18th November: 10am and 7pm London-time

How to Read Japanese Art: A Beginner’s Guide

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My first 60 minutes in Japan were a massive disappointment.

It was 2002, and I’d booked myself onto what sounded like the very swanky ‘airport limousine’ service from Narita airport into Tokyo. In fact, it was a big, sputtering orange and white coach which crawled along concrete overpasses while providing a dismal view out of the window: featureless beige buildings, tied together by tangles of cable and the occasional bit of rusty neon signage.

Where were the verdant green paddy fields and misty pine-topped mountains of my imaginings? Where were the temples, with their ancient wooden columns and wafts of incense smoke? Had Japan forgotten what beauty was?

Japan is hardly the only country where the drive out of the airport makes for a poor first impression, of course, or where the old continues to trump the new. It’s unfair to compare a cathedral to a retail park, or the Tower of London as we’d all love to see it…

… versus what you actually now get:

Still, more than two decades on, I’m still sometimes struck by the transition when you enter Japanese shops or restaurants: from the visual clutter of streets full of awkward balconies and exposed equipment into a space where every last detail has been thought through.

I’m not the only one to have asked how it is that a country that produces some of the world’s most beautiful art, objects and interiors can also be home to underwhelming cityscapes. The intrusiveness of overhead cables is one of the things that visitors to Japan often complain about, and just this past week the city of Tokyo has ramped up its efforts to require builders to bury cables rather than erect new poles - both on aesthetic grounds and because poles and wires might block emergency services vehicles if they come down in an earthquake.

It’s worth saying, first, that Japanese beauty has always been about more than rustic simplicity and tea-ceremony restraint. The great warlord Oda Nobunaga’s sixteenth-century Azuchi Castle boasted vermilion lacquer and lavish gilding, with flowers, wild animals and mythological scenes competing for space on hand-painted walls. It was a statement as much as a home: a base near Kyoto for a warlord on the up, who needed visiting friends and rivals to understand very quickly who they were dealing with.

Reconstruction of Azuchi Castle main keep, 6th floor

Alongside warlord maximalism, there’s also the celebration of the everyday, found in the art of print-makers like Utagawa Hiroshige and Hiroshi Yoshida.

Hiroshige used shadows cast by moonlight to raise ordinary street bustle to the level of the sublime. Yoshida used lamp-glow and the aftermath of a rain shower to achieve the same effect.

Left: Hiroshige’s ‘Night View of Saruwaka-machi’ (from 100 Famous Views of Edo, 1856)

Right: Yoshida’s ‘Kagurazaka Street After a Night Rain’ (c. 1929)

By the time Yoshida made this print, Japanese cities were starting to see riotous competition between traditional wooden buildings and Western-style offices, factories, tramlines and electrical infrastructure. Tokyo’s reconstruction after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 brought opportunities to modernise, but didn’t produce a uniformly planned city.

Then came the destruction of the Second World War. In the wake of American air-raids in the spring and summer of 1945, the most pressing need was to house the homeless and later to accommodate people moving from the countryside to emerging mega-cities like Tokyo and Osaka.

The Japan Housing Corporation, founded in 1955, built large ‘danchi’ estates and new towns in response. Surviving examples can look monotonous. But for many families moving in during the 1950s or 1960s, they were beautiful: safe, modern and richly symbolic of a new era of peace and fresh starts. They were just as important for what went on inside: family life free from the risk of conscription to a doomed war, lived amidst high-tech comforts from refrigerators to televisions.

Radio calisthenics outside early postwar danchi apartment buildings

These were hardly architectural masterpieces, of course. Amidst the postwar need for speed in building homes, followed by decades of fast-changing building regulations, Japan’s engineers became world leaders both in making buildings that could survive earthquakes - including skyscrapers designed to sway rather than collapse - and in designing homes which could be put up quickly and then taken down again a few decades later.

This often seems strange to people in the UK, where the hope is to one day buy a home that will grow in value over time. In Japan, it has often been cheaper to build afresh than retrofit to meet new and higher standards. This, plus tax and lending rules, has led to a situation where land retains value but the prefabricated structures sitting on top are a depreciating asset. The dream is not to inherit a home, but instead a good-sized patch of land on which you can build a brand-new home - in some cases picking from a catalogue.

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Personally, I like the sound of that. But it makes it harder to get continuity, or a sense of intention across a neighbourhood. What’s remarkable is the way that artists have been able to help people feel at home in cityscapes where finding beauty in minimalism and uniformity is not an option - and where the mechanics of what makes streets and buildings work are often found on the outside rather than the inside, from air-con units to cables and poles.

This is helped, I think, by planning rules that allow houses and shops to co-exist. You can walk through a neighbourhood and find a little restaurant tucked in beside a family home. Artists build on this intimacy, giving us streets that are intentional after all: not in the sense of a single designer’s masterplan, but brimming with a community’s everyday purposes.

Even those cables can be overcome. Research suggests that people screen them out after a while anyway, but one of the things that first struck European artists about Japanese woodblock prints was the way they actually valued partial or obstructed views. Mount Fuji glimpsed through a cooper’s barrel; or the moon seen from inside a tatami room.

Left: Katsushika Hokusai: ‘Fujimigahara in Owari Province’, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830-32.

Right: Kobayashi Kiyochika, ‘The Moon Beyond Shinagawa’, from the series One Hundred Views of Musashi Province, 1884

I’ve found that prints like these really have, over time, changed the way I appreciate beauty. I’d now find a simple, unobstructed view of Mount Fuji quite dull. There’s something about the sheer intensity of real beauty - and perhaps also real goodness - that you can only gesture at it, or get a little glimpse. Anything more than that, and our ability to perceive it seems to shut down and we miss it altogether.

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The heirs, of course, to Japan’s woodblock masters are manga and anime artists. If you’ve learned to love Japanese cities, warts and all, the chances are that you owe that to some degree to the likes of Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai.

Let’s end by testing that idea, with a quick visual experiment. If you like your views of Fuji to be really obstructed, then you might appreciate the photo on the left below.

But if you find it a little sad, then does the woodblock print-inspired anime still on the right help?

Is this now a neighbourhood where smiling families might soon emerge from doorways, watching their children head off to school under heavy backpacks? Might that car bob and sway as it moves - as though happy to be alive? Even the fact that the guts of the street have all ended up on the outside rather than the inside just about seems good, natural and homely.

The power of art! Come and find out all about it on 18th November - it would be lovely to see you there: How to Read Japanese Art: A Beginner’s Guide.

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Images:

Model of Azuchi Castle main keep, 6th floor: The Secret Story of the Construction of Azuchi Castle (fair use).

Radio calisthenics: Digital PR Platform (fair use).

Street scene: Sarmat Batagov, via Unsplash.

When I reached the age of sixty, and the dew of life had disappeared, 

I built a hut to be my final refuge.

… an old silkworm spinning his last cocoon.

By the close of his sixth decade, the poet and essayist Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1153 - 1216) had seen more than enough of life. His father, a priest at Kyoto’s prestigious Kamo Shrine, had died while Chōmei was still in his teens. Chōmei had been passed over for promotion. And then nature itself had rebelled.

In one of the great works of Japanese literature, Hōjōki (1212), Chōmei describes fire engulfing Kyoto, destroying some of the city’s grandest imperial buildings. Next came a whirlwind - flattening homes, ripping up gates, sending stone walls crashing to the ground and great plumes of dust into the sky.

Famine followed, after a harvest failed. People began descending on nearby temples: some to pray for relief, others to help themselves - stealing statues to exchange for food. Chōmei found firewood for sale that was painted in rich temple crimson and flecked with silver and gold. Aristocrats were seen touring the city in their finery, tiptoeing around corpses and knocking on doors to beg for help. Finally, a series of earthquakes arrived. ‘Mountains crumbled… seas heaved… the ground split open.’

Alongside nature’s revolt ran the steady corruption of society. Kyoto had always had its fair share of crime. The difference, from the mid-twelfth century onwards, was that heavily armed and highly trained bands of men from out in the provinces were starting to fight running battles with one another in its streets. A world of fine food and manners, poetry and scented love letters was deteriorating into anger, fire, and severed heads stuck onto spikes around the city.

Violence on Kyoto’s streets: ‘Battle at Rokuhara’, Heiji Scroll, early 14th century

This terrifying, profoundly disorienting sequence of disasters forced Chōmei to see with absolute clarity that nothing in this world is guaranteed, and nothing ever stays the same. He began to ask the biggest question of all: ‘where in this world should one live - and how?’

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On some Christian and Japanese Buddhist readings, the world is supposed to be liveable and life is supposed to be fair. Only human wrongdoing, coupled with the mysterious workings of the divine, gives us a world that often looks like a failure. Nor are we powerless to make things better. The exercise of love and compassion can help restore things to their intended state.

Chōmei didn’t see it this way. Shaped by the ‘Pure Land’ branch of Buddhism in responding to the turmoil both around and within him, he concluded that as human beings we cannot live without depending on something or someone. The wealthy, Chōmei reflected, depend on their status. They live in fear of its burdens but also of its fragility. The poor depend on those around them, living out their lives in shame and bitterness. All depend on a basic constancy in life that simply isn’t available.

So what do we do about it?

Chōmei’s answer was to try to cut down on his dependencies. Unmarried, and with no children, he exchanged his home in Kyoto for a tiny thatched hut in some nearby hills. Just three metres long and wide, it was intended to serve as a practical experiment in non-attached living. Too many of the people Chōmei knew back in Kyoto built up their homes, just as they built up their lives: as a doomed attempt to gain approval from others.

And yet readers of the Hōjōki soon find Chōmei’s experiment going wrong, as he morphs from ragged recluse to proud homeowner. He describes his awning, bamboo duckboard and image of Amida Buddha - this last looks especially beautiful, he writes, when bathed in the evening sun. He has black leather-lined baskets set out to store his poetry and music, alongside a lute and a Japanese zither. His writing desk sits under a window.

Chōmei, it seems, has brought much of his old life with him.

Nor is this a life of harsh self-denial. Depending on the season, Chōmei has wisteria, cuckoos and cicadas for company. He sings and plays his instruments, and now and again goes on walks with one of his neighbours. They pick flowers, gather nuts, admire fireflies and mingle with mountain deer.

This isn’t truly independent living. It’s the exchange of old dependencies for new ones. And yet this seems to be Chōmei’s message. It isn’t in our power to live with total independence. What we can do is reorder those dependencies.

Chōmei’s new dependencies are, by their nature, fleeting. Seasonal sights, sounds and foods; brief encounters with this or that creature. Transience turns out to be something you can truly depend on.

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This is a beautiful idea - but I think it comes with risks.

The Hōjōki begins with an image familiar to fans of Western philosophy: a river never stands still; change is a deep feature of reality. It’s tempting to respond to this insight by living life sitting on the riverbank, watching the water go by - never diving in, for fear of turbulence and loss.

Better, but harder, is to fully engage in life - love, purpose, joy - without clinging to it or trying to possess the people and things involved.

‘Thatched Hut by Water’s Edge’, circa 1500 - 1573: an idealised scholar’s retreat

It’s possible to read Hōjōki as an experiment in precisely this kind of living. For all that critics might regard Chōmei as remaining every inch the Kyoto courtier - with his lute and his literary references (Hōjōki is packed with them) - he seems to integrate these pleasures and sensitivities into his new, simpler surrounds. He becomes more responsive to the world.

He may even, at last, be flourishing.

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Come and puzzle this through with me! On 18th January, I’ll begin a 4-week online course on The Good Life in Japan. In the company of Kamo no Chōmei and a host of other deep thinkers and big characters from across Japanese history, we’ll be asking - and trying to answer - a version of Chōmei’s great question: what does it take to live well - and what might it cost us?

Each week features three short video talks, optional readings from an illustrated handbook and access to a discussion forum. You can follow the course in your own time or apply for a seminar place, joining me in a group of no more than eight people for four weekly discussions.

As a thank-you to readers of Japan and the World, your subscription gets you a discount on the course. It’s applied when you book, as long as you use the same email that you use to subscribe to my newsletter. You’ll find details and an enrolment link here:

The Good Life in Japan

If January seems a long way off, come to my very first online ‘History Evening’ on 18th November. We’ll be exploring ‘How to Read Japanese Art’, and once again Japan and the World readers receive the same kind of discount. You can find out more here.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Please feel free to like, share and comment.

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Credits

Ink portrait of Kamo no Chōmei, by Kikuchi Yōsai: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Battle at Rokuhara: Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain).

Thatched Hut by Water’s Edge: Cleveland Museum of Art (public domain).

Excerpts from Hōjōki adapted from Matthew Stavros’s translation, in Hōjōki: A Buddhist Reflection on Solitude (2024).

It’s almost a rite of passage for first-time visitors to Japan to enjoy the tatami mats and hot springs of a ryokan - a Japanese inn - only to be confronted the next morning at breakfast with a shock-and-awe attack on their digestive systems.

Lifting the lids on an array of little ceramic pots on my breakfast tray, many years ago, I had no idea what I was looking at. But strangest and most daunting of all was nattō: soybeans that have been left to ferment until they go slimy and gloopy.

It’s said that you should let someone try haggis before telling them what it is. Few people offered the chance to eat mashed-up sheep organs stuffed inside the poor animal’s stomach are going to rush to say yes. But haggis at least has a vaguely anonymous look on the plate. As soon as you start mixing your nattō, and lifting a few beans out of the polystyrene tray on the end of your chopsticks, there’s really no disguising what you’re up against.

And yet, for readers who’ve been to Japan or who live there now: I bet you eventually came to love it…

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In the Harding family, the price of a bicultural upbringing for our children includes scandalously inflated costs for imported food - including nattō. And we’re clearly not alone. While the consumer market in Japan last year topped an extraordinary 300 billion yen – getting on for $2 billion - it’s now doing big business around the world, too: a much-vaunted superfood, just like its fermented friend, kombucha. Japanese exports tripled between 2017 and 2025, reaching more than 5,000 tonnes. How did this happen?

People in Japan have probably been eating nattō since the 8^th or 9^th century – but not as we know it now. Shiokara nattō - salty, dark, non-sticky beans fermented with kōji mould - arrived in Japan from China, and came to be associated with Buddhist temples.

The other type was itohiki nattō – literally ‘string-drawing nattō.’ This is the bacterial breakfast with which you may have done battle in the past, and we only have good evidence of it being eaten in Japan from the early fifteenth century onwards.

The best - and hence probably unlikeliest - origin story for modern nattō lies with the famous 11^th-century warrior Minamoto no Yoshiie. On campaign in north-eastern Japan, he’s said to have discovered that a bundle of boiled soybeans, intended as horse feed, had been poorly packed and had begun to go bad.

When the rice-straw wrapping was peeled away, the beans were revealed as sticky and slightly smelly. The packaging, rather than the neglect, would have been the key here: rice straw is home to the all-important Bacillus subtilis.

Summoning all his samurai courage, Yoshiie waited until some of his men had tried the slimy beans first - and survived - before risking them himself. Eventually, he scooped a handful into his mouth, and declared them good.

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Minamoto no Yoshiie meets a fearsome foe - but is nattō afraid of it…

In yet another example of how much contemporary Japan owes to the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), many a citizen of the great city of Edo used to awake to the sound of nattō vendors calling out their wares.

Some Edoites put nattō in soup. Others chopped it up with vegetables and tofu. Over time, today’s winning combination emerged: soy sauce, mustard, and the placing of nattō on rice.

Since then, the innovations have kept on coming. The very first Japanese trains, towards the end of the 19^th century, must have reeked of the stuff now and again, as people bought nattō in rice-straw packages to offer as gifts.

20^th-century breakthroughs included refining the way that bacteria can be made to act on soybeans, in order to produce the perfect – or perfectly divisive – Japanese breakfast. The microbiologist Hanzawa Jun developed a hygienic production method using pure-cultured nattō bacteria and clean wooden containers, so that rice straw no longer had to be used. Later work refined the process even further, so that the smell wasn’t quite so overpowering for diners.

Even the snap-off polystyrene box lids on nattō have been carefully engineered, to ensure they work precisely as they should.

A nattō seller (on the right), featured in an illustrated encyclopaedia called Jinrin kinmō zui (1690)

The health benefits of nattō are meanwhile less mythical than its Minamoto origins. It’s packed with protein and fibre. And it doesn’t just give your stomach a run for its money in the morning: early clinical evidence suggests that it may actually improve your gut microbiome – something increasingly promoted, at least in the UK, as essential to good health.

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If you’ve learned to love nattō and are now approaching connoisseurship, the classic advice is to stir it 424 times before tucking in: 305 stirs, followed by another 119 after adding the soy sauce.

These wonderfully precise numbers are often attributed to the 20^th-century artist and epicure Kitaōji Rosanjin. He certainly advocated strenuous stirring, with the soy sauce added just a few drops at a time and the mustard at the very end.

But the 305-plus-119 formula seems to have fermented online before being taken up and tested by the toy manufacturer Takara Tomy Arts. In case you’re already starting to think about Christmas presents, let me leave you with its hand-cranked nattō-stirring machine - designed to produce that perfect, deliciously slimy result every time…

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share your divisive views about divisive foods in the comments below... And do like and share if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read.

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Images:

Nattō and chopsticks: Wikimedia (public domain).

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Hachimantarō Minamoto no Yoshiie, c. 1850: Wikimedia (public domain).

Nattō wrapped in straw: Wikimedia (public domain).

Nattō seller: National Diet Library of Japan (public domain).

Hand-cranked nattō stirring machine: SoraNews24 (fair use).

When we think about the closing months of World War II in Asia, one of the big themes is the obliteration of much of Japan’s urban architecture by American firebombing. As the US General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold put it, the intention was for Japan to surrender as a nation ‘without cities.’ We hear a lot less about Japan attempting during those same months to attack the continental United States. And yet they did.

Those attacks were a far cry from the kind of tech about which Japan’s pre-war scientists and fiction writers had dreamed. Some envisaged a ‘death-ray’ being fired from a remote mountain cave, lancing through the atmosphere and around the globe, before arriving in Washington D.C. and blowing up the Capitol.

Japan never got close to such a weapon. But a unique wartime combination of desperation, ingenuity and scarce resources led to the creation of a rather more basic fantasy-weapon: a balloon-bomb, known as Fu-Go.

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Each balloon was around 30 feet across and made from hundreds of pieces of laminated washi (Japanese paper), filled with hydrogen. These were put together by, amongst others, schoolgirls - hairpins and long fingernails were banned - in spaces large enough to accommodate the finished product, from gymnasiums to sumo halls.

Above: preparing glue and drying paper

Below: prototype testing in spring 1944

Suspended beneath each balloon was an assembly of sandbags, batteries, incendiary devices, and sometimes an anti-personnel bomb.

More than 9,000 of these balloon-bombs were launched across the Pacific, equipped with cutting-edge instrumentation designed to hold them within the high-altitude winds of the jet stream. Almost a thousand are thought to have made landfall, from the Aleutians in the north down to Mexico in the south.

Early reporters of these eerie objects included a father and son out on an early morning fishing trip. They saw what looked like a parachute or a balloon-like object drift by overhead and then off behind a nearby hill. A few moments later, they heard an explosion and saw a puff of smoke.

Type A balloon-bomb

The U.S. government decided to suppress news of these weapons, for two very good reasons. There was a risk of causing panic and damaging morale. And there was the danger that news about successful attacks would get back to Japan and help the enemy make their plans.

The downside was that the American public couldn’t be warned about these devices, and the danger of going near them. After press restrictions were lifted, Oregon’s Herald and News reported that when Archie Mitchell had been around 40 yards away from Elsie and the children, shouting at them not to touch what they had found, the device attached to the balloon exploded. Elsie and all five of the children died.

Back in Japan, government propaganda claimed that their new weapon had inflicted casualties on America ranging from 500 to 10,000 people. Claims were even made that a larger air campaign was just getting started. The next step, worried pessimistic American analysts, could be the placing of soldiers from the Imperial Japanese Army in pressurised cabins suspended from balloons - sending them off on the jet stream to cause havoc across the American homeland.

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The Japanese hoped their balloon-bombs might persuade the United States to divert forces away from the Pacific theatre. This appears not to have happened to any great extent, but some US troops - including an African-American airborne unit - were positioned in western forest regions, ready to fight fires. Aircraft were launched in response to reported sightings of balloons, though only two were actually shot down.

In the end, the resources on which Japan’s balloon-bombs depended - hydrogen amongst them - were choked off by American B-29 bombers hitting Japanese cities with a far more effective new weapon: napalm. The press blackout in the US had meanwhile done its work. The Japanese authorities heard a lot less about the bombs than they had hoped, and concluded they were no longer worth valuable material and labour.

As for Archie Mitchell, witness to the only deaths in the continental United States caused by wartime enemy action, he later remarried and went to Vietnam as a missionary. Captured by the Viet Cong in 1962, he was never heard from again. Twenty-five years later, in 1987, a group of seven Japanese women who had once glued pieces of washi together to create balloon-bombs turned their hands instead to folding paper cranes. A thousand were carried across to Bly, where some of them remain to this day, in Archie Mitchell’s old church.

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Images

Preparing glue and drying paper: exhibition entitled ‘The Balloon-Bomb Campaign and Preparations for the Decisive Battle on the Home Islands: The Girls’ War’ (fair use).

Prototype testing: Robert C. Mikesh, Japan’s World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America (1973) (fair use).

Type A balloon bomb: Oregon Encyclopaedia (fair use).

It seems odd that the country that gave us driver-controlled automatic taxi doors back in the 1960s should be getting around to this only now. Trials have been going on since 2018, when Japan’s prime minister Shinzō Abe promised driverless mobility services by the time of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

But Japan’s tech lead has been slipping away since the 1990s, amidst a global shift from hardware to software, and from large corporations doing long-range research to start-ups funded by venture capital. That ended up favouring America’s West Coast, and it’s striking that in the Tokyo taxis deal just announced one of Japan’s largest taxi companies - Nihon Kotsu - will run operations while the truly cutting-edge tech and intelligence will come courtesy of the Californian company Waymo.

It’s a sign of one possible future for Japan: its industrial excellence continuing to matter, while American AI and Chinese-produced raw materials remain indispensable. It’s not an enviable position to be in, when the US alliance remains uncertain and relations with China are in deep-freeze over the Japanese prime minister’s remarks last year about Taiwan.

A Waymo car in Minato Ward, Tokyo

And yet signs are starting to emerge of another possible future.

The Real Gaijin substack reports that Toyota and Nissan are working hard on autonomous driving. And it was announced earlier this year that Japan will devote $6 billion to achieving AI autonomy. It will seek to develop its own ‘sovereign AI’ model - reducing reliance on American companies (though Nvidia is a partner in the new venture) - and will use it to power some 10 million robots by 2040. These will work in sectors like industry, infrastructure, health and defence, putting Japan at the forefront of what’s called ‘physical AI’ - in other words, AI-powered machines.

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Japan has a lot of work to do here, in order to catch up and eventually get ahead.

Earlier this year, it was announced that Chinese humanoid robots are to be trialled at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, heaving luggage and cargo around. Then came the World Humanoid Robot Games a few weeks ago, at which a robot beat Usain Bolt’s 100-metre sprint record:

But demographic pressures are helping to push the pace. New figures released in Japan a couple of weeks ago suggest that the potential taxi drivers of tomorrow are emerging at a very slightly increased rate. Births rose a little in the first half of 2026, compared to the same period in 2025. Still, Japan’s overall trend towards a smaller, older population will continue, making it urgent that the likes of ‘care-bot’ technology at last be mastered.

Part of the problem in the past was that early care-bots themselves needed looking-after: wheeling from room to room; having their batteries charged. They also couldn’t be trusted with handling frail human beings, since the engineering and intelligence required to make them gentle, responsive and dexterous remained out of reach. For anyone interested in why the much-hyped care-bot revolution of the 2010s didn’t happen, I recommend James Wright’s excellent Robots Won’t Save Japan (2023).

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Even China hasn’t yet solved the dexterity problem. For all the impressive feats achieved by runners and kickboxers at the recent games, another robot failed to fold laundry. These are the sorts of problems that will have to be ironed out 😊 using the prodigious sums of money earmarked for AI and associated engineering in Japan.

Beyond the technical challenges lie human questions. Some are relatively modest. It wasn’t that long ago that people like me, who work mainly with academics and journalists, would only ever encounter something other than a liberal opinion in the back of a cab. This is easily solved: allow robotaxi users to set the personalities of their unseen drivers, along with their positions on the political spectrum. Maybe have a ‘shuffle’ setting, so you never know what you’re going to get.

More importantly, what about Japan’s fabled culture of omotenashi - its nothing-is-too-much hospitality? What about the steady shrinking of the time we spend around other people?

Old concerns about robots being unable to provide a sense of human connection appear to be morphing, now, into something else, as we re-think what connection means. AI agents and companions are becoming ever more normal, and countries like Japan are pioneering robot avatars for people - including those suffering with social withdrawal - who want to be ‘present’ somewhere, even while their bodies are at home.

Quite where ‘morphing’ will go is impossible to say, but it’s happening quickly. And it needn’t be all bad.

The promise of AI is supposed to be that we automate the routine in order to make space for the valuable: thinking, creativity, fun - time with loved ones. Perhaps the belated arrival of robotaxis in Japan marks the start of a similar principle operating in the world of physical AI, especially for the elderly and those living without easy access to transport.

You might feel a little uncomfortable embarking on your first robotaxi ride. But if it gets you out to dinner with your friend, when you might otherwise have been alone at home for the evening, then three cheers for that.

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Images:

Waymo car in Minato Ward, Tokyo: Yomiuri (fair use).

If you haven’t read the previous instalments, they’re available here (some were previously paywalled, but all are now freely available):

Part I - The Blue-Eyed Shōgun (Douglas MacArthur)

Part II - The Gangster (Kodama Yoshio)

Part III - The Star (pop icon Misora Hibari)

Part IV - The Entrepreneurs (Sony’s two founders)

All these figures have left extraordinary legacies. MacArthur oversaw the adoption of a new, American-authored constitution for Japan. Eighty years ago this month, it was being hotly debated in the Japanese Diet (parliament). It’s still being debated now, with Japan’s ruling LDP actively considering ways of amending the constitution to help up beef up the country’s defensive arrangements in uncertain times.

Japanese gangsterism seems to be in decline, although a new history of the infamous yakuza - which I’ll post about another time - argues that we ought never to count them out. Either way, one of Kodama’s major legacies has been the corrupting influence of money in Japanese politics, with many an LDP leader meeting their end after questions were asked about the party’s finances…

Japanese music is going strong around the world, especially with younger generations turning to Japanese and (South) Korean pop. More and more bands are now being formed from a combination of Japanese and Korean members - something unthinkable back at the start of the Occupation.

In entrepreneurship, critics would say that Japan has lost out, of late, to Korea and China. But that may change. The Japanese government recently announced a staggering $6 billion of investment in ‘physical AI’: robots that will run on an AI model made in Japan - the aim is to have 10 million of them operating by 2040, across sectors including defence and social care. The massive demographic challenges that I’ve covered before in this newsletter, plus competition with China and doubts about America’s future reliability, have been concentrating minds in Japan’s government and tech sectors.

Clockwise from top-left: Douglas MacArthur, Kodama Yoshio, Misora Hibari and Morita Akio (one of the founders of Sony)

In Japan, as everywhere else, people have mixed feelings about the impact of AI in their lives. That includes the world that Tezuka Osamu helped to bring into being: manga. Pessimists wonder whether the last generation of manga artists, drawing by hand, may already be passing away.

The economics of manga have always been tight: heavy competition, combined with poor pay and a great deal of uncertainty for artists. No-one yet knows whether AI will tip that balance even further against traditional artistry - or whether it may actually boost it, as ‘not made with AI’ becomes a premium feature of creative output. I hope it doesn’t need saying (!), but this newsletter is 100% human…

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Whatever happens to manga over the coming months and years, the legacy of Tezuka Osamu has been perhaps the greatest of anyone in my series. Born in Osaka prefecture in 1928, he grew up watching European and American cartoons on a home film projector and visiting the famous Takarazuka Revue with his mother.

He experienced World War II for himself as a young man, watching charred bodies float down a river in Osaka during the firebombing of Japan. It made him determined to play his part in making sure that something like this could never happen again.

The result was what you might call the ‘secret sauce’ of Japanese manga and anime, developed by Tezuka and those who came after him. One of the reasons, he thought, why Japan had ended up with a repressive, authoritarian and dangerously expansionist government by the late 1930s was that young people had not been brought up to be wise to the ways of the adult world - to be sceptical about what Tezuka regarded as the evil that can exist in people’s hearts.

Qualifying as a doctor in 1951 but choosing to pursue manga over medicine, Tezuka wanted his work to move beyond what he regarded as the beautiful and ground-breaking yet too-childlike fare that was coming out of Europe and the United States, most notably from his idol Walt Disney. He instead wanted to create manga that would take children seriously, acknowledging their maturity and refusing to talk down to them.

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Tezuka Osamu

Tezuka’s best-known early achiveement here was the creation of Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), a friendly boy-robot whose first adventures were published right at the end of the Occupation, in the spring of 1952. He was drawn in Disney contours, with Betty Boop eyes and two hair-spikes modelled on the shape that Tezuka’s own hair took in the bath as a child. He was powered by an atomic reactor in his chest, and boasted jets inside his red boots, searchlight eyes and twin machine guns stashed discreetly in his backside.

Where Batman and Superman were masculine and remote, Atom was cute, androgynous and emotional - a lifeline for children growing up after the war without a father or a brother.

Atom’s journey towards worldwide fame began with his transfer from page to screen in the early 1960s. Japan was so short on animators at this point that Tezuka and his co-workers had to invent workarounds where they couldn’t physically produce enough frames per second.

Static images were pushed around under the camera to create a sense of movement; sometimes, in dialogue scenes, only mouths would be animated. Meeting their first TV deadline, of New Year’s Day 1963, meant working seven-day weeks, with staff sleeping under their desks and skin rubbed so raw that illustrations went out smudged with blood. Later generations of animators blamed Tezuka for setting a pattern here.

Then along came a deal with America’s NBC, and the novelty of Japan sending a cartoon back across the Pacific - at a time when some in Japan had been starting to worry about the Occupation displacing Japanese in favour of American culture, in everything from family values to popular entertainment.

All did not go to plan, however.

Tezuka’s determination to take children seriously sat badly with the NBC producer Fred Ladd, who flew to Tokyo in 1964 to explain the cardinal rule of children’s entertainment in America: nobody dies. A dead body in the street, in one of Tezuka’s episodes, had to be changed to a man who was merely unconscious, in need of a hospital.

This was an easy enough fix, but three entire episodes were judged to be beyond saving altogether. One featured vivisection. A second had a nude painting in it - added as a joke, it seems, by a sleep-deprived assistant. And in a third, a villain left a message etched into the eyeball of Christ on a crucifix.

Tezuka, who had once been beaten up by a group of drunken American GIs and was an opponent of American intervention in Vietnam, wrote that it was strange how Americans were relaxed about violence in the real world but shunned it in fantasy.

But these turned out to be no more than early hiccups. Astro Boy gained a cult following in America and beyond, and across the decades that followed Japanese anime and manga grew and grew. Disney got involved in distribution in the 1990s, helping Miyazaki Hayao’s Studio Ghibli on its way. Then came major worldwide hits like One Piece, Doraemon and Dragon Ball, and the take-up of Japanese visual culture by Netflix and by seemingly every bookshop and toyshop I’ve visited in recent years. The global market for Japanese anime and manga now sits at around $40 billion annually.

Beyond the raw numbers, of course, lies the immense warmth and good will towards Japan that these exports have bought. It would have been difficult to imagine back during the Occupation, when Japan was an international pariah and its reputation seemed likely to be forever associated with the extraordinary brutality of the war, that a turnaround on this scale and of this depth would ever be possible. And yet here we are.

I’ll finish on an anime recommendation, for anyone with a Netflix subscription. Pluto is a dark reimagining of one of the story arcs from the original Astro Boy, created under strict licensing conditions by the manga artist Urasawa Naoki - who just happens to be one of those most concerned about the intrusion of AI into his art-form. A few weeks ago, he launched the first instalment of a new manga on this very theme: The Last Manga Classroom.

I haven’t had a chance to read that yet, but Pluto is well worth your time, connecting the Occupation era with some of the worries - and, who knows, the positive possibilities - of our own times.

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Conscious of the value of your time, and in hopes of making sure each edition of the newsletter is backed by the research and reflection it needs, I’m going to be publishing every other Friday from now on, rather than weekly.

Here’s a flavour of what’s coming up over the next few months:

• Japan’s trillion-yen gamble on ‘physical AI’ - will it be the key to solving the demographic crisis?

• How World War II shaped the ‘Godfather of Manga,’ Tezuka Osamu.

• What an infamous killing spree revealed about attitudes towards disability in Japan.

• Interviews with a yamabushi (mountain ascetic) and the translator of Convenience Store Woman.

• The surprising story behind Japan’s love of soy sauce.

• How to ‘read’ a Japanese temple.

• An introduction to Japanese comedy.

If there are questions or topics you’d like me to tackle, please drop me a line: chris@christopher-harding.com.

With best wishes,

Chris

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There they were, diligently clearing up their rubbish before leaving the stands. But while global audiences sighed with approval, back in Japan women took to social media with variations of the same complaint: you do this in public, but at home you’re a slob.

It looked like double-standards. But I think it was something slightly different: the behaviour expected of people in public versus the relative freedom they enjoy behind closed doors.

Those high public standards are one of the reasons why the ever-increasing number of western tourists flocking to Japan return home again asking themselves why in their own country they can’t have what the Japanese enjoy.

Less litter, less graffiti, less hassle on the street. Everything from transport to shopping working smoothly, and all of it lifted by a sense of people looking out for one another.

All this has become baked into our image of Japan - but why?

Partly it’s culture. From Shintō, you get cleanliness and respect. From Buddhism, compassion and an instinct for holding your self lightly. From Confucianism, respect again - especially for parents and social superiors.

And yet postwar Japan is famously non-religious. So it isn’t that these ideas in their raw, religious form naturally compel a great many people. It’s more that Japan has funnelled those ideas into a way of bringing up children that shapes them into the kind of people who are - for the most part, anyway - unlikely to relate to the world around them by mugging, stealing or defacing.

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This used to be described in America and Europe as ‘conformism’ - thereby flattering a free-wheeling West. I’ve always found that a bit negative and reductive, and reading Lisa Katayama’s fascinating new book The Japanese Way of Parenting confirms it. She’s a writer and executive living in Northern California, raising her two young daughters the way she was raised: Japanese-style.

The core of it, for Lisa - in her book and in an interview for this essay - is the concept of omotenashi. Many readers will know it from time spent in Japan: a wholehearted hospitality, offered selflessly and in which nothing is too much trouble. It has roots of a kind in the tea ceremony.

For Lisa, omotenashi runs broader still. She defines it as ‘radically caring for everyone and everything around you’ - a beautiful, ambitious idea, which becomes practical and precise when you have your first child. It can boil down, she tells me, to simple things like ‘is our space habitably clean… [are there] healthy and timely snacks’ available?

A lot of this is about active anticipation of someone else’s needs. Sure, it’s lovely to ask a friend, partner or child what you can do for them. But it’s sometimes even better to work out the answer yourself and make the arrangements without troubling the other person with a question.

Just ask my wife, who often preferred her mother’s help over mine in the weeks after our first child was born. Her Mum’s experience of parenting was a big part of this, of course. But she was also well-versed in omotenashi. I’d be constantly asking an exhausted new mother what she needed, or what we ought to be doing next for the baby. Her own mother would meanwhile be several steps ahead, knowing what was needed and getting on with it.

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As any parent knows, home is only half the story. The other half is nursery and school - how these places are run, and who your precious offspring might encounter there.

If omotenashi is the big, overarching value, the practical route to it in education is shūdan seikatsu: immersion in the art of ‘group living’, or ‘collective life’.

Lisa and her husband managed to find a Japanese daycare centre near where they live. Lisa’s daughter learned how to co-operate with other children in everything from cleaning their classroom and tidying away toys by category to pounding mochi for making rice cakes and looking after someone when they’re not having a good day.

As Lisa points out in her book, Japanese daycare centres and schools are as much about learning how to relate to other people as about picking up the basics of literacy and numeracy.

Lisa Katayama

Language offers a bridge between home and school. Common expressions that children become familiar with early on in both places include kashite (please let me borrow it), followed - in the ideal scenario, at least - by dōzo (here you go).

There’s a ritual quality to this. Children at my son’s daycare centre in Japan would say, slowly and deliberately, ka-shi-te while holding out their hands, treating it as an incantation that would pretty much compel the handing over of a toy car or a stuffed animal. If it didn’t work, the fall-back was usually to repeat the magic words, louder and ever more distinctly, until the other child gave in or a sympathetic adult intervened.

A testament to the power of language is that even once her first child had finished at the Japanese daycare centre in California, Lisa found that by switching from English into Japanese when asking her daughter to do something she was more likely to get agreement.

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The art of parenting this way outside of Japan seems to be to combine the best of how it’s done there with the best of what you find where you live.

For Lisa, this is about nurturing in her daughters the strong sense of self that’s natural to American culture. She tells me she’s not against the posters that American children make in their schools, focused on ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What do I like?’ They just need tempering with attention to others:

I want my daughters to be opinionated and resilient, but I also want them to understand when it might be appropriate to concede to someone else's (or society's) will.

I'm not always successful at this. I think they are first and foremost turning into free-form, ambitious West Coast kids. But underneath there is a layer of Japaneseness... a sense of what's right, what's fair, what's respectful of those around them. And my hope is that as they grow, this base layer will continue to guide them in making decisions that are both their own and considerate of everyone else.

I love this idea, and it points to another reason why ‘conformism’ was never a very useful way of understanding Japan. The parenting and education that Lisa talks about in her book aren’t primarily about control; what matters is shaping children into moral and social agents - providing the structure, but giving them dignity, respect and power within it.

You clean your classroom not because you’ve been ordered to but because it’s your classroom. Everyone gets their own job. There are class meetings.

It reminds me of the Michaela school here in the UK - regularly touted in our media as ‘Britain’s strictest school.’ Their ‘family lunches’ involve pupils serving and cleaning up after one another, everyone with their own role to play. ‘Strict’ doesn’t do it much justice - this is agency over enforcement. And that’s what, despite the undoubted pressures that its education system and wider society place on people, Japan has been pretty good at with its children.

If you have thoughts on education, trust and how I can get my teenagers to do my bidding, please feel free to leave a comment. Meanwhile, Lisa’s book is out now - and it’s well worth a read, whether you’re a parent or you’re looking for a new way of understanding Japanese values.

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Images:

Japanese fans cleaning stands: BBC (fair use).

Lisa Katayama: still shot from interview with author.

Late last year, a woodblock print which in its own day would have cost you about the same as a bowl of noodles sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for a cool $2.8 million.

There seems to be no stopping this iconic image: ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa,’ created by Katsushika Hokusai and included in his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1831). You’ll find it now, in Japan, on manhole covers, on banknotes, and in exhibition after exhibition. It’s on towels, tins, cups and chopstick sleeves. There’s a LEGO set, and beyond Japan it’s one of the most requested tattoos.

How did this happen? The Thirty-Six Views were a hit in Edo soon after publication. But ‘serious’ Japanese artists looked down on the likes of Hokusai, as mere tradesmen.

Hokusai responded - claims a late 19th-century account - with a certain outsider swagger. One story has him going head-to-head in an art competition organised by the shōgun himself. His opponent, Tani Bunchō, was a highly-regarded literati painter.

Hokusai’s effort that day was insultingly simple. He drew a single blue curve, let a chicken with vermillion-painted feet run across the paper, and declared that he had drawn maple leaves on the Tatsuta River in autumn.

It may be apocryphal - but we’d all love it to be true.

Legends can also be found surrounding The Great Wave’s rise to international fame and glory. In 1856, a French etcher named Félix Bracquemond supposedly discovered an edition of Hokusai’s Manga sketchbooks being used as packing material around some imported porcelain. From there - or perhaps for different reasons entirely - Paris went wild for Japanese woodblock art, and later for Hokusai in particular.

In one respect, The Great Wave was global from the outset. Hokusai created it using an imported pigment called Prussian Blue. But the image’s reception in Europe was what helped to make its name right around the world: praised by Van Gogh for its claw-like wave; featuring on the cover of Debussy’s La Mer; inspiring countless later artworks.

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Icon though it now is, both in Japan and internationally, The Great Wave is not read in the same way at home in Japan versus much of the western world.

The crucial difference, as the artist Carl Randall told me a little while ago, lies in the direction in which people read text.

In English, we read from left to right. This affects how we ‘read’ an image like The Great Wave. The eye naturally moves rightwards, so it feels as though we are travelling with the wave. We’re surfing it.

In Japan, people read in vertical columns from right to left. To read The Great Wave in that direction makes it feel as though you’re travelling into the wave - about to be engulfed by it, submerged, while Mount Fuji looks serenely on.

The Japanese reading points us more towards human drama: it emphasises the perspective of the people in the boats, in fear of being overwhelmed. To read from left to right makes the image - to my mind, at least - more about nature’s relentless momentum, and its indifference to us puny humans.

Whose side, you wonder, is Mount Fuji on?

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Japan and the World will be on its summer holidays for the next two weeks, returning on Friday 14th August.

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Images

Hokusai manhole cover: Sora News (fair use).

Japan today passed a law intended to shore up its shaky line of succession. That line currently consists of just three men, and one of them is 90 years old.

How have they done it? By making it possible for men from branches of the imperial family that were cut off after World War II to rejoin. They themselves will not be eligible to become Emperor - but their sons will.

How haven’t they done it? By allowing women to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne. That hugely popular change to Japan’s imperial arrangements remains as elusive as ever.

In this week’s post, I’m going to let you decide how this should go. I can’t guarantee to change Japanese law, but I can offer you some Substack democracy. I’ll give you what I think is the strongest version of each side, and then invite you to vote at the end.

Please share this post as widely as you can, and let’s get a decent vote going!

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NO - Japan should not allow female emperors

Japan has had an unbroken male-line succession for at least 1,500 years - and up to 2,600 years, depending on how far back you think the imperial line goes, before history shades into myth. A male-line imperial succession is Japan. There can be no getting rid of it.

What has, after all, been the primary role of the Emperor across all those long years? Shinto’s high priest: a profoundly sacred role - performing rituals for the sake of the nation - which has always been associated with male lineage and ritual purity.

You don’t need to believe, as people once did, that the imperial line is divinely descended to recognise something precious and remarkable here. Why tamper with it?

And especially why tamper with it just because of international pressure? Many European monarchies have equalised their succession arrangements between men and women. That’s fine for them - it doesn’t mean Japan must do the same.

Nor should Japan be bullied by progressive opinion, whether at home or abroad. The imperial family ought to lie beyond public sentiment, as it always has. We’re talking about the deepest of divine mysteries, and the soul of an old and noble nation. It’s not a gameshow.

This pressure for a female emperor is part of a bigger attempt to cut Japan off from its past, which began with the Allied Occupation of Japan after World War II. The United States followed up its military victory with an assault on Japanese culture, from the removal of the Emperor’s power and the insistence on pacifism to new rules on family life that upset the old household system of the past.

Liberal commentators in the West who complain about sexism in Japan’s imperial arrangements miss something important: this isn’t, ultimately, about whether Princess Aiko - the only child of the current Emperor, and a popular figure in Japan - should one day become Empress. Japan has had female Empresses before. The problem would come with her children, if she had any: there would be pressure for them to succeed her, thereby bringing male-only succession to an end.

Advocates for gender equality in Japan should look elsewhere for meaningful wins: in politics, in Japan’s business culture, in the way women are portrayed in the media, in the sorts of expectations with which girls and boys are raised. Address all these things, and leave this ancient institution alone.

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YES - Japan should absolutely allow female emperors

Under Japan’s constitution, the role of the emperor is to serve as a symbol of Japan and of the unity of its people. In a country which regularly features near the bottom of the rankings in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report - and the lowest in the G7 - what kind of message does it send that women are barred from the throne?

Look at that same constitution, and you’ll discover that Japan is a democracy. And what do people want, on this issue? By overwhelming majorities - often reaching percentages in the 80s and beyond - they want women to be permitted to become Emperor, and they want a line of succession that can pass through women.

At a time when young people in Japan, especially, are feeling disengaged from the monarchy, changing the law to this effect seems like an obvious measure - an easy win. Princess Aiko has gained plaudits for her work with the Japanese Red Cross, including an overseas visit to Laos last year (pictured above). Why can’t she be allowed to do this kind of work as Empress? Japan’s monarchy would gain an immediate boost, at home and around the world, with Aiko-sama one day at the helm.

Under these circumstances, ‘because tradition’ seems a very weak argument. Look at how this tradition was established and sustained, and you find ancient ideas about women’s bodies being impure or their minds so second-rate that they are legally incompetent.

Making this change would not mean doing away with tradition. Little or nothing else about the role of the Emperor/Empress, and their position in Japanese society and culture, would need to be altered.

The point about traditions is that they endure. If the conservative establishment truly want the imperial institution to survive, they need to equip it to do so. That means ensuring the succession by broadening the pool of candidates to include women - by themselves, today’s measures are at best a sticking plaster. It also means clearing up a manifest injustice, of which the people of Japan are acutely aware and on which they have made their feelings plain.

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There we are! Over to you:

If No/Yes feels a bit limiting, or you want to add to the case for either side, please feel free to comment.

And please share/re-stack, if you think others might like to get involved!

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Image:

Princess Aiko in Laos: New My Royals (fair use).

Until a few years ago, hikikomori was one of those words that most people associated only with Japan. It referred to people, mostly young men, who were extremely socially withdrawn. They spent months, even years, shut away in their homes or bedrooms without socializing, studying or working.

Debate raged in Japan over what this said about the country. Was it still a thriving society, where a small number of people were simply too lazy or self-absorbed to get out and about, forging a life for themselves and giving something back? Or was Japan no longer offering its young people the opportunities it once did, after years of economic stagnation? Were some hikikomori making a political point by staying in their rooms?

Presenting a BBC radio documentary about hikikomori this week - you can listen in HERE - two things struck me: how radically the debate has moved on, and how broad its implications for Japan and the rest of us may be.

The biggest change is that hikikomori is now being recognised and tackled around the world. You can find it everywhere from Brazil and South Korea to Iran and Ukraine. It is not, as once thought, uniquely Japanese. Instead, Japan, perhaps alongside South Korea, is simply ahead of the curve in exhibiting some of the traits of a hyper-modern society that foster extreme withdrawal - from precarious life prospects amongst the young to a heavily online and convenience-oriented culture that makes this kind of withdrawal feasible.

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Doctors and sociologists who study hikikomori find all sorts of telling patterns besides. Lots of people who become hikikomori have struggled at school, suffered severe mental illness, or experienced dramatic setbacks at work. They end up in a pattern of semi or total isolation that then proves fiendishly hard to break.

The old association of hikikomori with young men has also disappeared. Within Japan, most hikikomori are between the ages of 40 and 64, contributing to what is called the ‘8050 problem’: parents in their eighties providing financial and emotional support to children in their 50s.

And by a narrow margin, most hikikomori in the 40-64 cohort are women. This was possibly always the case, but Japan’s male-dominated work culture concealed it: women staying at home were less likely to be considered unusual.

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Recognising the global nature of this phenomenon helps us see connections across cultures and formulate shareable solutions. Our programme focuses on the role here of art and creativity. One of my favourite interviews was with the French artist Ymane Chabi-Gara, at her studio in Paris. In her work, some of which you can see over on Instagram, she explores her own desire to withdraw by taking found digital images of hikikomori in their bedrooms - often surrounded by magazines, screens, food containers and trash - and recreating them in paint. She then places herself in the position of the socially withdrawn man or woman.

Ymane Chabi-Gara

Elsewhere on our travels in the documentary, we meet current and former hikikomori who are seeking ways out of their isolation by creating manga and novels. Others use music, photography and masked appearances at street parades.

Some even become actors. In the short film American Hikikomori, the role of an exasperated father who physically drags a young hikikomori from his room is played by an actor - Naoyuki Ikeda - who was once himself socially withdrawn. Drop-in centres have been set up across Japan, and also in Italy, which is home to the Invisibili project (‘The Invisibles’).

‘Avatar robots’ are becoming part of the picture too. At a cafe near Shin-Nihonbashi Station in Tokyo, robotic waiters are controlled remotely by people who for a range of reasons - including hikikomori - cannot physically be present.

Virtual reality therapies meanwhile help families to immerse themselves in the hikikomori experience from different perspectives - sufferer, mother, father - without the need for more difficult face-to-face interactions.

DAWN Avatar cafe, Tokyo

Hikikomori in Japan are thought now to number up to 1.5 million people, or around 2% of the working-age population. The numbers in South Korea, too, are very high. The numbers are contentious, however, not least because post-Covid patterns of working from home mean rethinking how hikikomori is diagnosed. It’s not always straightforward to tell whether someone’s strong and sustained preference for their own four walls is a matter of distress and what psychiatrists call ‘functional impairment’ or simply legitimate personal preference.

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This is a debate worth watching, as it unfolds. It speaks to a broader loneliness problem affecting many countries around the world. And it’s part of what may become a shift in Japanese attitudes to making and sustaining communities.

Given Japan’s demographic decline, what should ‘community’ look like? Virtual reality interventions tackling hikikomori are explicitly designed to lead, in the end, to face-to-face interaction. But Kentaro Yoshifuji of the DAWN Avatar cafe is sceptical that community really requires physical bodies operating in what some call ‘meatspace’ - the slightly dystopian term for physical reality, in contrast to cyberspace.

He thinks about ‘being present’ not solely as physical presence, but rather a feeling of being present, which can be experienced by the controller of a robotic avatar and recognised as such by those around the avatar.

If some people genuinely flourish under these conditions, is it old-fashioned to regard it as second-best? Might digitally-mediated connection of this kind become unavoidable in Japan, due to population decline and thinned-out transport networks (the result, in time, of labour shortages and lower demand)?

You may, like me, be tempted to regard this as a sad state of affairs. But I’m going to try to keep an open mind about it, recalling a set of tongue-in-cheek rules set out by Douglas Adams about new technologies. Let me leave you with them, because they’re at once funny and genuinely worth pondering:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Thanks for reading! If you found this at all interesting or useful, I’d be really grateful for a like and a share. It helps me understand whether or not Japan and the World is giving people what they want. And please feel free to leave a comment!

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Images

Ymane Chabi-Gara: BBC Radio (fair use).

DAWN Avatar cafe, Tokyo: Barista Magazine (fair use).

Hiroko was kind enough to give me an interview, and for this week’s newsletter I’m going to share some of the highlights.

Enjoy!

Hiroko Yoda

What’s the story behind this book?

I’ve been interested in Japanese history and culture and tradition for a very long time. I co-authored a series of books about Japanese folklore, starting with Yokai Attack! So it was only a matter of time before I knew I would write about kami too.

There are a lot of books about Japanese religious traditions but they tend to be very academic, or simplified into self-help methods or things like that. I wanted to get at how Japanese actually interact with these traditions on an everyday basis.

Then I realized: my mother’s passing had sent me deeper into my country’s spiritual traditions, to try to rebuild my identity.

What were these ideas and traditions like for you as a child?

I wasn’t raised religiously. Like most Japanese I didn’t get any education about religion in school either. There is actually a strict separation between Church and State in Japan.

But as a Japanese person living in Japan, I was unknowingly engaging in all sorts of spiritual traditions without realizing it. Perhaps the most common thing is hatsumode, the first visit to a shrine or a temple in the new year. Huge parts of the Japanese population do it every year. It’s ‘prayer,’ but I don’t think most people think about it that way. We see it as common sense to greet the new year. It’s tradition.

There are little jizo statues all over Japan. There are from Buddhism, and it is common to show respect to them, but I don’t think many see it as a religious act. Again, it’s kind of common sense.

Another example is the butsudan, which many homes have to commemorate deceased family members. They look like furniture, basically wooden shelves, and a lot of Japanese people have one at home. People traditionally leave offerings to their passed loved ones, like a cup of water, or food, or burning incense. This reminds them of their connections. I suspect the majority of people don’t see their offerings as specifically Buddhist acts. It is simply a traditional way of thinking about or ‘communicating’ with departed family.

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At the heart of your book are the kami. In English, we often say ‘gods’ or ‘deities’. But perhaps that can be misleading?

I don’t think ‘gods’ is appropriate as a translation for kami, for a variety of reasons. In the West, ‘god’ or ‘gods’ typically involve concepts such as faith, worship, and even belief, none of which are prioritized in Japanese spiritual traditions. In Japan the important thing isn’t what you believe so much, as that you show respect and express gratitude.

In fact the concept of religion, which is translated as shūkyō in Japanese, is of very recent origin. It was coined in the late 1800s after the ports opened and many missionaries and evangelists began coming to Japan. We needed a way to explain these faith traditions that were so integral to Western cultures and shūkyō became the word.

This is why so many Japanese claim to not have a religion when asked in surveys. If you ask people if they have a religion (shūkyō) they associate it with those Western faith traditions. Many Japanese do not see the spiritual things they do in those terms.

I worked for many years as a localizer of games and literature and manga. There are many cases where we deliberately do not translate words because they are expressions of unique cultural concepts. Sushi, or samurai, or ninja are examples of this. Kami are a unique expression of Japan’s spiritual culture so I think they deserve to be called kami in English, too. It helps avoid misunderstandings.

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Depictions of the kami, in myths and stories, are often personal; they have all sorts of human attributes. Do you find that way of depicting them helpful?

This is an interesting question. The kami are portrayed in very human ways in the old texts of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. Those portrayals help readers empathize with the kami in the stories.

But the fact is most Japanese do not read these books because they’re very, very old and cryptic to read. Everyone knows of them, and knows they are mythical histories, but that’s about it. I don’t feel that anthropomorphic portrayals of kami are as integral to Shinto as they are to other beliefs, such as Buddhism, which has many beautiful portrayals of its deities.

I wrote in my book about Lafcadio Hearn travelling a great distance to a shrine in hopes of seeing what a kami looked like, but when the priest opened the altar it was just a mirror. And that really confused Hearn.

Once I asked a Shinto priest what form the kami took and he said, they are a space in your heart. They’re a space for you to fill.

You’re in an interesting position, as someone who knows both Japanese and American culture very well. What, for you, are some of the things that people in the US - and perhaps the West more broadly - are struggling with right now? And how can Japan help?

I do not see myself as a guru or anything like that. But if I could make one observation it is that Westerners tend to draw lines among their categories, whether personal identities or faiths or whatever. And defining yourself is important. But when you draw hard lines, you can find yourself defining yourself in negatives: what you won’t do or think or whatever.

Japan tends to take an additive approach to its spiritual traditions, incorporating rather than refuting. And I am not saying I believe it is superior, or anything like that. I am saying it is another perspective, that some might find helpful. There’s always room for more - this is one of the foundations of our spiritual worldview. It’s why there are so many deities and spiritual beings of all sorts from all kinds of places interacting without friction here.

I think that flexibility is the most important thing I learned in my journey. And I think the best way to cultivate it is by cultivating a sense of gratitude towards life. And the best way to cultivate that is by going outdoors into nature, because it reminds us that we belong to a bigger system. That’s easy to forget.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to Hiroko’s Substack HERE.

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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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Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please like and share.

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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).