’s far-reaching reassessment of Japan’s national security later this year. It may include the creation of a centralised national intelligence bureau, to replace Japan’s existing and fragmented system. Takaichi also plans to launch what some are calling a ‘Japanese CIA’: a foreign intelligence service and training school.

Critics charge that these organizations, together with new cybersecurity initiatives, are developing faster than any associated plans for civic oversight. These are essential for guaranteeing the upholding of the constitution on things like the right to privacy.

Add to this mix the building of a defence industry reliant on export contracts and you have a recipe for foreign policy being made in murky, self-interested semi-darkness.

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Public opinion has been softening for some time on the Self-Defence Forces, which were once suspected of being an incubation phase for a future Japanese Army. The prominent role of the SDF in disaster relief back in 2011, and any time Japan has a serious earthquake, has helped to build a degree of affection.

But that does not mean that people would necessarily support an SDF with improved offensive capabilities and the legal license to use them.

There is meanwhile strong opposition in Japan to Takaichi’s lifting of restrictions on the export of lethal weapons.

Developing more robust forms of self-defence and even deterrence is one thing: people in Japan are not naïve about the potential threat posed by China and North Korea. Setting out to make money, even indirectly, from the prosecution of wars around the world is a very different proposition. It far more obviously offends against the history and morality of postwar Japanese pacifism.

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It may also be bad for business, in particular those whose profits depend on Japan’s global reputation as a peaceful and civilised place - from tech and games companies to the country’s burgeoning tourist industry. They may become part of a new post-pacifist coalition, which accepts that those sunny postwar decades are not coming back but seeks to carry their best peace-loving qualities into the future, as part of a set of meaningful ‘Japanese’ values.

Japan’s original pacifist generation is dying out, and the old coalition led by leftists and students looks unlikely to reform. Civil society organisations like the Network Against Japan Arms Trade have seen their memberships falling in recent years. But their younger replacements include well-networked NGOs with good access to the media, some of which may end up partnering with businesses worried about reputational vulnerability.

The activities of these civil society groups, in shaping the thinking of the electorate while holding power meaningfully to account, will be essential over the years to come. Japan’s role as a beacon of pacifism may be coming to an end. But a worthy replacement would be for it to lead the way in showing other prosperous democracies how to engage in responsible military spending, geared towards defending their vision of how the world ought to work.

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A longer version of this article first appeared in UnHerd.

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Images

HELIOS: Interesting Engineering (fair use).

Imperial Japanese Navy honour guard: Old Tokyo (fair use).

At the moment, all’s well: we’re cheering both teams on. But on my slightly amateurish projections - correct me in the comments if I’m wrong - Japan and England may meet in the quarter-finals. At that point, I will be sitting at the opposite end of the sofa from my Japanese wife, and we’ll just have to see which way the children break…

As usual, the UK media is awestruck that Japanese football fans clean up after themselves when the game’s over - in contrast not only to England fans joyfully spraying the stands with beer but also, according to Japanese women taking to social media in recent days, to those same Japanese fans leaving the cleaning of their own homes to their wives.

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Cliché though it may be, the ‘tidy fans’ image is part of a powerful and under-appreciated aspect of Japanese soft power. Anime, manga, food and computer games get a lot of press. Sport deserves more.

Baseball has become the Japanese national game, arriving there in 1872 when an American professor introduced it to his students. But football reached Japan the very next year, courtesy of a British Royal Navy officer who decided to get Japanese cadets playing it.

It was from Britain, too, that the men’s football team gained their kit colours. The two big universities in Japan in the early twentieth century were Tokyo Imperial University and Kyoto Imperial University. In order to differentiate themselves in rowing competitions, they emulated the famous rivalry between Cambridge (light blue) and Oxford (dark blue).

After drawing lots, Tokyo got light blue and Kyoto took the dark. When Tokyo Imperial University’s football team represented their country in 1930, they wore the university’s light blue, won, and the colour stuck.

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Six years later, the Japanese men’s team faced Sweden at the Berlin Olympics - duly kitted out in blue, though the shade became steadily darker. In a sign of viciously racist times, ahead of their encounter a Stockholm newspaper reportedly declared: Slår vi inte dessa snedögda halvapor med åtminstone 10-0 är vi inte längre ett kulturfolk - ‘If we don't beat these slant-eyed half-apes by at least 10–0, we are no longer a civilised people.’

Assuming this story is true - and some doubt it - then maybe this ugly pre-match boast was leaked to the Japanese team at half-time. Having gone two-nil down, they roared back in the second half to take the game 3-2. For the Swedish newspapers, it was nothing short of a national humiliation. In Japan, it came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Berlin.’ Here’s the squad:

Tragedy intervened, in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, but sport became a huge part of Japan’s postwar image around the world - litter-pickers included. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics was a major come-back moment, showcasing a peaceful, high-tech country and featuring the vaguely raunchy-sounding ‘Blue Impulse’: the aerobatics team of the new Japanese Air Self-Defence Force.

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The men’s football team - under the branding of ‘Samurai Blue’ since the 2000s - went on to embrace the role of plucky outsiders at international tournaments. Their finest hour so far came at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, when they beat the host nation to take third place. Not bad for a team made up of ordinary salarymen, who went from training together after a day at the office to having bronze medals hung around their necks in front of a vast crowd at the Azteca Stadium:

The men’s team went fully professional in the 1990s, but they have yet to equal the achievements of the women’s team, which was formed in 1981 and managed just thirty years later to win the FIFA Women’s World Cup, in Germany in July 2011.

It was a beautiful moment, coming just months after the triple disasters of March 2011: earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. One of the squad members actually had a day job at the nuclear plant where the meltdown occurred. Still grieving for what had befallen their country, the people of Japan very much needed a moment like this:

So we’ll let Japan have 2011.

But 2026 as well? We shall see...

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Image credits:

Japan’s 1936 squad: The JFA (fair use).

Japan’s 1968 squad: The AFC (fair use).

Japan’s victorious women’s team: Guardian (fair use).

The star players in Barbarians include Japan’s ‘Three Unifiers,’ who took their country from fragmentation to nationhood using a judicious mix of scheming, bloodshed, ninjas and more bloodshed.

Each man had a nickname. Oda Nobunaga was once the ‘great fool’: like many a teenager, his future potential wasn’t immediately obvious to those around him. But in the 1560s and 1570s, he carved out for himself an impressive chunk of central Honshū (Japan’s main island), including the capital Kyoto.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was, to his one-time boss Nobunaga, ‘that bald rat.’ Others called him ‘monkey.’ When Nobunaga died suddenly in 1582, at the hands of one of Japan’s most infamous traitors - Akechi Mitsuhide - Hideyoshi seized the chance to pick up where Nobunaga had been forced to leave off. He became Japan’s virtual dictator, adding to lands inherited from Nobunaga the rest of Honshū and the islands of Kyūshū and Shikoku.

The third and final unifier came to be known as the ‘old badger.’ Tokugawa Ieyasu is remembered by history as a man of cunning and strategic patience, willing to play the very long game. He was ruthless when he had to be, but was never one to squander his energies, men and money in fights that were unnecessary or unwinnable.

By far my favourite portrayal of him is Hiroyuki Sanada in the role of ‘Lord Toranaga,’ in the FX series Shōgun - based on James Clavell’s 1975 historical novel of the same name. The silences. The calculating gaze…

Hiroyuki Sanada as ‘Lord Toranaga’ in FX’s Shōgun

The real life and personality of Tokugawa Ieyasu is very difficult to reconstruct, since much of what we know comes to us from chronicles that were anything but neutral in their treatment of him.

But those ‘old badger’ traits really do come through in the decisions he made, across a long and extraordinary life. One story - possibly legendary - encapsulates those traits. Having made an alliance with Oda Nobunaga in the early 1560s, a young Ieyasu was steadily consolidating his power in and around a modest fief in Mikawa, central Honshū. One day, Nobunaga sent him a basket of peaches as a gift. Ieyasu’s men were no doubt looking forward to getting stuck in. But Ieyasu launched into a sermon:

This fruit may be a rare delicacy, but Nobunaga’s territory is far larger than mine. The things we can enjoy must be in proportion. If people like me take to wanting rare things, there will be only loss and no advantage. It would only mean planting good rice land with useless [fruit] trees, and giving the men more work.

In the same way, keeping fancy animals means wasting good money in getting and looking after them, while a taste for curios means frittering away your focus on worthless playthings…

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He may not have been much fun at a party, but Ieyasu’s instincts served him well. When Nobunaga died, he calculated that he was not yet strong enough to make himself the successor. Out fighting in the field when the news about Nobunaga came through, Ieyasu decided to retreat to Mikawa to consider his options.

This wasn’t a very noble move, when set against Hideyoshi’s heroic act of vengeance against Akechi Mitsuhide. One of Ieyasu’s later chroniclers had, it seems, to concoct a face-saving account of what happened and why. Ieyasu, they claim, had wanted to go to the place where Nobunaga had died and take his own life - accompanying his lord into the other world. But his men had held him back, begging him not to leave them.

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An uneasy truce was later made with Hideyoshi, and in 1590 we find the two men striking a bargain - reputedly solemnised by urinating, side by side, off a high castle wall. Ieyasu would receive an enormous fief in the eastern part of Honshū. Hideyoshi would remain hegemon.

The result was a few quiet and unromantic years for Ieyasu, during which he built up his castle-town at Edo. The castle itself was a leaky, near-derelict mess when he inherited it. The small surrounding town was built near a swamp. But rather than wasting his resources challenging Hideyoshi, Ieyasu held back while his great rival launched disastrous wars in Korea, weakening in the process many of the powerful lords (daimyō) who were compelled to participate.

By the time of Hideyoshi’s death in 1598, Ieyasu had the largest fief in the country, many years’ worth of vital administrative experience, and a very healthy treasury. After a few months of plotting and scheming, he managed to engineer an epoch-making battle between warlords loyal to him - the ‘Eastern Army’ - and lords loyal to Hideyoshi’s son and intended heir Hideyori: the ‘Western Army.’

Even now, Ieyasu was not prepared to take chances. He bribed one of the commanders of the Western Army to come over to his side once fighting commenced, as it did in the autumn of 1600. What became known as the Battle of Sekigahara helped to turn the ‘old badger’ into the shōgun in 1603: technically subordinate to - and working for - the Emperor, but in reality lord of all Japan. A century later, his little town with its leaky shack of a castle had become, some say, the largest city on Earth. It was later renamed ‘Tokyo.’

Edo Castle and its surrounds in the 17th century, following some home improvements by Tokugawa Ieyasu

Ieyasu brought his trademark strategic patience to his relationships with Japan’s western visitors - at least at first. He hosted visitors from Spain, Portugal, Holland and England, hoping to boost trade and turn Japan into a seaborne power capable of sending merchants everywhere from South-East Asia to Spanish-controlled Mexico. There was still much to be learned from Europeans, Ieyasu knew, about navigation, silver-mining and ship-building.

For a few years, this worked. Japanese ships travelled under a ‘red-seal’ system to Macao, Manila and elsewhere in Asia. The seal served as a guarantee that they were backed by the shōgun: they weren’t pirates, and they should be treated well wherever they went - on pain of reprisals.

In time, ships like these might have been seen regularly traversing the Pacific. But it wasn’t to be. The great obstacle, in a word, was trust.

Ieyasu was a Buddhist, who made use of Confucian thought in planning Japan’s future. He wasn’t particularly opposed to Christianity, which he most likely regarded - at least early on in his life - as a new teaching from India, linked to Buddhism.

But rumours persisted that the Spanish were planning to colonise Japan, using Japanese Christian converts either to create diversionary unrest or actually to fight on their side. After the Dutch and the English arrived in Japan - in 1609 and 1613, respectively - Portuguese and Spanish emissaries always placed the expulsion of the hated Protestants somewhere near the top of their diplomatic wish-lists. The Dutch and the English, for their parts, whispered into Ieyasu’s ear about the nefarious designs of the ‘papists.’

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No less worrying for Ieyasu was the conversion to Christianity of close aides, some of whom turned out to be traitors. And when he began introducing restrictions on Christianity, the real nature of converts’ loyalties was exposed. It was bad enough that Christians worshipped a long-dead man who appeared to have been a criminal, lawfully executed by the authorities. But when Ieyasu had cause to burn a few Christians at the stake, under his own lawful authority, other Christians turned out to watch. They sang songs, cheered them on, and collected ‘relics’ at the end from their charred remains.

A man who had spent decades biding his time, building his base and planning Japan’s future in intricate detail now faced the prospect that after his death, this foreign cultural force - with ultimate loyalties pointing towards Europe - might undo everything he had striven to accomplish.

A Spanish galleon: the kind of ship that Ieyasu wanted his carpenters to learn to construct

By the standards of his time, Ieyasu wasn’t cruel. But he was decisive. In the four years leading up to his death in 1616, he clamped down ever harder on Christianity, paving the way under his successors for a full ban on Christian evangelism and worship - and on all westerners entering Japan, bar the Dutch, who were confined to the tiny island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. No Japanese were permitted to leave the country, on pain of execution if and when they returned.

Had he lived longer, Ieyasu might have found a less drastic solution to this problem of trust. Japan might yet have emerged as Asia’s paramount seaborne trading and military power. Instead, by the end of the 1630s, his successors had fully implemented a policy that came to known as sakoku: ‘closed country.’

But only in retrospect does all this seem like a missed opportunity. Put yourself in Ieyasu’s sandals, having at last seen an end to decades of civil war, and having managed to secure the title of shōgun for himself and then his son. Japan’s warlords had been brought to heel, and prosperity was returning. Why risk all that for the sake of a little overseas trade and good relationships with bickering Europeans?

If the final price of unification in Japan was clamping down on Europeans and their religion, then the Old Badger and his descendants were more than willing to pay it. Ieyasu’s reward was the passing of the title of shōgun not just to his son but onwards through another thirteen members of his extended family - across an extraordinary 264 years of Tokugawa rule. How’s that for playing the long game…?

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Thank you for reading! Back next week at the same time. Meanwhile, if you’re enjoying the newsletter, please feel free to share this essay. Comments and questions are also very welcome!

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Images

Lord Toranaga: Smithsonian (fair use).

Edo Castle and its surrounds: World History (fair use).

Spanish galleon: Wikipedia (public domain).

Wishing you all the best meanwhile!

Chris

The name ‘Tayto’ apparently comes from the way the young daughter of the company’s founder, back in the 1950s, pronounced the main ingredient of crisps.

The brand has since become synonymous with its product, in the way that Hoover and Google managed with vacuums and web searching. You hoover the carpet. You google something. And if you’re in Ireland, and healthy eating doesn’t interest you, you rustle up a tayto sandwich.

But what about ‘hunky dory’?

The first recorded uses of the phrase come from the United States in the 1860s. They include a song sung by what appears to have been an Irish-American minstrel group, to the tune of Limerick Races:

One of the boys am I,
That always am in clover;
With spirits light and high,
‘Tis well I’m known all over.
I am always to be found,
A singing in my glory;
With your smiling faces round,
‘Tis then I’m hunkey dorey.

In the same decade, you find people in the US beginning to complain about the expression, as part of a roster of new and unwelcome slang words:

I cannot conceive on any theory of etymology that I ever studied why anything that is ‘hunkee doree’, or ‘hefty’ or ‘kindy dusty’ should be so admirable.

By far the most entertaining speculation - and this comes with a health warning, because etymologists will point out that no real evidence exists - is that ‘dory’ originates with the Japanese word dōri, for ‘street.’

Even more of a stretch - but let’s enjoy ourselves here - is the claim that the full expression ‘hunky dory’ might come from honchō dōri: ‘Main Street,’ in the port town of Yokohama - which Americans and other westerners began to frequent in 1859.

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Honchō Dōri, Yokohama (1860): woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Yokohama was by all accounts a riotous place, in these early years. One English observer claimed that it attracted the ‘scum of Europe.’ Another told of fights breaking out in the middle of the night, and of guns being fired, seemingly for no reason.

Japanese curious about foreign people, fashions, food and music found themselves drawn to the port town and its bustling Main Street, as one might be to a circus or an open-air theatre production.

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Much of the energy on Main Street seems to have come from the rather flawed early relationships that grew up between Japanese and Westerners.

Shopkeepers were keen to relieve foreign visitors of their cash in exchange for porcelain, lacquerware and bronzes of such dismal quality that no Japanese customer would have given them a second look. Japanese merchants were accused, meanwhile, of providing excellent tasting samples for tea - and then, having made the sale, handing over a far inferior product.

Westerners meanwhile appear to have struggled to suppress their sense of cultural superiority. As an Irish doctor working in Yokohama put it: ‘We may disguise it as we like, but we are a set of tyrants from the moment we set foot on Eastern soil.’

It’s tempting to imagine that, leaving aside moments of anger and frustration, there was also a sense of merry chaos about Main Street, which might just - just - have persuaded one of the first modern visitors to Japan to associate it with a warm sense of contentment. We certainly find this a few years later, with the Irishman Lafcadio Hearn referring admiringly to Japan as a ‘fairy-land.’

So it may have been that Honchō Dōri became ‘hunky dory.’

No doubt the real origins of the expression lie elsewhere. But this is where they should lie - in this great, colourful moment of East-West connection.

Lest the etymologists come for me in my sleep, let me finish with some English expressions that really do have reliable connections to Japan:

• Head honcho (the main boss) → from the Japanese word hanchō, meaning ‘group leader.’

• Rickshaw → from jinrikisha: ‘human-powered-vehicle.’

• Tycoon → from taikun, ‘great lord,’ used for a while by westerners referring to the shogun.

Thank you for reading! If you’re enjoying the newsletter, please do spread the word:

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Meanwhile, for more on early Yokohama I recommend Simon Partner’s book The Merchant’s Tale. Simon is also now on Substack, so do take a look.

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Images

Woodblock print of Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art (fair use).

Outside the car: the moody, romantic wash of the Atlantic against sun-dappled cliffs and headlands. Inside: a fight to the death, pitting The Beatles alongside the 1990s (indisputably British music’s crowning decade) against the nonsense that my daughters enjoy.

In amongst that nonsense, something interesting: a trend for girlbands based in South Korea to feature one or more Japanese members, with song lyrics mixing Korean, Japanese and English. If you want to impress your friends/children/grandchildren with the details, two of the biggest bands are Ive and Le Sserafim.

More interesting than the commercial dynamics underlying this precision-tooled pop is the effect that it’s having on the relationship between the two countries. It wasn’t that long ago that young Koreans would grow up learning to detest and distrust Japan, with stories handed down and told around family tables about Japanese colonial rule in Korea, from 1910 to 1945.

Working against that have been the popularity of Japanese pop and manga in Korea, and of Korean drama in Japan. So many female Japanese viewers fell in love with Korean masculinity – allegedly more sensitive and attentive than its traditional Japanese counterpart – that a group of Japanese men once protested outside the offices of a television broadcaster. They claimed that having watched Korean dramas, their wives now expected too much of them.

The story of what mixed-nationality, multi-cultural girlbands are contributing to this steady softening of relations between Korea and Japan is a fascinating one for another time. Here I want to explore a lesser-known source of antagonism between the two countries: the legendary samurai warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi.

In the first essay in this series on Japan’s ‘three unifiers’ and the western world, we met Oda Nobunaga. Hideyoshi was his sandal-carrier, later a trusted general and finally Nobunaga’s avenger and successor. He also launched not one but two full-scale invasions of Korea in the 1590s, helping to sour relations ever since.

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Born into a peasant family in 1537, and rising through the ranks of Oda Nobunaga’s army, Hideyoshi moved quickly to claim his lord’s mantle after Nobunaga’s death in 1582. He did away with the traitorous Akechi Mitsuhide and then used a combination of threats, bribes and violence to bring potential competitors to heel. Ending up in control of most of Honshū, Japan’s main island, he conquered Kyūshū in the late 1580s and began to look for bigger prizes further afield.

Hideyoshi by now possessed – or at least projected – an extraordinary sense of his own importance and destiny, as a man born in a peasant hut who had become the virtual dictator of a newly-reunited Japan. Some around Hideyoshi must have baulked when he claimed that on the night of his conception, his mother dreamed that rays from the sun entered her womb: an augury of a son who would one day illuminate the world. Hideyoshi also commissioned and starred in Noh plays about his greatest accomplishments - then forced Japan’s elites to sit and watch.

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Oda Nobunaga’s attitude to the Europeans in his midst, mostly Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, had been governed by questions of security. If they could help supply wealth and weapons for his unifying cause, while helping him battle Buddhist influence in Japan, then they were welcome. Hideyoshi was different. If he could fit Europeans into his grand scheme for global recognition, then he was happy to do business with them. If they failed to recognise or support his greatness, they were in trouble.

Trouble is what they got. Having taken control of Kyūshū, Hideyoshi discovered that a local warlord had granted the Jesuits ownership of the port of Nagasaki. They were turning it into a highly lucrative Asian entrepôt, inviting Portuguese merchants to do business there as part of the India-China-Japan trade route.

One of the missionaries bragged to Hideyoshi that the Jesuits could help him secure his grip on Kyūshū by interceding for him with some of the island’s Christian warlords. Later, in a sequence of events whose details are disputed even now, Hideyoshi gained the impression that the missionaries might be softening Japan up for an invasion by Spanish forces – launched, perhaps, from the Spanish-controlled Philippines.

Detail from a screen painting of a Portuguese ship arriving in Japan

Hideyoshi’s response to all this was to clamp down on Christianity, as a foreign religion offensive to Japan’s kami. He had twenty-six Christians – a mixture of Japanese and Europeans – crucified at Nagasaki in 1597, as a demonstration of his displeasure.

Japan’s overlord was not against Europeans or European culture in general. He enjoyed, on occasion, dressing in what became known as ‘southern barbarian’ (nanban) style. This included baggy breeches, fancy hats, tight jackets, and rosaries and reliquaries worn about the body. One of his outbursts against Christianity is said to have been fuelled by a few glasses of good Portuguese wine.

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But in his dealings with Europe, Hideyoshi expected respect – a great deal of it, grovelingly expressed. In his letters, he referred to Japan as the ‘Land of the Gods’ and was fond of rehearsing his mythical origins and status as the country’s saviour. A missive sent to the Spanish governor in Manila gives a flavour of his diplomatic style:

The Lord of Heaven has willed that the country be united in my time, and that it be reduced to my obedience. In accomplishing this, everything was so favourable to me, that as yet I have lost no battle, but have been victorious in every one for ten years.

Even from Eastern India embassies have been sent to me… I am much surprised that [the Philippines] has not sent me an ambassador or messenger… If an ambassador is not sent, I shall unfurl my banner and send an army against that country to conquer it with a multitude of men; so that it will repent.

Hideyoshi also wrote to the King of Korea: in a similar tone, but with a different demand. Hideyoshi planned, he said, to conquer China. Geography being what it was, he needed to use the Korean peninsula as a through-route. He assumed that the king would be happy enough about this, having already expressed due deference to Hideyoshi – a claim which must have mystified the king.

The Korean king’s failure to give Hideyoshi what he wanted resulted in the massing of samurai in Kyūshū in 1592, ready to sail across to Busan in Korea and either negotiate passage to China or punish the country for its insolence.

It was the largest seaborne deployment of troops to another country in history, up to this point: some 150,000 men. It was also an unusually multi-cultural endeavour. Some of the most trusted Japanese commanders bore names like Dom Agostinho Konishi and Dom Sancho Ōmura: samurai converts to Christianity, thanks to whom the first known European to set foot in Korea did so in 1593: as chaplain to Konishi.

The siege of Busan Castle

Hideyoshi’s men fought their way up the peninsula before Chinese troops and the Korean navy forced them back. A second invasion fared no better. Generations of Koreans would remember a disastrous few years for their country, as many hundreds of thousands of people perished in what is known as the Imjin War. The idea remained vivid in Korean minds for centuries that the Japanese saw their country as inferior, and as a natural part of their own sphere of influence – a view of Japan dramatically reinforced in the twentieth century.

Europeans regarded the scale of the devastation in Korea with horror, while at the same time hoping that Hideyoshi’s covetous interest in the world beyond his borders – he even talked about invading India – might be open, in time, to cultivation. He loved the wealth that came from international trade, he was a fan of exotic clothes and destinations, and he enjoyed lording it over foreign leaders. Might he be persuaded to regard Christianity as central to this global culture – handmaiden, even, to future success?

Sadly, for those who harboured such aspirations – but happily, for the people of Korea – Hideyoshi’s destiny did not extend beyond the 1590s. Across the summer of 1598, his health began to fail, and he was soon confined to bed. His favourite European, a Jesuit interpreter named Rodrigues, tried to interest him in the prospect of Christian salvation. But a man who had mused on the possibility of taking ‘New God of War’ as his posthumous name was never likely to be receptive.

Hideyoshi died, entirely unrepentant, on 18^th September 1598. He left behind a death poem, whose meaning has been mulled ever since. Was it a final thespian flourish – a performance, rather than a sincere reflection? Or had Hideyoshi turned the dial of self-aggrandisement so far that he had ended up back at humility?

Ah! As the dew I fall

As the dew I vanish;

Even Osaka Castle

Is a dream

Within a dream.

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If you have thoughts on Japan and Korea, either now or in the past, please feel free to leave a comment.

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And lastly, if you have access to BBC iPlayer, I was a guest on a couple of episodes of Michael Portillo’s Great Japanese Railway Journeys last week. We were in Kyoto and Nara.

Visitors to the Samurai exhibition at the British Museum will encounter, towards the end, one darkly familiar figure: a beautifully-lit Darth Vader from Star Wars.

For younger readers, this is one of the most famous film franchises in cinema history - and yet one in which I have so far utterly failed to interest my children. I’m not sure whether that means the Force is weak in me, or weak in them…

Why is Darth Vader here? In that question lies one of the secrets of Star Wars’ success: the ability to work existential questions, elemental forces and timeless nobility into a sci-fi film - and somehow make it believable.

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The franchise’s creator, George Lucas, drew on a heady brew of Hinduism, Christianity and samurai culture. For the first of these, look no further than Yoda’s classic line, spoken to Luke Skywalker while training him in the swampy, mossy jungle of the planet Dagobah: ‘Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.’ In other words: this body comes and goes - but that which is most essential to you cannot ever be destroyed.

A major Christian theme - and this won’t be a spoiler, unless you happen to be one of my Star Wars-resistant children - arrives with the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi. ‘If you strike me down,’ he says to Darth Vader, shortly before allowing the latter to take his life with a lightsaber, ‘I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.’

This same scene is a good place to start with the Japanese themes in Star Wars. Darth Vader features in the British Museum exhibition because his helmet - rounded at the top, tapered towards the bottom - was modelled on that of a samurai. The visor was added to explain how Darth Vader could breathe in space.

But that isn’t the end of it. Lucas was fascinated by samurai culture and the films of Akira Kurosawa. These included Hidden Fortress, whose story of a princess being escorted through enemy territory inspired Lucas - and whose two bickering peasants became, in Star Wars, C-3PO and R2-D2.

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Lucas even hoped to persuade one of Kurosawa’s favourite actors, Mifune Toshiro, to take on the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucas appeared to hope that he would bring serious gravitas to the role of an ageing warrior training and encouraging the next generation.

Mifune’s daughter Mika made this claim around ten years ago, adding that her father had been worried that the kind of film Lucas sought to make might end up looking cheap and embarrassing.

Much Japanese sci-fi back then had its tongue firmly in its cheek, constrained as it often was to rely on men dressed up in giant rubber monster-suits. Mifune was serious about his craft, and about samurai culture. So he said no.

Mifune Toshiro in Seven Samurai (1954)

Lucas then asked Mifune to take on the role of Darth Vader instead, assuring him of a certain level of anonymity because of that famous mask. Again, the answer was no.

Mifune couldn’t reasonably have appreciated, at the time, that Lucas knew a thing or two about special effects, and that his franchise would achieve cult status. But there’s always been a great sense of ‘what if’ here - what would it have been like to see Mifune bring some samurai swagger to Obi-Wan Kenobi?

As a Brit, you’ll excuse me from making the obvious counter-point: what if we had never had Alec Guinness in that role? That signature mix of gravity, cunning and danger! Those gravelly patrician tones! For once a Hollywood creation where a British accent doesn’t signal evil, double-dealing or despicable cowardice…!

Mifune would have been a great Obi-Wan, no doubt. But I’ll settle for Sir Alec any day of the week. He captured the quiet nobility of the samurai - at their best - with complete perfection.

Thank you for reading! Do please share any thoughts in the comments - including ways of interesting my children in taking another look at the Star Wars franchise. And I always like a like, if you feel inclined.

Japan and the World will now be away for Easter, but back on 17th April.

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Images:

Darth Vader at the British Museum: author photograph.

Obi-Wan Kenobi fighting Darth Vader: still from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (fair use).

Mifune Toshiro in Seven Samurai: Wikipedia (public domain).

All true enough, but a much-underrated part of the samurai image is the inveterate social climber. You start to see it in the era of the Kamakura shogunate, once the samurai began their centuries-long dominance of Japanese life following a civil war in 1180-85.

Court nobles had been the big cultural sponsors and entrepreneurs up until this point. But across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we find high-ranking samurai joining them. Keen to overcome their low status as men of violence - which was how Kyoto high society regarded them - they became increasingly involved in pursuits like painting, calligraphy and the pioneering of new forms of theatre like Nō.

Zen Buddhist priests contributed, too, to this emerging cultural moment. Many had strong contacts with China and Chinese culture, and were accomplished artists and connoisseurs.

One of the places you’ll find this shift most vividly on display is in the look and feel of Japanese gardens. The entertainment gardens of the past didn’t entirely disappear. But they were joined by gardens that looked like Chinese landscape paintings brought to life in abstract form, often employing a karesansui (‘dry mountain water’) style: using raked sand or gravel to represent still or flowing water.

The focus now was less on entertainment and more on contemplation. Ponds, if used at all, tended to be smaller: their purpose was to contribute to an atmosphere of serenity, not to encourage people to carouse aboard a boat.

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A prime example of one of these ‘Zen gardens’ can be found at Ryōanji temple in Kyoto. Fifteen stones are set amidst raked white sand, each placed in such a way that from any given angle only fourteen will be visible - except from above of course, but medieval Zen gardeners weren’t thinking much about birds and had never heard of drones.

People have been asking the same question about this garden for 500 years: why design it so that one stone always obscures another? Some say that the stones represent islands of consciousness within a larger emptiness. The garden’s purpose is to help us see that no single point of consciousness – yours, mine, or anyone else’s – can ever apprehend reality in its fullness.

Visitors to Ryōanji sit on the deck of the main temple building, grappling with the garden’s possible meanings...

Warriors who didn’t want to walk to a temple to appreciate a well-crafted garden could have some of their juniors create one in the spaces around their homes. Some were in the newer Zen style; others resembled the entertainment gardens of the past - yet another way of claiming Japan’s aristocratic heritage for themselves.

The ancient principle remained strong, right through the Edo period and into the modern era, of representing grand natural landscapes in miniature - mountains, streams, shorelines. If you go to Japan now, you might see echoes of this in courtyard gardens known as tsubo-niwa - used to bring a little class and good cheer to homes, cafés, hotels and restaurants.

A warrior garden, designed to fit between buildings and compound walls.

Where tsubo-niwa emphasise the private enjoyment of nature, cherry blossom season brings people together - in celebration of a moment whose energy comes, in part, from the fusion of two very different forces in Japanese culture: Shintō and Buddhism.

Shintō celebrates life, including new life. And it’s hard to imagine a more immediate and vivid sign of new life than white and pink cherry blossoms bursting forth from previously barren branches. Buddhism’s reputation for gravity and grimness is meanwhile a little overdone, but it does place enormous emphasis on impermanence. And nothing says ‘impermanent’ quite like the sight of cherry blossoms falling to the ground and withering away.

The varied emotions that the cherry blossoms inspire across their life-cycles are unified in mono no aware: the capacity to appreciate and be moved by the passing of all things into and out of existence.

Trust a poet to put it best - here’s Ono no Komachi, a celebrated yet mysterious female poet of the ninth century:

The colour of the blossoms

has faded.

In vain

Have I passed through the world

While gazing at the falling rains.

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Cherry blossoms have served as powerful symbols in Japan across the centuries since, from cherry blossom-viewing as a mass seasonal event from the Edo era onwards to their use in World War II as a way of justifying and extracting maximum propaganda value from the deaths of young Japanese in combat.

A manga translator once told me how helpless she felt when a single frame at the start of a story featured cherry blossoms. Readers of the Japanese original would immediately connect with the intended mood, meanings and associations. But how do you conjure that in text for western readers, with virtually no space to spare on the page?

That problem is surely easing, now, with cherry blossoms going global as one of our major associations with ‘Japan.’ With that in mind, if you’re near London and want to avoid the ‘plague’ of Instagrammers descending on places like Notting Hill, I recommend a visit to the Kyoto Garden in London’s Holland Park - opened back in 1991 by two young princes, now King Charles III and Emperor Naruhito.

Here are some features to look out for:

• The cascade. If you’ve read Part I of this two-part series, you’ll know why the garden’s designer, Shoji Nakahara, had to locate this remarkable water feature in the north-east, with the outflow of the pond in the south-west. The pond is a lovely example of a ‘borrowed’ feature, suggesting a sea with a rocky shore, backed by a mountain - from which the waters of the cascade pour down.

• The bridge over the pond is staggered, lending it more interest and ensuring that evil thoughts - believed to travel only in straight lines - fall harmlessly into the water, rather than reaching the tea-house that would often be the final stop in a garden like this.

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London’s Kyoto Garden

• The well in the garden is square rather than circular, hinting at a famous zenga (zen picture) called Marusankakushikaku (‘circle-triangle-square’) by the Japanese monk Sengai in the early 19th century. It is said to be a representation of everything in the universe in three simple shapes:

• Embedded pebbles bordering some stepping stones. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! The garden originally had moss, but the public found it so easy to walk on - compared with the stones - that the moss wore away. The pebbles were the solution.

• Noise! Again, it wasn’t supposed to be this way, but the idea of what a garden is for differs a little in Japan versus the UK. Various solutions have been tried to keep things calm in Kyoto Garden, including ropes, signs, notices and gardeners doubling as security guards.

• ‘Cloud pruning’ of the Japanese maples and other features of the garden: intended to suggest floating clouds.

• Koi (carp): capable of bringing colour to all kinds of Japanese gardens.

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Images

Ryōanji: Japan Guide (fair use).

Warrior garden: illustration featured in David & Michiko Young, The Art of the Japanese Garden (fair use).

Kyoto Garden: author photographs.

Marusankakushikaku: Wikimedia (public domain).

It wasn’t that long ago that as a new company employee in Japan you might be required by your boss to go and camp out in a garden or park for a couple of nights, to reserve a cherry blossom-viewing spot for your elders and betters.

That doesn’t happen so much anymore - ah, the good old days…! But cherry blossom season, soon to be upon us, remains as significant as ever.

But what is that significance? And what should we make of the beautiful gardens in which those cherry trees are sometimes planted? What do they tell us about Japanese ideas of beauty, relaxation, good and bad fortune?

I’m going to explore all this in my next two posts. This week, we’ll go strolling in the sort of garden that Murasaki Shikibu would once have enjoyed, more than a thousand years ago. Next week, we’ll get into Zen gardens, cherry blossoms and one of the UK’s top Japanese gardens: Kyoto Garden, in London’s Holland Park.

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To truly live the good life in the Heian era - Japan’s classical hey-day, from 794 to 1185 - you ideally wanted to be a member of the nobility, living in a mansion built in the glorious shinden style.

This was a complex of rectangular wooden buildings, most of them just one storey high, connected by covered walkways. To help cope with hot and humid summers, they might use overhanging rooves of bark to create shady verandas, alongside raised floors to allow cooling air to flow underneath. So that aristocrats could switch easily between party time and private time, rooms often featured slidable or removable screens.

Model of the Heian-era Sanjō Palace in Kyoto (National Museum of Japanese History).

As a noble lord or lady, you wouldn’t be getting your hands dirty in a garden. You would employ someone, and you’d want to make sure they owned a copy of Sakuteiki: Records of Garden-Keeping (11th century) - probably the oldest gardening book in the world.

In its pages, your ancient Japanese Alan Titchmarsh would learn that the main feature of a garden is its pond. Two streams of water must flow into it: one to feed the pond itself, the other to flow into a waterfall constructed from rocks artfully collected on top of a hill at the centre of the pond.

Your gardener would have to plan this water-flow with the utmost care, so as not to bring bad luck upon you, his employer. He’d need to understand Chinese geomantic ideas about guardian spirits associated with the four directions:

• Seiryū the Blue Dragon was guardian of the East, symbolising spring, rebirth and growth.

• Byakko the White Tiger was guardian of the West, representing autumn and protection.

• Genbu the Black Tortoise was guardian of the North: winter, endurance and mystery.

• Suzaku the Vermillion Bird was guardian of the South: summer, fire and spirituality (Heian-kyō’s most famous street, on a north-south axis, was named after Suzaku).

The east was the source of purity, and the west the outlet for impurity, so streams in gardens would be dug to flow either from east to west or from north to south. In the words of the Sakuteiki: ‘the waters of the Blue Dragon shall follow the path of the White Tiger.’

Once the direction of water flow was sorted out, rocks, trees and shrubs could be artfully combined to suggest miniature versions of impressive real-life vistas somewhere in Japan or China: mountains, waterfalls, valleys and seascapes.

The effect could be heightened by thinking carefully about where someone viewing the scene would stand. Using larger rocks or trees in the foreground, compared with those in the background, helped to create a sense of distance in the garden.

A really clever gardener would create an entire journey, planning a guest’s path through - on beaten earth or stepping stones - so that they would encounter particular features at particular points.

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Katsura Imperial Villa, Kyoto

The most valuable rocks were found in nature rather than hewn to order, and those of real distinction were given names. There are stories, in a later era, of samurai stealing famous rocks from one another’s gardens.

You, or you gardener, must then be careful to use the rock in the way that it was originally found. Taking a reclining rock and using it in an upright position, or vice versa, would result in a ‘phantom’ or ‘cursed’ rock.

Trees, meanwhile, were often chosen for their symbolism. Pines represented endurance: evergreen and able to withstand even the strongest winds, twisting rather than breaking.

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Rather than the symmetry that came to be prized in Europe - at places like Hampton Court, for example - Japanese gardeners strove to achieve a sense of charismatic imperfection, placing objects off-centre or else staggering them (an effect known as ‘geese in flight’).

The power of suggestion was important, too. Rather than show your viewer everything, ideally you would give them a little to work with, plus some open space, and allow their cultured imaginations to do the rest.

The final touches to your new garden would be ornamental: flowers and stone lanterns, bridges and fish. Perhaps a tea-house, too. With a large enough pond, you could arrange for party-goers to go boating.

There would be poetry, song and no doubt some romance, too, at these parties. Grassy areas could be sprinkled with a little white sand, so that they glittered in the moonlight. Guests might send small cups of sake bobbing precariously along one of the streams, from pourer to drinker.

Seiho-Ike Pond, at the Heian Shrine in Kyoto

Towards the end of the Heian period, gardeners began to find their aristocratic clients asking for something new.

Many of those clients had always been worriers, paying Buddhist priests for charms, talismans and rituals to keep them safe from harm, and out of the clutches of their enemies.

Now, some of them were becoming interested in Buddhism’s ‘Pure Land’ teachings. These were based on the idea that the world was going badly wrong, and that in order to be saved one had to call on the name of Amida Buddha. He would grant you rebirth in his Pure Land after death.

Late Heian-era writers who wrote vividly about the magical wonders of this Pure Land inspired the creation of ‘paradise gardens’ connected to noble homes.

A pond in the Pure Land garden at Mōtsūji temple in Iwate Prefecture

Unusual plants and animals were sometimes used in these gardens, to conjure the strange beauty of the next life. Symbolic plants were installed, too. The lotus flower was especially popular. It grows in mud, yet rises up into beauty - just as we human beings aspire to marvellous things, even from our humble beginnings and natures.

A good, optimistic note on which to end. Next week: Zen gardens, cherry blossoms and London’s best shot at a Japanese garden.

If you’re enjoying this so far, I always appreciate a like (via the heart button), a share and even a comment!

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Images:

Cherry blossom viewing at Himeji Castle: Wikipedia (fair use).

Model of the Heian-era Sanjō Palace in Kyoto: National Museum of Japanese History: Wikimedia (visitor photo).

Katsura Imperial Villa, Kyoto: Travel Caffeine (fair use).

Seiho-Ike Pond: Japan Experience (fair use).

Paradise Garden at Mōtsūji: Nippon.com (fair use).

I hope this week has treated you well. It’s been a hectic one over here, so please accept my apologies for the lack of a post this week. It’s on its way for next Friday!

Wishing you all the best in the meantime,

Chris

Sanae Takaichi made history last October by becoming Japan’s first female prime minister. Earlier this month, she made it again, leading her ailing party – the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP – to a landslide victory, winning a larger proportion of seats in Japan’s powerful lower house than any other party since the end of World War II.

The LDP now enjoys a ‘supermajority,’ meaning that, if necessary, it can override the upper house in pushing policies through the Diet. But what does Takaichi want?

A major question for what may become a historic premiership is what use Takaichi has for the past. Looming over Japan’s relationships with China, Korea and its Southeast Asian neighbours is the grim and ever-contested history of Japan’s twentieth-century empire. A regular refrain in postwar Chinese critiques of Japanese defence spending, right up to the present day, has been that it risks awakening a dormant militarism.

Those critiques hold less weight now that China is expanding its naval and nuclear capabilities at a rapid rate. But Takaichi has declared her desire to revise Japan’s American-authored postwar constitution in order to clarify the role of the Self-Defence Forces. She is a member of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a powerful conservative lobby group dedicated to a traditionalist vision of Japan with the Emperor at its core. And she is mulling a first visit, as prime minister, to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine.

This is a lightning-rod issue in East Asia because it pits those in Japan who wish to honour their war dead stretching back to the late nineteenth century (this was the shrine’s original purpose) with those in countries like China and Korea who focus on the fact that amongst around 2.4 million souls enshrined at Yasukuni are those of convicted war criminals from World War II.

Relitigating the Second World War’s controversial episodes and cultural consequences – which many in Nippon Kaigi equate with excessive Americanization since Japan’s defeat in 1945 – may well prove counter-productive. If she wants to revisit that period, Takaichi would be better off studying the intensifying perception in Japan, around a century ago, that it was becoming encircled by hostile powers: Soviets, Chinese Nationalists, Europe’s Asian colonies and the United States. China may soon find itself in a similar position, feeling surrounded by insufficiently friendly countries just at the point where its ageing population and slowing economy suggest that the window for reorganising its neighbourhood is beginning to close.

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Japan is the most important link in a ‘First Island Chain’, which runs from the Kuril Islands down to Borneo and constrains Chinese access to the Pacific. The US-Japanese aim remains, for now at least, the strengthening of that chain and the cultivation of a coalition in the Asia-Pacific that is capable of balancing out Chinese economic and seaborne military power and maintaining freedom of the seas. It’s a reasonable project, but one that will need to be pursued with sensitivity.

The ‘First Island Chain’, running from the Kuril Islands in the north down to Borneo in the south

A careful reading of the past may also help Takaichi and her administration think through China’s likely long-term intentions. This is a topic on which analysts around the world are deeply divided. There are those, in the United States especially, who believe that Chinese reluctance to pronounce on the internal affairs of other countries is about current capabilities rather than political culture: once its military is able to project power in the way that the United States can, and European nations once could, then we will begin to see a more interventionist China.

Another way of reading the past and present is that the benefits of territorial or maritime expansion are not what they once were. Power and prosperity in the mid-twenty-first century rest more on economic and commercial leverage than boots on the ground and the taking of direct and costly responsibility for other countries’ affairs.

Takaichi’s conclusion may be that China seeks prestige rather than empire. Rather than replace the US as global policeman, it may simply want to do away with that role, exchanging a postwar international culture of liberal co-operation under American auspices with one defined by national self-interest and multipolarity. This may happen slowly, avoiding the risk of upsetting China’s highly globalised economy and allowing the impression to set in that it is a natural rather than a managed transition.

For now, it is in both Japan and China’s interests to continue their economic co-operation, even while Japan and its partners try to balance out Chinese attempts at gaining economic leverage in parts of Asia, Africa and South America – via loans, investments and supply-chain dependency. Japan is already at the forefront, globally, of reducing reliance on China as a supplier of key components and raw materials including rare earths. That leadership role may expand under Takaichi.

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There is one last way in which Takaichi might usefully look back in order to forge a path forward. It is not so much a clear-cut lesson as a question: at what point does a relationship between rival nations shift from prioritising prosperity based on economic co-operation to allowing strategic aims or fears to dictate their actions? And what, if anything, can Takaichi do to prevent that shift occurring when it comes to Taiwan? If hers ends up being a lengthy premiership, it is highly likely that the Taiwan question will be ‘resolved’ on her watch.

For all the anger in China when Takaichi made her comments last November about the Self-Defence Forces becoming involved in a conflict over Taiwan, the chances of Japan remaining unaffected by a Chinese attempt on the island are very slim. War games consistently emphasise the importance of Japan as a re-supply base for US forces responding to such an attempt, and as a source of essential supplies for the Taiwanese population in the event of a Chinese maritime blockade.

There is a chance that China may yet engineer a peaceful takeover of Taiwan, such is the island’s divided domestic politics and ongoing efforts by China to normalise such an outcome both in Taiwan and internationally.

This, however, would hardly bring tensions in the region to an end. Japan would face the very dangerous scenario of having the People’s Republic of China on its doorstep – visible, on a clear day, from the south-western Japanese island of Yonaguni.

The Japanese island of Yonaguni, seen from Taiwan. Japan and the PRC might one day find themselves this close

This would be worrying enough, for Japanese security. But the next question would be whether or not China’s strategic aims end there. From the Chinese point of view, taking Taiwan is a matter of bringing a renegade province to heel rather than expanding its borders. In time, however, that same logic could be used to make and perhaps enforce a claim over some or all of the Okinawan islands – of which Yonaguni is one.

At present, such claims appear periodically in Chinese media and academic writing, rather than in government pronouncements. Still, they are encouraged by China’s leadership at times of tension with Japan, including late last year in the wake of Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan. And for analysts who suggest paying more attention to the balance of military power than to political rhetoric – or indeed to what historians or legal scholars might argue about Okinawa – it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that soon after talk of a ‘Taiwan contingency’ ends, talk of an ‘Okinawa contingency’ might begin.

Even if China had no intention of pursuing a sovereignty claim on the Okinawan islands, the stoking of nationalist sentiment in China would be useful to the CCP while the effects on Japan could be profound: a drop in international investment and a constant sense of threat – after all, if China’s leaders proved willing to act on their Taiwan rhetoric, why wouldn’t they do so on their Okinawan rhetoric too?

Takaichi’s political leanings mean that the past is often on her mind, as it was for her mentor Shinzō Abe. As she sets about reviewing Japan’s National Security Strategy this year, alongside continuing her wooing of Donald Trump and perhaps thawing her relationship with Xi Jinping, we must hope for a creative and purposeful approach to Asia’s history.

The wrongs and the suffering of the 1930s and 1940s are not to be forgotten. But the stakes are now too high for indulging in the weaponisation of those wrongs and that suffering. Rather than refighting the last war, we must focus on preventing the next one.

Thank you for reading! Please share your thoughts in the comments - and I always appreciate a share and a like if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read…

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A longer version of this essay was first published at UnHerd.

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Images

Takaichi and Trump: Japan Times (fair use).

Yonaguni, seen from Taiwan: Taipei Times (fair use).

For most of us, a first visit to Japan comes with joyous sensory overload. We soak it up, drink it in, and do our best to capture it all on camera. Carl Randall has spent the last twenty years capturing it, instead, on canvas. He’s an award-winning figurative painter, who first went to Japan on a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation scholarship back in 2003. He was my senpai: I went out in 2004.

We met up at the Foundation in London, scene of nail-biting interviews for the both of us more than two decades ago, to talk about what first got Carl interested in Japan, how he creates his art and some of the great Japanese artists of our day.

I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation, and the chance to see lots of Carl’s work along the way.

As always, please like and share if you enjoy what you find here!

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Last weekend, Japan’s first female prime minister, Takaichi Sanae, won herself a landslide in a snap election to her country’s powerful lower house. She and her coalition partners now enjoy a ‘super-majority,’ meaning they can pass legislation even if the upper house tries to oppose it.

It remains to be seen what Takaichi will do with all this power, but it’s striking that while most pollsters and pundits thought this would be the most unpredictable election in years, one organisation apparently knew better.

From pretty much the moment Takaichi called her election, rumours circulated on social media that America’s Central Intelligence Agency was predicting a Takaichi landslide and was trying to work out how to play it to US advantage.

Whatever the truth of those rumours, it should come as no surprise that the CIA might have a keen grasp of Japanese politics. Since the end of the Second World War, the CIA has been more than just an interested observer of Japanese politics. It has actively helped to shape it, providing money and assistance to some of its biggest - and most notorious - players.

To understand why the CIA took the interest that it did in Japanese politics, we need to go back to the heady early days of the Allied Occupation of Japan, which began in the late summer of 1945 and was led by the United States. Idealistic young Americans set to work in Japan building a liberal paradise, only for the calculus to change as tensions rose with the Soviet Union and the prospect loomed of China falling to Communism.

What America now needed in Japan was a robustly conservative ally, one that would be sympathetic to its foreign policy aims, provide bases for its troops and buy its exports. Ambitious American wheat producers even hoped to wean the Japanese off rice and onto bread – sparking conspiracy theories, raised once again last year by the populist right-wing party Sanseito - about Americans trying to weaken the Japanese by separating them from their staple.

One of the most controversial moves made by the Americans in this period, known as the ‘reverse course,’ was to rehabilitate ultraconservative politicians and political fixers who had been expected to serve long stints in prison – or even to face execution.

One of the most notorious was Kodama Yoshio, about whom I wrote a few months back: a gangster who made a fortune in China during World War II, supplying essential raw materials to the Imperial Japanese Navy. Of particular value to American intelligence after the war was his network of friends and informants within the Chinese Communist Party and their Nationalist rivals.

Kodama was released from Sugamo Prison in Tokyo in December 1948 – the day after Japan’s wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki was hanged there. He began helping the CIA with their anti-Communist work in East Asia, and collaborating with them in the creation of a new conservative party in 1955: the Liberal Democratic Party or LDP, which under Sanae Takaichi has just secured a landslide election win.

In truth, Japan was moving in a conservative direction anyway, by the end of the 1940s. One of the great social injustices which fuelled support for Socialism and Communism was the large number of Japanese farmers who, at war’s end, still worked their land as tenants. Occupation-era reforms changed all that, making landowners of millions of Japanese overnight. It was one of the largest peaceful redistributions of land in history.

Having secured their ownership rights, in a country that would always need rice and fresh produce, Japanese farmers became a reliable vote-bank for the LDP.

Still, declassified records show that the CIA did what it could to help Japan’s nascent conservative party on its way across the 1950s and 1960s – much as it did Italy’s centre-right Christian Democrats. Operatives based in the US embassy in Tokyo, and others working outside it, spent millions of dollars supporting the LDP, largely in the form of cash contributions to election expenses:

(Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-68 XXIX Part 2)

The CIA believed that Japan’s Socialists were receiving help from Moscow. So they did what they could to infiltrate the party, along with the student groups and labour unions that were affiliated to it.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party is said to have pleaded with the United States not to release these documents, given the reputational risk to them in Japan - the LDP has always maintained that it received no support from the CIA.

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What did the CIA get for their money? The LDP’s unimpeded stewardship of a trade-friendly economy stands out, as does its dogged support for American military bases on Japanese soil – particularly in parts of the country such as Okinawa, where local opposition has been fierce.

The best-known casualty of that loyalty to America was Kishi Nobusuke, a suspected war criminal who was released from prison the same day as Kodama and who went on to become prime minister.

So controversial were Kishi’s tactics in crushing opposition to the renewal of Japan’s Security Treaty with the US in 1960 – hiring Kodama and his thugs to secure the streets; barring entry to Japan’s parliament for members who opposed him – that he was eventually forced to resign.

Above: protests in 1960 against the renewal of Japan’s Security Treaty with the United States

Below: Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke at the signing ceremony for the renewed Security Treaty at the White House

The LDP has also toed America’s line on China, over the years: freezing its relations with Mao’s Communists, thawing them after Nixon made his famous visit in 1972, and now sticking closely to America’s position on Taiwan. LDP politicians are meanwhile thought to have funnelled information about Japanese politics – and especially the Left – back to the CIA.

Advocates of CIA involvement in Japanese politics argue that it gave it the unity of purpose required to build a strong and prosperous country. Critics point out that for much of the past 80 years, Japan has looked like a one-party state - and a corrupt one at that.

A culture of exchanging cash for influence set in, causing scandal whenever Japanese politicians were caught drawing on secret slush funds or taking bribes. In the most colourful cases, stories appeared in the Japanese media about people wheeling around shopping trolleys filled with cash, or having their homes raided and stacks of cash and gold bars discovered.

In recent years, Japan’s economic woes have hurt the LDP’s dominance. Opposition parties, especially on the centre-left, have begun to do better. And yet thanks to Sanae Takaichi’s extraordinary personal popularity - with fans buying up her famous black leather handbag and pink pens during the recent election – her party, steeped in Cold War politics and covert operations, is now riding high once more.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, please take a moment to like and share.

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Image credits

• 1960 protests: MIT Visualizing Cultures (fair use).

• Kishi Nobusuke: Japan Times (fair use).

• Sanae Takaichi: NBC News (fair use).

This week, I’ve been reading Alone in Japan: a disturbing yet strangely beautiful meditation on Japan’s declining population, written by Tom Feiling and due out at the end of this month. Having lived in Japan in the early 1990s, Feiling returned thirty years later to witness the social fallout from its shrinking population and ‘lost decades’ of economic stagnation.

Many visitors never see this side of Japan, because most of the major tourist attractions are thriving. Much of Tokyo still feels young and wealthy. Kyoto is hardly short of people. Hiroshima has managed to both transcend and immortalise the suffering that befell it eighty years ago.

But readers who have wandered off the beaten track, or who are based in Japan, will have seen something of what Feiling describes. Abandoned homes - in urban as well as rural areas. Shuttered shops. Quiet streets. School playgrounds with only a handful of children out playing.

Japan’s shrinking and ageing population means that by 2050, an extraordinary 44% of Japanese households may consist of a single person living alone.

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If, as expected, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triumphs at the polls this weekend, perhaps she will grasp the nettle and attempt to do something radical about Japan’s demographic decline and all the associated loneliness. For a reminder of the options, have a look at the piece I wrote a few months back.

What strikes me about Feiling’s account is that people aren’t holding their breath for a miraculous intervention. They’re trying to make the best of what looks like being a managed decline in Japan’s population by finding ways of living with increased isolation. This in a culture, as Feiling points out, not known for fostering ‘rugged individualists.’

A decade ago, a book called The Courage to be Disliked became a bestseller. It wasn’t especially original: it leant heavily on the psychotherapist Alfred Adler, a one-time colleague of Sigmund Freud. But it’s remarkable for attempting to persuade people that running their lives according to the wishes of others simply won’t pay off anymore. The old social contract is broken, and it’s not coming back.

Other titles include Supreme Solitude and Retired in my 20s: A Happy Life with Five Days Off Per Week. The latter is by Daigo Ohara, a writer who specialises in advising people on the economics of opting out of the harsh work culture that defined Japan until comparatively recently. Another of his books promises to show people how to live in Tokyo on just 900,000 yen per year - that’s around £4,200 or $5,700.

Alongside these publishing trends, Feiling traces the rise of faddish new words containing the word ji, or ‘self.’ Many sound like globalised clichés: being true to yourself (jibun rashisa), self-actualisation (jiko jitsugen), the search for self (jibun sagashi). But they have a different valence in Japan, given its longstanding communitarian ideal.

Back in the nineteenth century, translators struggled to find an acceptable new word for the political concept of liberté. They settled on jiyū (literally ‘self-reason’), but critics interpreted it as having one’s way at the expense of others. Plenty of words in use today hint at a similar low regard for an individual as a single, isolated unit: jiko-chūshin (self-centred), jiko-hoshin (self-preservation), jiko-kenjiyoku (attention-seeking).

An argument is now raging in Japan - and has been for years, in fact - over whether young people who embrace isolation are selfishly or morbidly opting out of society, or whether they’ve effectively been booted out by a rise in insecure working conditions and their devastating knock-on effects. Those effects run from problems getting a mortgage to deciding that marriage and a family will never be affordable.

Less open to question is whether elderly people have ‘chosen’ a lonely fate. Many live alone after the death of a spouse. They’re often physically healthy and sometimes very active. But they suffer devastating, profoundly disorienting loneliness, compounded by poverty amongst women in particular - because they spent their lives tending a household rather than building up a pension.

For years, psychiatrists and social services have been trying to tackle suicidal feelings in this demographic, so strong can the conviction become that they are little more than a burden on people. In the haunting words of the proprietor of a place Feiling stays at in the village of Kaifu: ‘Isolation is a quiet experience. It can make people strange… without jobs and often without families, their minds wander… People no longer feel that they are being propelled into the future.’

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There is some light on the horizon. Five years ago this month, Japan got its first Minister of Loneliness. In 2024, a Headquarters for the Advancement of Measures to Address Loneliness and Isolation was established. It’s headed by the Prime Minister, involves all Cabinet members and is working to co-ordinate support services and counselling across the country.

Citizens have meanwhile been mobilising in support of one another: with community cafes, hotlines and zero-pressure social spaces. These last are intended to be places where people can go simply to be around others, without worrying about making conversation.

Perhaps, in time, long-running efforts to get more people out of the big cities and back to the countryside will pay off. An astonishing half of the population currently live in just four great conurbations: Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Osaka. If wealth, culture and people can all find their way back to rural Japan, it’s possible that new forms of community might be pioneered there. Advocates of fresh alternatives to the old model of never-ending national economic growth argue that smaller populations can be happy, integrated and productive ones.

I intended to leave you on this relatively hopeful note… but I can’t resist a final comment on that famous symbol of modern Japanese life: the convenience store (konbini).

Many a visitor to Japan returns home with a long wish-list for their own country, from clean public toilets everywhere to quiet trains and high levels of trust. Convenience stores are often on that list.

And yet Feiling, in one of my favourite passages from his book, asks us to think for a moment about the lifestyles they make possible. Ready-made meals, banking, parcel collection, office facilities, household essentials: all these things make it easier to live without family homes - to live without families.

I’m not pinning Japan’s problems on the rise of the convenience store - though it’s interesting that they emerged at the very same point, around fifty years ago, that the seeds of Japan’s population decline were sown. It’s more that they encourage a kind of quiet, anonymous coping, rather than the urgency and action that’s needed.

Finishing Alone in Japan, I had the strong sense that there is still enough energy and willpower in Japan for its loneliness crisis to be successfully tackled and perhaps become a guide for countries like the UK, which are heading slowly but surely in the same direction. The question is how quickly and how decisively that energy and willpower can be harnessed and deployed. There isn’t much time left to drift.

Thank you for reading! Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments - and I always appreciate a share and a like if you feel inclined…

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Image credits:

Abandoned house: Tokyo Times (fair use).

Elderly women: Borgen Project (fair use).

Convenience store (Akita, Japan): Mainichi newspaper (fair use).