The scrap was written by the Japanese artist Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece: the bestselling manga of all time. For nearly 30 years, fans have followed Oda’s rascally pirate, Monkey D. Luffy, as he and his friends sail the seas in search of the fabled treasure that gives the series its name. Some enthusiasts have wondered, of late, whether Luffy would ever find it, or even whether Oda himself knows what or where it might be. In celebration of an astonishing 600 million copies of his manga circulating worldwide — and perhaps to mollify his fans — Oda committed the answer to paper and placed it in that orb. The truth, he promises, will surface when the manga finally finishes.

You may never have heard of Luffy. But you’ve probably seen him. A skinny young man in a straw hat, red waistcoat and blue shorts, he adorns children’s clothing from London to LA. There are trading cards and Lego sets. Shops like HMV are crammed with franchise memorabilia, and where manga fans once had to seek out specialist bookshops or trawl the internet to feed their fix, mainstream retailers now devote enormous amounts of shelf-space to Japanese manga in general — and to One Piece in particular. For their part, Netflix subscribers will be familiar with the One Piece anime and live-action series, due to be joined at the end of this month by LEGO One Piece. The anime series has run for 26 years, racking up some 1,180 episodes and counting. It is now broadcast in around 80 countries across the world.

Why has One Piece become so ubiquitous? And, as we reach peak Luffy, are we also reaching peak “Japan” as a global brand? Oda himself doesn’t offer many answers. Reportedly very sociable in private, he has always sought to avoid a public profile. In part, that’s because he doesn’t have the time or energy. Brutal deadlines from his publisher have sometimes obliged Oda to sleep for less than three hours a night. And where most top manga artists pen their main characters and then — like the Old Masters — delegate much of the rest to assistants, Oda claims to draw anything that moves: crowds, animals, smoke, even the sea.

But Oda doesn’t appear interested in becoming a public intellectual, like some manga artists. He grew up on rollicking adventures like Dragon Ball and the German-Japanese animation Vicky the Viking: the latter, like One Piece, revolving around a plucky boy and his crew roaming the high seas. Oda is also partial to a good yakuza film or period drama, and as a history fan seems attracted to the enterprise and audacity of the Age of Discovery and the Golden Age of Piracy. His driving question in drawing One Piece is simple: would his 15-year-old self enjoy this?

The result is a main character, Luffy, who wants what most 15-year-olds want: fun; freedom from interference or consequences; fairness from people in authority; an endless supply of food, and — ideally — superpowers. After eating a mystical fruit as a child, Luffy is able to deploy stretchy, rubbery limbs against his foes. He’s also blunt, ambitious, and willing to battle the “World Government”, whose cruel will is enforced by thick-set gym bunnies in the Marines. Luffy is also devoted to his friends: Roronoa Zoro, a muscular, laconic swordsman; Nami the navigator, who brings brains and a bit of business acumen to Luffy’s Straw Hat Crew; Sanji the chain-smoking chef; and Usopp, a coward and compulsive liar — complete with Pinocchio nose — who gives the series surprising emotional depth.

Suggested Reading

Japan's bleak vision of the future

By Tom Feiling

Yet the characters alone don’t account for One Piece’s outsized popularity. There’s also its unique art style — charmingly ragged, where many of its rivals employ a samey precision — plus its ever-compounding status as the recommended starting point for anyone wanting to get into manga and anime. Alongside all this runs Oda’s gift, shared with other internationally successful Japanese creatives, for finding the universal in the particular: drawing out, from Japanese life, values, sentiments and dilemmas, ideas that possess broad human appeal.

On and off down the centuries, some in Japan have prided themselves on taking the collective good — family, neighborhood, company, nation — more seriously than wealthy rivals like the UK and the US. The result is a rich artistic legacy, which dramatizes the tensions involved in trying to live this way. An individualist can stick two fingers up, and walk away. There’s romance in that, perhaps, but not much real drama. On the other hand, to remain committed to the welfare of a group or a whole society, while mourning serious and possibly intractable failings, is difficult and painful. It’s also truer to the way most people live.

These are the very waters in which Luffy and his friends sail. There’s Princess Vivi, for instance, drawn to the life of the Straw Hat Crew but who chooses to stay behind in her war-torn kingdom. We see her standing on the shore, tears streaming down her face as Luffy and his friends sail away without looking back. Have they forgotten her already? In fact, they can’t answer her, because it might put her in danger from the watching Marines. But, as one, the crew all raise their fists in the air, an “X” marked on each of their arms in covert salute to a friend. It is one of the most poignant scenes in the series.

Suggested Reading

Welcome to the age of Otaku

By Louis Elton

Pirate yarn though it is, then, One Piece can be read as a conservative tour de force, championing age-old values like freedom, solidarity, justice, hard work, self-sacrifice and ninkyō: a chivalrous spirit, oriented towards helping the weak and fighting the strong. It is associations like these that have Gen Z protestors flying the Straw Hat Jolly Roger at marches in Indonesia and Nepal, illustrating their opposition to what they regard as corrupt and authoritarian governments. The Jolly Roger has the additional virtue of being politically ambiguous, and thereby complicated for governments to ban without reinforcing the critique that they are indeed repressive. And yet trouble may be looming on the horizon, for the Straw Hat Crew and the wider world they represent.

Oda recalls discovering as a small boy that you could draw manga for a living, realizing in that moment that he might never have to work a day in his life. Quite a few people in Japan have felt the same way, feeding the rise of one of the country’s great postwar export industries — but also contributing to infamously demanding work conditions, as an over-supply of manga artists meets tight profit margins, quick turnaround times, and a publishing culture in which low polling among readers quickly places a manga at risk of being dropped.

An already under-pressure industry now has to contend with AI hoovering up its output and creating rival content at lightning speed. Japanese manga also faces competition from Korean manhwa and Chinese manhua, which often take web novels as their source material and use assembly-line production to create full-color panels. Readers find themselves drawn into a primarily online revenue system, one geared towards mobile phone reading and tie-in purchases.

Suggested Reading

How Weebs lost their way

By Poppy Sowerby

Alongside East Asian competition runs East Asian history. One of the greatest achievements of artists such as Osamu Tezuka and Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki was the refurbishing of Japan’s international reputation after the Second World War. They replaced the militarists and colonizers of old, if not quite burying them, with animated adventures that were variously funny, consoling, saccharine-sweet, techno-futuristic and deeply dystopian. Hopes ran high that young Chinese and South Koreans brought up on Japanese manga and anime would be inclined to reject as outdated and irrelevant dark tales told by their parents or teachers about Japanese imperialism. Yet survey evidence suggests that, for South Korea’s young, it is possible to regard Japan both as a place that produces great food and fiction and where the events of the past have yet to be sufficiently atoned for. So too in China, where a patriotic school education tends to cast Japan as the main villain (closely followed by the British), and where the government has shown its willingness to filter Japanese manga, films and music, and sometimes to ban them outright.

Compounding this problem is Japan’s recent policy of beefing up its military and intelligence operations, while also seeking to strengthen the constitutional position of its armed forces and crack down on foreign espionage. Advocates argue that all these measures are necessary, even overdue. But scholars equally note that Japan’s creative output travels well when it is, as the sociologist Koichi Iwabuchi puts it, “culturally odorless”. A few years ago, a row broke out in South Korea when fans noticed that red-and-white earrings worn by one of the characters in Demon Slayer resembled Japan’s wartime Rising Sun flag. Inevitably, then, the future reception for manga and anime in East Asia, and indeed further afield, will be shaped by perceptions of how Japan’s politics and social attitudes are changing.

When One Piece first launched, back in 1997, Japanese manga was subject to restrictions imposed by South Korean authorities who feared a repeat of the cultural colonization of the past. Luffy’s 30-year odyssey has unfolded alongside Japan’s rise to become Asia’s cultural superpower. Whether that reputation survives until his journey ends is likely to be decided less by Oda than by politicians in Tokyo, Washington, Seoul and Beijing. By the time the One Piece finale arrives, and Oda’s treasure chest is opened, the most interesting secret of all may be what the world has come to think of Japan.

Today, however, nearly half of the UK’s top-40 translated fiction titles come from Japan. The most popular of them, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, sold more copies in the UK — exceeding 400,000 — than it had done back home, where it was nevertheless still a success. Alongside the carnal, the cozy and the comfortable — including a strange fixation with cats — runs the darkly criminal. The thrill of this latter genre is surely similar for both Japanese and British audiences. Members of two relatively low-crime, high-trust societies find it bracing to witness, at a safe remove, the temporary and localized breakdown of law and order. What makes stories like these plausible in both places is a long-standing sense, running from detective fiction’s Golden Age a century ago through to the present day, that beneath the public civility on which both cultures pride themselves lies misery and even horror.

Britain’s detective fiction bond with Japan goes back to the arrival on Japanese shores in the late 19th century of Sherlock Holmes in translation. Japan’s leaders at this point saw themselves playing an urgent game of Great Power catch-up. They developed modern armed forces, opened factories and began trading in the international economy. But they soon realized material progress alone was not enough. The physical and intellectual quality of the population mattered too, in an age of fierce, zero-sum global competition.

Literature had a role to play here, as the country set about weeding out the remnants of “superstition” and other unwanted relics of the past. Whereas the popular new “I-novel” genre delivered an unhelpfully mixed verdict on Japanese modernization — its first-person narrators were often bewildered by the present and yearned for the past — the translated adventures of Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes performed a more useful service. Sales of both men’s adventures were modest at first, and yet the criminal mastermind and the bohemian sleuth both, in their differing ways, served as compelling adverts for the logical, deductive mind. The exposure and punishment of wrongdoing was already a thread in Japanese storytelling, from tales of civic and samurai justice to Buddhist warnings of karmic comeuppance. But reading about someone perpetrating or reverse-engineering a fiendishly clever crime, against the backdrop of the complexities of modern life, was a fresh and salutary exercise for what Agatha Christie’s Poirot liked to call the “little grey cells”.

The so-called “fair-play” crime thriller, unfolding in a closed setting with a finite list of suspects, ended up becoming a staple of crime writing in Japan. It weathered suppression during the Second World War — for its Western origins and focus on individual brilliance over collective effort — before rising again with Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders (1946). The novel was published in English in 2019 — to rave reviews — by the Pushkin Vertigo imprint. The Honjin Murders centers around an apparently impossible crime. A newly-wed couple is found murdered in their detached annex, which is locked from inside. The snow all around it meanwhile remains entirely undisturbed.

Fun though puzzles are, however, there were those in Japan as far back as the Twenties who wanted the genre to do more. They included the godfather of mystery writing, Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen name was a not-so-subtle phonetic clue to the debt he owed to America’s Edgar Allan Poe. The kanji used evoked someone “staggering along the Edo River”.

Ranpo’s fictional detective Kogorō Akechi was a dark twist on Sherlock Holmes, augmenting the latter’s powers of observation and deduction with an intuitive grasp of human psychology — especially that of abnormal or unstable minds. The satirical intent seems clear: you can know a society by the sorts of crimes and crime-fighters it throws up. The Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes was ordered and contained. Akechi, on the other hand, succeeded only by becoming attuned to perversity and dysfunction. Ranpo, as his creator, became a master not of the “whodunit” genre, but the whydunit.

More from this author

The end of Japanese pacifism

By Christopher Harding

It was hardly the case, of course, that Japan was falling apart in the Twenties, when the first Akechi mystery was published. But there were seeds of uncertainty and discontent with which Ranpo could work. Until relatively recently, most Japanese had lived and died in or around the town or village where they were born, knowing almost everything about everyone in the community. Now, in a rapidly-urbanizing country, plenty knew what it felt like to move to a new town or city and suddenly have complete strangers for neighbors. The new and unnerving forms of intimacy that resulted — physical closeness without real knowledge or sympathy — power some of Ranpo’s best-known stories. In The Human Chair (1925), a voyeuristic furniture maker conceals himself inside an armchair so that he can enjoy the experience of having people sit, entirely unsuspecting, on his lap.

Sharing Ranpo’s love of using crime to probe dysfunction was Seichō Matsumoto, creator of Inspector Imanishi. He was less interested than Ranpo in an “erotic and grotesque” (eroguro) sensibility, preferring to focus on Japan as a whole during its postwar return to prosperity from the Fifties to the Seventies.

The crime, for example, in Inspector Imanishi Investigates (first published in Japan in 1960-1), is quite humdrum when set alongside the derangement of Ranpo’s villains. An unremarkable man is found beaten to death by a railway line. And yet this is precisely what gives Matsumoto’s detective fiction its bite. A vividly eccentric crime tells you about a single person; a “conventional” one implicates a whole society. An activist as well as a bestselling author, Matsumoto used Inspector Imanishi to explore the discrimination and class prejudice which he regarded as underpinning Japan’s respectability — ugly realities from which his killers drew their motivation.

Matsumoto is often billed in the UK as “Japan’s Agatha Christie”, and he’s now popular enough here to command inclusion in the Penguin Modern Classics label. And yet the Christie comparison is not quite right. Her villains tend briefly to upset a privileged, if rarely very happy, gathering. Their arrest and removal is a reset. So full and compelling is Matsumoto’s portrait of postwar Japan, by contrast, that the reader ends up sympathizing with some of his perpetrators, as more-or-less powerless products of their time and place.

Suggested Reading

Richard Osman's common people

By Nicholas Harris

British readers coming to Matsumoto in the 2010s and 2020s no doubt recognize his villainous societies in part from those found in crime writers like Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin. The former took aim at the obliviousness of the privileged and the murderous frustration and shame that it could inspire in society’s have-nots. Rankin’s Edinburgh, meanwhile, was split between a genteel New Town and the deprivation and decline that characterized less well-known parts of the city. Both are themes for Matsumoto: the festering of social and psychological wounds, and the corruption that outwardly respectable societies like the UK and Japan become adept at concealing.

All this makes it easier for Japan to become part of our cultural subconscious, as it surely is, bit by bit. The heyday of Haruki Murakami, back in the Nineties and 2000s, was also the era of the Palin travel documentary and Jonathan Ross’s Japanorama: Japan was at once sophisticated and weird. Now, thanks in no small part to the fiction boom and a generation of talented translators — including Ginny Tapley Takemori (Convenience Store Woman) and Polly Barton (Butter) — we see Japan not so much as exotic as simply early, in arriving at some of the challenges we face: an aging, shrinking population; the steady disappearance of stable careers; patterns of living and consumption that draw us apart from one another rather than bring us together; and attempts to fix some or all of this with technology. The gig economy and the perpetual part-timer lie at the core of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman; low fertility and the pressure to reproduce drive Vanishing World, by the same author. Even the comfort genre — Before the Coffee Gets Cold, plus all those books about cats — gestures at a profound need for consolation, in the face of loneliness and isolation fostered by long working hours and anonymous urban living.

No doubt there’s a selection effect at play here: no publisher of translated fiction gets far without an instinct for the universal, or at least a fine-grained sense of their target audience. But whereas Western readers once enjoyed Japanese literature as anthropology — “unlocking Japan”, as the popular phrase had it — there is, more and more, a recognition effect at play. That is great for publishers seeking sales, but perhaps less so for the rest of us, when the individual struggles and social dysfunction we’re recognizing seem at times so dark. Pessimists see Japan as a harbinger of the UK’s own doom: we’re headed for similar demographic decline, only without the excellent infrastructure and high levels of social trust that help make Japan livable despite its troubles.

And yet it’s possible to find more in Japanese fiction than this. The country’s old social contract may now be disappearing. But many of Japan’s novelists offer cautious hope. Convenience Store Woman shows people trying to rethink what a successful life might look like; Before the Coffee Gets Cold is about overcoming loneliness by reconnecting with the world. The relationship between two of Butter’s main protagonists, Rika and Reiko — by turns tempestuous and tender — provides both women with liberation and comfort. Perhaps what attracts British readers to Japanese fiction is not just the thrill of a plausible dystopia, but the strength and ingenuity of the people who find themselves born into one.

To Taiwan’s leaders, that sounds ominous. Did Trump just receive a thorough schooling in Xi’s view of his near neighbor, making it less likely that Trump might — in his own words — “travel 9,500 miles to fight a war”?

At stake is not just whether this US administration, or a future one fashioned in its image, would defend Taiwan if attacked; Trump is also currently mulling the approval of $14 billion worth of weapons sales to East Asia’s most embattled island. 

The uncertain politics of weapons supplies renders all the more important a controversial decision made in Japan last month. It is moving to abolish long-standing restrictions that limit military equipment transfers to five nonlethal categories: rescue, transport, warning, surveillance and mine-sweeping.

In future, countries with which Japan has a defense equipment and technology transfer agreement — a roster of 17 nations that includes the US, UK and Australia (but not Taiwan) — will be able to avail themselves of Japanese-made missiles, rockets, drones, jets, frigates and eventually electromagnetic railguns and laser weapons, both 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 defense against swarms of cheap drones.  

Japan’s move has been widely described as historic. The country has been a beacon to pacifists for more than 80 years. Atomic devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 forced the world to face the possibility that any future war might be humanity’s last. Leaders and citizens in those two cities have, as a consequence, long embraced a role as the moral conscience of anti-nuclear activism. Japan is celebrated as an example of a society that flourished after renouncing war — which it did at the behest of the United States, author of Japan’s postwar constitution during a transformative seven-year Allied occupation.   

Yet advocates of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s more assertive security stance argue that Japan’s postwar comeback had less to do with pacifism and more to do with the country’s strategic value to the United States during the Cold War. Japan allowed US bases and forces on its soil, turning the archipelago into a giant aircraft carrier. In return, the US allowed Japan to shelter under its nuclear umbrella while devoting its industrial expertise to cars and consumer electronics rather than costly defense. 

Increasing numbers of Japanese now accept that those days are over. The new world of the 2020s is all about countries fending for themselves, as America becomes a less stable global guarantor, and international institutions like Nato, the EU and especially the UN struggle to maintain relevance. With China pressing its regional interests, and North Korea refining its nuclear weapons technology, Japan must do more than simply cross its fingers that if push came to shove a future American president would invest potentially scarce political capital in protecting its old Asian ally — especially if they had recently been treated to a late-night history lesson by a charming Chinese president.     

Takaichi has made clear the importance of self-sufficiency in areas like energy, semi-conductors and rare earths. She clearly takes the same view when it comes to self-defense. She is subjecting Japan’s key national security documents to a fast-tracked review and is now seeking to grow her country’s defense sector by expanding its client list beyond Japan’s own Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Ever-greater proportions of Japan’s GDP are being ear-marked for the country’s own defenses. And within weeks, the Prime Minister will receive recommendations on reviewing those key national security documents — including potential revisions to her country’s three non-nuclear principles: never to produce or possess nuclear weapons, or allow them to transit Japanese territory. 

Suggested Reading

Xi Jinping wants Taiwan for free

By Eyck Freymann

Developing Japan’s defense sector is a long-term project. Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric have already announced that they will be hiring new people. But such is the gradual pace at which capacity is built, products developed and sales agreed, that Takaichi herself may well not be in office by the time her latest policy change begins to bear fruit.   

Still, the potential market for Japanese weapons is vast. America’s own stocks are perilously low after wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and Asian neighbors including the Philippines appear keen to acquire Japanese hardware. The Philippines’ defense secretary has welcomed Takaichi’s move, and a sale is in the offing of three pre-loved Abukuma-class destroyer escorts, which are soon to leave active service in Japan. 

Further afield, Japan may be able to steal business from the US arms industry, amid growing complaints  about high costs and late deliveries. Added to this is Japan’s perceived ability to make big ideas work where America has given up. The railgun is a prime example. The US spent half a billion dollars over several decades before setting the project aside in 2021. Japan has a working prototype.

Problems loom. China has once again raised the specter of Japanese “remilitarisation”. For now, Takaichi may be able to shrug this off as hypocrisy: China is building up its own military at a far quicker rate, while rising to become the world’s fifth-largest arms exporter — to countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. 

And yet consider how Japan’s latest move looks if you’re sitting in Beijing. Japan has long been building links with countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia, in an attempt to counter Chinese economic and military power. If you then start to see hi-tech Japanese weapons arriving at military bases in these countries, you might conclude that a line is being crossed from friendly ties into coalition-building.

Then there is the question of the past. Memories remain vivid in East and Southeast Asia of the swaggering entitlement and resulting cruelties — murder, rape, starvation — that characterized a militarily-dominant Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Part of the problem is Japan’s perceived lack of contrition, thanks to the absence of political and public stock-taking comparable to that seen in postwar Germany. The question asked by those in Asia who genuinely worry about remilitarisation is whether, in 1945, Japan entered a period of deep change or was simply deprived by the Allies of the ability to behave as it previously had. For some, this is about a putative Japanese psyche, which blends civility with a propensity towards unrestrained violence. It is an old notion, dating back in the Western imagination to Catholic missionaries’ shock at the ease with which lives were taken by warriors during Japan’s 16th-century civil war. 

We ought to resist such arguments, which in their modern form are rooted in wartime Allied propaganda. The Imperial Japanese Army did not start out as an evil organization, a mere vehicle for Japanese bloodlust. It degenerated, under specific historical conditions in the Thirties and Forties, into an institution defined by brutality, poor discipline and a racist disregard for the value of non-Japanese life. 

Those concerned about Takaichi’s latest move ought to worry less about unreconstructed samurai toting laser weapons and take an interest instead in how it was that Japanese civil society eroded. 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 — combined with the dominance of the country’s politics by industrialists, military men, an unaccountable police force and a partially corrupt judiciary. Critical newspaper coverage was met with bullying, fines, imprisonment and eventually the shutting down of publications. Radio remained under strict government control. Parliamentarians, already given precious little real power under Japan’s constitution, were progressively silenced. Bit by bit, and under the rhetorical cover of doing what had to be done to save their country, a ruling clique squeezed the life out of Japan’s fledgling democracy.

Now look at how Prime Minister Takaichi has instituted her new policy on lethal weapons. It was not in her manifesto; nor was it put before parliament. Instead it was decided 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 give its armed forces greater legal leeway. It will likely do both — the strategic climate, sadly, seems to require it. The question is whether Japan’s democracy, and the civil society on which it rests, remain healthy enough to manage these changes in a way that people, both in Japan and around Asia, can trust.   

In 2013, when Takaichi’s mentor Shinzō Abe was seeking to develop his policy of “proactive pacifism”, he got a State Secrecy Law through parliament. Now a government can, with no external or judicial checks, deem anything it likes to be a secret — thereby preventing its disclosure. Meanwhile, the people who collect and weigh the nation’s secrets are subject to little oversight.

Suggested Reading

What does Sanae Takaichi want?

By Chris Harding

This matters because Takaichi’s far-reaching reassessment of Japan’s national security includes the creation of a new national intelligence bureau, to replace Japan’s existing and fragmented system. She 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 the sorts of checks and balances needed to uphold constitutional rights including the right to privacy. Add to this mix the building of a lucrative defense industry heavily reliant on export contracts, and you risk a return to foreign policy being shaped by cliques working in murky semi-darkness. 

Back in the Sixties, some of the staunchest defenders of constitutional freedoms were communists, socialists and university students. Mass protests in 1959-60 against renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the US became serious enough that Japan’s democracy was briefly threatened: there was violence inside and outside parliament, and a decision was nearly taken to cross the Rubicon and call in the Self-Defense Forces to put down the protests.

A protest tradition has remained alive and well in Japan ever since: seen in student protests during the late Sixties; a struggle over government attempts to seize farmland to build Narita Airport; opposition to the presence of American forces in Okinawa; and anger, in the aftermath of the triple disasters of 2011, at the mismanagement of Japan’s nuclear power infrastructure.  

Takaichi has faced protests of her own in recent weeks, including over the prospect of Japan sending military equipment to the Gulf. Developing more robust forms of self-defense and even deterrence is one thing: people in Japan are not naïve about the threat posed by China and North Korea, and their warm relations with Taiwan continue to be a thorny issue in Sino-Japanese diplomacy. But setting out to make money from the prosecution of wars around the world is a very different proposition. Becoming a “merchant of death” far more obviously offends against the history and morality of postwar Japanese pacifism.

It may also be bad for businesses, in particular those whose profits depend on Japan’s global reputation as a peaceful and civilized 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 — not as rhetorical cover for something darker, but as meaningful “Japanese” values. 

Japan is already home to a large number of well-networked NGOs, which campaign on a range of civil society issues. These include holding the police and judicial system to account over the importance of their independence from politics together with the questionable methods used to secure Japan’s famously high conviction rate of over 99%. Nihon Hidankyō, an organization which campaigns for nuclear abolition, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024. 

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. If Japan’s role as a beacon of pacifism is indeed coming to an end, its new purpose could be almost as valuable: showing the world’s democracies how a country can rearm without losing its conscience.

It’s hard to credit now, but throughout the Eighties a real fear existed in American boardrooms that Japan’s rapid economic growth would lead to it overtaking the US as the world’s largest economy. In those days, the Imperial Palace was said to be worth more than the state of California. However, after I left in 1993, Japan went into the first of several “Lost Decades”. The GDP growth rate flatlined, wages stagnated and living standards went into decline.

When I returned 24 years later, this time as a journalist, I was curious to see what happens when a country starts to shrink. Returning for another three-year stint was a fascinating exercise in watching a country in slow decline: the empty business hotels, the tiny cars, the poorer quality of the goods in the shops. Japan is still a sign of things to come — but this time round, the future doesn’t look so bright.

There are lessons here for the UK. Japan is now well-versed in post-growth economics — i.e. how to make a living once an economy has flatlined. But the main lesson is how to adjust to the consequences of a low birth rate. Japan’s total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.15 in 2024. Apart from Israel, all countries in the developed world now have a fertility rate below 2.1 children per woman — the level required to maintain a stable population. What makes Japan the canary in the coalmine is that its fertility rate dropped below replacement level in 1974, before any other country. This means that the consequences of low fertility — a rapidly aging society and a shrinking population — are becoming apparent there before they do anywhere else.

You may also like:

Meet Japan's Iron Lady

By Christopher Harding

Last year, the population of Japan shrank by over 900,000, and the rate of decline is only going to grow faster with time. The country is also aging: the proportion of over-65s in the total population currently stands at 29% and is expected to rise to 38% over the next 10-20 years. On one level, this is a great achievement, a tribute to a high standard of living, a universal healthcare system and healthy lifestyles. The problem is the exorbitant cost of providing pensions, medical care and long-term care to so many over-65-year-olds.

Another problem with mass aging is the way the political landscape tilts towards the gray. Electoral turnout is higher among the elderly than it is among the young — and older voters tend to plump for stability and continuity. That’s all very well when your country is in the clover, but it comes to look ostrich-like when it is facing an existential crisis.

Japan has been suffering labor shortages for decades. This is because there are so few young people to become the farmers, carpenters and IT workers of the future. In just about every occupation, Japan has the oldest workers in the world. But the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) still can’t bring itself to admit the need for mass immigration. That’s partly because elderly voters tend to be more hostile to mass immigration than younger voters.

Many LDP politicians argue that mass immigration is unnecessary, if only businesses can raise productivity — which is stubbornly low in Japan. Conventional thinking says that raising productivity means investing in education and R&D. But this is not high on the list of elderly voters’ priorities. Indeed, government expenditure is being diverted away from education and R&D into pensions and healthcare for the elderly.

Under its new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, the LDP government is now hoping that by embracing AI and robots, it can kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, raise productivity; on the other, provide care for the country’s burgeoning elderly population. There has been a lot of hype around “carebots” in particular. Huge sums have been invested in carebots like The Hug and the Robear, which are supposed to be able to lift care home residents in and out of bed. The latest iteration is the Lovot: a plump, baby-like robot that has clearly been designed to fill the gap once occupied by Japan’s toddlers.

The LDP likes robots, partly because it hopes they will obviate the need for foreign care workers, and partly because robotics is one area where Japan still looks like a harbinger of a brighter future. Like me, the country’s politicians still see Japan as the land of technological wizardry. Most of them came of age in the years of miraculous economic growth rates, when Japan was synonymous with technology. The disastrous meltdown of a nuclear power station on the coast of Fukushima in 2011 made the public suspicious of state authorities, but trust in science and high tech remains high. Despite the gradual decline in R&D budgets, there are still loads of inventions to inspire national pride — from the bullet train to the pot noodle.

Culture goes a long way in explaining Japan’s love of robots. Japan is not scared of robots in the way that Europe is. This may be because there is no Luddite tradition in Japan, and no Frankenstein’s monster. Japan is the home of the vengeful Godzilla, but also of the irrepressible Atomboy.

The love of robots may also be down to Shintoism, the indigenous, animistic, and polytheistic religion of Japan, which holds that everything has a soul. In the old days, that meant rocks and rivers; in the modern era, all kinds of inanimate objects have been deified. Priests at Sensoji temple in Tokyo have been holding retirement ceremonies for leather workers’ needles for many years (they are entombed in blocks of tofu, in the belief that they will appreciate its softness). These days, they also hold ceremonies for aging robots.

In Europe and the United States, there are fears that AI will lead to mass unemployment. But if there’s one thing a country with a shrinking population doesn’t have to worry about, it’s unemployment. The problem is that robots are of limited use in addressing Japan’s most pressing labor shortages. “Carebots” are just too clumsy to be of use in care homes. They are also too expensive. Investing in robots makes good financial sense for manufacturers of TVs and cars, but it is beyond the budgets of most care homes.

Japan’s politicians and bureaucrats have known about the declining birth rate for 40 years. So far, their response has been piecemeal and cosmetic. It’s easy to criticize a stodgy ruling party that has been in power for the last 70 years — and in their defense, what is happening is unprecedented. Still, the LDP seems stumped for answers.

Many companies accept that Japan needs more foreign-born workers, but the country still doesn’t really have an immigration policy. Japan has been traditionally hard to migrate to, but this has changed in recent years, and the beginnings of a multicultural society can be seen in the big cities and manufacturing centers. The new migrants come from across east Asia: China, Korea and the Philippines, but also Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The electorate is finding mass immigration a bitter pill to swallow. It’s not hard to understand why. Rich, confident countries with younger populations prize their autonomy. Dependence on others is a sign of declining power, whether for people or nations. Like the Reform Party, the LDP wants to have it both ways, rallying its supporters behind the twin cries of “Let’s stop migration” and “I’m old! I’m entitled to a triple lock pension!”

Viewed from one angle, Japan already exists in a kind of far-Right fever dream: a highly patriarchal, near-ethnic monoculture that is pro-business and high tech, ruled over by a party in hock to an entitled, conservative and xenophobic electorate. This was all well and good when Japan was booming, but in an era of economic stagnation, mass aging and rising debt, the old virtues have come to look like vices. Official government data shows that Japan has moved from having 7.7 workers supporting each OAP in 1975 to around 1.9 supporting one in 2025. That’s not sustainable and neither is the country’s national debt, which is the largest in the OECD.

Aside from native xenophobia, the problem is that, notwithstanding the timidity of the LDP, every way forward seems blocked. Japan’s multinationals are flush with cash — but investment opportunities at home are limited. As all kinds of businesses, from electricity producers to food producers and car makers, are learning to their cost, an aging society consumes less than a young one. More importantly, a declining population means shrinking markets. What is the point of investing in a business if the only certainty is that returns are going to diminish over time?

Crucially, Japan is still rich, or at least its big companies are. Many of its people are poor and getting poorer. This is one of the root causes of its low birth rate. Poverty might not hold people back from having kids in the developing world, but it certainly does in the developed world.

The second root cause of the low birth rate is the country’s outdated gender norms. The ruling party has its first female leader, and the country its first female prime minister, which is a good start. However, notwithstanding Takaichi’s landslide election victory in February, Japan is still a remarkably male-dominated society.

You might think that a patriarchal society, in which men are expected to become salarymen and women to stay at home, might result in a higher birthrate. But men are no longer the only breadwinners. Economic stagnation and declining living standards have been pulling women into the workforce for the last 30 years. Despite this expansion, Japan’s corporate culture still doesn’t make enough allowance for working women. Women’s issues (of which raising children is considered one) are habitually brushed over. This is changing, but at a glacial pace.

Across the developed world, governments need to do more to help people hit the 2.1-kids requirement. If they can’t, or if people simply don’t want to have 2.1 kids anymore, they need to get used to mass immigration. Productivity boosts are all well and good, but on current showing, the robots just aren’t smart enough to take the places of all those missing workers.

***

Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future by Tom Feiling is published by Allen Lane.

Commentators agree that most of the credit here is due to Takaichi herself, and to those around her, for making a wildly successful gamble on her personal popularity. “Sanamania” gripped the country during the short election campaign as people queued up to buy Takaichi’s trademark black leather handbag and her famous pink pen. While Japan’s humiliated opposition, the Centrist Reform Alliance, picks itself up off the floor, the country’s currency is riding high — suggesting at least modest market confidence in what Takaichi’s reign might bring.

The question now is what Takaichi may do with her mandate. The last time a comparably emphatic victory was won in a Japanese election, back in 2012, it marked the start of Shinzō Abe’s long and decisive premiership. Those hoping for strong leadership on Japan’s domestic challenges — its intertwining demographic and debt crises — and on regional tensions in the Asia-Pacific, will be looking to Takaichi to deliver. She is due in the United States in mid-March to meet Donald Trump; a few weeks later, President Trump is expected to make his highly-anticipated visit to China. A reset in East Asia is on the cards — but what does Takaichi want?

More from this author

Meet Japan's Iron Lady

By Christopher Harding

The Prime Minister’s reputation is that of a China hawk. Last November, she angered China’s leadership by appearing to suggest that Japan’s Self-Defense Forces might be deployed in the event of an armed Chinese attempt on Taiwan. This violated a long-standing Japanese policy — mirroring that of the United States — of strategic ambiguity when it comes to what the country might do in the event of a “Taiwan contingency,” as the standard euphemism goes. The Chinese response was swift: a ban on Japanese seafood imports, the shutting down of Japanese films and music concerts in China and hints dropped about restricting supplies of rare-earth minerals to Japan.

Evidence from the campaign trail, however, suggests that Takaichi’s refusal to apologize for her remarks helped her cause with the Japanese electorate. Public opinion on China is hardening, while long-standing opposition to the Self-Defense Forces — particularly among older Japanese, committed to post-war pacifism — has softened in recent years. This will give Takaichi confidence in continuing the pivot, from defense to active deterrence, that she inherited from her predecessors.

Takaichi has already brought forward a target of spending 2% of Japan’s substantial GDP on defense, from 2027 to March this year. She is lavishing money on south-western Japan, near Taiwan, and on sites around the country’s coastline. Japan is also making heavy investments in aerial, surface and underwater drones, alongside long-range strike capabilities including American Tomahawk missiles. Japan’s comparatively small domestic defense industry is now being developed at pace. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries enjoyed a landmark win last year when it was awarded the contract to build Australia’s next-generation frigate.

For Takaichi, these moves promise a triple benefit. They signal to China that Japan is serious about its defense. They reassure an ever-transactional Donald Trump that, as requested, Japan is doing more towards its own security. And they build Japanese resilience for the day — should it ever arrive — when American interest in the Asia-Pacific region begins to recede.

Even if its interest fluctuates over the years to come, the US will always have to pay careful attention to what is happening across the Pacific. The downgrading of the threat from China in the latest US National Security Strategy no doubt came as a shock in Tokyo, but the basic underlying geographic and strategic realities haven’t changed. Japan remains the most important link in the “First Island Chain”, which runs from the Kuril Islands down to Borneo and constrains Chinese access to the Pacific. The US-Japanese aim remains, for now at least, the cultivation of a coalition that is capable of balancing out Chinese economic and seaborne military power in the Asia-Pacific and maintaining freedom of the seas.

Key to these efforts are the Quad (Japan, the US, India and Australia), ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and a series of bilateral relationships including Japan-Vietnam and Japan-Philippines. Japan has been remarkably successful in cultivating regional relationships in recent years, using Official Development Assistance (ODA) to fund the building of ports, railway systems and more in countries like Vietnam. Japan also has an ODA-funded agreement in place to fund the building of six patrol vessels for the Vietnam Coast Guard. In the Philippines, Japanese finance is contributing toward new roads, new bridges and the Metro Manila Subway Project.

A major question for what may become a historic premiership is what use Takaichi has for the past. Looming over Japan’s relationships with China, Korea and its Southeast Asian neighbors is the grim and ever-contested history of Japan’s 20th-century empire. A regular refrain in postwar Chinese critiques of Japanese defense spending, right up to the present day, has been that it risks awakening a dormant militarism. Those critiques hold less weight now that China is expanding its naval and nuclear capabilities at a rapid rate. But attempts by Japanese governments as recently as the Seventies and Eighties to woo Southeast Asian neighbors with economic assistance foundered on a perception of Japanese self-interest — even, in some quarters, neo-colonialism. Originating with postwar reparations, much of that aid and investment looked suspiciously like an attempt to find profitable outlets for Japanese export goods, helping it to rebuild its war-ravaged industries.

Japan has had a happier history with Southeast Asia in the decades since, but Takaichi’s personal convictions demand that she look backwards as well as forwards. She has declared her desire to revise Japan’s American-authored postwar constitution in order to clarify the role of the Self-Defense Forces. She is a member of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a powerful conservative lobby group dedicated to a traditionalist vision of Japan with the Emperor at its core. And she is now mulling a first visit as prime minister to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine — a lightning-rod issue in East Asia. The shrine’s original purpose was to honor Japan’s war dead from the Boshin War of 1868-9 but it also commemorates those who died in Japan’s mid-20th century wars. Any potential visit pits those in Japan who wish to honor their war dead with those in countries like China and Korea who focus on the fact that among the 2.4 million souls enshrined at Yasukuni are convicted war criminals from World War II.

Relitigating these controversial episodes and cultural consequences — which many in Nippon Kaigi equate with excessive Americanization following Japan’s defeat in 1945 — may well prove counterproductive. If Takaichi wants to revisit that period, she would be better off studying the intensifying perception in Japan, around a century ago, that it was becoming encircled by hostile powers: Soviets, Chinese nationalists, Europe’s Asian colonies and the United States. China may soon find itself in a similar position. It may feel it is surrounded by insufficiently friendly countries just at the point where an aging population and a slowing economy suggest that the window for reorganizing its neighborhood is beginning to close.

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

Another way of reading the past and present is that the benefits of territorial or maritime expansion are not what they once were. Power and prosperity in the mid-21st century rest more on economic and commercial leverage than boots on the ground. Taking direct responsibility for other countries’ affairs is both risky and costly, and Takaichi’s conclusion may be that China seeks prestige rather than empire. Rather than replace the US as global policeman, it may simply want to do away with that role, exchanging a postwar international culture of liberal cooperation under American auspices with one defined by national self-interest and multipolarity. But this may happen slowly. China will want to avoid the risk of upsetting its highly globalized economy and meanwhile allow the impression to set in that it is a natural rather than a managed transition.

Perhaps Japan could live with this. It could maintain credible self-defense while continuing an economic partnership with China that is currently valued at around $300 billion per year and involves deep integration of Chinese and Japanese manufacturing. It is worth remembering that for all the appearance of an unassailable position in China’s national life, the principal source of the Chinese Communist Party’s appeal is its ability to raise living standards and restore Chinese pride internationally. Takaichi’s own party dominated Japanese politics for nearly four decades on much the same basis, beginning in the mid-1950s. She knows only too well how quickly public support can drop away once people no longer see the expected returns. There is a limit to how far China and Japan’s political arrangements can usefully be compared. But the CCP’s leadership appreciates that when it comes to getting people to do what they want, even a very high-tech stick requires a little carrot alongside.

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

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

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

There is a chance that China may yet engineer a peaceful takeover of Taiwan. The island’s domestic politics are divided and China is making ongoing efforts to normalize such an outcome both in Taiwan and internationally. This, however, would hardly bring tensions in the region to an end. Japan would face the very dangerous scenario of having the People’s Republic on its doorstep — visible, on a clear day, from the south-western Japanese island of Yonaguni.

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

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

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

Takaichi’s political leanings mean that the past is often on her mind, as it was for her mentor Abe. As she sets about reviewing Japan’s National Security Strategy this year — while continuing to woo Donald Trump and perhaps thawing her relationship with Xi Jinping — we must hope for a creative and purposeful approach to Asia’s history. The wrongs and the suffering of the 1930s and 1940s are not to be forgotten. But the stakes are now too high for indulging in the weaponization of those wrongs and that suffering. Rather than refighting the last war, we must focus on preventing the next one.

The reason for this string of punishments lies in a comment made in early November by Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. Asked what might constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan when it came to the tensions swirling around Taiwan, she offered what many Japanese would regard as a reasonable and realistic answer: “If there are battleships and the use of force, no matter how you think about it, it could constitute a survival-threatening situation.” Under a law passed in Japan 10 years ago, expanding the traditional interpretation of Japan’s pacifist constitution, this would mean that Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) could be activated.

Taiwan lies 110 kilometers away from Japan’s south-westernmost island of Yonaguni. You can see it from the beach on a clear day. Over the past decade, scuba-divers have jostled for space on Yonaguni with members of the SDF, there to set up bases and radar stations and more recently to prepare for the deployment of medium-range surface-to-air missiles. The fear in Japan is that any Chinese attempt on Taiwan would pose a threat to islands like Yonaguni. They might be attacked or even occupied, for use as forward operating bases.

China’s reaction to Takaichi’s comments was swift and forceful. In addition to shutting down Japanese films and concerts, the government placed a devastating import ban on Japanese seafood and asked Chinese tourists planning to visit the country — as millions do every year — to think again. China regards Taiwan as its business, and no-one else’s: a renegade province that will be dealt with as and when it sees fit. For Takaichi to hint at military intervention was deemed unacceptable.

In fact, Takaichi wouldn’t have much room for maneuver in the event of a Taiwan emergency. A decade-old law allows for the SDF to be deployed if a country with which Japan has close relations is attacked — but only if Japan’s own survival is also at stake. Even then, the SDF is only permitted to do the minimum necessary to protect Japan and its people. Those surface-to-air missiles headed for Yonaguni don’t have the range to make it even halfway to Taiwan.

More from this author

Meet Japan's Iron Lady

By Christopher Harding

Still, Japan tends to follow America’s lead when it comes to Taiwan: recognizing China’s claim to the island without endorsing it, and maintaining a policy of strategic ambiguity when it comes to potential actions in the event of a Taiwan emergency. Takaichi briefly crossed a line here, damaging Chinese attempts to manage the public conversation about Taiwan across East Asia and beyond. China is reportedly involved in buying media influence in Taiwan, wooing low-level officials with subsidized visits to China and undermining faith in democracy. Hints of solidarity with Taiwan, which might boost pro-independence sentiment and morale, go down very badly in Beijing.

Chinese officials have no doubt watched with growing alarm as Japan and Taiwan have grown close across recent decades. The two are not formal allies — Japan doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan — but they have a strong trading relationship. Taiwan’s semiconductor-maker TSMC has a factory in Japan and a second is in the works. Taiwanese people also adore Japanese culture: Japan is a major tourist destination for Taiwanese, and everywhere you go in Taipei, you’ll see Japanese food, fashion, anime, music and convenience stores.

Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te was thus pushing at an open door when, in the wake of China’s ban on Japanese seafood, he posted an image of his lunch to social media — yellowtail sushi and scallops — and suggested that now might be a good time for Taiwanese to eat Japanese seafood. The idea went viral on social media and people have been buying up Japanese seafood and booking holidays to Japan.

What’s remarkable about this is that Taiwan was part of the Japanese empire for 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. Korea and parts of China were under Japan’s control for less time and yet bitterness there remains acute and politically potent to this day. Why, then, such warmth for Japan in Taiwan?

Part of the answer is that when Taiwan transitioned from martial law to democracy in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Japan served as an inspirational model: rich, open, peaceful and technologically advanced. Affection grew over the years that followed. When Japan suffered its “triple disasters” of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011, the generosity of Taiwanese donations was equaled only by those from the US. A decade later, when China placed a highly-damaging ban on imports of Taiwanese pineapples — ostensibly for health and safety reasons, but widely regarded as political — Japanese consumers participated in a “Freedom Pineapples” campaign, buying up Taiwanese produce in a show of solidarity.

But colonialism is part of this picture, too. Far from being swept under the carpet for the sake of better relations, Taiwan’s half-century under Japanese rule is remembered by many on the island as a formative phase in its history.

In 1895, Japan was an emerging Asian power, keen to show the likes of Britain and France that it was capable of becoming their equal. One of the ways to do that, during the high noon of empire, was to demonstrate the civilizing influence that you could have on other countries, near or far.

Taiwan was the ideal candidate, after it was ceded to Japan by Qing China following the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5). The island’s Japanese administrators treated it, in the words of one official, like a “laboratory” for testing out modern ideas of all kinds. Wide streets were created featuring impressive buildings including what is now the presidential office — which faces east, towards Japan and the rising sun. Schools and hospitals were built, rabies and various tropical diseases were eliminated, and opium addiction was tackled; 10,000 kilometers of roads and railway lines were laid down and a public sanitation system was established. Japanese rice, miso soup and raw fish all became major elements in the Taiwanese diet.

Democratic politics was not on the list of Japan’s modernizing reforms. In common with their British and French imperial mentors, the Japanese did not believe colonized peoples to be ready for self-determination. Anti-Japanese resistance in Taiwan’s mountains was severely punished — on at least one occasion, it is thought, with the use of chemical weapons. An educated urban middle class discovered that asking nicely for rights didn’t work either.

But for the Japanese and many Taiwanese, the results of the “model colony” approach were deeply satisfying. European visitors to Taiwan professed to love what the Japanese had done with the place, lavishing praise on colonial administrators for the manifest good they were doing.

Taiwanese nostalgia for the era of Japanese colonial rule owes a great deal, too, to what happened in the years after Japan’s defeat in 1945. The island came under the control of the mainland Chinese government led by Chiang Kai-shek. When he finally lost his war against Communist insurgents in 1949 and a People’s Republic was declared, he and what remained of his allies and army — some 1.5 million people — fled to Taiwan. They ruled the island under martial law for the best part of 40 years, fostering economic growth but dealing with democratic aspirations so harshly that both the old Japanese empire and the new postwar Japan appeared benevolent by comparison.

China and Japan may still find a way out of the current impasse. Perhaps economic self-interest will ride to the rescue, restoring relations between two countries that did nearly $300 billion worth of trade with one another in 2024. But with both Taiwan and Japan beefing up defense spending under pressure from Washington, and Xi Jinping showing few signs of changing his mind about the urgency of the Taiwan question, some kind of escalation around the island appears grimly inevitable.

Russia’s failed full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has no doubt been watched with much concern in China. China’s leadership risks serious reputational damage, both at home and abroad, if an attempt on Taiwan by its relatively inexperienced armed forces goes wrong. And yet the more that China’s ability to manage international public opinion appears thwarted by warm feelings and symbolic seafood moments, the likelier its leaders are to conclude that a much talked-about naval blockade and even a full-scale invasion is unavoidable.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump already advertised his extreme dissatisfaction with allies who took advantage of America’s free-trade fanaticism — regardless of huge trade deficits — to deny US exporters access to their own markets even as they flooded the country with cheap imports. Trump was equally unhappy with allies who were “free-riding” US military protection, while spending very little on their own defense: in many cases not even 2% of their GDPs.

Japan was squarely in the line of fire on both accounts. On economics, structural obstacles to US imports had persisted even after years of talks, while on defense Japan was not devoting even 1% of GDP to defense, with 2% a far-off fantasy.

At the time, I was under contract with Japan’s foreign ministry — not to lobby the US government or any such thing, but to help redefine the country’s national strategy. That was Abe’s own personal focus, and therefore I met him every time I went back to work in Tokyo. He himself told me how very worried he was about the possibility of a Trump victory, a worse problem for him than for other leaders.

Obama, after all, had already caused him needless problems, including sending Caroline Kennedy as his ambassador to Tokyo. That empty-headed celebrity degraded a post previously held by eminent ex-speakers of the House or Senate Majority leaders, who Japanese prime ministers could usefully consult. On top of that, Kennedy took it upon herself to publicly criticize Abe for visiting the nationalistic Yasukuni Shrine very dear to his core constituency, an unprecedented impertinence for an ambassador.

More from this author

The breakdown of the CIA

By Edward Luttwak

It was in that fraught context that Abe decided to ignore all protocol rules, and brush aside both the foreign ministry’s traditional caution and indeed US law, to try to meet Trump as soon as possible after his surprise election. His aim? To explain — truthfully enough — that his own goal was to make Japan a much stronger ally for the United States: neatly pre-empting anti-Japan policies even before they were formulated by Trump’s “transition team”.

And so it was that, on the afternoon of 17 November 2016, Abe and his interpreter met with the President-elect in his family apartment in Trump Tower. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was present, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner — but as they all sat comfortably on sofas, there were no officials or note-takers in sight.

That not only ensured a relaxed atmosphere, but also provided legal protection against the US Logan Act which prohibits private US citizens, including Trump before his inauguration, from negotiating with foreign governments.

As it happens, Abe liked Trump, and vice versa, and each believed the other’s assurances that they would step in whenever officials allowed disagreements to get out of hand. In fact, over the years that followed there were no US-Japan quarrels, and more immediately word got back from Tokyo that Abe thought Trump very reasonable — and a better negotiating partner than the studiously reserved Obama.

This feedback persuaded Trump that he could ignore State Department reservations, just as Abe had ignored his famously over-cautious foreign ministry, and bargain face-to-face with foreign counterparts, just as he had countless times before as a real-estate magnate.

In addition to less memorable encounters, Trump’s personal diplomacy in his first time culminated in the unprecedented June 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They met right on the DMZ, which Kim actually invited Trump to cross, making him the only US official to ever have stepped on North Korea’s soil. Some televised cordiality ensued while the TV cameramen had a bit of a rugby scuffle.

In the aftermath, in an astonishing display of collective amnesia, Trump’s critics kept saying that the Trump-Kim meeting had achieved nothing, because the DPRK had refused to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet that ignored how things had been before: with an alarming build-up of threats against South Korea, which Trump defused by his meeting with Kim.

Now, Trump is once again traveling in Asia to defuse a rise in mutual threats. But though North Korea remains as quiet as ever — a continued testament to Trump’s adept diplomacy six years ago — the President faces a much bigger crisis: with Xi Jinping’s China.

Suggested Reading

Meet Japan's Iron Lady

By Christopher Harding

After mounting threats against Taiwan, and even a date-specific 2027 invasion plan, over recent months China has launched a broad campaign of geoeconomic escalation. One obvious example is Beijing’s politically deadly import boycott of US soybeans, whose exports to China went from 985-million bushels in 2024 to zero so far in 2025. The US, for its part, has revoked the small-package tariff exemption, once set at $200 but more recently at $600, which allowed a tsunami of Chinese clothing and gadget postal-order imports at extremely low prices, which drove many remaining US small manufacturers out of business.

This escalation culminated in last week’s Chinese attempt to limit the US products that can be made with imported Chinese-refined rare earths. This is an unprecedented intrusion, and one which incidentally exposed years of policy paralysis. The fact is that “rare earths” are not all that rare; they only seem so because unreasonable environmental restrictions virtually prohibit processing in the US.

Either way, ahead of his vital meeting with Xi on Thursday, Trump has prepared in the usual way — buttering up his Chinese counterpart with unreciprocated praise and fulsome compliments. Yet he is also loaded for bear with the tariffs America has already imposed, which really weigh heavily on the Chinese economy, whose years of ultra-rapid growth are but a fading memory.

The Chinese middle classes that invested their savings in apartments for rental — because bank deposits earned virtually nothing, while the stock market mostly lost money for investors — must now rent them for very little — with huge numbers unrented impoverishing their owners. Unfortunately for them, far too many housing blocks were built before the construction companies themselves finally collapsed.

Meanwhile, China’s huge investment in railways and roads has also slowed: too many high-speed trains were traveling empty. That means that the parents of many poorly educated youngsters, who can no longer find construction jobs, must support them instead. As for their well-educated compatriots, they can no longer expect to immediately find a good job in the cities—in huge numbers, they are living in basements on menial gig-economy jobs. In short, China is overbuilt and over-supplied for a rapidly aging and falling population, and needs access to the insatiable American consumer to have any real growth.

Having imposed tariffs unilaterally — simply because he is not paralyzed by free-trade dogma — Trump can now reduce them in exchange for Chinese concessions. That includes a return to soybean imports, with farmers an important pillar of the MAGA coalition, and a toning down of truculent threats to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, Trump knows that he cannot ask the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war in Ukraine.

As for Japan, Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister, promises to end the post-Abe decline in US-Japan policy cooperation. Under Abe, a minimum of communications between officials in Tokyo and Washington was quite enough to ensure that both countries coordinated smoothly, for example to sustain the Philippines and other weaker countries threatened by China.

After Trump left office in 2021, and after Abe himself was murdered, everything had to be negotiated point by point. Abe’s successors hesitated to act as decisively as he did, meaning significant initiatives just petered out. Fortunately for Trump, Takaichi, the motorcycle rider, martial artist, and anti-immigration Right-winger, was very much Abe’s disciple.

And, certainly, their meeting seems to have been a success. Takaichi gifted Trump a golf putter that once belonged to Abe, while the pair signed a rare-earth minerals deal and reiterated tariffs agreement negotiated earlier in the year. But for their relationship to thrive over the longer term, Takaichi must herself do what Trump’s Argentine protege just managed to do very successfully: win a parliamentary election to gain more seats for her party, allowing her to rule without frail coalition partners.

So far, at any rate, Trump’s highly personalized diplomacy is again serving him well, though of course his meeting with Xi Jinping will be the biggest test of all. That Xi has just locked up top generals he had himself appointed means that there are cracks in his regime on top of the stalled economy, while Trump faces relentless opposition at home — so both men will try to be tough poker players, in spite of some weak cards.

While Takaichi’s premiership will represent a milestone for modern Japan, it’s important in Japanese politics not to place too much weight on the frontman — or woman. The reality is more like one of those bands where the bassist writes the songs but, disliking the limelight, hires a series of relatively disposable vocalists to present them to the public. Alongside machinations in her own party, the LDP, where senior background figures largely decide who gets the premiership and how long they keep it, Takaichi’s fortunes may come to depend on how she deals with two intertwined issues: the economy and immigration.

First, the economy. People in Japan, and the young in particular, are furious about a combination of high taxes, low wage-growth, rising inflation and insecure job prospects. Japanese governments of the past 30 years have struggled with some or all of these problems, trying and largely failing to find solutions against the backdrop of a national debt that has now ballooned to an extraordinary 235% of GDP.

One of the reasons why Japan’s economic problems have been so intractable in recent years is the country’s rapidly declining population — now shrinking by almost a million people every year. Nearly a third of Japanese people are over the age of 65 and after years of hard graft, they expect to be looked after in old age. But that takes money and it takes carers. Japan is short on both. Nursing has long been in crisis, with just one applicant now for every four jobs advertised.

Back in the 2010s, the hope was that “care bots” might see to the needs of the elderly and infirm, freeing up younger people to increase productivity in the wider economy. But the widespread deployment of humanoid caregivers is not expected until well into the 2030s, if ever, in part because of the level of mechanical precision combined with advanced AI required of a robot designed to look after humans. Even robots that simply provide companionship have turned out to be prohibitively expensive and to require a self-defeating level of human oversight: charging them, fixing them, getting them from A to B.

More from this author

Hiroshima could happen again

By Christopher Harding

Instead of robots, Japan could decide to depend on carers from Vietnam or the Philippines — two of the major sources of overseas labor in Japan. But inviting further immigration would be tricky politically. Japan’s foreign resident population has risen by an average of around 10% each year over the past three years. Some are predicting that the country’s total overseas population will need to rise from 3% at present to 10%, in order to cater to the needs of the labor market — from care work to construction. And yet Japanese public opinion remains ambivalent at best.

Japan has a long history of isolationism, from the literal (though partial) closing off of the country in the early modern era through to national and ethnic exceptionalism during much of the 20th century. Many Japanese operate with a dim but unmistakable hierarchy of foreignness in mind, with white westerners near the top. But hostility towards migration is not just about race. It’s about the specter of a Japanese way of life that depends on respect and restraint being undermined by newcomers who either don’t understand it or don’t intend to live that way. To denounce the Japanese as polite but ultimately xenophobic, as many commentators do, fails to get at the tangle of racial antipathies and cultural anxieties that exists in many people’s minds and hearts.

Politicians in Japan have tended to avoid getting into any of this, tackling public concerns about immigration either by stressing economic need or by liberalizing visa arrangements on the quiet — hoping to help the labor market in the short-term without needing to have a serious national conversation.

That approach has backfired of late, with the rise of populist nationalist parties like Sanseitō which are able to claim that the political establishment has been pulling the wool over people’s eyes about immigration. The party ran a “Japanese First” campaign in elections to Japan’s upper house this summer, claiming that a “silent invasion” was afoot. They gained serious traction among young men in particular.

At the local level, tensions are rising. A case in point is southern Saitama prefecture, where a small Kurdish population has experienced a backlash both on the streets and online. In Kyoto, meanwhile, a booming tourist industry has drawn in large amounts of foreign labor. Critics argue that the shared housing foreign workers live in, combined with more and more old homes being converted into Airbnbs, threatens the steady ghettoization of a once-proud city.

Meanwhile, social media is whipping up anger towards foreigners. Witness the viral videos, some making it onto Japanese TV, showing foreign tourists shouting at train station staff, riding around on the backs of bin trucks or doing pull-ups on a red torii gate at a Shinto shrine. Officials in Nara, Takaichi’s hometown, have been forced to deny reports that tourists are hitting or kicking the sacred deer that run wild through that ancient city’s streets. And just last month, a cultural exchange program between four Japanese municipalities and four African countries was canceled after false claims spread that it was a new immigration route into Japan.

Takaichi’s success in her party’s leadership race is partly down to the hope that she is sufficiently nationalistic in outlook and reputation to slow Sanseitō’s rise. But the danger is that, by tacking right on immigration, Takaichi exchanges the public conversation about immigration that Japan desperately needs for a gesture politics that fails to address the country’s problems and makes life harder for Japan’s overseas population.

The longer-term challenge for Japan, which may well shape the country in the decades to come, takes the form of a question: what does it mean to be Japanese? Is it primarily a question of blood or is there potential for “Japanese” to function a little like “British” or “French”: more a civic identity than an ethnic one? For all the antipathy that he attracted during his long stint as prime minister between 2012 and 2020, Shinzō Abe was among those to talk about developing a “civic nationalism” for Japan: a vision of what it means to be Japanese that is built around values, rights and standards of behavior. So far, this vision hasn’t gained much traction in Japan’s political debates, but it’s difficult to see what a viable alternative would be beyond a steadily souring status quo.

For Japan’s migrant population to have secure rights and to feel welcomed rather than merely tolerated, then either Takaichi or a near-term successor will need to find ways of confronting a worried and increasingly restive public with their realistic options for the future. If technology alone can’t ride to the rescue and Japan’s population decline is otherwise irreversible, then the best bet may indeed be a properly integrated overseas population alongside a more capacious understanding of what it means to be Japanese. Takaichi might take a lead here from local governments in Japan, which are pioneering attempts to help migrants learn Japanese, understand their rights, and mingle with locals rather than living apart. With luck, the day will come when this larger “Japanese” community, secure in its shared identity, can tut-tut in unison at tourists behaving badly.

Hiroshima was transformed in an instant. The bomb exploded around 600 meters above the city’s industrial district, and most of that area either disappeared completely or began to be consumed by fire. Some 70,000 buildings in total were destroyed.

Soon after the explosion, people began journeying into the city center to look for relatives, pushing carts in the hope of carrying home the injured. What they saw reminded them of images of Buddhist hell. The artwork at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which I visited in recent days, captures these real-life scenes in unforgiving detail. In one drawing, people are slumped over the sides of a large fire cistern, with bright-red burn marks across their backs. Desperately seeking water, they made it to the cistern and then died or passed out when they got there. In another, ghoulish figures stagger along the road, heads bowed and arms outstretched. Their clothes are in tatters; their flesh drips from their bodies.

Elsewhere in the city, bizarre sights could be picked out through the blood-colored smoke: the pattern from someone’s kimono imprinted on a wall; a pink cavalry horse standing alone in the street, its hide stripped away by the blast. The steps running up to the Hiroshima branch of Sumitomo Bank were bleached white, save for a patch where someone had been sitting when the bomb went off. Those steps are now kept behind glass in the museum, and you can see the dark patch marking the spot where that person was incinerated. Nearby, a photo reveals the bathos of wartime Japanese bureaucracy carrying on despite it all: just hours after the bomb was dropped, a policeman sits at a table in improvised bandages issuing disaster certificates to people who have suffered property damage in the blast.

At this point, of course, no one knew what was coming next: vomiting, hair loss, rapidly worsening skin conditions and hopeless attempts by bewildered relatives to stop their loved ones slipping away — all signs of the enormous quantities of radiation released by the bomb. Most people on 6 August naturally put the blast down either to a very powerful conventional weapon or, given that American B-29s had not been sighted in the numbers required to inflict carnage of this kind, some kind of devastating accident.

Japanese scientists were swiftly dispatched to Hiroshima to investigate. They soon concluded, based on tests of sand and bone, that the Allies had beaten Japan to an atomic weapon. The “prompt and utter destruction” threatened in the Allies’ ultimatum to Japan just a few days earlier took on a terrifying new dimension. A single bomb had done all this. And who knew how many more the Allies possessed?

Eight decades on, the question of whether or not the United States ought to have resorted to using its new weapon at this late stage of the war is as far as ever from being resolved. The most compelling argument in favor was, and remains, the enormous loss of life — both Allied and Japanese — thought likely to occur if a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands went ahead as planned in the autumn of 1945.

Projected casualties were sometimes exaggerated after the war, as a way of justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki amidst worldwide revulsion. Nevertheless, the ferocity with which minor Pacific islands and other territories were defended by the Japanese naturally pointed to an enormous death toll if the Japanese military and ordinary civilians decided to defend their country to the very last. It seemed plausible that a threat of prompt and utter destruction, combined with a taste of its awful reality, might tip even Japan’s military hardliners into agreeing to the surrender terms set out by the allies at Potsdam.

Suggested reading

Fiona Hill: The world is going nuclear

By Freddie Sayers

Instead, in the hours and days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, those hardliners argued that if Japan could withstand firebombing then it could — and must — withstand atomic bombings, too. Stalemate within the Japanese leadership, split between would-be peace-makers — who still held out hope of persuading the Soviets to act as intermediaries with the other Allies — and military officers who refused to countenance surrender, remains perhaps the best argument against the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.

The Allies were aware of the somewhat uncertain position of the Emperor in Japan’s modern constitution. He was, in theory, the supreme authority in every area of Japanese life. At the same time, his elevated status — descended from the gods — meant that he was not to be troubled with everyday decision-making. A relatively late convert to the cause of peace, Emperor Hirohito had always preferred to give his blessing to decisions made by civilian and military leaders rather than force his will upon them. He tended to make his feelings known by asking pointed questions or by employing strategic silences. After the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Manchuria on 8 August, and the bombing of Nagasaki a day later, the emperor’s subordinates still had to make two requests for a seidan — “sacred decision” — before he broke the ministerial deadlock by calling decisively for the war to be discontinued.

It was far from clear at the time that the use of an atomic weapon could somehow overcome these institutional barriers to peace-making in Japan. Then again, would any of the alternative options, including an extended naval blockade, have fared better? How hungry would people in Japan have needed to become before their leaders — who had, so far, regarded ordinary citizens more as raw material for achieving strategic objectives than as human beings whose lives were precious — decided that enough was enough?

There is some merit to the claim that Hiroshima was partly about showing the Soviet Union what America was now capable of. It is true, too, that the Americans feared the Soviets getting their hands on large chunks of Japan, if the war was not concluded swiftly and on terms favorable to the United States. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for America, there was no obviously superior means of ending the war in the summer of 1945.

Suggested reading

Nuclear horror still haunts us

By Paul Heron

Reluctant supporters of America’s decision to use an atomic weapon might add that, distasteful though such arguments may be, it is difficult to draw a clear moral distinction between napalm — itself a relatively new weapon, used to devastating effect against Japan’s wood and paper buildings in the spring and summer of 1945 — and an atom bomb. The latter is vastly more powerful and has after-effects that dwarf those of firebombing in their horror and longevity. And yet it remains the case that far more Japanese people died, suffered injuries or were rendered homeless by firebombs in the Second World War than by atomic weapons.

The arguments over Hiroshima and Nagasaki will no doubt change in the decades to come, depending on the role that nuclear weapons play in shaping our world. Up until now, it has been possible to argue that the sort of devastation to which the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum bears grisly witness served as the clearest possible warning against allowing conflicts ever to go nuclear. But 80 years from now, people may look back and conclude that we simply got lucky for a while: proliferation was limited and, among powers who possessed atomic weapons, a combination of cool heads and good fortune prevented the unthinkable.

Already, memories of the disaster are fading. The numbers of hibakusha — people directly affected by the atomic bomb — are dwindling, their stories in danger of vanishing with them. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is already advertising talks both by the families of survivors and by “successors”. The classics of Japanese cinema and literature that the bomb helped to inspire are meanwhile now firmly in the past, from the first Godzilla film — whose eponymous monster was envisaged as atomic disaster “made flesh” — to the harrowing animated movie Barefoot Gen.

Does Hiroshima still have the power to shock us, and to stop people with access to nuclear buttons from pushing them if they feel they really must? We must hope so. Perhaps another 80 years of relative peace between the world’s great powers is possible. But no one should underestimate the potential of nuclear brinksmanship gone wrong, or the steadily escalating deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to take us to a point where the extraordinary suffering visited on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki breaks the bounds of history and comes for us all.

For Shigeru Ishiba, the incumbent Prime Minister, this is clearly a humiliation. In truth, though, the world’s media seem most interested in another politician. With his sharp tongue and provocative charisma, Sohei Kamiya is already being likened to a Japanese Trump. Certainly, his Sanseito party’s “Japanese First” slogan is clearly based on the MAGA rallying cry of “America First”, even as Kamiya’s anti-immigrant sentiment echoes populists from Italy to Ireland.

As a result, Kamiya’s star is rising, with some pre-election polls placing his populists in third place, the party ultimately won just 14 seats. That’s an impressive victory for sure. But Sanseito is just one piece of the opposition pie, one encompassing several parties and 112 other seats. That includes everyone from the center-right Democratic Party to the Communists, each against the LDP — but each with very different ideas on Japan’s future.

“Do you have no party to vote for? Then we were born for you.” That is the tagline on Sanseito’s English language website — a howl of rage against Japan’s political establishment. Believing that the establishment Liberal Democratic Party is both politically ineffective and insufficiently conservative, it’s rooted in traditional values like family and national pride.

More from this author

Japan and South Korea are the ultimate frenemies

By Oliver Jia

This is particularly evident in Sanseito’s anti-immigration rhetoric, with Kamiya alleging that foreigners are being prioritized for welfare benefits, despite providing little evidence to support his claim. Yet just like the Farages of the world, who often tone down their words after some time has passed, Kamiya later admitted that Sanseito “has never called to drive out foreigners” and that “Japanese First” was less an actual policy than a nifty campaign slogan.

Besides, Sanseito’s rise among a subset of Japanese voters comes not because Kamiya’s ideas are popular — but because he’s been able to attract an electorate desperate for alternatives to the LDP. Prime Minister Ishiba, though hailing from the same party, is a completely different leader to the more domestically popular and internationally respected Shinzo Abe. Shockingly assassinated in 2022, the late Abe was certainly divisive. Yet he carried a sense of focused leadership that the current administration simply lacks.

The LDP’s current predicament is a mess of its own making. A slush fund scandal has rocked the party over the last few years, raising questions around the role of money in Japanese politics. It’s unclear what part Abe himself played in these events, but the dead are mercifully silent. Still, it was Abe’s political faction that was directly incriminated in the scandal, and it is now completely disbanded.

Prime Ministers Yoshihide Suga and Fumio Kishida both failed to regain public confidence in the LDP. Kishida attempted to address the scandal by sacking officials and dissolving his own implicated faction, but the public was not satisfied. The result was Kishida’s resignation, the end of LDP-Komeito’s majority in Japan’s lower house, with the ruling coalition now losing their hold of the Diet.

As a political outsider unrelated to the scandal, at any rate, the hapless Ishiba has inherited a Japan tired of LDP failure. Even so, it’d be wrong to see Kamiya as the Trump to Ishiba’s Hillary. For if Japanese populism may initially seem analogous to its Western counterparts, this is an entirely different political landscape. Sanseito’s pie-in-the-sky proposals — notably providing 100,000 yen (about $690) to families for every child they have — are closer to Corbynite social welfare. Kamiya’s push for AI and automation would be anathema to Rust Belt voters, but they make a bit more sense given Japan’s collapsing population.

In fact, it’s because of Japan’s notoriously low birthrate — actually not that far off other first-world countries — that jobs are becoming hard to fill. Representing about 3% of the population, foreigners can today be found in low-paying jobs such as manual labor. Yet there still aren’t enough of them to “steal” jobs from anyone. There are certainly more foreigners in Japan now than 20 years ago, but the numbers pale compared to the mass-migration seen in Europe. Approximately 357,000 foreigners arrived in Japan last year, a sharp contrast to the 1.2 million who migrated to the UK over the same period.

Illegal immigration? It’s actually on the decline in Japan. There are about 70,000 illegal immigrants in Japan out of an overall population of 123 million. America, for its part, has roughly 11 million illegals versus a population of 347 million. Proportionally, then, Japan is nowhere near close. According to a 2025 report from the Right-leaning Sankei Shimbun newspaper, the number of illegal overstayers in Japan is significantly down from the 1993 high of around 290,000, fluctuating between 60,000 and 80,000 since then. Because Japan has a tighter lid on illegal immigration compared to Western countries, it should come as no surprise that more quotidian issues, like the cost of living crisis, were far bigger concerns.

Over recent months, social media has highlighted the bad behavior stemming from overtourism, such as littering, noise pollution, and treating sacred Shinto sites like a playground. The government is doing its best to address these problems, but that’s little comfort for the locals who live nearby. It’s important to remember, however, that the troublemakers are tourists rather than immigrants. Studies suggest that crime rates among foreigners living in Japan are about the same, or even lower, than for the Japanese themselves.

More from this author

Donald needs a Tokyo bromance

By Oliver Jia

What, then, comes next for Sanseito? To begin with, don’t count on the party being around forever. While their triumph this time was notable, grassroots political parties tend to have a short shelf life in Japan: due to infighting, scandals, and poor leadership. Most of Sanseito’s newly-elected candidates have little to no political experience, while their idealism will eventually rub up against other opposition parties and the LDP itself, which is still a force to be reckoned with.

Yet even if Sanseito eventually dissolves, the establishment cannot ignore the grievances of its voters. As the past decade has shown, populist movements thrive when the “left behind” rise up. What happened last week is only the start of the LDP losing its grip on power — if, anyway, it refuses to change course. Stagnant wages, rising inflation, a weak yen, and Ishiba’s failed tariff negotiations with Trump — all these have left voters frustrated.

If things continue to worsen, then, the LDP is likely to expel Ishiba and find an alternative. A new leader is no guarantee of success, but Shinzo Abe’s heir apparent Sanae Takaichi has stated her intention to run for the party’s leadership. Much of her worldview, from economics to foreign policy aligns with Abe’s, which would potentially allow her to steer the LDP back towards what allowed it to stay in power for so long. Like the late prime minister, Takaichi is a dedicated nationalist, and supports Abenomics stalwarts like fiscal stimulus. More controversially, she is also dedicated to pushing for constitutional reform which would greatly expand Japan’s military powers — something Abe himself ultimately failed to do.

Then again, the LDP still has a serious image problem, not least with the slush fund scandal fresh in the nation’s mind. Should the opposition form a coalition powerful enough to become the ruling bloc, we may see a repeat of 2010 to 2012, when the LDP was out of power. Despite this setback, it eventually returned under the rebranded leadership of Shinzo Abe. Sanseito, in short, may enjoy some influence for a time — but will need more than slogans to stay relevant.

When the wrestlers, or rikishi — literally “strong men” — enter the ring, they throw purifying salt and perform their stomp to scare away evil spirits. They clap to attract the attention of the gods, raise their arms to show they are concealing no weapons, and cleanse their mouths with water.

Then, in front of a referee wearing the robes of a Shintō priest, it is down to business: the rikishi crouch on their marks and eyeball each other in a prolonged act of psychological combat known as shikiri. The bout begins only when both wrestlers finally have both hands touching the ground. After that, if any part of your body but the soles of your feet touches the ground, or if you are forced from the ring, then you are vanquished.

More from this author

What Labour could learn from Japan

By Christopher Harding

It’s a familiar sight for any fan of Japan’s most honored pastime, especially those who will be in attendance at the Natsu Basho — Summer Sumo Tournament — currently underway in Tokyo. Across two weeks of intense competition, all eyes are on the winner of the previous tournament back in March: Ōnosato. Just 24 years of age, he has been heavily involved in sumo since his early high-school days. Since turning professional, he has risen rapidly through the ranks and is now on the verge of earning the coveted title of yokozuna, or “grand champion”. There is huge anticipation in Japan: sumo has become ever more international of late, and most grand champions of the past 20 years have been born in Mongolia. Ōnosato would be the first Japanese wrestler to become yokozuna in almost a decade.

This matters because while baseball is Japan’s most popular sport, with more than 26 million people attending professional league games each year, sumo is the country’s national sport, Japan’s ancient past brought to heaving, sweating life. And, like the country as a whole, it finds itself at a crossroads: thriving, both at home and abroad, yet beset by major demographic and social challenges.

Sumo’s links to its past are on display at a handful of shrines around Japan where bouts are held between a man and a local deity. To the mortal eye, only the human contender is visible, yielding the nickname hitori-zumo or “one-person sumo” (the expression now doubles as a metaphor for inner struggle). Quite how many people watching hitori-zumo sense the presence of two contenders is both hard to say and beside the point. Religion in Japan has long been a fascinating blend of ritual, play, humor and heightened awareness of the world. Sumo draws on all of this, while channeling and celebrating a certain kind of masculinity — discipline, character, focused aggression — and a little bit of swagger.

The sport’s human origins are said to trace back to a nobleman and notorious braggart named Taima no Kehaya, who claimed in 23 BC that he was the strongest man “under the heavens”. The Emperor took offense and commanded a potter called Nomi no Sukune to teach him a lesson. This he did, dealing Kehaya such devastating kicks to the ribs and back that he died the following day. Sukune is now remembered as the “father of sumo”.

Sumo went on to serve, across the centuries, as a mixture of spectacle, strength training for aspiring warriors, and religious ritual, performed in hopes of good harvests. Where early sumo was raw combat, with few if any rules, form and etiquette were gradually introduced over time: rings, rankings, winning techniques, “stables” where wrestlers could live and train, and public tournaments — often held to raise money for good causes. After Japan opened its doors to the modern West in the mid-19th century, sumo wrestlers and samurai alike became symbols of a distinctly Japanese kind of masculinity: guardians of the country’s traditions against encroachment from abroad. One of the best-known woodblock prints of a sumo wrestler dates from 1861 and shows him throwing a puny and over-dressed foreigner to the ground.

Opinions differ in Japan regarding how well this sumo masculinity has aged. Critics note the long and largely unflattering history of women in the sport. The earliest recorded use of the word “sumo” goes back to bouts between women in the fifth century AD, but these were topless matches arranged by the Emperor to try to distract a palace carpenter who had boasted he never made a mistake. The Emperor’s plan worked: the flustered carpenter ended up damaging one of his tools and was duly executed. More than 1,000 years later, women once again returned to the sumo ring. But professional names like “Big Boobs” and “Holder of the Balls” tell you all you need to know about who the punters were and what they turned up to see.

Women now compete as amateurs, but at the professional level they are not even allowed to enter the ring, for fear of its defilement. This became a flashpoint in Japan back in April 2018, when the mayor of Maizuru lost consciousness while he was giving a welcome speech from inside a sumo ring. A number of female spectators, including a nurse, ran onto the ring to administer CPR, only to be ordered off again by a panicked-sounding announcer. A male emergency worker eventually took over, the ring was purified with salt, and the tournament commenced. But the scene was viewed millions of times, which led commentators at home and abroad to question whether the rules on women’s participation laid down by the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) ought at long last to change.

If sumo has struggled with its rules on women, reflecting what critics charge is Japan’s broader failure to push the patriarchy from its perch, something similar has played out over the question of how welcome an addition non-Japanese rikishi might be to the ranks.

In July 1972, English was spoken for the first time from a sumo ring. A telegram from President Richard Nixon was read out, congratulating the Hawaiian wrestler Jesse Kuhaulua — better known as Takamiyama — for winning a tournament at Nagoya. Some in the Japanese media nicknamed him kurobune: “black ship”, recalling the unwelcome arrival off Japan’s shores of American gunboats back in 1853. Others questioned whether a foreigner could ever rise to the rank of grand champion, since that coveted title depends not only on a person’s qualities as a fighter but also his “outstanding character”.

The problem — or opportunity — for sumo, as for Japan as a whole, is that a shrinking population means difficult choices. A dwindling number now choose to go professional in sumo. Football, basketball, rugby and baseball all represent more attractive careers: often more lucrative, while lacking the grueling training (and eating) regime required of sumo wrestlers, at enormous cost to their health. Instead, Hawaiian and, more recently, Mongolian wrestlers have begun to dominate the upper tiers of the game — the former through long-standing links to Japan and the latter thanks to Mongolia’s own wrestling traditions. Both populations boast good numbers of people with the right build. Opinion is divided in Japan, between those who hanker after Japanese heroes and those who are impressed with the respect and dedication exhibited by foreign-born competitors. To add to their list of woes, the Japan Sumo Association has been accused of slowness in dealing with bullying directed at young wrestlers by senior members of the stables where they train — intended to toughen up new recruits and in some cases to punish them for a lack of proper behavior.

And yet, despite these challenges, sumo in Japan is more popular than ever. A younger generation became hooked during lockdown and later through the sport’s growing presence online and via highly-publicized children’s competitions for girls and boys. Sumo got its Rocky moment in 2023, with the hit Netflix drama Sanctuary tracing the rise of a rookie wrestler, Enno, from dysfunctional beginnings to troubled superstar. Real-life stars meanwhile serve as highly-effective hadaka taishi, “naked ambassadors”, for their country or their region within Japan. And good seats for tournaments now sell out within hours, while tickets for tours abroad — including the Royal Albert Hall this October — are equally in demand.

Suggested reading

Welcome to the age of Otaku

By Louis Elton

Progressives in Japan recently noted with pleasure the decision of baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani to take parental leave to look after his baby. Might, they wonder, “Papa-tani” encourage other Japanese men to do the same — in a country where child-rearing is still thought of primarily as women’s work? What wonders might female rikishi (suitably-attired) work on Japanese hearts and minds?

The question, for now, is moot. Female rikishi at the professional level seem no closer a prospect than women priests in the Catholic Church — and perhaps for broadly similar reasons. Just as it’s often said that the fastest-growing Christian denominations are the ones least prone to compromise with modern culture and shifting public opinion, so many in the Japan Sumo Association see their role as custodians of practices going back many centuries.

No doubt Japan will apply to sumo a little of its tried-and-true formula for surviving and thriving in the modern world: a generous dollop of tradition gingered up with a splash of innovation and cutting-edge tech. Expect foreign tours by major rikishi to see sumo gaining ever more in popularity abroad in the years ahead. And don’t be surprised if some serious money finds its way into supporting grassroots women’s sumo, raising it up to the point where men and women go head to head — if not in that sacred ring, then at least in a competition for attention from fans both at home and abroad. And, all the while, there’ll be that heritage, that sense that when a rikishi stomps by in his kimono, you’re witnessing not just a bit of traditional culture but a presence that transcends history. And there will always be a hunger for that.

By 8 May 1945, the Americans had only taken a very small part of Japan — the 11.5 square miles of Iwo Jima island — a conquest very expensive in blood: 6,821 US troops were lost and three times as many were seriously injured. Japanese combat was very different from that of the Americans: they would fight to the death with no thought for their own survival, and their tactics were designed to circumvent the vast superiority of American firepower. Victory over the remaining 145,937 square miles of Japan, therefore, would inevitably come at the cost of far more lives than all the allies had worldwide.

The Japanese had no intention of surrendering. They were determined to continue to inflict such heavy casualties that the allies would give up their demand for unconditional surrender and instead accept a negotiated settlement that would assure the continuation of the imperial dynasty — a strategy they called Ketsugō (Operation Decisive). And, with more than three and a half million Japanese troops still on duty in the home islands, not counting those being evacuated from China and Korea, they had the manpower to make it happen. Beside combat forces, which would attack using aircraft and small arms, there was the Civilian Volunteer Corps — all able-bodied men and women armed with rifles and pistols taken from the British, Chinese and Dutch troops defeated earlier in the war. But what really made the Japanese so confident, what made them truly a force to be reckoned with, was their extraordinary stoicism. Uniquely, they really did prefer death to surrender.

But because Ketsugō was not studied properly by foreign historians for decades, a false narrative took hold — one that serves as useful propaganda for the Russians to this day. This asserts that when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Japan was already defeated. Cut off from oil supplies immobilizing aircraft and ships, surrender was only days away at most. The only reason the bomb was dropped, in this telling, was to frighten Stalin into accepting US supremacy in Europe in spite of the superiority of the Red Army. The deaths of the men and women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prolonged suffering of the survivors poisoned by radioactive fallout were most cruelly inflicted for cynical American political purposes.

Every part of this narrative is wrong. In reality, when Hiroshima was bombed, Japan could still count on as many as 10,000 aircraft for kamikaze suicide attacks. Second, nobody in the chain of command, from President Truman right down to Paul Tibbets, the 29-year-old pilot of the B-29 that dropped the “Little Boy” fission bomb, knew anything about immediate radiation or the subsequent radioactive fall-out — apart from the sheer size of the explosion, they had no idea of what they were about to unleash. The reason the bomb was dropped was that US military leaders and President Truman were terrified by the thought of all the Iwo Jima battles it would take to conquer the rest of Japan.

Suggested reading

What’s the point of VE Day?

By Mary Harrington

Despite the desperate damage inflicted, the bomb did serve one enduring purpose. For decades after, all of us remembering VE day in May 1945, looking at those pictures of celebrating couples kissing enthusiastically, could be certain of one thing: there would be no more wars in Europe. That certainty was not because of the actions of the United Nations, utterly ineffectual even then, nor the result of some Great Power diplomacy in the Security Council, which only fails when it is most needed. Instead, the very long peace that Europe enjoyed — an unprecedented 77 years without a major war — was “the sturdy child of (nuclear) terror”, as Churchill said, a thing far more reliable than any human wisdom. And this only came when the bomb was dropped two months after the emotional celebrations of VE day.

That was still true on 24 February 2022, when Putin, who had been creeping into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, dramatically escalated and invaded Ukraine outright, aiming straight for its capital, Kiev. For it wasn’t the protective arm of nuclear deterrence that failed on that fateful day and led the Russians to make their reckless move. It was the failure of NATO, and its attendant governments, to reaffirm deterrence in word and deed during the weeks and days of growing tension before the invasion.

In fact it can be argued that the Biden administration unwittingly triggered the Russian escalation when, at the behest of the always-wrong CIA, which was predicting the swift fall of the city, it evacuated the US diplomatic mission in Kiev. That, in turn, precipitated a mass flight of other Western (and Middle Eastern) diplomats. Even worse, the German government contrived to outdo Biden’s foolish move by declaring that it would not stop the Nord Stream II doubling of gas imports from Russia, even if there was “some incident” in Ukraine. For the German-speaking Putin it was a big green light to invade.

Russia’s “post-modern” invasion did not rely on firepower. It aimed to capture Kiev and conquer the country by giving the impression of strength: the image of that endless double column of armored vehicles was a powerful one. When that fashionable fantasy collided with the reality of stubborn Ukrainian defenders firing anti-tank rockets at very close range, Nato’s leaders had an opportunity to take immediate action. They could go into an emergency session to demand an end to the fighting, and a prompt return to pre-combat positions.

More from this author

Trump's reverse-Nixon manoeuvre

By Edward Luttwak

But no such session happened because only the British and the new Nato members who had long lived under Soviet rule were willing to oppose the Kremlin head-on. The Biden administration was mostly focused on “avoiding escalation” and the French, Germans and Italians as usual loudly demanded a voice in Nato’s decisions while offering only platitudes when it was their turn to speak .

As a result, on VE day 2025, a war still rages while a fragmented alliance struggles to cobble together an effective defense strategy. So as flags are waved in celebration of that long-past victory, men are again dying, and European governments again hoping that the US will step in and do the heavy lifting. It was, after all, an approach that worked well enough in the past, when the US had far larger forces and Russia was everyone’s bad guy.

But today everything has changed. There is an enemy that the Americans are more worried about than Putin: Xi Jinping, the Mussolini of our time, who is determined to show that today’s Chinese are courageous and formidable fighters, unlike their defeated ancestors. And as China openly prepares for war, the US has no choice but to prioritize the “Indo-Pacific”. Perhaps, as Europe finds itself abandoned, or at least insufficiently protected, and unwilling to rearm in earnest, it is now the time to ask: for how long will the nuclear deterrent hold?

It all started last Tuesday when a relatively obscure tech entrepreneur, Grant Slatton, uploaded a seemingly ordinary family photo to ChatGPT-4o’s new image generator to “Ghiblify” it. Awash in pastel skies and gentle smiles, the image it spat out was the perfect encapsulation of the studio’s aesthetic.

The post went viral, amassing more than 43 million views in just a couple of days and prompting an eruption of Ghibli content. Suddenly no meme could escape Ghiblification. And backlash swiftly followed. Some critics took aim at the obvious intellectual property ambiguities. Others circulated clips of a 2016 documentary where Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki declared AI animation “an insult to life itself”.

However, this rapid onset Ghiblification foreshadows a much darker, and crucially stranger future than mere IP infringement and artistic degradation. In tech criticism, it is fashionable to contrast two dystopias: Beijing versus Las Vegas. The former is well-known. It foretells a 1984 Orwellian future of mass surveillance and thought control, turbocharged by AI-powered spyware. This is best characterized by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher’s warnings of a Chinese Communist Party-exported “Orwellian” AI surveillance dystopia.

In contrast, the Las Vegas dystopia envisions a future where we are distracted by entertainment as foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This vision, proposed by Neil Postman in his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, presents the future where “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.” This is a future of limbic capitalism where we are inundated by the addictive soma of Las Vegas pleasures. Books don’t need to be banned, because everybody’s too busy scrolling, eating fast food, gambling, gaming, and watching porn.

More from this author

Britain needs its luxury class

By Louis Elton

Yet the rise of Ghiblification presents a third tech future, not from Beijing or Las Vegas — but from Tokyo. This is not a future of mere tech surveillance or opiate. Rather, it’s a vision of the world that fuses the pleasures machines of Vegas with the emotional worldbuilding of the Japanese otaku subculture — a niche consumer tribe known for their devotion to anime, manga, and video games. While long subjugated to their parent’s basements, weird corners of the Internet, and Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, otaku is now going mainstream.

In order to make sense of how this unique style of consumption is shaping our future, we must understand two macro shifts: one cultural, the other technological. The first is the mainstreaming of a postmodern otaku logic that prizes fiction over fact and vibes over shared mythologies. The second is the potent concoction of next generation multimodal AI and their capacity to create custom alternative realities with the touch of a button. Together, they herald a future not of a shared digital commons, but of hyper-personalized Matrixes-for-One.

To grasp the first shift requires digging out Japanese media theorist Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 cult media theory book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Chronicling the rise of Japan’s otaku subculture, Azuma coined the term “database animals” to describe a new kind of postmodern consumer emerging from the worlds of manga and anime obsession. These consumers no longer follow grand narratives or cohesive story arcs. Instead, they graze from a vast database of aesthetic elements, characters, and tropes — selecting whatever fragments give them the most effective hit. They are “animals” not in a pejorative sense, but in that they prioritize instinctual pleasure over ideological coherence or shared meaning.

Azuma explains the rise of otaku subculture in the context of what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “decline of the grand narrative”. From the late-18th to the mid-20th century, overarching grand narratives were the cornerstones of modernity, providing order and meaning for citizens. Now, in a thoroughly postmodern world where traditional horizons of meaning have collapsed, “grand narratives” have given way to something very different.

Grand narratives, according to Azuma, function like a tree. The trunk is the big “worldview” — a shared mythos that structures culture. From this trunk grow the branches and twigs of “small narratives”, the everyday stories, rituals, and traditions that reinforce and transmit the deeper worldview. In essence, the “surface outer layer” of small stories, rituals, and acts of consumption connects consumers to the “deeper inner layer” of the grand narrative. In Britain, rituals like churchgoing, learning Shakespeare, or buying a royal-warranted Wedgwood teapot tethered citizens to the mythos of God, King, and country. Similarly in Japan, reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, visiting shrines, conducting tea ceremonies bound citizens to a virtuous vision of Emperor, nation, and spiritual destiny.

Azuma argues that these grand narratives were disrupted by waves of turmoil. First came the Westernization of the Meiji Restoration, then the Second World War. In their wake, citing Jean Baudrillard, Azuma describes an emergent postmodern world where the trunk-and-branch models of reality are replaced by a rhizomatic “hyper reality”. In this world, meaning becomes a tangled web where the lines between truth and fiction blur, and symbols become unmoored from the realities they once represented. Here, the grand narratives are “swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra”, a world where there are “no originals and no copies”. All that survives is endlessly circulating fragmented content with no shared story — if only Baudrillard were alive to see our world inebriated by memes, trends, and vibes.

Suggested reading

Beware the new leviathans

By Terry Eagleton

This post-modern hyperreality breeds ideological chaos. As the grand narratives collapsed — in Japan and globally — their absence was felt in various ways. Azuma argues that the otaku were the first to trailblaze a new mode of reality-making in a world stripped of unifying mythologies. Abandoning conventional “narrative consumption”, they pioneered what he calls “database consumption”: a logic that replaces the tree-and-branch structure with a database and hyper-individualized pick-and-mix consumer mindset. Stories are no longer linear journeys with moral arcs, they become modular fragments, plucked from a database of options and consumed as highly personalized forms of pleasure and identity-making.

Azuma observes that otakus — in contrast to regular fans — are almost entirely uninterested in official canon or coherent storytelling. Rather, they are obsessed with animalistically chasing an emotional rush — known as moe — triggered by modular elements of certain manga/anime characters. Different otakus chase different “moe-elements” (or moe-yoso). Some are visual: cat ears, knee-high socks, specific hairstyles, maid or sailor outfits, flaming swords. Others are more abstract: distinctive speech patterns, familiar plot beats, even particular curves or camera angles.

Otakus call the hunt for this affective sugar hit chara-moe. Many actively search for their preferred moe elements regardless of what franchise or series they come from. Further, otakus use search engines like TINAMI to filter the endless databases and feast on their moe of choice — whether it is styles of ships or spectacles, or just good old-fashioned bikinis.

For Azuma, what distinguishes the otaku is not their devotion to manga or anime per se, but their distinctive mode of database consumption. While the objects of their obsession — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sylvanian Families — have had an obvious cultural spillover into the West, it’s this underlying logic of fragmented, non-narrative consumption that has truly gone mainstream. The seemingly endless and narratively incoherent Marvel Cinematic Universe and online culture wars demonstrate the hypnotic power of non-linear database consumption over linear grand, cohesive narratives. Our media landscape now resembles an endless database of familiar image templates, catchphrases, and decontextualized references — shared and reshuffled for the sheer thrill of recognition. To giggle at and share an AI Ghibli meme that hits right is to indulge in chara-moe. In essence: if database consumption is now the primary driver of demand, then it’s now suddenly met with a perfectly created and curated supply.

Which brings us to the macrotrend powering Ghiblification: the rise of next-generation multimodal AI. Last week’s ChatGPT-4o update offered a glimpse of what happens when ordinary users are handed tools to conjure images in any style they wish, instantly. While Ghibli aesthetics may have stolen the spotlight, the algorithm’s reach is far broader. From Lego to Pixar, South Park to The Simpsons, the internet has exploded with a surreal parade of fan-made transformations. Ghibli versions of The Office. Pixar versions of Severance. The possibilities are endless. Ghiblification is not really about Studio Ghibli, it’s about the turbocharging of hyperreality with AI.

This shift is being driven by a new frontier in generative AI: the rise of multimodal, or “omnimedia” large language models. Just a few months ago — the Dark Ages, in AI terms — most models were siloed by medium. To write or code you used ChatGPT or Perplexity. To create an image, DALL·E or Midjourney. To create a video, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora were your best bet. Yet with the latest update to ChatGP-4o (the “o” stands for omni), we have entered a stratospheric new era. Very soon, models will no longer be confined to one input or output. Instead, they are being stitched together across modalities — capable of inhaling and exhaling text, image, video, audio, and more. In this new “anything-to-anything” paradigm, you can turn a photo into a cartoon, a game, a song — even a 3D-printed statue. With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.

It’s only going to get faster. The primary barrier to fully automated Ghiblification is no longer AI developer genius or human creativity, but computing power. Today, it takes 30 seconds to generate a near-perfect detailed image. Soon it will be instant. In 2024 alone, tech firms poured more than $100 billion into AI processing infrastructure to speed things up. By 2028, that number is forecast to go over $200 billion. The direction is clear: the only thing standing between users and immersive, personalized AI worlds — whether they be Ghibli, Pixar, or South Park — is processing time. IP rights and energy costs may be barriers, but on matters of AI, it seems that politicians are more concerned with Chinese AI drone swarms than artists’ rights and emissions. Everything else — the demand, the tech, the servers — is there.

Furthermore, it’s amplified by a different kind of AI: interest-graph recommender algorithms. In recent years, feed curation has quietly shifted from the social graph (what you and your friends like and follow) to the interest graph (what you actually pay attention to). The algorithms of TikTok’s “For You” page do not care what you claim to value; they optimize for what you linger on. And what do people want? AI slop. As Altman put it: “one man’s slop is another man’s treasure”. The latest research backs it up. A recent blind study found that most people genuinely prefer AI pastiches of the great poets to the real thing. On a critical level, it is easy to say one believes in the Miyazaki and Nick Cave characterization of AI creativity as “a grotesque mockery”. In practice it’s harder. While older models made creepy, creatively bankrupt pastiches, emerging visual models are increasingly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Ghiblification is unlikely to be a fleeting trend.

And so here we are at the beginning of the new age of Otaku, possibly the end of shared reality as we know it. While reflecting on the creative process, Miyazaki once explained that “the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos”. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the opposite is happening. Reality is being shattered into billions of AI-crafted otaku worlds for one, but perhaps that’s exactly what we want.

In practice, though, solidarity hasn’t always been easy. Though 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of Japan and South Korea officially normalizing relations, the past six decades have been a rollercoaster mix of cooperation and nationalist hatred. That’s clear enough recently — in 2019, Tokyo and Seoul became embroiled in a bitter trade war and mutual boycott. Foreigners are often baffled at why two countries with such similar systems of governance, and both surrounded by nuclear-tipped threats, get into such heated spats. Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even tried to get both sides to get along during the 2019 trade dispute. To no avail.

In part, the answer involves the normal ebb and flow of politics, with parliamentarians in Seoul and Tokyo happy to exploit their neighbors for short-term gain. In 2023, for instance, opposition politicians in South Korea’s parliament bashed President Yoon Suk-yeol for a summit with then-Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, calling it “humiliating, subservient diplomacy”. At root, though, what really matters here is history, and the brutal legacy of Japan’s long occupation on the mainland — even if Trump’s foreign policy revolution may, finally, bring the two sides together.

More from this author

Donald needs a Tokyo bromance

By Oliver Jia

Following its defeat in 1945, Japan relinquished imperial control of the Korean Peninsula. The spheres of influence which would define the Cold War for the rest of the century soon formed, as the US occupied Japan and what became South Korea, while the Soviet Union backed the Kim regime in Pyongyang. The Korean War broke out in 1950, following Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the South, which quickly drew America into the conflict. Despite Washington pressuring Seoul to allow Japan to get involved, South Korea’s dictator Syngman Rhee balked at the idea of Korean soldiers fighting alongside their erstwhile enemy, not least when memories of the occupation were still fresh in everyone’s mind. While acknowledging Japan’s strategic importance as a base for US forces, Rhee staunchly refused to normalize relations.

That would only happen in 1965 when both countries signed the Treaty on Basic Relations. Rhee had been ousted from power, but the parliamentary system that replaced him was weak and ineffective. President Park Chung-hee took advantage of the instability and launched a coup, cementing himself as a brutal military despot. Though he was also a militant anti-communist like Rhee, he also recognized the need to partner with Tokyo to face down the reds in China and the DPRK. It probably helped that Park had collaborated with the Japanese during the Second World War, working with the Empire as an officer instead of against it as a rebel. He graduated top of his class at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, one of the few Koreans allowed to attend.

In other words, then, though relations between Japan and South Korea were officially normalized decades ago, it only happened within the context of Cold War geopolitics and through a controversial Korean president who didn’t truly speak for his people. That meant Tokyo and Seoul moved on from their tragic past — but only for a while. This was proved after South Korea emerged as a democracy in the Eighties, and there was now more space for free discourse among Korean citizens.

For better or worse, old wounds reopened. There is no getting around the fact that, for 35 years, Imperial Japan subjugated the Korean people to its whims. Slave labor was widespread throughout the Empire, while by 1944 Korean males were being drafted into the army to assist with manpower shortages. These men saw direct combat with Allied forces, with over 22,000 dying on the battlefield. Between 270,000 and 810,000 Korean forced laborers also perished in coal mines and military factories under appalling conditions. The lack of clear data makes precise figures hard to determine, in turn allowing those with political agendas to inflate or diminish the number of victims as needed.

Suggested reading

The corrupt heart of Japanese politics

By Christopher Harding

Even more emotionally charged is the issue of “comfort women” — a euphemism for the Korean and other Asian women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops. Intense debates persist around exactly how many comfort women existed, and to what extent the highest echelons of the Imperial Japanese state were involved in the practice. Just as striking, some Japanese politicians continue to show a distinct lack of contrition for the affair. In 2012, for instance, the late governor of Tokyo said that “prostitution was a very good way of making a living for women at that time and they chose the trade not unwillingly.” Osaka, for its part, terminated its sister-city relations with San Francisco over a proposed comfort women monument.

To be fair, Japan has tried to make amends. In 2015, for instance, a bilateral agreement signed between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Korean counterpart Park Geun-hye included apologies and financial reparations — and was supposed to have been the final word on the scandal. Yet by 2019, the deal was essentially dead in the water. The conservative Park was ousted after a major corruption scandal, while the succeeding progressive Moon Jae-in administration was uninterested in maintaining the status quo.

Moon chose to capitalize on the anger of activist groups that probably wouldn’t ever have accepted any settlement to start with, even as he made Korean nationalism, fueled by anti-Japanese feeling, a key pillar of his government. This was further seen when South Korea tried another round of diplomacy with North Korea in 2018. This bickering explains that 2019 trade war, with some restrictions in place as late as 2023.

Yet, once again, the vagaries of politics are making themselves felt. After Moon finished his term, South Korea again went conservative. Affirming that Japan has “transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner” President Yoon Suk-yeo made repairing relations with Tokyo one of his main priorities. On the Japanese side, meanwhile, the nationalistic fervor of Shinzo Abe’s faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has largely been replaced by Fumio Kishida and his more emollient tone. Into this mix came Joe Biden, and his focus on preserving America’s traditional alliances. The result was a rare moment when South Korea, Japan and the United States all backed their tri-party partnership against the looming Chinese threat.

If all of that sounds too good to be true — it was. Yoon is now in hot water for his failed attempt at enforcing martial law, a botched effort to harm the progressive opposition. It’s unclear if the disgraced President’s impeachment will be upheld, but if an election were held today, it’s almost guaranteed that Korea’s progressives would return to power. The leader of the opposition, Lee Jae-myung, is notorious for his anti-Japanese views. Some say these are genuine beliefs; others that he’s just an opportunist. Either way, Tokyo can probably expect some awkward conversations if Lee becomes South Korea’s next president.

As for Japan, the timing couldn’t be worse. The ruling LDP coalition recently lost their Lower House majority for the first time in 15 years, while Kishida is hardly as sly a political fox as Abe. With little domestic backing, he must walk a fine line between pushing for Japan’s interests and maintaining a good relationship with the tariff-happy Trump. Their first summit in February wasn’t a disaster — but Kishida pragmatically chose not to take sides in Washington’s criticisms of Ukraine.

Going forward, then, Japan will do its best to keep the US onside, but it’ll also have to work hard at maintaining good terms with South Korea. Ironically, anyway, pressure from one might prompt friendship with the other. If Trump introduces serious tariffs against both countries, they’ll inevitably need to boost mutual economic exchange. Not that American power is likely to vanish altogether. Especially on security, the US has always played a key role in getting Japan and South Korea to play nice. Washington’s last-minute intervention saved a pivotal information-sharing pact between Tokyo and Seoul during their 2019 trade war. Given Trump’s tough attitude on Europe, expect the commander-in-chief to make similar demands of his Asian partners once more — whether they want to get along or not.

Among other things, Japanese social media users noted that Ishiba looked rather awkward next to the imposing Trump, with the Prime Minister even neglecting to unbutton his suit jacket while sitting down. Such gaffes are rather common with Ishiba, but fashion sense was the least of his worries over the weekend. The most pressing item on the docket was convincing Trump to leave Japan out of his next round of new tariffs. Tokyo is also unhappy over the Biden administration blocking Nippon Steel’s plans to buy US Steel, though on this Trump agrees with his predecessor in the White House. And if that hints at economic trouble ahead, it speaks equally vividly to turbulent dynamics within Japan’s ruling party — and, perhaps, to a geopolitical future where Japan moves further and further from its erstwhile US partner.

In the near term, Ishiba will go home happy he hasn’t made things worse for Japan. Showering lavish praise on Trump’s personal qualities, suggesting he’d been “chosen by God” after his brush with a sniper’s bullet, he also stressed that Japan has been the US’s biggest foreign direct investor over the last five years. The President, for his part, expressed his love for Japan, but was quick to note that Washington’s trade deficit with Tokyo must be cut. Trump also responded in the affirmative to press questions if Japan would be included among his tariffs should no improvement be seen. On the Nippon Steel issue, he stated that the Japanese company would not fully own US Steel, but could “invest heavily” into it.

Suggested reading

Has Japan given up on pacifism?

By Christopher Harding

These were more or less temporary answers to complex economic questions — questions which will surely test Tokyo-DC relations over the next four years. It’s tempting, here, to return to the ebullient Abe, and wonder whether Japan might be better prepared to face Trump 2.0 if he hadn’t been assassinated in 2022. That would be wrong. Quite aside from the fact that Abe had already stepped down as leader of his country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2020, the fact is that Abe and Ishiba are two very different political creatures. Foreigners often hold the mistaken impression that, because the LDP has stayed in power almost constantly for the last seven decades, very little in Japanese politics changes. That could not be further from the truth.

While the LDP indeed usually runs things, it is split into multiple factions, each with a distinct ideological flavor. Abe, for instance, came from the now-defunct Seiwa Kai faction, which promoted Japanese nationalism and was notably conservative. Ishiba, however, has always been against factionalism within the LDP, is less of a nationalist than Abe, and has his own ideas of how foreign policy should be conducted. While Abe was very hawkish on issues like China and North Korea, Ishiba believes in using diplomacy to de-escalate regional security issues. He is a former defense minister, and is famous for having an encyclopedic knowledge of military technology, but advocates for cautious moves that are less likely to upset Japan’s neighbors.

Ishiba won enough votes within the LDP last year to become the party’s leader, following a major slush fund scandal and the resignation of outgoing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Having always been critical of such circles, Ishiba painted himself as a reformer, while some political observers have even referred to him as an idealist. That’s clear enough given his support for pie-in-the-sky policies like an Asian version of NATO and nuclear weapons sharing with the United States. The Japanese public are obviously unimpressed by such fantasies, giving his government dismal approval ratings, with the LDP coalition recently losing its majority in Japan’s lower house for the first time in 15 years.

In short, then, Ishiba is under immense pressure to prove that he is a competent prime minister. Yet beyond these domestic challenges — quite aside from Japan’s weak yen and infamously low birthrate — his idiosyncratic foreign policy also has vast geopolitical consequences. It’s uncertain how long Ishiba will remain Prime Minister, but for the time being Washington must take his distinctive worldview seriously, especially when it comes to the threat of China. During his Friday summit, certainly, Ishiba made the right noises, supporting “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” while once again claiming sovereignty over the disputed Senkaku Islands.

In practice, though, his recent actions suggest that Japan is moving closer to Beijing. The prime minister began courting Xi Jinping late last year, stating during a leader-level summit that Japan and China have a relationship that holds “significance beyond [the] bilateral dimension”. Ahead of Ishiba’s recent trip to the White House, meanwhile, top LDP officials met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing to discuss China removing bans on Japanese seafood imports. That may sound like a minor trade dispute. But with Trump potentially leveling new tariffs on Japan, Ishiba may look across the South China Sea for more reliable partners. Quite aside from Abe, this is a different tone to his immediate predecessor Kishida, who was consistent in calling Beijing a threat to Japan’s interests.

Trump, on the other hand, has filled his cabinet with China hawks. One good example came last week, when secretary of state Marco Rubio took aim at Beijing for exercising “unacceptable” influence and control over the Panama Canal. During his confirmation hearing a few weeks earlier, Rubio also warned of Washington’s “unbalanced relationship” with China, referring to the country as “the biggest threat” to American interests. Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, echoes these sentiments, affirming that the US will leverage existing Indo-Pacific partnerships to curb Chinese interests.

Between Trump and Ishiba, then, we see two leaders singing very different tunes on the People’s Republic. For the White House, the worst-case scenario here would be if Japan strengthened its relations with Beijing, which could lead to greater disagreements on security issues. Stronger economic ties with China might make Tokyo more reluctant to take an aggressive stance against regional CCP influence, anathema to hardliners in Washington. Recall that tens of thousands of American troops are stationed across Japan, ready to go to war, even as Ishiba has been notably skeptical of their deployment. Among other things, he’s criticised the aftermath of a 2004 military helicopter crash, which saw the area locked down by US investigators.

For the moment, though, a major rupture seems unlikely. Quite aside from the warm words during that White House summit, there’s 80 years of history to contend with. The general consensus is that a robust US presence is necessary to maintain Japan’s national security. Along with South Korea, indeed, Japan is America’s most important ally in East Asia, and all three countries serve as a bulwark against threats from China, North Korea and Russia. Besides, Ishiba’s personal views notwithstanding, not everyone in his party is as doubtful, and the premier would face significant domestic pushback if he tried to rip up the alliance altogether.

More from this author

North Korea is ready for war

By Oliver Jia

In the long term, the status quo needs work. As the ruckus over US Steel implies, that starts with economics. If the US can cut its trade deficit with Japan, Trump will be less inclined to impose new tariffs. The President said as much over the weekend, even as there’s a stark political dimension here too: avoiding a trade war with Washington would give Japan less reason to cozy up to China, especially in industries like cars and semiconductors. To be sure, that wouldn’t be a panacea. Because Japanese automotive, electronics and banking firms still have considerable investments in Mexico and Canada, factories there would still be affected by Trump’s tariffs.

Even so, it’s obvious that keeping Trump happy could do wonders for Ishiba’s freedom of movement, not least on foreign affairs. Beyond his position on Taiwan, which looks to be a largely unchanged continuation of US solidarity, the President seems keen on restarting diplomacy with North Korea, something the Biden administration mostly ignored. Should new engagement happen, the Japanese prime minister could prove his worth as an ally by supporting the negotiations. That wouldn’t be easy: the DPRK’s abductions of Japanese citizens through the Seventies and Eighties remains unsurprisingly contentious, with the aging relatives of abductees are desperate for a breakthrough. All the same, Japan maintains some of the strictest sanctions in the world on North Korea. And if denuclearization is impossible — as it increasingly seems to be — Ishiba could dangle sanction relief as a way of getting a measure of arms control from Kim Jong Un.

There’s also a wild card scenario. Trump has always seen US troops abroad as an expensive investment, and is strongly pushing American allies to pull their weight. Ishiba, for his part, wants less US involvement in his country, and for Tokyo to have more control over its national defense. Despite their very different backgrounds, this could turn out to be a surprising area of agreement. Just don’t expect chats about trainspotting anytime soon.

“Cool Japan”, the policy that resulted, was an attempt to mobilize the soft power of anime, manga and J-pop in the West. The country’s economy had been in the doldrums since the asset bubble burst in 1991; its geopolitical heft now seemed contingent on its role as the homeland of Sailor Moon, Naruto and Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved Studio Ghibli. Foreign policy aside, the finances of anime were not to be sniffed at either — the global industry will be worth more than $60 billion by 2032.

Western children and teens — particularly in France and Russia — were by now already hooked on the absurd, dreamlike aesthetics of anime and manga, with their narrative worlds so different from the rigid Christian morality of Disney. In this, they mirrored the Japanophiles of the 19th century who, after the country reopened to Western trade following two centuries of isolationism in 1853, fixated on Japan as a land of mystique, with its “charming, artistic, doll-like inhabitants”. Then, Van Gogh, Degas and others were among the European sophisticates who hoarded lacquered cabinets and ukiyo-e prints. This time, 4Chan christened the white Japanophiles calling each other senpai in school cafeterias “Wapanese”, then Weeaboo — and finally, Weebs.

Twee governmental efforts to push Cool Japan — including appointing a cartoon cat as an anime “ambassador” — belied the strangeness of the Western appetite it courted. Very soon, things would get very weird. By the time the initiative began, the scourge of offputting dorkiness had already taken root among Weebs, with young men embracing otaku culture — obsessive fandom — and feminists balking at the eroticized little girls of manga, notoriously printed onto dakimakura pillows to be embraced by undeodorized, undersexed disciples. From the 2010s, more and more Western cosplayers packed out miasmatic comic-con events, their bright pink and blue wigs, peace signs and puff-cheeked duck pouts becoming shorthand for a certain type of internet nerd — obsessive, horny and curiously alienated from the mainstream. For them, Japan represented a sort of aestheticized dreamland, a refuge from the blows of high-school jocks.

In 2025, the “manga accent”, with its accompanying hand gestures and bouncy body language, has become a staple of American dorkdom. Alongside this, the hikikomori lifestyle has taken hold: in 2022, there were about 1.46 million such people in Japan — recluses who have not left home for six months or more, wrapped up in virtual worlds and living from bed. Now, the nihilism of hikikomori seems to appeal to alienated Americans who might once have been goths, with anxiety-wracked bloggers emulating the lifestyle with their own videos of snack-strewn beds, figurines and drawn curtains.

Suggested reading

The dangerous aesthetic of psych-ward TikTok

By Poppy Sowerby

At the same time, there is increasing alarm within Japan around the rise of soshoku-danshi, or “herbivore men”, who have little interest in sex or relationships. Their abstinence is often connected with the lure of hyperstimulating anime porn, or hentai, the supreme weirdness of which has done little for Japan’s global reputation. The subset of much-whispered-about “tentacle porn”, initially an Eighties ploy to circumvent censorship rules, crystallizes the Western fixation on Japan as a land of paraphilias. In this strange sexual environment, around a third of Japanese men and women aged 18-34 show no interest in having a relationship — a figure borne out by a plummeting birth rate, a trend to which the West is rapidly catching up.

The Cool Japan initiative certainly didn’t intend to play up the nation’s reputation as a fantasyland of intense, intoxicating fandom and alienated, fantastical hypersexuality. But Weeb culture has latched upon this vision of Japan, making it synonymous with social disengagement, strangeness, sexlessness and aggressive introspection. Japan has always been a site of Western anxieties — think of Ridley Scott’s neon-lit Blade Runner vision of dystopian LA, based on the Shinjuku district of Tokyo — but what’s new is the heavy identification of homegrown anime fans with a lifestyle of imagination and isolation.

There is a curious irony in this. A progressive generation of Westerners raised with the hot breath of Edward Said forever on its neck has come to see rhapsodizing over distant lands as a cardinal sin — but Japanophilia is a notable exception. Japan’s figurative power as an otherworldly site of eroticism is the textbook example of Orientalism — yet this blind spot is everywhere, perhaps owing to Weebism’s close associations with queer culture. Recently, a white trans X user pulled the pin on a grenade in announcing they would be adopting the name Saeko; this month, a TikToker made a viral appeal: “Just because you’re non-binary doesn’t mean you’re also Japanese.” The confluence between gender discourse and anime is not a coincidence; despite springing from a highly conservative country where even gay marriage is not yet legal, anime is replete with boyish sylph protagonists, as in Revolutionary Girl Utena and The Rose of Versailles. The iconography is all languorous androgyny, shaggy hair and slender bishōnen, or “beautiful boys” — modeled on the effeminate princeliness of Tadzio in Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice.

Meanwhile, yaoi and yuri — “boys’ love” and “girls’ love” — are distinct anime genres beloved by women and men respectively; these are melodramatic, idealized homoerotic romances which typify “Japanese sexuality” as a category all its own. This is a sexual world unanchored from politics or even real-world lust, all playing out in two dimensions. Nowhere is anime sexuality’s fantastical remoteness demonstrated better and more disturbingly than in a viral video of a “VTuber” (virtual YouTuber, god help us all) concert from 2023, in which an audience of parasocial teen girls screams at the “face reveal” of an animated manga-style singer.

Boy and girl-love romances are excruciatingly slow-burning and structured around heterosexual formulas — seme, or dominant, characters emotionally wrestle with uke submissives. They are designed, in the case of “boys’ love”, for the titillation of shy young straight women who are more comfortable with the unthreatening, dreamlike symbolism of two boys exchanging whispers than the real prospect of sex with a man. The politics of the genre is complicated; upon the opening of a manga exhibition at the British Museum in 2019, the academic Susan Napier told the BBC that the medium “held up very progressive models”, and in Japan, yaoi and yuri might fairly be interpreted as inevitable sproutings of liberalism in an undersexed and highly formal culture. But as these genres bobbed over oceans to the West and became incorporated into mainstream queer movements, they have become Weebish totems of alternative gender identities, something you’ll notice if you spend five minutes auditing profile pictures on X — a curious departure from their culturally conservative provenance. Both the androgynous aesthetics of anime and its atmosphere as an outsiders’ club lie beneath the Weeb-gender overlap, one which has produced viral X accounts whose sole purpose is to post “a canon/implied trans person a day” — mainly plucked from anime.

All of this is important, because it situates the very real field of Western sexual politics in the realm of dreams and imagination, and explains in part the conceptual disconnect between Trump’s generation and the young trans people he is legislating against. The American Right and gender-critical feminists are in an uncomfortable alliance in their preoccupation with physicality; for the young, online Left, and particularly that sizeable Weeb-queer nexus, imaginative potential and identification with figurative avatars — I identify with, even worship, this character, therefore I am them — has unmoored them from the politics of the body. So it is that Japan’s soft power has weaned a generation of Americans which has, according to plan, grown-up enraptured by anime — but never grew out of it. So it is too that the generation most concerned about the diktats of Said is willing to project its dreams onto Japan, imagining it as the ultimate sexual utopia; the Japanese exception to Orientalism, it seems, relies on the green light of queer, nerdy and compulsive Weebery.

Suggested reading

The dirty secret about OnlyFans

By Poppy Sowerby

Japanese critics have long lamented the Orientalizing gaze of Weebs, with Hiroki Azuma namechecking Said’s theory in 2005 and writing that “what is behind the image … [is] completely erased when they are exported overseas”. There are fascinating analogues of this deracination in all realms of media: in the world of house music, white Western DJs are using Japanese-coded avatars. The San Franciscan DJ Dr Gabba uses the image of an evil scientist from Sailor Moon, while the Georgian musician Osean World has created a vocaloid (a synthesized singer) called Yameii, a pink-bunned anime girl who layers accented, eerie vocals over the 2020 hit Baby My Phone, which has nearly 16 million views on YouTube. Last week, the singer FKA Twigs released a collaboration with Kanye-Kardashian royalty North West, in which the 11-year-old sings in Japanese (“My name is North-chan”) for no apparent reason. All very strange, and no doubt frustrating to Japanese observers — but wasn’t it the government’s aim to spread the aesthetics and catchphrases of anime worldwide? Is this power, in the end, a little too soft?

The critical characteristic of Weebism is its situation within fantasy — which the lead singer of The Vapors presciently captured in his song Turning Japanese, written from his Guildford bedroom in 1980. In it, the singer obsesses over a photograph of his lover — “I sit there staring and there’s nothing else to do” — and embraces the slow creep of isolation: “No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women”, maddened by his own private idol-worship. Though unconscious — David Fenton said he’d heard the phrase “turning Japanese” in a dream, and had even written a motif which “is more likely to be Chinese, so I got that completely wrong!” — the song captures the shut-in, engrossed individualism of Weebery decades before its time, the tentacles of which have spread into Western youth politics, conducted not from the streets but from a lonely bedroom.

Given all this, has the experiment of Cool Japan failed? Of modern-day manga creators, Miyazaki Hayao said in 2014 that “some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people.” In this, Weebs are the perfect cognate. A decades-old Japanese government initiative around soft power has instead produced a sort of soft Orientalism, one which reduces the nation to an eroticized cartoon fantasy. This is how Cool Japan was transfigured from the real-world politics of diplomacy to the splintered, bedroom-bound dreamworlds which now characterize the young Western Left. Progressive youth movements, weaned on screens and taught morality by the internet, are beginning to creak in the face of a nastier, more robust camp intent on dashing every trace of Weebish woke. The heirs of Cool Japan are a generation those ministers in Noughties Tokyo would hardly recognize. And the Weebs themselves? They are culturally at sea, now that the jocks are back in charge.

In a sense, Ferreira’s argument remains true today. Barely 1% of Japanese people now identify as Christian, and if you asked the average Tokyo commuter to explain the Eucharist, they’d likely just stare. Yet if Japan is unique among the East Asian countries for remaining almost devoid of Christians, this is also a society where people wear their faith lightly, and where Buddhism and Shintoism have coexisted for centuries. That surely explains why modern Japanese now wallow in the symbols and traditions of Christmas, even as they twist outside customs to their needs. No less striking, those few Japanese who do embrace Jesus tend to do remarkably well — hinting at its long associations with Western sophistication.

Much as Catholicism is the assumed religion of every Italian — a faith, at the very least, to be embraced at birth, marriage and death — Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan are chiefly cultural institutions. The typical Japanese will visit a temple or shrine at the beginning of the new year out of tradition, and get married in one, but whether or not they literally believe in gods or spirits is harder to answer. When it comes to the God of the Western monotheistic religions, in fact, most Japanese would likely be considered agnostic. Given how different the Japanese attitude to faith is from Western monotheism — original sin and scriptural dogma are unknown — Shusaku Endo may have had a point when he wrote that his fellow countrymen “cannot think of an existence that transcends the human.”

Suggested reading

How the Moonies took over Japan

By Philip Patrick

Yet ever since the Portuguese arrived during the Age of Discovery, there have always been Christians here. The first mass on Japanese soil is said to have occurred in 1552, at the behest of Jesuits based at Yamaguchi. The Portuguese had landed in the Land of the Rising Sun less than a decade prior, being the first Europeans to do so. Francis Xavier led the first Christian mission to Japan in 1549, with his successors to learning Japanese and converting as many natives as possible. Prefectures like Yamaguchi and Nagasaki still have the highest concentrations of Christians in Japan — partly because of the work of these hardy Catholic pioneers.

It’s debatable how many of these early Japanese Christians actually understood Christianity: most initially interpreted the religion as simply another sect of Buddhism. During his early proselytising, in fact, Xavier used “Dainichi” (“Great Sun”) as a Japanese translation for the Christian God, borrowing the name of a major Buddha. Yet if this subtle approach led to the conversation of several high-ranking daimyo (lords), with aristocrats keen to embrace the faith of the prosperous and musket-wielding outsiders, it also pushed the shogunate to crush Christianity and expel all foreigners from the country.

The artificial island Dejima, off Nagasaki, was the only port where Dutch traders were permitted to do business, and they skirted the ban on Christianity by framing their Christmas celebrations as marking the New Year. Some high-ranking Japanese officials occasionally attended these “Dutch New Year” festivities. Their European hosts did their best under the circumstances, cooking lavish feasts including sweet bread and pies, both unusual sights when the journey back to Amsterdam took six months.

Christmas proper would not be celebrated again for over 200 years, when the Emperor Meiji abandoned centuries of isolation and re-embraced Western culture. With the ban on Christianity fully lifted in 1873, Japanese writers like Inazo Nitobe converted to Christianity, received Western educations, and helped shape modern Japanese society. Like the daimyo of old, this was often an upper-class movement. By 1933, one in 2,000 white-collar Japanese had embraced Christ, compared to one in 55,000 farmers. At the same time, the number of foreigners entering Japan increased sharply. Diplomats and their families, oceans away from home, celebrated Christmas at their embassy postings.

That foreignness helps explain the spread of Christianity among the Japanese elite, with lawyers and doctors keen to both showcase their Western credentials and distinguish themselves from their more humble peers. You might say something similar about the spread of Christmas as a secular celebration. It’s telling that festivities became popular around the turn of the century, and the arrival of Western multinationals: Coca-Cola started selling its products in Japan in 1919, with the company famously associated with all things Santa. By the Thirties, Christmas imagery could be found in school textbooks, magazines, shops, restaurants, and cafes nationwide.

Ultimately, though, it would be the post-war American occupation that permanently embedded Christmas into Japanese culture. Little wonder Japan’s most famous Christmas tradition involves families chowing on Kentucky Fried Chicken. Similar to Coca-Cola and Santa, KFC Japan has made Christmas a signature part of its brand at the end of each year. Takeshi Okawara, the manager of the first KFC restaurant to open in Japan, supposedly heard foreigners talking about how they missed eating turkey, and wondered if his chicken could work instead. It did: KFC Japan now sells limited-edition buckets every Christmas. A cut above the usual fare, options include barbecue chicken legs and chocolate cake, even as diners must book tables.

The Japanese would absorb, or anyway distort, other festive Western customs — an echo of Dainichi and a mark of how adept they’ve become at shaping foreign influences to their tastes. One good example is the way many Japanese now view Christmas Eve to be the most romantic time of the year, even rivalling Valentine’s Day. It’s not entirely clear when this tradition started. As far back as the Thirties, magazine articles featured stories about young Japanese on romantic festive dates. Most likely, businesses wanted to take full advantage of consumer revenue before closing for New Year’s. At any rate, couples now plan lavish dinner dates weeks in advance: expect the classiest restaurants and hotels to be fully booked through the end of December.

No less striking, Japan now has a range of totally new Christmas traditions, together blending East and West. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” — composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto for a film of the same name starring David Bowie — is a universal favourite. The holiday also regularly features in manga and anime storylines. Directed by Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfathers is perhaps the most famous example. The visually stunning animated film is set during Christmas and centres around the country’s homeless community: a perspective rarely seen in Japanese animation. There are even Christmas-themed Japanese video games. Published in 1996, Nights into Dreams has players exploring a vivid dream world. The standard version was beautiful enough, but the Christmas edition adds winter scenery, and a cover of “Jingle Bells” as background music.

More from this author

North Korea is ready for war

By Oliver Jia

While most Japanese aren’t Christians, in short, the Christmas spirit is now a permanent fixture here. But what of that tiny minority that really do convert? In certain ways, the faithful in Tokyo are similar to their counterparts in Paris or Berlin. Churches hold Christmas masses each December, often featuring Japanese-language hymns. In a nod to the country’s relaxed attitudes to faith, non-Christians regularly join their religious friends in celebration.

And if Japanese Christians manage to carve out a place for themselves this December, amid the Bowie and the lights, it’s also true that they occupy a distinct place in wider society. Over the years, Japan has boasted a remarkable nine Christian prime ministers, or 14% of the total. That includes Shigeru Ishiba, the current incumbent. Each found God differently. Takashi Hara was baptised Catholic after studying at a French parochial school in Tokyo. Taro Aso, for his part, seems to have inherited his faith from family.

But while religion here is basically private — unlike the US, politicians aren’t expected to invoke their faith in public — this political preponderance again speaks to the popularity of Christianity among the Japanese elite. The numbers, once more, are clear: one study, from after the Second World War, found that 40% of Japanese Protestants had gone to university, compared to barely 15% of the population at large. That’s dovetailed by more personal examples, like the Hattoris, a prominent Catholic family that owns the Seiko watch company. Of course, these success stories don’t wear their faith on their sleeves. That wouldn’t be the Japanese way. Yet amid the gentle universality of Buddhism and Shintoism, Christians in Japan are clearly doing well. Not that the public at large, busy with their chicken and date nights, really know or care.

To be a self-respecting Japan fan back in the Nineties meant moving on from our grandparents’ dark memories of the Second World War while rejecting as tourist-board nonsense the clichéd image of Japan as a place where high technology meets traditional values and aesthetics. To really “get” Japan, we were all earnestly certain, required effort. Many of us turned, for insights, to Japanese novelists in translation. In decades past, Yasunari Kawabata was a popular option. But the Nobel Prize-winning writer belonged to the old Japan: his classic 1948 work, Snow Country, was a paean to a country that was already passing away when he was a young man. Instead, we looked to Murakami as our literary key to the Japanese psyche.

There was a great irony in this. When Murakami first became a big name in Japan, thanks to the runaway success of Norwegian Wood in 1987, critics were quick to point out how un-Japanese he was. Born in 1949, during the postwar Allied Occupation of Japan, Murakami read European and American novels in English while at high school, studied drama at university and ran a jazz bar with his wife in Tokyo before going full-time as a writer. He had little time for Japanese literature, after hearing his parents — both of whom were teachers — go on about it ad nauseam while he was growing up.

Suggested reading

Michel Houellebecq is literature's Lucifer

By Darran Anderson

Realising that all this had left him unable to write fiction in his native language, Murakami composed his early lines in English and then translated them back into Japanese. His relatively modest English vocabulary compelled him to write in short, simple sentences. A style was born, with which millions of readers around the world would one day become intimately familiar.

To Murakami’s legions of young fans, Norwegian Wood felt bracingly contemporary and cosmopolitan. It tells the story of a man in his mid-thirties, Toru Watanabe, who hears a rendition of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and is transported back to his youth in the Sixties: a heady era of student protests and intense and tragic friendships. The listlessness and longing that permeate the novel, as a group of young people try to make sense of their lives amid political turmoil and disappointment, struck a chord with readers not just in Japan but in Taiwan and South Korea, too: they had been through similar experiences during their countries’ democracy movements in the Eighties.

Murakami’s Japanese detractors, particularly those wedded to the country’s highbrow “pure literature” genre, dismissed his work as “odourless” and lacking any sense of place. With his interest in beer, coffee and jazz, and the relative absence of Japanese reference points in his work, Murakami seemed to be, as Theresa May might have put it, a citizen of nowhere. For Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of Japan’s coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1958 and the country’s second Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, the problem was partly generational. Ōe singled out both Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto as young authors who, unlike their literary forebears who wrote about the tragedies of war, sold hundreds of thousands of books by pandering to a disaffected youth, “content to exist within a late adolescent or post-adolescent sub-culture”.

Views like these probably prevented Murakami from winning the Akutagawa Prize and being accepted into Japan’s literary establishment. He seems to have felt the rejection keenly, choosing to leave Japan in the mid-Eighties when a combination of critical hostility and growing popular celebrity became too much. He relocated first to Europe and later to the United States. Meanwhile, his fame spread from Japan and East Asia to the West, as readers of Norwegian Wood and his magical realist A Wild Sheep Chase thrilled at their encounter with cool and rebellious Japan. It was a far cry from the stereotype among Westerners at the time about Japan’s conformism.

But perhaps more important than Murakami’s rebellion was his universalism. He has a talent for depicting human relationships as uncertain and half-formed, forged and held together by silences and bemusement as much as by real meetings of minds. You don’t read Murakami for the quality of his dialogue but, when reading Norwegian Wood, there’s a sense that you understand both Japan and yourself a little better in the process.

A few years later, those who had charged Murakami with indulging in whimsy, while novelists such as Ōe reckoned with Japan’s wartime past, received a response of sorts. His 1995 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle traversed scenes inspired by Japanese mythology and history: abandoned houses, old wells and the transcendent breaking into human life amid the mud and din of the Second World War’s battlefields.

This was the first time that Murakami had shouldered the kind of social responsibility that was expected of a Japanese novelist. Writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle from his home in the United States, he credited his turn towards his home country to the opportunity he had to view it from a distance. Kenzaburō Ōe thoroughly approved, serving on the committee that awarded Murakami the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1995.

It was this sense of responsibility that brought Murakami back to Japan that same year, after two disasters that came within weeks of each other. In January, an earthquake killed more than 6,000 people. Then two months later, the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō released sarin gas onto the Tokyo underground. Although far less deadly than the earthquake, the attack had a disturbing impact on Japan — the members of the cult turned out to be ordinary, intelligent young people who had become profoundly disillusioned with life in Japan. Interviewing victims of the attacks, Murakami reflected on what it meant for Japan in Underground (1997). It is perhaps his finest work of non-fiction to date and part of what he described as his mid-Nineties turn from “detachment” to “commitment” as a novelist. He began to take an interest in how social and political systems ensnare people, likening such systems in a 2009 speech to high walls against which people throw themselves like eggs.

As a young writer, Murakami never dreamt that he would become so big in the West, that bookshops would stage midnight openings to celebrate the release of his books. Much of the credit for this goes to his English translators, including Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. European audiences followed suit, via translations that were often made from the English rather than the original Japanese versions of Murakami’s work. His books have now been translated into more than 50 languages. Hardcore Murakami fans — “Harukists”, as they are known — will be pleased to discover that in Taiwan there is even a research centre dedicated to studying his oeuvre.

More from this author

What Labour could learn from Japan

By Christopher Harding

Across the late Nineties and early Noughties, Murakami continued to produce critically acclaimed novels. Eagerly awaited though each of these books were, commentators began to note a tendency for Murakami to return to favourite themes — inspiring a New York Times cartoonist to create Haruki Murakami Bingo, with entries including cats, cooking and ear fetishes.

Less likely to find a place in Murakami Bingo was “fleshed-out female character”. Even fans of Murakami’s work have noted that women in his novels are often lonely, broken or somehow mysterious in the eyes of male protagonists. They are there, it seems, primarily to serve the men: clarifying something for them or functioning like “mediums… harbingers of the coming world”, as Murakami himself put it.

It is safe to say that Murakami’s new book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, does little to address these criticisms. We are once again inside the head of a gently unsettled, faintly nostalgic male narrator, who discovers that the boundaries between his world and another can be diaphanously thin. In Japan, where Murakami remains a big deal — albeit never accepted into the country’s literary establishment — the book has received mixed and occasionally slightly confused reviews. But the Murakami magic remains intact. Re-immersing myself in his dream-like pacing feels like slipping back into a warm bath. The old images and emotions return, some of them heightened now that I have enough years on the clock to share Murakami’s bewilderment at the passing of time.

Fortunately, for those of us who find ourselves using fogeyish phrases like “back in the Nineties”, Murakami suggests that “truth is not found in fixed stillness but in ceaseless change and movement”. This reads to me like an encouragement not to remain too long in Murakami’s signature nostalgia mode and instead to embrace what is around us now — with the possible exception of J-Pop. Fresh consolation, then, from an old master.

Perhaps the Catholic Church should give it a try. What better way for the Vatican to shake off its harsh and forbidding reputation among the faithless young than by designing a winsome kawaii mascot for the Church’s forthcoming Jubilee Year?

Such was the apparent thinking of the high-ups who this week unveiled Luce, a character designed to put the adorable into religious adoration. Along with a raft of identically proportioned sidekicks, Luce is an unfeasibly large-headed, big-eyed, short-limbed cartoon child whose proportions are dictated by the chibi tradition in Japanese anime — also known as the “super-deformed” style. Blue-haired and snub-nosed, her enormous eyes brim with saintly sweetness as she guides young pilgrims towards the faith.

The Vatican masterminds are surely right that kawaii culture is popular with youth across the globe. Starting in the Seventies, with the massive success of Hello Kitty, it has since been fuelled by international crazes for manga, Studio Ghibli films, and Pokémon characters. Vaguely sinister soft toys with neotenous features, pointless pastel-coloured plastic tat, and decorated notepaper too small to actually write anything on are like crack for pre-teen girls worldwide.

More from this author

The god delusion of secular liberals

By Kathleen Stock

According to one theory, Japan’s national obsession with cuteness has roots in Sixties Japan, as representations of the ageing Emperor Hirohito started to depict him as endearingly enfeebled. This was arguably a cultural coping mechanism, as the Japanese faced post-war realisations about the limits of their military and economic power. Other commentators have made connections with the classical tradition of Japanese aesthetics, according to which sadness is an appropriate response to beauty: cute things are often thought of as enjoyably “pitiable” in kawaii discourse. The Shinto religion is also thought by some to be a relevant background factor, with its emphasis on innocence and play. And feminists have pointed out that traditional models of Japanese femininity construe women as small, powerless, and vulnerable — all features heavily present in the kawaii tradition.

Somewhere in all that, perhaps, is Japan’s excuse for its obsession with anything endearingly small, innocent, and childishly appealing. But what’s ours? For cuteness is increasingly not just an obsession of Generations Z and Alpha. The same nauseatingly sugary aesthetic is creeping — or rather, perhaps, playfully skipping as fast as wobbly oversized heads will allow — into Anglophone adult worlds. In this, it is no doubt encouraged by local conditions, in which “adultescence” can yawn into one’s thirties and distinct cultural boundaries between generations barely exist.

Consider that we are now in the season of adult Halloween costumes — in itself, a giant exercise in tooth-aching whimsy — and whole articles are being written, apparently seriously, about how sinister clown costumes have gone cute this year. Middle-aged textspeak is scattered with cartoon emojis, and phone cameras have filters that make owners look like puppies or princesses. Grown humans watch Pixar films or go to Disney World without the excuse of accompanying offspring. And, believe it or not, there are even “maid cafes” selling “kawaii culture” in UK cities, where youthful-looking young women in maid outfits will draw smiley faces on your pancakes or play boardgames with you, allegedly with no sexual undertones whatsoever.

Noticing the trend, this year Somerset House put on an art exhibition exploring what its curators called the “irresistible rise of cuteness”. And then there’s the ubiquitous concept of the “meet-cute”, now part of the contemporary lexicon to describe a first date. In terms of relationship ideals, it’s no longer considered sufficient to encounter a prospective partner by means of a firm handshake at a rendezvous planned in advance. Instead you should do something that would elicit gooey-eyed “awws” from your friends in the retelling: accidentally chuck a cup of coffee over him, say, or find yourself in a furious bidding war over the same antique vase. And if the meeting goes wrong and no sexual attraction is thereby experienced, modern parlance now has it that you have “the ick”. At both ends of the spectrum then, adult agency and mature sexual attitudes are being smothered in cooing, babbling, and clucking noises.

Indeed, the fact that cuteness has the capacity to reduce grown women and the occasional man to babytalk is a frequently observed feature of its strange power. In her great book on minor aesthetic properties of our time, cultural theorist Sianne Ngai quotes a 19th-century journalist attending the society wedding of Lavinia Warren and “General Tom Thumb” Stratton — two people of very short stature — who observed that the onlooking enraptured female crowd emitted “small-sized adjectives and diminutive ejaculations” as they gazed upon the adorable spectacle. In such a way, Ngai suggests, “cuteness generates ever more cuteness”. Or, to put it bluntly, cuteness kills vocabularies and, ultimately, brain cells. No surprise, then, that it should become totemic of this most stupid of eras.

There is another thing about cuteness that seems to make it irresistible. Namely, as noted, it implies vulnerability and powerlessness: aspects our culture is intoxicated by. Luce holds a pilgrim’s stick, but to eyes hungry for emblems of weakness it could just as easily be mistaken for a disability aid. Everything about her speaks to smallness and defencelessness. Some warped souls will find this an outright turn-on; more, though, will be non-erotically gratified by the projected image of the self.

For there is something obviously self-regarding in the pleasure to be had from exaggerated caricatures of human vulnerability. In a susceptible observer with enough mirror neurons firing, cute representations make her feel both maternal and meltingly childish, unsure if she is imaginatively positioned as watching subject or as adorably smol-bean-like object. For the same sorts of reason, cuteness can produce profound ambivalence in an onlooker. Do I want to hug this thing? Protect it? Buy it? Be it? Destroy it?

Pace the Vatican then, it seems to me that cuteness is a bad vehicle for the traditional elements of religious experience. Whatever else Luce achieves — increased brand awareness, perhaps, or even the physical presence of more young people in churches — she is unlikely to directly draw them closer to God. For, in comparison to the more traditional aesthetic categories of beauty and sublimity, cuteness seems essentially secular. Ngai agrees, writing that because cuteness “dramatises” its own “frivolity and ineffectiveness”,  it is “fundamentally non-theological, unable to foster religious awe and uncoupling the experience of art from the discourse of spiritual transcendence”.

More from this author

The crucifixion of Kate Forbes

By Kathleen Stock

Even when affected by the sight of Luce as presumably intended, viewers will still only be in the realm of small bursts of manageable feeling, with no loss of self but rather an intensification of queasy self-awareness as just described. In some ways, this makes the mascot a weird strategy on the part of the Church. The one thing everybody knows about teenagers — and especially girls — is that they have an enormous capacity for engaging in ecstatic, swooning acts of self-abandon and absorption in the absolute. Just ask Saint Teresa of Ávila or Joan of Arc.

Yet unlike traditional religious paintings or pieces of music, full of awe-inspiring power, grand drama, or painful intensity, one cute representation is exactly as affecting as the next — which is to say not very much. Looking at Luce might make you feel pleasantly squishy in the solar plexus; but then again, so might looking at Bambi or Pikachu. It is for this reason that cuteness sells so well — it’s cheap and easy, in every sense. Even the tackiest of Catholic kitsch tries harder to whip up a sense of God’s immanence than this.

No doubt there will be those who say I’m overthinking. Can’t I just be happy that an out-of-touch institution is making relatable overtures to a new generation? I’m afraid I can’t. The modern cult of cuteness is too revolting. We get the aesthetic properties we deserve, perhaps; but surely the Church can do better than metaphorically placing potential converts in soft play. Many manifestations of religious experience are available, but I’m fairly sure saying “awwww” isn’t one of them.

Is there anything Sir Keir could learn from the Japanese? They certainly have a better diet. For one thing, it is easy to get hold of a wide range of fresh fish, whereas in UK supermarkets much of our fish is either frozen, breadcrumbed or gives off that tell-tale fishy smell that means it’s already going bad. Add to that tofu, fresh and pickled veg, miso soup and nattō — sticky fermented soybeans — and you have the basis of a very wholesome diet. What’s more, in Japanese cuisine there is an emphasis on high-quality ingredients, simply prepared, with comparatively little in the way of complex sauces liable to introduce large amounts of fat, sugar or salt into a meal. Japanese children learn about nutrition in depth at school, and lunches there are prepared with strict nutritional guidelines in mind. Youngsters are also taught to stop eating when they feel 80% full, on the basis that by that point they have eaten all they need and the brain just needs a little time to register the fact.

More from this author

The corrupt heart of Japanese politics

By Christopher Harding

Still, there is more to the story than diet and nutrition. Successive governments stretching back to the late 19th century have had a hand in crafting Japanese attitudes towards physical health — and not always out of straightforward concern for people’s wellbeing. Some of modern Japan’s earliest nutritionists worked for the armed forces, trying to build the bodies of their soldiers in the 1860s and 1870s. One of the reasons why Japan dropped its Buddhist prohibition on meat-eating — ushering in a first generation of “stew-restaurants” — was the hope that beef-eating in particular would help soldiers to heal faster from their injuries. Everyone from the Emperor downwards soon began eating beef for its promised health benefits.

Nineteenth-century doctors in Japan took a great interest, too, in the health of pregnant women. Healthy women and healthy babies were thought to be essential to the building of a robust workforce. Much was made of how workers in Western countries were often taller and stronger, placing Japan at a competitive disadvantage in everything from industry to future combat. In short, the thought emerged very early in the life of modern Japan that a person’s health is a public good.

This was part of a bigger picture in which the job of the state was not so much to fulfil the wishes of the population as to manage it according to what a small ruling elite regarded as being in the country’s best interests. Japan’s civil servants regarded themselves as “shepherds of the people”: they would research the sorts of Western social problems to which a modernising Japan was liable to fall victim, come up with solutions and then implement them with the help of doctors, midwives and school teachers. Compared to countries such as the UK, mass party politics and the idea of bottom-up political change never really took hold in pre-war Japan. People were taught that the state, as the expression of the Emperor’s will (in reality, the will of a tiny ruling clique), knew best. This idea survived into the postwar period, when after a brief flirtation with Left-wing politics an “iron triangle” of Right-leaning politicians, businesses and the civil service helped to manage the country’s remarkable economic recovery.

Suggested reading

Who killed Sue Gray?

By Tom McTague

The result of all this has been that people in Japan accept a degree of paternalism and official cajolery from their leaders that would feel culturally alien in the UK. Public trust is sometimes undermined, when politicians are revealed to be on the take or when the state response to disasters — notably the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of March 2011 — is exposed as inadequate. But the Japanese state has proven resilient over the years, notably in responding to public disquiet about environmental pollution in the Sixties and Seventies by advising big businesses to salvage their reputations and protect themselves against legal action by agreeing to stringent environmental and health and safety legislation. This included workplace health checks like the ones that Labour are considering for the UK: these have been happening in Japan for more than 50 years.

The trend, over time, has been towards expanding the scope of these checks. What started, in 1972, as a basic physical exam alongside blood and urine tests steadily expanded to include tests for cholesterol and blood sugar levels and even electrocardiograms. Employers are under a legal obligation to follow up with their employees, meaning that your boss may insist on you taking measures to lose weight. For the past decade, psychological stress has been tested too, partly in response to high-profile lawsuits launched by families of workers who died from overwork, including by suicide.

It may be that in the UK, too, once people have accepted the idea of health checks in the workplace then the scope of those checks will steadily grow. Whether or not we will become comfortable with our employers taking a close interest in our health, however, remains to be seen. During the mindfulness boom of the 2010s, suspicions were raised that companies encouraging their employees to meditate might have their eye more on improving workers’ productivity than their wellbeing. Besides, in Japan it has long been accepted — if not necessarily welcomed by all — that employers and even complete strangers may comment on your physical health. It was part of a culture of corporate paternalism that saw employers regularly attending their employees’ weddings and even giving speeches at them. At the same time, what might be considered fat-shaming or plain old rudeness in the UK happens quite frequently in Japan: people report having comments made about their size in public, even receiving gentle prods in the stomach as someone marvels at their excess flesh.

Some say that we can’t tackle obesity, Japan-style, because we would first need to reimagine our society, accepting a deeper level of involvement by the state, our employers and even complete strangers in our physical health. But perhaps that puts things the wrong way around. It may be instead that by adopting measures of the kind that Labour is proposing, the idea takes root that physical health is a communal rather than just a personal good, not least because it eases pressure on the NHS. Obesity is less obviously harmful to others in the way that smoking and drink-driving are: two practices that were reversed in part by establishing them as socially taboo. But it is not impossible to imagine the case being successfully made.

Critics of Japanese conformity might say that this isn’t the sort of society we want to become; that “community” is all very nice until you bump up against ideas that you find unacceptable, but which other people seek to impose on you. And yet for those who think that post-Covid Britain is losing its sense of community and basic interpersonal trust, workplace health checks — conducted with compassion and with real interest in people’s lives and wellbeing — might, in time, become part of our road to recovery.

Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.

To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family. 

This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.

So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.

And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives. 

Now, the existence of a political gender gap is nothing new — but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times bigger than in 2000. Survey data has found that from 1999 to 2013, about three in ten women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal but rose to 40% in 2023. And crucially, Gallup interprets these changes as “stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts”, particularly in elite colleges. 

More from this author

Why London is beating America's cities

By Joel Kotkin

In sharp contrast, an increasing proportion of men, particularly in the working class, are embracing Right-wing causes. Just like their American counterparts, who are increasingly supportive of Donald Trump, European men under 30, are also shifting to the Right. Meanwhile, in Korea, the Right-wing shift among young males was sufficient enough to put a Right-wing “anti-feminist” into the Presidency. 

Likewise, a post-sexual society in the West will not be a pretty picture. For one thing, the breakdown of sex relations undermines the traditional focus on long-term wealth creation within families. Married people, for example, aided by the mingling of spousal resources, account for 77% of all US homeowners. But when society no longer places the same value on such a traditional focus, calls for government assistance can be irresistible.

Rather than seek to bolster the prospects for young families, there are growing calls to expand such things as rent subsidies or direct transfers. At a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, speaking to over 10,000 supporters, Kamala Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases”. This latest statement mirrors her earlier position before Biden withdrawal where Harris shared on X her belief that “Every American deserves affordable housing”. This refers to the Biden administration’s call to cap rent increases by 5% on landlords with 50 or more rental units or risk losing federal tax breaks. She has also called for Medicare for all, essentially replacing employer-based healthcare , until she decided to backtrack from this unpopular stance.

For many, the idea of family solidarity has all but disappeared as a primary source of support. Rather than being progressive, as is often suggested, the sexual war and the decline of familialism seem likely to accelerate societal decline, mirroring the plague-cursed Medieval period when as much as 15% of the population was estimated to have been permanently celibate and when classical values about the primacy of family tended to fade before theological concerns. As Richard Reeves has noted: “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.” 

Suggested reading

Why aren't women having more babies?

By Mary Harrington

The future, it seems, will belong to those largely disconnected individuals who somehow find a way to negotiate what the US Surgeon General has described as an epidemic of loneliness. Already by 2020, 28% of all occupied homes in the US were one-person households, up from just 8% in 1940. Three years later, Pew found that 10% of Americans had no close friends. 

But this is not just an American tragedy. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China are evolving similarly. In Japan, the number of people living alone is expected to reach 40% of the whole population by 2040. Already, there are estimated to be 4,000 “lonely deaths” in Japan every week. 

Changes in sexual relations are of course inevitable and, in some ways, liberating for individuals. But on a mass basis, the sexual war represents a critical civilisational challenge. As one seminal study from Singapore has noted, family buttresses not just society but serves as “the primary source of emotional, economic and financial support” for individuals and as the best way to “protect society from the negative fallouts” of a competitive economy. Without a strong family structure, individuals can be cast adrift, looking to material pleasures, government aid and virtual worlds for comfort.

If not addressed, the decline in sexual relations suggests a very dystopian future, in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed. Governments — whether in America, France, Japan or Scandinavia — have not found an effective way to slow this process. That may be because this is more a matter of spirit, than just incentives. What is needed is nothing less than a rediscovery of romantic love and embracing the value of nurturing offspring. Freud may have exposed the seamy side of family life, but he still understands that it stands at the centre of any successful human civilisation.  

Why have Japan’s postwar prime ministers found it so hard to cling to power? One of the biggest reasons is Japan’s failure, since the end of the American Occupation (1945–52), to become a true multi-party democracy. The early years of the Occupation helped restore democracy to Japan after years of militarism. New parties formed and women voted for the first time. But a strong showing by Japan’s socialists and communists worried those in the United States who hoped to turn Japan into a profitable trading partner and dependable Cold War ally. Left-wing success concerned Japanese businesses, too, many of which leant their support to new conservative parties such as the Nihon Jiyūtō (Japan Liberal Party) and to the merger of conservatives in 1955 that created today’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

More from this author

The race to choose the next Dalai Lama

By Christopher Harding

But America’s interest in supporting anti-communist forces around the world did more than provide a boost for big business in Japan. It ended up creating space in postwar Japanese politics for wartime figures who might otherwise have lived out their days in quiet retirement (or, in some cases, prison). Government bureaucrats managed to hang on to their jobs because the Occupation authorities regarded them as essential to running postwar Japan: senior figures were required only to take a fitness for office test — dubbed the “Paradise Exam” because unlimited time was provided for its completion, alongside tea and cigarettes. Even the notorious ultranationalist and gangster Kodama Yoshio earned himself a second act. He had worked as a fixer in China and Manchuria during the war, building up a multi-million-dollar fortune by running a network that provided intelligence and raw materials like radium and nickel for clients including the Imperial Japanese Navy. Imprisoned in 1946, he was released two years later when America’s intelligence agencies realised how valuable his skills and contacts might be.

Kodama was a man who liked to plan ahead. Before his arrest, he handed over some of his wealth in diamonds and platinum to a friend in the Japan Liberal Party, thereby purchasing himself a place in postwar conservatism. Then, while in jail, he spent time with Kishi Nobusuke, the highest-ranking bureaucrat in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and Tanaka Kakuei, an up-and-coming politician who had been caught taking bribes. Both men were future prime ministers of Japan and both would go on to benefit from Kodama’s underworld connections. Once out of prison, Kodama played a role behind the scenes, together with the CIA, in launching the LDP. Kishi joined the party after his own American backers helped to secure his release from prison. He became prime minister in 1957 and welcomed Tanaka into his first Cabinet post that same year. The price of admittance was a backpack stuffed with three-million yen in cash. Three years later, when Kishi found himself facing popular unrest over the renewal of Japan’s controversial security treaty with the United States, Kodama rustled up some violent men to attack and intimidate the crowds of protestors.

The upside of the LDP’s connections with big business, civil servants and allies in the United States was that the party was able to co-ordinate a remarkable return to prosperity for Japan across the Sixties and Seventies. But this in itself caused problems. The LDP came to dominate Japanese politics so thoroughly — it has rarely been out of power from 1955 to the present day — that the most important policy debates tended to take place not between rival political parties with strong grassroots support but between factions within the LDP whose influence was built on pork-barrel politics. Tanaka Kakuei became perhaps the greatest player of this game. There is no denying his achievements in office, not least a bridge-building visit to Mao Zedong in Beijing; the two men shared rustic roots, and bonded over talk of Buddhism, Confucianism and incense. But the Japanese were shocked by revelations that Tanaka was involved in bribe-taking from American aerospace manufacturer Lockheed to persuade All Nippon Airways and Japan’s defence agency to choose its aircraft over those of its rivals. Helping behind the scenes to move cardboard boxes stuffed with Lockheed cash was one Kodama Yoshio.

Tanaka was forced to resign in 1974, but it did not mean the end of his political career. In Japan’s system, the most powerful people often operate from behind the scenes, as Tanaka now did. He continued effectively to run Japan from a lavish mansion in Tokyo, meeting with aspiring new members of his LDP faction and handing out “bullets”: parcels of tightly-packed banknotes worth 100 million yen each, wrapped discreetly in traditional Japanese cloth. His protege Kanemaru Shin worked in much the same way, until he fell from his senior LDP position in 1992 after being implicated in a bribery scandal involving a delivery company and the Inagawa-kai yakuza group. A raid on Kanemaru’s Tokyo apartment uncovered $50 million in cash, bonds and gold bars, hidden away in wardrobes and desk drawers. Kanemaru — nickname: “The Don” — died before justice could be done, but not before sharing a last word with an astonished and aggrieved Japanese public. “My political philosophy,” he declared, “is to have some appreciation for a person who saves a drowning child in a river, even if that person happens to belong to a crime syndicate.”

Japan’s “lost decades” of economic growth, from the Nineties to now, has eroded the dominance of the LDP and tempered the scale of political corruption. But both remain prominent themes, alongside the failure of opposition parties to mount effective and long-lasting challenges to the LDP. The scandal that has helped to cut Kishida Fumio’s premiership short involves 85 LDP lawmakers who have been accused of channelling profits from the sale of tickets to party gatherings into slush funds, to the tune of more than £3 million. Small change, compared with decades past. But a good many disillusioned Japanese long ago turned to local politics and civic activism via non-profits and the courts to get things done instead. A powerful example of this approach has been the attempt to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples. National politicians are divided on the issue, but campaigners have succeeded in persuading local administrations to offer them official status, along with a number of district courts.

LDP leaders have also struggled, in recent years, to tackle a demographic crisis at home — an ageing and declining population — alongside an uncertainty of purpose abroad. Not everyone in Japan approved of Abe Shinzo’s vision of a more robust Japan, making a “proactive contribution to peace” in its region and internationally. But greater defence spending does seem to make sense in light of China’s rise and doubts over America’s commitment to Japan’s security. The problem is how to pay for it while tax receipts dwindle and the cost of living continues to rise. Added to all this is anger among the Japanese public about politicians’ links to the Unification Church, which came to light after the assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022. Here again, history looms large. Back in the Sixties, Abe’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, cultivated links with the Church’s founder Sun Myung Moon, a strong anti-communist.

It is possible that when the time comes, in September, for the LDP to elect its next leader, Japan may get its first female prime minister. Takaichi Sanae — once the drummer in a heavy metal band and now a hawkish Minister for Economic Security — is one to watch, as is Kamikawa Yōko. Both may struggle, however, to garner the level of behind-the-scenes support that has always been needed to win this contest. If a woman does succeed in taking the top job, then Japanese politics will no doubt enjoy a much-needed boost, both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the holy grail of Japanese politics, a functioning multi-party system reasonably free from the wheeler-dealing of the past, appears for now to be out of reach.

Ever since the formation of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces (SDF) back in July 1954, Japan has argued over its remit and how best to present its role to the public, both at home and abroad. The general approach up until 1990 was neatly expressed by a senior figure in the SDF: “The pheasant would not be shot, but for its cries.” In other words, given worries within Japan and across East Asia that the SDF might somehow be a continuation of the old Imperial Japanese Army, which in the mid-20th century had subverted democracy at home and waged war abroad, the best thing the SDF could do was to keep its head down. That policy, it became clear, would have to change.

The SDF had its roots in a National Police Reserve (NPR), formed in 1950 with the strong encouragement of the American-led Occupation administration. Its official remit was to keep the peace at home while American troops stationed in Japan for that purpose went off to fight in the Korean War. Keen to shore up their Asian ally, the US equipped the NPR and encouraged its enlargement, regarding it not so much as a police force as the nucleus of a future Japanese army. And indeed, it would have been an impressive domestic insurrection whose quelling required the use of the NPR’s bazookas, flame-throwers, tanks and artillery.

The morphing of the National Police Reserve into the Self-Defence Forces — Ground, Maritime and Air — did not alter the official interpretation of the constitution in Japan. While the UN Charter allowed for both individual and collective self-defence, Japan permitted itself only the former. It could not come to the aid of its ally, the United States. Even then, the SDF had to work hard to build up a degree of trust with the Japanese public, taking on roles in civil engineering projects and disaster relief. When, in 1960, Tokyo erupted in violent protest against the renewal of Japan’s unpopular security treaty with the United States, there was a moment when it looked as though the SDF might be called upon to intervene. This would have been disastrous: confirming domestic fears that Japan might be becoming once again the kind of society where the military held the whip-hand.

More from this author

In defence of Weebs

By Christopher Harding

Fortunately, the moment passed and the SDF struggled on, using the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 to help bolster its reputation. The SDF helped out with security, contributed athletes to some of the events — including the winner of a gold medal in weightlifting — and even dazzled the crowds with an aerobatics show, courtesy of its display team “Blue Impulse”. Three years later, the SDF enjoyed what seemed at first to be a great propaganda coup, when the celebrated writer Mishima Yukio enlisted in the Ground Self-Defence Forces. The moment soured in November 1970, when Mishima attempted to instigate an actual coup from inside a GSDF barracks in Tokyo and then took his own life in grizzly, samurai fashion when it failed.

In the wake of the Gulf War, and the reputational damage done to Japan, the Japanese Defence Agency (now the Ministry of Defence) began to do what countries like the United States had been doing for a long time: seek to massage public opinion surrounding their own armed forces with the help of top PR experts. The advertising giant Dentsū was enlisted and the SDF gained its very own mascot: the cute and inoffensive Prince Pickles, whose story was told in a dedicated manga series. Pickles is convinced that his peaceful, idyllic Paprika Kingdom has no need of its defence force. His father, the king, sees things differently. The prince cannot succeed him, says the king, unless he first learns at first-hand the value of maintaining such a force. Cue a series of adventures, involving a nearby ally, the Broccoli Kingdom and an Evil Empire just next-door, in the course of which Pickles learns that there can be no peace without a deterrent.

Prince Pickles and his love-interest, Miss Parsley, were eventually retired as SDF mascots, replaced by a boy and girl named Takuma-kun (from the Japanese word for “resolute”) and Yū-chan (from a word meaning “kind”). Meanwhile, the Self-Defence Forces have tried a range of other tactics to win over the public, from Miss Air Force Contests to music festivals. Then there are the live fire exercises held each year at the GSDF’s training area at the base of Mount Fuji, which used to attract tens of thousands of spectators before becoming a live-stream only event in 2023.

Opinion polls suggest that some combination of PR efforts, SDF contributions to disaster relief in Japan — most notably in the aftermath of the triple disasters of 2011 (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown) — and the tense security situation in East Asia is warming people in Japan to their Self-Defence Forces. The SDF is now trusted more than the police, and about the same as the country’s hospitals. The question is whether and how their remit may change in the future.

More from this author

The case for decolonising philosophy

By Christopher Harding

The political and diplomatic context for the contemporary SDF was set by Shinzō Abe during his second term as prime minister, from 2012 to 2020. A National Security Council was created in order to centralise security policy and a National Security Strategy was developed, whose core aim was for Japan to make a “proactive contribution to peace”. The ban on Japan engaging in collective self-defence was lifted and multilateral relationships in the Asia-Pacific were strengthened, notably via Japan’s membership of the “Quad” alongside the United States, Australia and India. Since 2022, Japan has also been a regular attendee at Nato meetings, where this week the threat from China was once again restated. Meanwhile, efforts have been made both to improve relations with China, with which Japan has very strong economic ties, and to ensure that the US-Japan alliance remained strong enough to withstand the doubts noisily expressed by Donald Trump while on the campaign trail and later as president.

Little has changed under Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, who served for many years as Abe’s foreign minister, except that worries about China, Russia and North Korea have intensified. There have long been debates about whether the Self-Defence Forces ought to develop a means of pre-emptively destroying missile launch facilities abroad rather than relying on ballistic missile defence — giving itself, to use the military lingo, a spear to go alongside the shield. At the same time, heavy investment is being made in space and cyber capabilities, and joint exercises have been carried out in recent years with the British Army, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Marines. The SDF has even opened its first ever overseas base at Djibouti International Airport — dubbed an “activity hub” in deference to those old, lingering fears about what Japan’s Self-Defence Forces might eventually get up to.

One of the greatest challenges for the SDF is the threat of China attempting to take Taiwan by force. The fear in Japan is not just of being drawn into any resulting conflict, but being drawn in only for the United States to prove unable or unwilling to look after Japan’s security should the fighting spiral out of control. Japan’s south-western islands might then be at risk, since it is from here that elements of any American response to an attack on Taiwan might be launched.

Those south-western islands include the tiny sub-tropical paradise of Yonaguni, home to around 1,700 people, and from where it is sometimes possible to get a glimpse of Taiwan’s coastline, just over 100 kilometres away. Residents and visitors already share space with SDF personnel operating radar bases on the island, and there are plans for expansion. Earlier this year the US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, paid the island a visit — the first ever to make the trip.

Residents of Yonaguni are divided on what all this might mean for their island. Some fear that the military build-up here and on nearby Japanese islands will only make tensions worse. Others take a view similar to that of Prince Pickles, back in the Nineties: there can be no peace without a strong deterrent. Security analysts including Matsuda Yasuhiro, at Tokyo University, argue that a Chinese operation against Taiwan might include the taking of Japanese islands for use as forward operating bases. Matsuda believes that China may wait a few more years yet, for its military capabilities to grow and American interest in Taiwan to decline. At that point, Japanese people’s faith in the Self-Defence Forces may face its toughest test yet.

To many on both the Left and the Right, this is an almost inconceivable state of affairs. His popularity seems nearly impossible to justify, and thus people come up with equally fantastical or belittling explanations for his success. To some, Trump appears like some sort of hypnotist, a snake charmer who has simply mesmerised much of the electorate. To others, the “explanation” begins and ends with concluding that Americans have simply gone insane.

But America hasn’t gone insane, nor is Trump — a man who has occasionally been booed at his own rallies, even by his own most loyal supporters — some sort of hypnotist. The appeal of Trump in 2024 is quite different from the Trump that rode down that golden escalator eight years ago and promised to “Make America Great Again”. In fact, you don’t hear that particular slogan chanted very much at all these days. This might seem paradoxical, but it really is not: as the belief in “MAGA” has waned, the power and appeal of this new Trump has only waxed. This is no longer a man who promises to make America great again — and this is precisely the reason why many American voters still feel that they need him.

The growing constitutional crisis now taking place on the border between Texas and Mexico illustrates this dynamic. The governor of the Lone Star State, Greg Abbott, recently did something truly audacious: he mustered the Texas National Guard and ejected federal border patrol agents from a piece of the border. This was a clear breach of both written and unwritten rules in today’s America, but Abbott persisted, claiming the migration crisis was simply too great to ignore. But as the Biden administration offered Texas a 24-hour ultimatum to stand down, with an implied threat of seizing federal control over Texas’ National Guard if he did not, around half of the governors of the US’ 50 states openly pledged their support to Abbott. Trump himself took to social media to urge every loyal governor to send their own national guardsmen to Texas to shore up Abbott’s efforts to plug the hole in the border, federal government be damned.

Some observers have dismissed this all as a form of political theatre, a showy gimmick to shore up votes in the upcoming election. But it is far more serious than that, and it has its roots in unresolved political fault lines that go back nearly 200 years. To introduce those fault lines, it’s useful to look at a somewhat similar example outside of America: Japan’s great 19th-century revolution, where the centuries-long rule of the Shoguns finally ended.

A very quick history lesson is in order here. Towards the latter half of the 15th century, Japan’s Ashikaga Shogunate began falling apart, as various powerful feudal magnates began waging bitter feuds against each other. At the beginning of the 16th century, central power had collapsed, and Japan fractured into many small, mostly independent feudal states. This was the sengoku jidai, which is usually translated here in the West as “the warring states period”. This lasted for more than a century, until a succession of warlords managed to unite most of the country under their rule through a combination of war and diplomacy. By the year 1600, the battle of Sekigahara finally consolidated national hegemony in the hands of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who then went on to found the Tokugawa Shogunate, which lasted all the way to the revolution that finished it off in 1868.

Suggested reading

The American Crack-Up

By David Samuels

What makes this little bit of Japanese history relevant to America today is that the events that took place in Japan in 1868 were, in more than one sense, merely a continuation of old grudges left over from 1600. Not every powerful samurai daiymo (feudal lord) supported Tokugawa’s side at Sekigahara, and the people who picked the wrong side back then (or simply tried to sit on the sidelines) were given a permanent black mark for the next 250 years. They became the tozama daimyo, the outsiders; as they were seen as politically unreliable, they were now permanently barred from holding higher office in the Japanese bureaucracy.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, Japan was no longer stable. It now suffered from a massive social crisis, as the Samurai only became poorer and the commoners became richer. It had been forcibly opened up to Western trade, and this led to massive inflation and economic instability. It also suffered from an invasion of foreigners, who by dint of their superior military technology, the Japanese could not stop. The issue of foreigners walking around Japan like they owned the place was particularly galling, and it was this issue that served up the spark for the Meiji revolution. But as the revolution started, the unsettled grudges from all the way back in 1600 came roaring back to life; the most dogged opponents of the Tokugawa shogunate turned out to be families such as the Mori, the Date, the Shimazu and the Uesugi: in short, the losers from 1600. A quarter of a millennium had passed since Sekigahara, but they had not forgotten those old slights.

When America fought its own civil war between the northern states and the southern confederacy, the issue at the heart of the dispute was slavery as an economic model, yes, but also something much more basic than that. The southern states genuinely believed that the United States had been formed in such a way that the federal government was meant to be a servant to the states, and not the other way around. They weren’t interested in spreading slavery to the north; they wanted to leave, indeed they asserted they had the right to leave the union if they wanted to.

This basic disagreement on the nature of the United States, the true role of the federal government and the prerogatives of the states has never truly been settled. As in Japan, overwhelming political might could suppress dissent effectively, but it could never make the dissenters truly renounce their point of view.

Underscoring this, too, were the major political transformations undergone by America since its inception. It wasn’t really supposed to be an empire, with hundreds of bases all over the globe. It wasn’t meant to invade the world and invite the world, or to play world police and to overthrow governments left and right. This is the extremely open secret at the heart of the American empire: it wasn’t actually meant to exist. But that empire does exist today, and for a very long time, dissent on the nature of what America should be has been both politically and militarily pointless. But that situation is now clearly changing, and as Texas sends its guardsmen to plug the hole in the American border, they are at the same time slowly unleashing those old grudges that America could only bury but never resolve.

When Abbott was presented with the demand to stand down, he published an open letter justifying his own actions. That letter was carefully written, and it was written specifically to resurrect old conflicts. Citing James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, he accused Biden’s government of illegally abandoning its duty to protect the states. Biden, sitting idly by as America faced an unprecedented migration crisis, was in fact refusing to defend Texas from an invasion. With the federal government having failed in this most basic task, the supreme legal right to self-defence reverted back to Texas, and thus Abbott was doing what the constitution allowed him to do — even demanded that he do — which was to protect Texas.

To invoke the constitution to justify your actions isn’t exactly a novel thing in America. But if one reads Abbott’s letter, it’s clear that the constitution he relies on is not the “modern” constitution. It is not the same document that is now being used to justify transgender rights, diversity and inclusion initiatives, or federal school lunch programmes. It is the constitution of a much older America; America from before the empire, before the civil war.

Suggested reading

Why American cities are squalid

By Chris Arnade

Just like Japan could sweep its more intractable problems under the rug for 200 years, only to have all those problems come out with a vengeance once its economy crashed and its military position weakened, so has America stuffed most of its own serious contradictions into the closet. But that only works as long as things are stable, and America today is seeing its empire crack and split apart. The federal debt is exploding, inflation is busy ruining people’s living standards, the country’s military dominance is slipping. Americans by and large no longer trust their own government: they think the country is heading in the wrong direction, the economy is terrible, and they increasingly see other Americans as enemies rather than people with whom they simply disagree with.

Even before Abbott invoked the ghosts of Madison and Hamilton to consecrate the Texas guardsmen’s defiant stand against the federal government at Eagle Pass, the ghosts of the American civil war were clearly already making their way back into popular consciousness. Statues depicting figures from the civil war — and even of founding fathers or older presidents — have increasingly become a flashpoint for a real political and cultural struggle. A low-intensity war on the past is now being waged across many states, but the removal or destruction of statues now only has one effect: to harden hearts and solidify the battle lines being drawn in the sand.

Consider how, in late 2023, a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee was taken from its monument in Charlottesville, decapitated, and then melted down into ore, from which new art pieces were supposed to be created. The point here was to destroy the past and to usher in a new, better future. What happened afterwards is telling: pictures of Lee’s molten, red-hot face began circulating on the internet, and it was immediately appropriated as a symbol of resistance. Far from destroying the ghosts of the civil war, the statue’s desecration only roused them further from their long slumber — it only further sharpened the growing divide in America between an “us” and a “them”.

It is here that we must return to the meaning of Trump, and why so many people feel that he is still needed, even in 2024. If one looks past the fairly dishonest slander by his many critics, it’s pretty obvious that Trump’s basic message in 2016 was one of hope. America was broken, the forever wars were based on a lie, the dollar didn’t buy as much as it once did. Sure: all of that was true, and Trump proclaimed that he was the only one who dared to say this openly. But he was also the only one, according to himself, who could fix these things. America used to be great; vote for Trump, and it would be made great again.

That hope is mostly gone now, and it is not the focal point of Trump’s campaign. There isn’t much point in making “America” great again in 2024, because by now it is becoming increasingly clear that there is no such thing as a singular “America” that is capable of being made great. There are in fact now different Americas, completely separate and irreconcilable ideas of what the basic political dispensation should be. This was of course also true back during the period when America fought its bloody civil war. Back then, one particular America silenced all the competition, for the simple reason that it was victorious on the battlefield. But now the American empire is fraying, and more and more people sense that it can’t be revived. In other words, suddenly, the old rules no longer have to apply: those old grudges that were hidden and papered over by a century of military and economic dominance are now rapidly becoming relevant again.

Suggested reading

Ron DeSantis and the failure of pseudo-Trumpism

By Michael Lind

The result is that it is now a very open question whether the federal government can succeed in a tug of war with a state such as Texas. Many people are calling for Biden to federalise the Texas National Guard and order them to stand down, as happened during the struggle over segregation half a century ago. But with 25 other governors pledging support — some even pledging to send their own national guard detachments as reinforcements — the Biden administration can’t guarantee victory.

But even if this particular showdown over a piece of Texan real estate ends inconclusively (as it is quite likely to do), the problem will not really been solved. Once states begin to openly defy the federal government, reasserting old forgotten political rights from centuries ago, it’s almost impossible to pretend it didn’t happen. If Biden wins re-election, these sorts of open acts of defiance will become more, not less common. If Trump wins, democrats are likely to become even more fervent champions of states’ rights than the republicans themselves. Either way, obstructionism and paralysis are likely to rule the day — both in the leadup to the 2024 election, and for very long afterwards.

Why then, does Trump keep winning? What is the “secret sauce” that makes people want to rely on him, even though his flaws and failures are extremely well-known at this point? It’s not because he promises to make the current America great again, not really. Trump isn’t going to reinforce all those hundreds of military bases, solve the recruitment crisis, and make sure the next couple of forever wars are ran competently this time. The empire probably can’t be saved at this point; almost everyone now senses that some sort of massive break is coming. And if the empire does break, if the “America” that shunted all competitors aside just like Tokugawa Ieyasu sidelined all those other samurai clans after Sekigahara, what follows will be a war for the future: a war between all those different Americas.

The Trump of 2024 is radically different from the Trump of 2016. Then, people hoped he could fix what was clearly in the process of breaking apart. Now, people instead turn to him for a very different reason: because they think that in the days to come, when America begins the struggle against itself, Trump will hopefully be the one guy actually fighting for their America.

As far as hopes go, the hope now being invested into Donald Trump’s third run at the presidency isn’t particularly optimistic. But is it crazy or irrational? Hardly.

Saito’s argument is pretty straightforward: capitalism is destroying the planet, and the only way to pull civilisation back from the brink of extinction is for “the entire world, without exception, to become a part of a sustainable, just society”. In other words, to embrace degrowth communism — a radical reorganisation of society based on the elimination of mass production and consumption, the prioritisation of use-value (social utility) over commodity value, and the total decarbonisation of the economy.

According to Saito — and this is what puts him at odds with most Marxists — Marx himself, towards the end of his life, embraced this kind of back-to-Earth communism, rejecting his earlier “productivist” iterations of communism. Indeed, Saito goes to great lengths in the book to rehabilitate Marx’s ideas in the light of contemporary progressive sensibilities, offering what some would describe as a “woke” interpretation of the German philosopher.

Several pages, for example, are dedicated to absolving Marx from the accusation of Eurocentrism — the idea, undeniably present in Marx’s most famous works, that every nation was required to follow the path of capitalistic industrialisation laid out by Western Europe, because this would eventually prepare the ground for revolution. “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future,” Marx writes in Capital.

According to Saito, Marx, in his later life, made a clean break with this view, acknowledging that the archaic, steady-state communal societies of the non-Western and pre-capitalist world actually represented a powerful alternative to capitalism — one that contained the seeds of revolution, and held important lessons even for the industrialised countries of the West.

This may very well be true. Yet, for all his criticism of Marx’s early Eurocentrism, Saito seems oblivious to his own Eurocentrism — or perhaps I should say Western-centrism. Even though Saito claims to speak “on behalf of the Global South and future generations”, and insists that the problems we face are global in nature, the truth is that Saito’s concerns reflect a very particular worldview: that of relatively affluent Westerners, especially young millennials and members of Generation Z.

Saito’s entire worldview, after all, is informed by a deep concern with the climate crisis and its allegedly existential threat to humanity. Throughout the book, he often repeats the quasi-millenarist notion that “human civilisation is facing a threat to its very existence” as a result of climate change. But this apocalyptic, doom-laden approach to the climate issue, which is at odds with climate science itself, is a specifically Western phenomenon.

Suggested reading

Green capitalism is a con

By Kohei Saito

This is understandable: post-material concerns such as ecology tend to take hold in places where basic material concerns have already been satisfied — that is, in affluent countries, first and foremost Western ones. It is no coincidence that Saito comes from Japan, which enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. But for most people on the planet, especially those living in poorer countries, climate change systematically ranks among the lowest policy priorities — well below more pressing material concerns such as hunger and poverty, access to water and sanitation, and education.

To the billions of people who still live in extreme poverty, and the millions who don’t even have access to electricity, Saito’s vision of degrowth communism, and his plea to scale back production and consumption, is unlikely to be very appealing. In fact, Saito’s insistence that countries in the Global South should refrain from pursuing growth — even “green growth” — might very well be seen as a form of Western eco-imperialism. Or, indeed, Eurocentrism: isn’t Saito implying that every country in the world should simply conform to the worldview of Western middle-class environmentalists?

In this sense, degrowth communism suffers from the same drawback of old-school communism: it’s an intrinsically universalist worldview, one that purports to offer a one-size-fits-all solution for all human societies, regardless of local cultural and civilisational specificities. This globalist outlook is typical of post-Nineties leftism, which Saito harks back to in several respects. This is also evident in his rejection of the nation-state, viewed as a reactionary, quasi-fascist construct, rather than the framework through which virtually all the major social, economic and political advancements of the past centuries were achieved.

It’s a view that is completely at odds with global realities. Simply put, the billion-plus people who still live in poverty in countries such as India, not to mention those in Africa, legitimately aspire to the comforts of industrialisation: round-the-clock electricity, modern housing, heating and cooling technologies, and healthcare. This will inevitably drive up their energy consumption. Western environmentalists such as Saito continue to entertain the notion that the future energy needs of developing countries can be met entirely by renewables, mainly wind and solar, but this is a fantasy.

Suggested reading

How Bolshevism built modern Britain

By Pratinav Anil

Many of the world’s poorest nations have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years, ideally in combination with nuclear energy, if they want to raise living standards — and indeed are taking steps in that direction, despite demands from rich-world advocates and policymakers for developing countries to abstain from fossil-based resources. This will drive up their emissions, but it will also pull millions of people out of poverty. Insofar as trade-offs go, this should be a no-brainer. But not for Western eco-warriors such as Saito.

Moreover, development and growth in the Global South should be welcomed for reasons other than just poverty reduction; it’s also about shifting the balance of power. For all of Saito’s criticism of the Imperial Mode of Living — the Global North’s reliance on the plunder of the people and resources in the Global South — he conveniently disregards the fact that the only way to for poorer countries to break free from the grip of Western domination is to boost their relative economic strength.

Indeed, Saito completely ignores the biggest story of our time: the shifting of the world’s geopolitical balance of power from the West to the Brics bloc, which was made possible because a country, China, managed to develop its own productive forces, and become a global powerhouse, at breakneck speed. This required the burning of huge amounts of fossil fuels — but has contributed to weakening the West’s stranglehold on the world to a degree that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. You would expect a critic of Western imperialism such as Saito to welcome this global shift; it isn’t even touched upon in the book.

Instead, Slow Down often reads like it was written in the late Nineties or early-2000s, at the height of the unipolar era. The Global South is described as a powerless victim of Western imperialism. But this is itself a Eurocentric view, one that ignores the huge challenges being mounted around the world against the Western international order — in Ukraine, the Red Sea, Francophone Africa and elsewhere. This includes breaking out of the structural underdevelopment imposed on developing nations by the West.

The fact that Saito completely ignores this trend betrays his Western middle-class biases: for eco-leftists like him, the fight against climate change will always trump the fight against imperialism. They would rather have the masses of the Global South languish in a state of underdevelopment rather than see them develop their productive forces — which inevitably entails the burning of fossil fuels. As it turns out, developing countries have no intention of pandering to Western middle-class concerns.

But while Saito’s message of degrowth has little to offer to the countries of the Global South, it would be a mistake to disregard it entirely. After all, in Western countries, it clearly resonates, and it’s important to understand why. His call for degrowth communism, like other contemporary critiques of capitalism, taps into a growing disillusionment with the Western socioeconomic model. Saito states the obvious when he says that our current system is no longer working for most people: notwithstanding the fact that we live in affluent societies, many of us are overworked, underpaid and lead ever-more precarious lives. Economic inequality continues to rise.

Suggested reading

Marx's vision of inequality

By Branko Milanovic

But perhaps even more dramatically, we live increasingly atomised, purposeless lives: there’s no higher meaning binding us together as a society. French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term anomie to describe a society defined by a breakdown in social norms and moral values. Aside from the diminishing returns of abiding by society’s rules — finding a job, creating a family — many young people wonder what the point of it all is. No wonder they are attracted by radical ideas such as degrowth communism, which promise less stuff but richer, fuller, deeper, more meaningful lives.

As Saito writes, under degrowth communism “there will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read. We can host those close to us in our homes and eat together with friends and family.” It’s easy to see the appeal of this vision. Not only does it offer the prospect of a better life; perhaps even more importantly, it offers something to fight for. It offers meaning. And the climate issue only strengthens the project’s secular-theological grounding: it’s not just about transforming society — but about “saving the world”.

In this sense, ideas such as degrowth communism and climate doomerism are, ultimately, the flipside of the anomic societies created by late-stage capitalism. Perhaps Marx was right: capitalism really does end up sowing the seeds of its own demise — not because of ever-rising levels of productivity, but because of ever-decreasing levels of meaning.

The Eighties was an era of trade frictions between Japan and the West, of bellicose political rhetoric and literal Japan-bashing: American lawmakers gleefully took sledgehammers to Japanese electronics on the steps of Congress. But my friends and I were not deterred, enchanted as we were by animated fantasies so strikingly different from anything in our own culture. And even then, we could tell that there was something different about a certain anime auteur. His name was Hayao Miyazaki.

It is the rare creator who possesses the knack of appealing simultaneously to casual moviegoers, die-hard genre fans and tastemakers alike. Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, set records when it was released in Japan this year; this weekend, it made history as the first original anime movie to reach number 1 in both American and Canadian cinemas. Influential international devotees include Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro, who took David Cronenberg to a screening of Miyazaki’s beloved ode to childhood, My Neighbor Totoro. And last year, a stage adaptation of Totoro premiered at the Barbican to so much acclaim that it has been revived already.

Miyazaki never set out to appeal to the outside world, let alone change it; he claims to be “baffled” by the popularity of his work abroad. Nevertheless, his films have captivated generations of foreign audiences — and transformed our view of Japan. The nation made itself rich by selling the world things, ranging from appliances to automobiles. But Japan made itself popular by selling us fantasies: anime, manga, Nintendo. Where my grandfather’s generation saw an aggressive foreign power, mine saw a factory of dreams.

Today, Japan is associated with cleanliness and order, but when anime was born, in the decades after the Second World War, the scars of conflict were everywhere and civil unrest commonplace. In 1960, millions of Japanese rallied to protest the Anpo, a military treaty with the United States that war-weary citizens fiercely opposed, for fear — justified, as it turned out — that it would drag their nation into America’s conflicts. The ruling party eventually railroaded it through parliament by forcibly ejecting politicians who dissented: a blatant rejection of democracy, which triggered demonstrations that would escalate into open violence over the course of the decade.

Suggested reading

The colonial hypocrisy of Japan

By Eri Hotta

It was in this era that Miyazaki joined the ranks of Toei, then Japan’s biggest animation company, as a fresh university graduate. His career was minted mere months after anime itself: on the New Year’s Day that year, 1963, Japan’s first domestically produced, full-length animated television series, Mighty Atom, had debuted. Its creator, Osamu Tezuka, proudly described his work as anime, a contraction intended to distinguish it from imported animeshon, as imported foreign cartoons were known. Mighty Atom reminds us that protest runs in anime’s blood: the very first episode ends with a mass demonstration, as robots take to the streets to demand equality.

Across Japan, workers struggled against managers. Toei was no different. Miyazaki’s early years there were marked by low wages and unpaid overtime; he soon banded together with fellow animators in a labour union to protest. The vice president of the union, Isao Takahata, took a shine to the young Miyazaki, and recruited him to work on a new animated feature he was directing. Takahata aimed to jettison Toei’s established corporate structure in favour of making art on more democratic, even communal terms. The resulting film was a commercial failure; the partnership was a success.

Over the course of the Seventies, Miyazaki and Takahata, worked on a series of children’s shows. But manga and anime were evolving rapidly from kid’s stuff into something more, firing up a generation of young adults who were passionate about righting the wrongs of the world. Western authorities strictly regulated illustrated entertainment with measures such as “comics codes” and “comics campaign councils”. In Japan, artists were left to their own devices, allowing manga to emerge as a platform for delivering biting socio-political commentary, right under the noses of the establishment.

Japanese student demonstrators carried copies of manga Weekly Shōnen Magazine into their protests against the Vietnam War. And when members of the Japanese Red Army hijacked a passenger jet in 1970, they sent a missive claiming responsibility to the press that ended with the words “Never forget: we are Tomorrow’s Joe” — the name of a popular manga character who fights his way out of crushing poverty through boxing.

Suggested reading

The art world's lost sense of humour

By Kat Rosenfield

Miyazaki always claimed to eschew politics in favour of symbolism. “I have no interest whatsoever today in producing animation as part of an ‘art’ movement, in trying to bring attention to social issues, or in sending out messages,” he wrote in a 1985 essay for Japanese readers. “I want to create works that children can enjoy.” But the bite of his convictions, which bubble up in his works in quiet ways, is precisely what gives his films such power. It is impossible to ignore its ever-present anti-authoritarian bent.

It was an original feature film called Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind that served as Miyazaki’s breakthrough. Arriving in Japanese cinemas in 1984, it told the story of a young woman in a dystopian future, where Earth is now a toxic jungle, filled with poisonous air, towering fungi, and enormous insects. Fiefdoms of human survivors feud endlessly over what little habitable land remains. Miyazaki was not globally famous at this point, but Nausicaä was released abroad, albeit after being disastrously re-edited and censored.

Foreign anime fans sought out Nausicaä in its uncut, untranslated form. The coveted bootlegged VHS arrived in my parent’s basement towards the end of the Eighties, and even on a fuzzy cathode-ray tube screen, even without subtitles, the film proved revelatory. It is classic Miyazaki: a young female protagonist navigates a strange world; venal adult authority figures clash with young dreamers; the story gently guides the viewer to question class and power, war and peace. Here is a fundamentally countercultural Japanese worldview, expertly cloaked in artistic allegory. Watching this wild drama made it impossible for me or my friends to view Japan as an enemy or a rival. How could it be, when its fantasies spoke to us so deeply?

After Nausicaä, Miyazaki’s rise was meteoric, and inextricably linked to Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded in 1985. While rivals pursued lucrative corporate sponsorship, Studio Ghibli was self-funded, which gave it total creative control. Now, the studio’s reputation has reached such heights that it recently made the unthinkable decision not to promote The Boy and the Heron at all. Despite reportedly being one of the most expensive Japanese films ever made, Ghibli released no trailers, no print ads, no interviews, no press screenings, nothing at all save one cryptic poster. It had the biggest opening weekend in Studio Ghibli history.

Suggested reading

The twilight of the Disney princess

By Mary Harrington

But the flip side of total creative control was that neither Takahata nor Miyazaki could cede enough of it to anoint a successor. Takahata passed away in 2018, and Miyazaki, now 82, has announced and renounced his own retirement numerous times. Ghibli continues to flourish as a business, but its future remains uncertain: the closure of the production division was announced in 2014, only for it to be reopened long enough for Miyazaki to make The Boy and the Heron. That film’s stunning success has led to rumblings of another production in the works, but nothing concrete has been announced. Earlier this year, the studio sold a controlling stake to the Japanese television network NTV, ending nearly four decades of independence.

Ghibli’s concerns about its future mirror those of Japanese society as a whole. In the half-century since Miyazaki’s 1963 debut, Japan emerged as an economic superpower, before becoming a case study in stagnation. It is one of the oldest societies on the planet, Japan’s young people seem to see the world quite differently from Miyazaki’s; they are a minority, after all. They express less hope and less faith in their ability to affect meaningful political change, if multiple surveys are any indication.

Stagnation seems to have brought the dreams of anime down to Earth, too. New features focus less on changing the world than simply finding ways to survive in it — or escaping it altogether, as in the hugely popular genre of isekai, literally “other worlds”, where protagonists flummoxed by reality find meaning for themselves in fantasy realms. A demand for adventure has given way to a hunger for comfort and familiarity. Your Name became a hit in 2016 by cut-and-pasting a hodgepodge of anime clichés. It was set not in a vividly rendered imaginary world but a Tokyo so meticulously accurate that fans can use its scenes as a literal tourist map. Miyazaki, perhaps unsurprisingly, is notoriously ambivalent about the direction anime has taken in recent years, concerned that it has become narcissistic.

“I think that animated movies can relax, cheer and refresh,” he said in a 1983 interview. “And in so doing, they can help us escape from ourselves.” But through his work, Miyazaki has proven that anime is more than a form of entertainment; it can bridge cultures, and help young people understand and come to terms with the world in which they find themselves. We need it as much as we ever have — even though, or perhaps especially because, it feels harder to dream these days.

Japanophiles had it tough back then. Tell someone you’re a Francophile, and they’d assume you liked the food, the literature, or had a favourite holiday spot. An Anglophile might stand in cultured awe of Shakespeare, or indulge a misty-eyed reverence for Churchill. By contrast, the “phile” in Japanophile — linked with an assumed attraction to cutesy, submissive femininity within Japanese pop culture — suggested something unhealthy, even unnerving; the need, possibly, to be on a register of some sort.

Since then, however, Western appreciation for Japan has blossomed. Netflix has ramped-up its Japanese offerings, while ever more shelf-space in bookshops and supermarkets is given over to the fantasy worlds of My Hero Academia and One Piece, slightly disappointing sushi, and ingredients marketed with faux-Japanese fonts and logos. This Christmas, white-bearded octogenarian Hayao Miyazaki will gift us his final film on Boxing Day: The Boy and the Heron. It caps a career that has helped to define “Japan” in the West: from ancient, spirit-filled forests to presentations of ordinary urban life in which the transcendent seems always about to break through.

Today, Japan seems more firmly entrenched than ever as a cultural superpower: up there with Italy, France and the United States. And yet something of that old suspicion remains. Express too strong an interest in Japanese culture — and in anime and manga especially — and you risk the accusation of being a “weeb”. The origins of the term lie with the 4chan online imageboard in the early 2000s, where Japan-obsessed white Westerners were derided as “wapanese” — a portmanteau of “wannabe Japanese” or “white Japanese”. Things got heated, and 4chan moderators replaced “wapanese” with the word “weeaboo”, from which “weeb” derives.

More from this author

How to rewild Christianity

By Christopher Harding

Twenty years on, however, there are signs online that the word “weeb” is at last being claimed, with gentle irony, by lovers of Japan across the board. And it’s about time. Extreme anime fans who adopt the clothes and mannerisms of their favourite characters, or give themselves made-up Japanese names, are undoubtedly a bit weird. But high-culture purists can be equally clichéd in their devotion to Japanese art, architecture, martial arts or the good old tea ceremony. And they have more in common with the lowly weebs than they’d care to admit: all are heirs to a history of Western fantasy and longing.

You have to go back nearly 500 years to meet the first weebs. Jesuit missionaries struggled to be taken seriously as bringers of profound metaphysical revelations when Japanese feudal lords saw that they kept livestock in their homes, turned up for meetings in shabby religious attire, lacked various social graces, and rarely seemed to wash. It was under the tutelage of such critics that the Jesuits learned to use chopsticks, take small bites, speak Japanese, appreciate (and indeed perform) the tea ceremony, and dress in a Japanese variant on the traditional Jesuit cassock and cloak.

The Portuguese missionary Luis Fróis was among the greatest of this generation, befriending the legendary warlord Oda Nobunaga and pioneering some of the first cultural comparisons with the West. “In Europe,” he wrote in 1585, “baring even one’s foot before a fire to get warm would be considered strange; in Japan, anyone standing before the fire to get warm unabashedly bares his entire backside…”

In the early 1600s, the Tokugawa shoguns banned all Europeans save the Dutch from trading in Japan in a feat of early-modern border control which Westerners rather conceitedly interpreted as “seclusion” — Japan in fact continued to trade with its nearer neighbours. Being cut off added enormously to the romance of the place, and the first generation to step across a newly reopened Japanese threshold in the 1850s was determined to make the most of it.

Suggested reading

How the Moonies took over Japan

By Philip Patrick

Barriers of language and culture enhanced Japan’s exotic appeal. Visiting in the 1870s, the travel writer Isabella Bird commended Japan to her readers as offering “as much novelty perhaps as an excursion to another planet”. The British designer Christopher Dresser was meanwhile perplexed to find the otherwise “genial” and “loving” Japanese indulging the “barbaric cruelty” of slicing a live fish into quivering, edible chunks — a form of cuisine known as ikizukuri. And Irish-Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first people to be called a “Japanophile”, described his adopted home of Japan as “a world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings… the realisation, for imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a World of Elves”.

Yet there was a strong sense, too, that the West was polluting Japanese culture. When the British ornithologist and plant collector Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram first visited Japan in the early 1900s, the country appeared Eden-like in its lack of “smoke-begrimed cities” and the cynicism they bred. A few years later, he declared it to be suffering a “violent aesthetic indigestion”, born of taking in too much, too quickly. Plenty of visitors who followed in his footsteps ended up equally disappointed, travelling thousands of miles in search of a pure, pastoral romance long-since lost back home, only to find a far-Eastern Britain under construction.

The desire to catch up with the West, industrially and militarily, seemed to have resulted in purpose crowding out meaning. Children passed through schools having factory or office skills bolted on. Music lessons were motivational: brass bands and singing in unison — the more whimsical Japanese flute and shamisen were deemed shamefully uncivilised. Clocks were everywhere. The Emperor’s personal tutor spoke for a great many Japanese conservatives when he worried about adopting too much from “foreign civilisations [whose] only values are fact-gathering and technique”.

Indeed, Westerners whose love of Japan was premised on its vaunted depth and purity were not short of allies among the Japanese. They included Okakura Kakuzō, author — in English, for such was his target audience — of The Ideals of the East (1903). He claimed that modern Japan was uniquely placed to steward the “Asiatic soul” and replenish its desiccated Western counterpart. Similar ideas were put forward by Japanese advocates of Zen, and Buddhism more broadly. Some even went on lecture tours of America and Europe, marrying critiques of modern Western life with classes on how to meditate.

This sort of thing annoyed some Japanese commentators. While they were pleased to see their country garnering respect abroad, they worried that a reputation for kindliness and passivity risked holding it back. The Indian poet and friend of Okakura, Rabindranath Tagore, visited Japan on a speaking tour during the First World War and lauded a “culture that enjoins man to look for his true wealth and power in his inner soul”. One Japanese critic in the audience pointed out that Japan had lately done rather well out of wealth of the economic sort, and power of the kind that went “bang” — just ask the Russians, defeated by Japan’s modern armed forces in 1905. Another dismissed Tagore’s message as “the song of a ruined country”.

Suggested reading

The colonial hypocrisy of Japan

By Eri Hotta

On that same tour, Tagore warned his hosts about succumbing to the temptations of European-style nationalism. Heading down that very path in the mid-20th century, Japan suddenly found itself short on Western admirers. When eventually they returned, it was for much the same reasons: Japan as a place of stillness, spaciousness and quiet. Dignified longing was offered up in the films of Yasujiro Ōzu (Tokyo Story, 1953) and the novels of Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel Prize laureate for literature. And Japanese cultural diplomacy steered artfully clear of the country’s recent history, leaning heavily instead on peaceful, timeless art-forms: ikebana (flower-arranging), the tea ceremony, calligraphy, sushi.

Japan’s radical art of the Sixties and Seventies — from painting to performance — struggled to find a mass audience in the West, perhaps because it was too familiar in its forms and political concerns. Instead, manga and anime became the first elements of non-traditional Japanese culture to travel westward, pioneered by artists who had lived through the war or its immediate aftermath, who sought to show Japanese children just how compromised and corrupt the adult world could be. Osamu Tezuka (“godfather of manga”) was part of that group, as were Hayao Miyazaki and Yanase Takashi — the latter not well-known in the West, but adored in Japan for his children’s superhero Anpanman. Japan’s centuries-old tradition of visual satire and storytelling — myths, ghosts, jokey takes on everyday life (one of Japan’s oldest surviving cartoons depicts a fart battle) — was reworked to create fantastical characters and worlds, in which childlike innocence was shown capable of winning out over darker forces.

Japan’s political leaders slowly cottoned on to the potential of enhancing Japan’s reputation abroad while providing a counterbalance to American cultural imports. Talk emerged in the early 2000s of “cool Japan”, and politicians began taking awkward photos alongside anime characters like Doraemon. Western critics pointed out the disparity between the fun, vibrant and ultra-modern on-screen fare and Japan’s creaky political situation, under which the economy sputtered and women struggled to be taken seriously in the workforce. Was there not something a little wrong, they wondered, with filling the pockets of Japanese culture industries whose job seemed to be to supply just enough comfort and creativity to keep moral or political despair at bay?

Suggested reading

Are you a fictosexual?

By Katherine Dee

A defence of weebery may be exactly what we need, as it looks like it will be a major ally of Britain for years to come. At its best, anime shows us how people in different parts of Japanese society imagine and understand themselves. Cultural diplomacy may even be easing Japan’s relationships with its East Asian neighbours, balancing out the strong anti-Japanese sentiment in education systems and political discourse. It is perfectly possible to love My Neighbour Totoro and hold unforgiving views of Japanese colonialism and war-making in the 20th century. But surveys suggest that Japanese pop culture, combined with tourism, is encouraging young Chinese and Koreans to think about Japan primarily in terms of quality entertainment (more relatable than American fare, given shared cultural roots), tasty food, politeness, convenience and good shopping. Far more Chinese can name a Japanese pop-culture classic than the other way around. If dishing out Belt and Road money turns out to be a flop, China’s leaders may find themselves desperate for the Chinese equivalent of a weeb debate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once warned, with Western fans of Indian culture in mind, that “every man has a fairy-land just beyond the compass of his horizon”. But to wonder whether life might be better elsewhere is surely to wonder whether life could be better, full-stop. Whatever your views on weebery, that is surely the sort of wondering with which we ought never to lose touch.

It is not entirely for want of international pressure. In the spring of 2019, for instance, a new design for a 10,000-yen note featuring a portrait of Japan’s pioneering industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was announced, provoking a harsh reaction from South Korea — where Shibusawa’s portrait had been briefly used on the currency imposed by Japanese colonial rulers. The nation’s objections were duly reported in Japan, yet little public debate followed. The banknote will be released, as originally planned, in 2024.

This response echoes the better-known controversy over “comfort women”,  a euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Chinese and Korean women forced to become sex slaves to Japan’s imperial army during the Second World War. Japan’s apparent resistance to engaging fully and sincerely with these historic crimes  has inspired much international criticism, including demonstrations outside Japanese embassies in Seoul and Manila.

To understand why Japan is so guarded about its empire, it is necessary to understand how exactly that empire came about. After all, the nation had only narrowly escaped being colonised itself in the mid-19th century, when the industrialised Western powers set their sights on Asian territories. In the 20th, as the first and only non-Western country playing the game of great power politics, Japan tried to adopt the role of the anti-colonial colonialist, predestined to liberate other Asians from Western imperialism and to lead them on the road to progress. Japan’s stated aim was to create “an Asia for Asians”, a slogan it used to justify its own aggressive invasions. China had to be freed from the Western-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek; Malaya and Burma from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French; the Philippines from the Americans. According to this view, Japan’s imperialism was not self-interested — and acted in opposition to Western colonialism.

Race was at the heart of Japan’s Pan-Asianism. Writing in late 1918, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who would later become prime minister, urged Japan to “reject the Anglo-American Peace” to be proposed at Versailles. Shortly after attending the conference, he wrote: “That the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor coloured people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black people.” And his suspicions were arguably vindicated when Japanese delegates tried to have a clause in favour of racial equality included in the League’s charter — and failed.

More from this author

The drawbacks of Japan's cult of peace

By Eri Hotta

After the worldwide depression, as the Great Powers became inward-looking — putting up protectionist trade barriers and, in some cases, introducing laws against Asian immigration — Japan’s rhetoric became focused on economic security. The nation insisted that each of its expansionist steps was part of a grand project — to build a “New East Asia Order” or the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The official goal of Japan’s war with the West was declared, in late 1941, to be the establishment of Asian “stability”. Just as the Japanese were taught to believe in their emperor’s divinity, they were also taught that their nation had a sacred mission in Asia — especially in colonial South-East Asia, where the dissatisfaction in European colonies justified Japan’s involvement, for some. For others, it had the opposite effect: in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew, who was then Singapore’s Prime Minister, identified Japan’s military occupation from early 1942 as a wake-up call. Japanese occupation made his generation of young people “determined that no one — neither the Japanese nor the British — had the right to push and kick us around”.

To this day, the belief that ousting the predatory West from Japan’s backyard was morally legitimate persists. In the Nineties, one best-selling manga by the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, claiming to be a “philosophical comic book”, painted Japanese imperialism in a shamelessly self-glorifying light. The Japanese army, it argued, “bravely fought the white imperialists, who arrogantly regarded coloured peoples as lowly primates”. More recently, the hawkish former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s success was partly down to his effective deployment of neo-nationalist rhetoric, which has remained present since his death.

But whatever the present-day Japanese would like to believe, in practice Japanese occupiers used anti-colonial rhetoric while behaving very much like colonial masters themselves. This led the historian Grant Goodman to observe in 1991 that Japan “out-colonialed” Westerners in terms of brutality and exploitation. In reality, it would be misguided to dismiss Japan’s “Asia for Asians” claim as purely disingenuous, a post facto excuse for its aggressive expansionism. The philosophical underpinnings for it preceded Japan’s empire.

In the late-19th century, Asian intellectuals — often writing in English — sought to reject the colonial view of Asia as an entity that was racially inferior. The Japanese art historian Tenshin Okakura, an associate of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, emerged as one of the most influential Pan-Asianist voices. Despite its comparative material and military weakness, Okakura asserted, Asia was a civilisation par excellence. In the preamble of The Ideals of the East, he wrote:

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal.”

And yet, Japan’s quest to reach the status of the white nations that ruled the world was conducted not in spiritual terms but old-fashioned military ones. With Japan’s victory in the war against Tsarist Russia in 1905, it became the first non-white power to defeat a white one in a modern war. Unsurprisingly, this stoked anti-colonial sentiments beyond the Japanese archipelago. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1939, recalled the excitement he felt as a boy: “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm … Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.”

A string of anti-colonialists started to seek refuge in Japan — including Indo-Chinese nationalists Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, Indian independence fighter Rash Behari Bose, and, most famously, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism. Many of them were morally and financially supported by Japan’s Pan-Asianists. The movie studio tycoon Umeya Shokichi, for example, drew on his fortune to help finance Sun’s nationalist movement, as did Torazo Miyazaki, a philosopher who actively collaborated with the Chinese nationalists by volunteering to be their publicist and supplier of arms, and even a combatant.

Suggested reading

Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

Meanwhile, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Japanese literature, the novelist Masuji Ibuse, worked in Malaya and Singapore, writing editorials for the local newspaper. He emphasised the importance of propagating the Japanese language. In February 1942, he wrote, ironically in English:

“The substitution of Nipponese (Japanese) for English as the lingua franca in Malaya is but the natural recognition of a nation which has stood up for things Asia [sic] and which is now in the process of saving Asians from continuing to be the victims of the British strategy to squeeze the wealth and culture of Asians.”

Ibuse was convinced that learning Japanese would elevate other Asians. To him, and many others, Asia was not only one, as Okakura had proclaimed; rather, “Asia was Japan”.

Despite Japan’s utter defeat in the Second World War, this narcissistic self-image persisted. That the emperor was never held responsible for Japan’s imperialism did much to hinder the development of an honest debate: his throne was spared by General Douglas MacArthur out of fear of Japanese rebellion, which would have stifled efforts to rebuild post-war Japan as a fortress against communism. A lingering reverence for the imperial institution has also made Japanese colonialism something of a sensitive — if not a taboo — subject in post-war Japan. The emperor, moreover, has become a symbol of peace in a nation that now hasn’t seen war for a lifetime.

All this partly explains why the West’s post-colonial reckoning has so far elicited no discernible reaction in Japan. There is always a slight time lag before Japan absorbs any social and intellectual movements coming from the outside world. Advocacy for LGBTQ rights, for instance, took some years for college students to embrace. Yet there is a bigger reason why Japan has not reckoned with its colonial past. Whereas in Britain the ideologies used to justify colonialism, including Social Darwinism, have been thoroughly debunked, the imperial Japanese claim that Asia had to be liberated from the West is, in theory, morally unobjectionable. None of this excuses the atrocities committed by Japan in practice. And while most Japanese today are indifferent to the topic of the empire, it’s still a subject that gets conservatives riled up. They stick to the classic narrative of Asian solidarity, in which Japan stood up to the imperial bullies, instead of emulating them.

It is a story that stars Radhaninod Pal, an Indian judge beloved by the Japanese Right. Sitting on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, he became famous for arguing that all the Japanese defendants, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, should be acquitted. He insisted that Japan’s crimes were hardly unprecedented, that one only had to look at Western imperialism to find equal brutality. He also pointed to America’s nuclear bombings as war crimes, and accused the victorious powers of moral relativism and racial prejudice. Because of such statements, Pal is to this day memorialised in Japan as a brave nationalist who sided with an Asian ally in the face of Western arrogance.

Japan’s pose as the anti-colonial colonialist will persist so long as it continues to think of itself as having fought a selfless, civilisational war for the good of Asia. All the while, an uncomfortable truth will remain ignored: that, in its execution of the Pan-Asianist dream, Japan fell far too short of delivering its grand promises.

But what if a different crisis gets us first? What if the biggest problem we face is that billions of people are getting old at a faster rate than babies are being born? In Italy there are so few children that schools are “vanishing like the melting glaciers”. In Japan, adult nappies have outsold the baby variety for over a decade. Indeed, there is such a superabundance of waste from incontinence products that one town has started burning them for fuel. The problem is global: for countless millennia, forming families was the most intuitive thing imaginable, but no longer.

Of course, not everybody sees this as a problem. The glass-half-full take is that the declining birthrate has finally put our Malthusian terrors to bed. The threat of exponential overpopulation has corrected itself: for instance, China’s population is set to drop from 1.4 billion today to 800 million by 2100. The glass-half-empty view is that there won’t be enough young people to sustain this vastly expanded older population. The advice offered by economists is simple and utilitarian: countries that are depopulating must increase immigration.

But the materialist nature of today’s discussion, where it is being had, obscures the many profound existential questions posed by the impending arrival of a grey planet. In fact, there is only one forum in which these are being addressed: science fiction. Here, a handful of stories have tried to imagine what a world without children would look like.

The most famous of these thought experiments is Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film, Children of Men, based on the PD James novel, in which an ecological catastrophe has rendered the human race infertile, and civilisation stands on the brink of collapse. But while Children of Men is bleak enough, and contains generous helpings of man’s inhumanity to man, it is only set 18 years after the last birth. As a result, there are still plenty of young people about, among them a vigorous 40-ish-year-old Clive Owen, who ultimately discovers a mother and baby. The film ends with their rescue, and choral music, and the sound of children laughing. Crisis averted!

But if Children of Men loses its nerve, ultimately resisting the full ramifications of its premise, the same cannot be said of Greybeard, a novel by the British Grand Master of science fiction, Brian Aldiss. Written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it imagines that a nuclear catastrophe has left all humans and many animal species infertile. Crucially, Aldiss begins his story half a century after the event, when humanity is on the verge of extinction. The youngest people in the novel are Algy Timberlane, aka “Greybeard”, and his wife, Martha, who are both 56. Most of the characters are in their seventies or older.

More from this author

The heroic failure of Cumbernauld

By Daniel Kalder

This enables Aldiss to explore the nature of an aging planet in detail. His first assumption is that a physically frail, and therefore vulnerable, community is a much more fearful one. At the start of his novel, Greybeard and his wife have spent a decade living in the village of Sparcot, which is run by a petty local tyrant. They have accepted his irascible rule in exchange for the promise of security. The residents squabble and complain about toothache while living in fear of invading Scotsmen and, of all creatures, stoats — one of the few species of mammal to have escaped the catastrophe with their reproductive organs intact, meaning they proliferate. The choice of animal is inspired: if Aldiss’s protagonists had feared feral dogs, their weakness would have been less obvious; how much worse that this diminished population cannot control a pest that nobody today gives a second thought. How alarming that Aldiss’s prophecy is starting to come true, on depopulated Japanese islands where cats vastly outnumber pensioners.

Loss of strength is only part of the problem, however. Civilisation is also undone by a collective loss of will. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the survivors hope that the infertility is a transient phase from which they will recover. Then, as the years pass, and it becomes clear that there will be no children to inherit the fruits of their labour, people lose interest in maintaining society beyond the bare necessities required to survive. The economy collapses and the result is a simpler, reduced world, of villages without businesses and new technologies. But this is not the pastoral dream of today’s “degrowth” proponents; it is an impoverished, dilapidated world that has given up on itself, and awaits oblivion.

Darkest of all, however, is Aldiss’s take on how this ageing remnant of humanity would treat children. Ownership and exploitation are the dominant attitudes. Initially, a global effort is made to gather the surviving minors in three “Childsweep” centres, where there are “three psychiatrists to every child”, to help them cope with the trauma of the world they have inherited. But like any scarce resource, the children become the subject of an international dispute, which leads to a catastrophic war. When, decades later, Greybeard arrives in a village which has a handful of mutant children, he finds that they are periodically put on display as a “treat” for the inhabitants of a village. Later still, when he discovers a few healthy youths, the first one he meets is being kept as a sex slave by a con man. Aldiss’ bitterness may be partly explained by the fact that when he wrote the book, he had lost custody of his children following a divorce, but his point is universal: as we saw during the pandemic, when humanity is under pressure, it does not treat its children well.

Of course, Greybeard is extreme by design. I’m not arguing that our leaders should abandon all thoughts of climate change and prepare for a crumbling world overrun by feral stoats in which most adults abuse the dwindling number of children. But the thing about the real world, as opposed to the world inside a novel, is that we can have many intersecting (and insurmountable) problems at the same time. Today’s climate change activists think too much like novelists: they are performing one simple thought experiment, by imagining our world as it is now — the same balance of young and old, the same technologies, the same governments — and extrapolating the future along one central theme, in search of a tidy resolution. But the warmer planet they imagine will also be a grey planet, filled with elderly people.

There will be many more Joe Bidens unable to make it to the end of a speech or climb stairs unaided, many more Mitch McConnells freezing before the cameras, many more geriatric pop stars miming to songs they first performed 50 years earlier. And they will be the lucky ones. A great many others will be alone, ill, vulnerable, surrounded by decaying infrastructure, while rats and other creatures run wild. In this context, we may want to reconsider some of our anxieties about the AI apocalypse. Indeed, this could be one area where it would benefit us to be a little less existential and a little more materialist. An older, depopulated world will clearly require a far higher degree of automation and augmentation; there’s a reason that Japan is known for its robot technology.

Aldiss’s conceit rules out some possibilities that are open to us, of course, including the economists’ favourite: immigration. But you don’t need to be a science fiction grand master to imagine how this policy might go awry. They are assuming that older, poorer countries will remain attractive destinations for the inhabitants of younger ones; that there will not be significant backlash from the existing populations; that the immigrants themselves will not adopt the customs of their host societies, stop reproducing, and also grow old.

Suggested reading

The rise of baby doomers

By Jennie Bristow

Those countries that cannot stomach more immigration will seek to incentivise larger families. This is the approach of Hungary, which grants mothers under 30 an exemption from income tax. Historically, however, the idea of rewarding families for great feats of reproduction has had mixed results. And the time may be coming when no matter how attractive the tax breaks, couples simply can’t have children. Sperm counts are plummeting worldwide. Scientists have suggested that everything from obesity to “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” may be responsible, but without firm conclusions, humans may yet end up like French bulldogs, unable to reproduce without direct medical intervention. And of course, some communities opt for extinction over change: today, for every 150 Parsi Zoroastrians born in India, 600 die, but the community refuses to recognise the children of women who marry outsiders. In the 200 years of their existence, the Shakers have had ample opportunity to reconsider their celibacy, but have declined to do so, relying on conversion to keep the numbers up. Today, two remain.

You would think that — given its inevitability — we would put a bit more effort into imagining this grey new world. But Greybeard is one of very few attempts to confront a planet in which most people are very, very old. In politics, the story is worse than in literature. All the signs are that we would rather not think about it: China, for instance, stopped reporting on its fertility rate in 2017. Perhaps this is because we have already made our decision: like the Parsis, we are not going to have more children, and so all we can do is wait for the great die-off to unfold.

What makes Tokyo so enviable is its abundance of housing and the ease with which new building projects can get off the ground. An astonishing number of homes are built every year in the city — 145,000 in 2018 — which is more than in the whole of California (with roughly three times the population) and, in some years, than in the whole of England (with about four times the population).

Nimby Tokyoites may object to new projects, but their protests can be swatted away by the determinedly pro-housing central government, which wields almost unlimited power. Local government rarely gets a look in. And unlike in Britain or the US, new housing tends to be squeezed efficiently into existing neighbourhoods rather than built on empty land, of which there is little. As policy expert Alan Durning writes, Japan’s process of approving housing projects is “simple, uniform, and markedly more welcoming to homes of many sizes than other nation’s policies”.

More from this author

The truth about Japan's sex culture

By Philip Patrick

With earthquakes an ever-looming threat, Tokyo homes are knocked down at a much faster rate than elsewhere to keep them secure (Japanese buildings have the same lifespan as an American car, about 30 years). But rather than being a nuisance, Durning points out that this creates more opportunities to replace a house with a block, which tend to be far more capacious; “pencil buildings” make efficient multi-story use of a very small footprint. Tokyo has tripled its housing stock in the past 50 years. Only Singapore and Seoul have done better.

The Japanese government’s aggressively pro-building policies stem from an attempt to boost the economy after the collapse of the real estate bubble in 1992. A steady eradication of housing regulations over the next decade culminated in Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Urban Renaissance project, which allowed fast-track approval of high-rise inner-city developments. Now, Japan’s cities seem to be in a dizzying state of flux and thrum to the sound of construction.

This is not to say that there is no opposition to the permanent vista of cranes or the occasional fightback when the government overplays its hand. There was spirited, if unsuccessful, opposition to the demolition of the much-loved Nakagin capsule tower in Tokyo last year, and music legend Ryuichi Sakamoto campaigned against the redevelopment of Meiji Jingu Park — one of Tokyo’s few central green spaces — up until his recent death.

Suggested reading

British renters are losers

By Joel Golby

It should also be noted that though Japan has ample housing, much of it is uninspiring and characterless. Built to last a couple of decades at most, even the better-quality blocks lose their shine quickly. Like seedy nightclubs, they are given glamorous English names like “Suginami Deluxe Heaven” or “Ogikubo Princess Stage” in an attempt to give a veneer of sophistication to mundane steel and concrete cubes. Almost no one has a garden, a spare room, or a pleasing view.

It’s not always easy to find a home in Tokyo as a foreigner. Most long-term residents will have a tale of entering an estate agents and noticing an immediate froideur (think of the slaughtered Lamb scene in American Werewolf in London). I was denied entry to one letting agent in Urayasu, a Tokyo suburb which, rumour has it, is entirely closed to foreigners. The woman behind the counter leapt up and raced to the door as she saw me approaching, crossing her arms and shaking her head.

It has been estimated that only 10–20% of real estate companies in Tokyo will rent to foreigners, though few will openly admit this. Prejudice may be a factor, but a more likely explanation is caution: landlords don’t want to take a chance on a tenant who probably can’t read the rental agreement or understand the subtle, unwritten neighbourhood rules.

Stigma is less of a problem when it comes to social housing, which Tokyo has in varying quality. The once-cherished “Danchi” — Soviet-inspired blocks known in the Sixties as the “homes of the future” — are now dark, dingy, and depressing places that house only the desperate and the elderly. They are infamous for being the most common location of kodukushi or “lonely death”, whereby someone living alone will pass away and lie undiscovered, sometimes for years. More attractive are the Urban Renaissance homes, which are usually of decent quality, though there are only 740,000 of these nationwide and competition for one may be intense.

Could the UK profit from emulating Tokyo’s housebuilding success? To an extent. The lack of red tape for perfectly uncontroversial projects is admirable. But Japanese cities have very few historic buildings whose demolition anyone would object to, nor do they have extensive green areas to preserve. A similarly permissive regulatory regime could hardly work in Bath or Oxford or Edinburgh.

It is also uncertain that Brits would be satisfied with the often very modest, unadorned dwellings that Japanese people live in, sometimes all their lives. The Japanese invest very little of their personality in their homes, spend less time in them than other nationalities, and frequently see them as places to sleep in and little more. (Tokyo’s suburbs are often referred to as “bed towns”.) An indicator of the Japanese attitude to their homes is that even at the height of pandemic restrictions, the figure for home-working only hit 20%. In the UK it is currently 44%.

Perhaps the best lesson we can learn from the residents of Tokyo is to obsess less over property: to expect less. Thanks to the threat of earthquakes, property is not a good investment; and living anywhere too grand, or renovating or extending your home, would be considered ostentatious and threaten the precious societal harmony. City-wide safety and a clean, reliable, and inexpensive transport system means there is less of a postcode premium or stigma. People just aren’t that interested in where, or how well, you live.

With lower expectations and less emotional attachment, it’s perhaps no wonder that Tokyo has solved its housing conundrum. I once asked a student to describe her dream home and after a lengthy, bemused pause, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “I don’t know, somewhere near a Starbucks.”