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.

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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.

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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.

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”.

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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.

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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.”

The apparent motivation for the crime was quickly revealed: a grievance held by the assassin against the Abe dynasty for promoting a religious group, the Unification Church — better known as the “Moonies”. He alleged the group had pressured his mother into making huge donations — around $1 million — leaving the family “devastated”. Revulsion at the murder was quickly followed by intense curiosity as a spotlight was placed on the murky relationship between Japan’s political class, especially its eternal party of government the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and what are referred to as the new or upstart religions, or less politely, as cults.

Followers of the Unification Church would dispute the latter designation, but it is certainly a controversial organisation with a track record of illegality. The founder Sun Myung Moon, a close friend of Abe’s grandfather — the former PM Nobusuke Kishi — served time for fraud in the USA, and the group’s fundraising activities in Japan, conducted under the alleged protection of the LDP, provoked a group of 300 lawyers to set up an association to help people who claimed to have been coerced. It is alleged that agents of the Unification Church would scan the obituary columns, then target the grieving with emotionally manipulative appeals. The bereaved would be told that their recently deceased relatives needed assistance to reach heaven, which could be arranged, in return for sizeable and ongoing bequests. In 2020, a court in Tokyo ordered the church to repay $34,000 obtained through such methods.

Despite its occasional setbacks, the success of the Unification Church in Japan has been exceptional: it is believed to have raised 70% of its income in the country. But it is far from unique. Japan has proved to be fertile ground for a wide variety of pseudo (or nouveaux) religious groupings, and there are an estimated 180,000, or one for every 700 people in Japan. Many are innocuous, but the more controversial are characterised, according to a study by Inoue Nobutaka, by extreme levels of secrecy, erratic growth, and coercive proselytising.

This trend can be traced to the 1860s, a period of great social upheaval where centuries-old rules and customs were rapidly supplanted by a flood of new ideas and outside influences. The severing of the syncretic ties of Shinto and Buddhism and the lifting of the 250-year-old ban on Christianity in 1873 created space for a proliferation of new faiths. These were initially persecuted by the Right-wing militarists that ruled Japan, who subscribed to the official state religion of Shinto. But after the Second World War, which put an end to emperor worship and saw freedom of religion enshrined in the new US-imposed constitution, a spiritual vacuum emerged. As did, for the unscrupulous, a distinctly attractive tax-free business opportunity.

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Customers, or converts, were not hard to find as post-war Japan struggled to rebuild. Cities were flooded with young people from the countryside, who were poor, lonely, and often desperate. The migrants sought not just employment, but spiritual succour and a sense of belonging — the new religions offered both. In Tokyo especially, where the pace of life and the stifling rules of etiquette made making friends a great challenge, the allure of the welcoming new religions was palpable. (Even today, neighbours often don’t speak to each other, knowing one “hello” obliges them to repeat the greeting forever.)

Of those that flourished, some religions sought power and security through politics. The most famous of these is Soka Gakkai, a form of Nichiren Buddhism based on the teachings of a 13th century priest. It now claims eight million followers in Japan and twelve million worldwide. It has its own political party, Komeito, which thanks to the rigid discipline of its members — who vote as they are instructed — has become a key player in Japanese politics, often as a coalition partner for hire.

Komeito has been in alliance with the ruling LDP since 1999 and is the junior coalition partner of the present government. Michael Cucek of Temple University in Tokyo calls Komeito “the most important and least understood part of Japanese politics”. He says that the party is essentially run by women, with the most powerful part being its decision-making inner sanctum the Fujimbu, or mothers and women’s association. The political alliance is controversial within the LDP, but Cucek explains that as 25% of the party’s district votes are believed to be supplied by Komeito — in return, naturally, for favours — the awkward embrace looks likely to endure.

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It is tempting to compare the relationship between the two parties to that which the LDP’s senior politicians once maintained with the yakuza — Japan’s organised crime gangs — in the turbulent early Sixties. Kishi maintained a close relation with the mob boss Yoshio Kodama, whose assistance in supplying muscle he called on from time to time. Whether the fixers wear the sharp suits and Hawaiian shirts of the gangsters, or the flowing robes of religious leaders, makes little difference to the outcomes: they get things done.

At the other end of the spectrum are the apocalyptic cults, the most notorious of which was Aum Shinrikyo, founded by Matsumoto Chizuo, the half-blind son of a tatami mat maker. Aum promised psychic powers and salvation from a forecast Armageddon — a prospect with far more resonance in a country regularly struck by natural and man-made disasters. Aum drew on their leader’s charisma and unbounded self-belief: he persuaded followers he could fly and sold a panacea (actually orange peel in water) for $7,000 a shot to hoodwink followers into signing over their assets.

The group offered a form of spiritual cleansing for those who had become disgusted by the moral rot and emptiness that seemed to characterise Japanese society in the Seventies, when Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei (known as Japan’s version of Richard Nixon) was embroiled in a bribery scandal and tainted by association with Yoshio Kodama, and Eighties, when Japan’s bubble economy ushered in an era of decadence and greed. Acolytes tended to be professionals, who were not just cynical about the decline of Japanese ethics but had been numbed into a fatalistic credulous passivity by the banality of corporate life.

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Aum was responsible for the world’s only WMD terrorist attack by a private organisation when they released sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 13 and injuring 6000. The leader was executed, but astonishingly the group survives, having changed its name to Aleph and lowered its profile. It is rumored to have 1600 members and has been in the news recently for refusing to cooperate with government surveillance orders.

The subway attack has become Japan’s signature cult-inspired atrocity, the one everyone knows about. But it is not an isolated incident: in 1986, seven women, calling themselves the “brides of God” and members of the “Friends of the Truth Society”, immolated themselves on a beach in Wakayama.

No one knows for sure how many Japanese are cult members today, but a figure of 10-20% has been estimated. The fundamental problem, one Japan expert tells me, is that “Japan has no real religion”. Traditional Buddhism is more of a philosophical and lifestyle creed and Shinto is mainly concerned with aesthetics, he explains. All of which makes the Japanese yearn for a more structured, accessible, transactional theology.

And once you recognise this yearning, you see evidence of it everywhere. It’s there in the mini-deities or spirits of the yuru-chara — mascot characters that represent everything from prefectures to companies to household goods. It’s there in the teen-pop idols, scarcely allowed to exist as real people, worshipped by devotees who will buy special tickets to shake their hands, or just sit in their presence. It’s there in the exclusive neighbourhood culture schools led by a revered “master” rewarded with discrete cash payments. And it’s there in the faux-religious rituals of tidying guru and Netflix star, Marie Kondo.

Japan is often questioned over its unsettled history, with the various legacies of the Second World War and its aftermath still a source of difficulty. But perhaps it is its unsettled spirituality, which lurks in the Japanese psyche, leading vulnerable and lonely people down dark pathways, that is the deeper, and more troubling issue.

A few days before her hearing, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I 500-yard women’s freestyle race was won by an athlete named Lia Thomas. Looking at the medal presentation photographs afterwards, you don’t have to be a biologist to see that something is amiss. Huddled together on the right-hand side, on the number three podium, are three young women. The number two position is empty. To the left stands the winner, on the first place podium: to my eyes, a strapping lad, albeit in female attire and with long hair. I clearly have no hope of a place on the Supreme Court.

Lia Thomas, born William Thomas, has undoubtedly had an impressive swimming career. William started competing from the age of five, was All-American in high school and went on to follow in his older brother’s footsteps by swimming for the University of Pennsylvania. For three years, William was one of the stars of the men’s team.

But in 2018, William declared that he was, in fact, Lia and, in May 2019, began taking hormones to suppress testosterone. Thomas has not yet “fully transitioned”, and still has male genitalia. However, last year Thomas was allowed to switch to Penn’s female swim team and has since competed as a woman. Thomas recently told Sports Illustrated,“I am a woman, just like everybody else on the team”, adding: “There is no such thing as half-support, either you back me fully as a woman or you don’t.”

Now, there are some in the swimming community who do “back” her. Erica Sullivan, a biological woman, represented the US in the Tokyo Olympics and finished third behind Thomas. Before the race, she wrote in support of Thomas, claiming that sportswomen have a lot more to worry about than trans women competitors — such as sexual abuse and harassment, unequal pay, and a lack of women in leadership roles.

By and large, however, Thomas’s competitors and their parents aren’t willing to ignore the biological repercussions of that victory. Reka Gyorgy, a fellow swimmer who finished 17th in the qualifying heats, just one spot away from the final race, has written a letter to the NCAA stating that Thomas’s win “was not a specific athlete’s fault. It is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes.”

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A fellow Penn female swimmer complained that Lia walks around the women’s locker room exposed, making teammates feel uncomfortable. “It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,” she explained. Meanwhile, parents complain that the team is divided and “everything has fallen apart.” Such is the outrage that Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has been forced to wade in; this week, he signed a proclamation declaring the “rightful winner” of the race to be Emma Weyant, who came in second.

I have no prejudice against men who wish to identify as women. Nobody chooses to undergo surgery or take body-altering medicine on a whim. The transgender community deserves our support in the face of any and all abuse. None of this, however, means that biological women should be forced to accept the participation of trans women in their sports competitions. As law professor and former athlete Doriane Coleman has explained: “Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilisation, and higher anaerobic capacity.”

The same applies to trans women who have gone through male puberty, regardless of any hormones they are taking, as many developments from puberty are permanent. As a report on male-bodied athletes by the International Women’s Forum makes clear, there are more than 3,000 genes that contribute to muscle differences between human males and females. “Genetic differences cannot be eliminated by reducing testosterone, and these differences may create different muscle responses to training between even those men and women who have the same concentrations of testosterone.”

This isn’t some fringe view: even the New Yorker agrees, noting that “males who have gone through puberty have, on average, more cardiovascular capacity, greater muscle mass, higher tendon mechanical strength, and denser bones… In many sports involving timed races, men are roughly 10-12% faster than women.” Lia Thomas proves this point, winning the NCAA 500-yard comfortably with a time of 4 minutes and 33.24 seconds. Though finishing at 65th overall when competing in the men’s 500-yard freestyle, Lia leapt to finishing first when competing against women.

The encroachment of male-born athletes into the female arena is not new: various controversies over female athletes deemed too masculine have played out over the past century. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for instance, officials forced American runner Helen Stephens to undergo a humiliating genital examination after she was accused of being a man. And well into the Sixties, female athletes were forced to participate in “nude parades” and undergo chromosome tests. Such measures undoubtedly degraded the very women they were intended to protect; yet as the case of Lia Thomas demonstrates, the sporting world is yet to conjure up a reasonable solution to the transgender question.

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In January, the NCAA announced a “sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation”, dropping its previous rule that all trans women could participate in women’s sports after just a year of testosterone suppression. Instead, it would now allow each individual sport to determine their own regulations. USA Women’s Swimming quickly responded with a new system that would have permitted trans women to participate only after three years of T-suppression, and added a panel examination to see if a trans woman had “physical developments” that might confer an advantage over biological women. But the NCAA struck down the new regulations, claiming that the late-stage rule change was “unfair” and had “potential detrimental impacts” on swimmers such as Thomas.

There was — surprise, surprise — little discussion about the “unfair” consequences the reversal would have on the other women competing. But should we be surprised? One sport after another now accepts trans competitors, from New Zealand’s weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who competed in the 2020 Olympics, to CeCe Telfer, who won an NCAA Division II track title in 2019. If this trend continues, it’s not inconceivable that biological women may find themselves squeezed out of sport altogether. What’s the point in a girl even trying to excel when, sooner or later, a trans woman could come along and deny them victory?

Yet there may be a solution: the Paralympics holds the key for how we can move forward. This isn’t to make any comparison between transgender people and those with physical disabilities — it’s merely to observe that it is possible to hold different sporting competitions for those with different innate physical characteristics.

At the heart of the Paralympics lies a fair and equitable approach to allowing athletes to compete against each other. All competitors are assessed by a panel of experts who examine both physical and technical limitations. The merits of the process are obvious: it stops able-bodied individuals from identifying as impaired and competing against those with limitations.

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Why not develop similar events for trans athletes, allowing individuals such as Lia Thomas to compete with appropriate peers? If Thomas meant it when she said that “I’ve always viewed myself as just a swimmer”, then this solution would enable her to do just that, while also accounting for the aspirations and rights of biological women. For trans men, too, it would also be an attractive option, given they currently stand little chance of sporting success.

The alternative — allowing Thomas to continue competing against women — is simply untenable. Thomas has already expressed interest in competing in the Paris Olympics in 2024 for the US women’s swim team. And without the kind of system I am proposing, she might well make it, shattering the hopes of  biological woman who deserves that place.

“I want to swim and compete as who I am,” Thomas said in a recent interview. It’s a sentiment I suspect is shared by many of the female swimmers she has competed against in recent years. Along with them, I look forward to cheering her on in the Trans Olympics.

But comparisons to Weimar are a dime a dozen in the West, and their explanatory power is incredibly questionable. Our modern historical lexicon often seems to be a book with all the pages ripped out, save for one or two badly smudged chapters on the European interwar period. And this is a shame, because there are many other historical periods that could do more to advance our understanding of current political events, both in the US and elsewhere. History is, after all, quite expansive.

More than any other, one particular moment, mostly unknown today, may have a lot to tell us about where the US is headed next: Japan’s bakumatsu period — the polarised and chaotic end period of the old Tokugawa shogunate.

To understand the bakumatsu, one should know what came before it. In 1600, Japan’s ‘warring states era’, or the sengoku jidai, came to a close with the Battle of Sekigahara. Soon afterwards, the victorious Tokugawa clan implemented a policy of almost total national lockdown, known as sakoku (literally: locked country). Generally, foreigners were forbidden from entering the country, and Japanese commoners banned from leaving on pain of death. Though there were some minor exceptions, Japan essentially closed itself off to the rest of the world.

There were a host of benefits to this, including more than two centuries of internal peace, economic growth and innovation in the fields of arts and culture. Under the surface, however, contradictions in Japanese society slowly built up. The samurai were now a caste of warriors without any wars left to fight, while low-born merchants grew in wealth, slowly undermining a society that assigned status according to birth.

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Moreover, the divisions that led to the battle of Sekigahara were never really mended; Japan’s most powerful samurai magnates, or daimyo, were split into two different camps: the tozama, and the fudai. The former were descendants of magnates who had been neutral or against the Tokugawa in 1600, while the latter came from families that had been on the winning side. Still, the tozama remained quite rich and powerful, even later in the 19^th century, but they were barred from almost every important post in the Government. Their resentment at this never dissipated, but merely simmered on a low boil for centuries, waiting for an opportune moment to roar back to life.

This brings us to the bakumatsu period itself. In 1853, the US Navy forcibly entered the bay of Edo (modern day Tokyo), and demanded that the country open itself up to trade. The Japanese, after their centuries of isolation, could do very little to defend themselves against Commodore Perry’s Black Ships. At gunpoint, the Japanese were forced to abandon a policy that had been the cornerstone of their existence for the last two centuries.

The immediate result of this shift in policy was the start of an extreme social and political chain reaction; abandoning isolationism at the hands of foreign barbarians upended not just Japanese public opinion, but the very basis of legitimacy for the Tokugawa shogunate. Meanwhile, uncontrolled foreign trade also led to a collapse of the Japanese currency system, which only inflamed public opinion further. Suddenly, Japanese society went from (a somewhat deceptive) placid calm, to rapid, uncontrollable polarisation. Street violence became common; there were attacks on foreigners by patriotic mobs, and armed violence between supporters of the Shogun and increasingly organised opponents of the status quo.

Sound familiar? Of course, elite consensus in 2016 America turned out to be, if anything, built on an even more precarious foundation than Tokugawa’s peace in 1853. Beneath the surface, all manner of social and economic ills had already built up; deindustrialisation was slowly choking America’s working and middle classes, while the wars in the Middle East were poorly run, costly, and corrupt. And, just as with Commodore Perry, the election of Trump merely served to topple the first domino, unleashing a chain reaction that was already primed into the system, inaugurating a period of intense polarisation that exists to this day.

What bakumatsu Japan and modern America share is a straightforward problem: that smashing an old, non-functional system to the point where it can no longer be repaired is not the same as building anything new. On the American Right, people today refer to the ‘dead consensus’ when they talk about political positions that everyone in the GOP had to hold to be taken seriously pre-2016. They do not talk about a ‘new consensus’, however, because no new consensus exists. And that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.

To return to the bakumatsu, Japanese society eventually polarised into two broad factions; those who were loyal to the Shogunate, and those who supported the Emperor returning to political power (at this point, the Japanese royal family have been powerless figureheads for about 800 years). What followed was a civil conflict defined by its confused and contradictory nature.

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The backers of the Emperor attacked the Shogunate for being too friendly with the West. But many of the most powerful backers of this putatively xenophobic, anti-Western faction had also been the most eager importers of foreign instructors and weapons, who had then managed to defeat opposition forces with their smaller, far more Westernised armies. And indeed, once they won the ensuing civil war, their post-unification agenda turned out to be… the abolishment of the feudal caste system, the disarmament of the samurai, and the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of Japanese society. Whoops!

While ideology always plays a part in civil conflicts, the bakumatsu is not so much a story of traditionalism versus progressivism as simply what happens when a large political vacuum is created almost overnight, and there’s no good alternative on hand. The result is a very chaotic period of political free-for-all, as old coalitions rapidly collapse and new ones form, and centuries-old grudges suddenly come rearing back to life. And the creation of that vacuum, and the polarisation that fills it, is precisely what we are seeing in America today.

In the case of America, the empire is clearly in a very deep, systemic crisis. The military machine is deeply broken, the policy of spreading liberal democracy is a total failure, and the globalised economy has now frozen and seized up. Nobody, whether they’re on the Left or the Right, really has any solution to these problems. The vacuum is simply too big. And thus, we are slowly beginning to see the same sort of political dynamic manifest in America as it did in Japan during the bakumatsu. In America, just as in Japan, political street violence proliferates, and people form into armed and organised political gangs.

Yet, if 19^th century Japan offers some interesting parallels in terms of what has already happened in the last five years or so, it also gives us some hints of what is in store in America’s immediate future. First, the chaos that defined the bakumatsu suggests it’s probably foolish to expect American polarisation to cool down or improve anytime soon. If anything, it is likely to get a great deal worse, as nobody really has any sort of practical solution on hand to address the fundamental rupture introduced into the American political economy by deindustrialisation. This problem is especially acute, given the supply crisis that is now slowly choking producers and consumers. The current model is broken, but that breach is the result of decades of active policy choices. It can’t be unbroken in a week, and like a rotting tooth, it’s a problem that will keep spreading pain until it is finally dealt with.

Second, one of the most serious potential flashpoints in the years ahead is going to be the relationship between the federal government and various recalcitrant states. In the bakumatsu period, the Tokugawa government slowly lost control over the tozama magnates, who increasingly came to either ignore orders from Edo, or explicitly worked to undermine the Shogun.

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In America, this sort of political brinkmanship is starting to play out. Recently, Oklahoma’s Governor, Kevin Stitt, brazenly defied Washington by firing the commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, replacing him with a man whose first order of business was to free Oklahoma’s guardsmen from any obligation to comply with the Covid vaccine mandates. Though its effect didn’t extend beyond state borders, it’s a fairly ominous sign of where things are headed; the weight of federal writ is clearly not what it once was in America, and if the country continues to polarise and experience economic crisis, these sorts of conflicts will become increasingly common, and increasingly serious. In a couple of years, for example, if federal agents are ordered to arrest or imprison a popular state governor such as Ron DeSantis after some vexing display of Floridian insubordination, nobody really knows what could happen as a result.

More than anything, the most important lesson of the bakumatsu is simply to expect the unexpected in the days and years ahead. Political hypocrisy, back-stabbing, the embrace of exceedingly strange bedfellows, rapidly changing alliances, and much more; these things are not just likely but more or less guaranteed in times like these.

Just like the Japanese weren’t actually fighting merely for or against modernisation, or for or against the Emperor, the figurative (and increasingly literal) battles inside America today aren’t really about race, or taxes, or personal autonomy. They are about the heart, soul, and future of the nation, about what gets to fill the hungry vacuum left behind by the Black Ship that conquered the country in 2016.