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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Skepticism in China about Christianity predates Communism by quite some way. When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1510) began to visit in the late 16th century, they found that even those elites who were sympathetic to their faith required a great deal of persuasion before entering the fold — God appeared to ask too much while offering too little and so many of the aspects of Christianity they would have to adopt seemed to clash with traditional Chinese life. Doing away with concubines seemed self-defeating, since they might furnish a man with an heir. Removing ancestor tablets from the home meant losing the means of paying filial respect. The crucifixion of Jesus struck many as shocking rather than heroic: corporal punishment was reserved for the very lowest in society.

Still, Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

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Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organizations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organizations were banned in favor of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out.

Even then, given the CCP’s interest in managing people who possess the ability to influence whole communities in China, the ideological soundness of church leaders has never been taken for granted. Education at seminaries is tightly managed, with a strong focus on patriotism. Qualified clergy face constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty, to which some respond by emphasizing Christianity’s proletarian credentials: Jesus was a carpenter, who chose fishermen as his early disciples and had harsh words for merchants and the wealthy.

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organizations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicization”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

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The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicization” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership program. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalization in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularization theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanization. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

Modi had been angling for a moment like this since September of the year before, when he lobbied the United Nations to make 21st June “International Yoga Day”. In an address to the General Assembly, he claimed that “Yoga is an invaluable gift from our ancient tradition. Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action … a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and our well-being. Yoga is not just about exercise; it is a way to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.”

Modi’s successful pitch for yoga at the UN contained eerie echoes of a pitch for Hinduism made by one of his heroes, the religious teacher Swami Vivekānanda, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago back in 1893. It was a masterclass in using the language of inclusivity to make the case for a particular idea. Hinduism, declared Vivekānanda, is the “mother of all religions” and has “taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”. To an audience consisting primarily of American Christians, familiar with Jesus’s claim that “No one comes to the Father except through me”, Vivekānanda offered a contrasting line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

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Vivekānanda’s expansive case for Hinduism was helped by the fact that the concept itself was only around a century old by the late 1800s and remained somewhat flexible. Europeans in colonial-era India had used the term “Hindu” (derived from a Sanskrit word for the Indus River) to describe people on the subcontinent who did not belong to better-understood and apparently more clearly-defined traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Indian reformers later used the term “Hinduism” to refer to a broad system of ideas and practices that went beyond “religion” in the narrow confessional sense familiar to modern Westerners and encompassed culture, identity and, in time, a sense of national political purpose.

In the decades running up to Indian independence in 1947, there was nervousness among religious minorities — particularly Muslims — about what this might mean for the role played by Hinduism in a future independent India. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was among those who advocated for secularism and religious pluralism. Other forces in Indian politics, including the predecessor to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), encouraged the idea that India is fundamentally a Hindu country and that its politics and institutions ought to reflect that fact.

The vexed politics of “Hinduism” in India — religious tradition versus a more encompassing cultural or national identity — has been mirrored in the West by arguments about yoga, one of whose earliest teachers was Swami Vivekānanda during visits to the United States. Is yoga essentially religious in character? If so, is it wrong to use it purely for its health benefits or to teach it in schools that are subject to rules about the separation of church and state? And given its origins in India, is there something morally wrong or at least a little unseemly about white Westerners making money from promoting it — or even practising it at all?

Just as these anxieties appear to be ebbing in the West — though concerns remain about shallow and overly-commercialised forms of yoga — Modi has been leading the charge to reclaim yoga for Indians, and for himself in particular. It is part of a broader push to promote traditional Indian culture at home and to leverage India’s spiritual wealth abroad as a soft power asset. Modi has already made much of his country as the home of Buddhism, finding it useful when dealing with Buddhist-influenced cultures around Asia, from Vietnam to Korea.

Modi’s critics worry about what this might mean for the secular and pluralist character of their democracy. When, in his 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly, Modi described yoga as a gift from “our ancient tradition”, who exactly was the implied “we”? Indians as a whole — or the country’s large Hindu majority? Modi and the BJP are suspected of using yoga as a means of encouraging people, both at home in India and abroad, to think of those two categories as more or less one and the same. That risks reinforcing the idea that India’s Muslims, Christians and Dalits — formerly referred to as “untouchables” and historically mistreated by upper-caste Hindus — are outsiders, potentially exposing them to yet more discrimination and violence. Modi is also accused of engaging in what one commentator memorably called “om-washing”: linking yoga to everything from world peace to a healthier climate while pursuing destructive policies on these and other issues.

No doubt there will be those who regard worries over Modi’s appropriation of yoga as of no more consequence than hand-wringing in the West about wellness enthusiasts who like to greet each other with namaste gestures. Depending on your point of view, Indian soldiers performing yoga in freezing temperatures at the Siachen Glacier is either a step towards entrenching Hindu nationalism at the heart of Indian politics while provoking Pakistan — with whom India remains in dispute over sovereignty in the region — or simply a nice touch for International Yoga Day. Likewise, government bureaucrats and foreign diplomats in India taking up yoga, on Modi’s advice, may be regarded either as working on their general health or participating in a slow but steady narrowing of acceptable discourse in India.

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Time will tell just how much or little this matters for India. As Modi enters his third term as prime minister, the argument over yoga seems set to extend to schools across the country. Some BJP-led regional administrations have already sought to make it mandatory among the nation’s children, prompting objections from defenders of India’s minorities and the country’s secular constitution. A Sun Salutation — or Surya Namaskar — may strike most as an innocent sequence of yoga moves. But “Surya” is both the sun and the Hindu solar deity, rendering the sequence controversial in the eyes of some Muslim groups in India.

Those wanting to see yoga’s influence diminished in Indian politics may hope that Modi’s Olympic dream comes true. Modi wants the Games to come to India in 2036, and for yoga to be included on the list of events alongside chess, kabaddi, kho kho, squash and T20 cricket. It may well prove divisive: plenty of yoga practitioners will no doubt object to what they see on display, just as large numbers of karate fans regarded its Olympic incarnation — when Tokyo hosted a delayed Games in 2021 — as “not proper karate”. A more potent message still would be sent if things take an Australian turn. The sight of an unfortunate competitor butchering their contribution — offering an unintentionally comic twist on the downward dog to rival Raygun’s kangaroo hop — might end up harming yoga’s global reputation.

In the shorter term, there seems little prospect that Modi will retire yoga as a pawn in India’s over-heated politics. Promoting ancient glories is a cheaper and more reliable way of winning hearts and minds than promising the earth politically, whether at home or abroad. And as long as the wellness boom is with us, so too will be that sweet spot where fitness, fulfilment and wisdom coincide — seasoned, dare it be said, with a dash of the exotic, courtesy of images of the far-away or the long-ago. For all the anxieties that it seems to be causing of late, in the West and in India, nothing promises to hit that spot quite like a good sweaty hour on a yoga mat.

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).

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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.

Tibet and China go back a long way together, and theirs has rarely been a happy history. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the Tibetan kingdom’s armies fought their way into the great capital of Tang China, Chang’an, and occupied it. The Tibetan Empire would later fragment after the last king of Tibet was murdered in 842, and Buddhist teachers known as lamas would eventually come to rule in his place. They helped the Mongols to govern Tibet in the 13th century. Then, in 1279, Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol-led dynasty of China, and Tibet became nominally part of his empire.

The degree of authority over Tibetan affairs exercised by Chinese emperors of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties fluctuated a great deal over time, but in general they preferred indirect influence to outright control. Crucial to these arrangements was the maintaining of good relations with Tibet’s Buddhist leaders and in particular its tulkus. These were lineages of men and sometimes women who were regarded as manifestations of a particular bodhisattva: an enlightened being who puts off their entry into paradise in order to help others. By controlling the intermediate realm between death and rebirth, they were able to choose specific human incarnations, again and again, in order to continue their lineage and fulfil their salvific purpose in the world. Among the best-known Tibetan lineages are the Karmapas and the Panchen and Dalai Lamas.

The lineage of the Dalai Lama goes back to the turn of the 15th century, peaking with the “Great 5th” Dalai Lama who united Tibet under his rule in 1642. Subsequent Dalai Lamas enjoyed both spiritual and political authority but found themselves embroiled in struggles for power between neighbouring Mongols and Chinese. In 1720, the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty won a decisive victory over a Mongol rival and managed to install his favoured candidate as the 7th Dalai Lama. From then on, China’s Qing dynasty regarded Tibet as a protectorate of sorts and the question of a Dalai Lama’s reincarnation as very much their business.

Yet the mysteries of reincarnation were often hard to control. Traditionally, an elderly Dalai Lama might leave written information about where he intended to be reincarnated or drop hints during the last weeks of his life. The direction in which the smoke drifted at his cremation might be watched for clues. Senior lamas would weigh these things alongside dreams or intuitions of their own before paying a visit to the homes of children who appeared to be likely candidates. There they might lay in front of the child some of the predecessor’s possessions, alongside unrelated objects, to see whether the child recognised the correct items as his own.

Concerned about the political quarrels and corruption that sometimes accompanied this process, and worried more broadly about Tibetans dabbling in divination when this was supposed to be the prerogative of the imperial court, the Qianlong Emperor sought to exert some control over Tibetan reincarnations. In a move that may well have important repercussions next year, the Emperor decided in 1792 to intervene in the process of identifying reincarnations within tulku lineages. Personally doubting the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation but resigned to managing the people of Tibet on their own terms, the Emperor had a golden urn made and sent to Lhasa. When it came time to identify a reincarnation, candidates identified in the usual way would have their names placed inside the urn. After prayers were said, a single name would be drawn by a Qing official.

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This wasn’t about luck or having China’s preferred candidate fortuitously selected, though it did rather usefully allow for the latter. The Golden Urn method was based on a form of divination already used in branches of China’s imperial administration and was intended as a means of avoiding human corruption and allowing fate to take its course. Qing efforts to make the method acceptable to Tibet’s elites were helped by the fact that the chosen children frequently came from wealthy and influential families. The Golden Urn method ended up being used, over the decades that followed, to finalise a number of reincarnations. Precisely how many is debated, but they may have included the 10th, 11th and 12th Dalai Lamas.

After the Qing dynasty fell and a Republic of China was proclaimed in 1912, the 13th Dalai Lama sought independence for Tibet. But both the Republic and then, after 1949, the People’s Republic continued to regard Tibet as belonging to China. After the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India in 1959, China moved steadily to consolidate its control over Tibetan affairs. This included the use in 1995 of the Golden Urn to identify the 11th Panchen Lama. It was an important moment: the Dalai Lama’s favoured candidate was rejected and both the candidate and his family were disappeared into “protective” custody. The People’s Republic has since gone further still, creating a register of all those who are permitted to reincarnate after death. The state can revoke that permission at any time. It also claims authority over when the search for a new reincarnation may begin.

Much of this appears to be designed to ensure that the 15th Dalai Lama will be a person with whom the Chinese Communist Party can do business. The current Dalai Lama, alongside Tibet’s government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, rejects the idea of using the Golden Urn to identify the next Dalai Lama and insists that no candidate who is effectively chosen by the People’s Republic will be acceptable. It is highly likely as a result that within a few years we will have two people both claiming to be the 15th Dalai Lama: one in China selected using the Golden Urn, and another elsewhere chosen in the traditional way. Assuming that both are children — likely, but not inevitable — they will probably have regents speaking and acting on their behalf.

Why would the CCP go to all this trouble? More than a decade ago, the current Dalai Lama relinquished his political authority in favour of a prime minister, or sikyong, elected by Tibetans in exile. But although the Dalai Lama no longer holds political power, over the course of a long life he has become synonymous with Tibet’s spirit and its hopes of independence — the question of who succeeds him is therefore enormously important. The United States made clear its position in 2015: Chinese government interference in the Tibetan reincarnation process would go against the internationally recognised right to religious freedom. The Tibetan government has been working hard, of late, to persuade European countries to follow suit, but much will depend on how willing those countries are to risk antagonising China. Standing up to China over Tibet in the Sixties was a relatively cost-free exercise for Westerners. That is no longer true in 2024.

India, meanwhile, will face a particularly difficult decision. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently warmed to the Dalai Lama, sending him birthday greetings and attending a Global Buddhist Summit alongside him in 2023. It is all part of an effort to deploy Buddhism as part of India’s soft power, especially with countries such as Japan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and South Korea, in whose cultures Buddhism runs deep. Modi has spoken of India’s “Buddhist cousin nations” around the world and of his desire to develop Bodh Gaya — the place where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment — as the “spiritual capital” of Buddhism. In April 2023, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting produced “Lessons from Lord Buddha”: a compendium of speeches by Modi that emphasise his spiritual debt to Buddhism. India’s Prime Minister is, the introduction assures readers, “a huge admirer and follower of Lord Buddha”.

India cannot, however, afford to ignore its relationship with China. India recognises China’s sovereignty in Tibet and has to tread carefully when it comes to disputed border areas in the Himalayas — many of which are home to significant Buddhist populations. China’s leadership has already shown its displeasure, on a number of occasions, with Modi’s wooing of the “anti-China” Dalai Lama. It also hopes that a “Buddhism with Chinese characteristics” will be capable of enhancing relations with its neighbours. Both Modi and Xi Jinping, it seems, regard Buddhism as key to their attempts to win friends and influence people in Asia.

Modi may also need to worry about how the search for the next Dalai Lama could cause divisions within Tibet’s exile community in India. Without the current Dalai Lama there to act as a unifying figure, older rivalries may once again come to the fore. Meanwhile, it is no longer sensible to assume that Beijing’s candidate for the 15th Dalai Lama will be uniformly rejected or ignored by Tibetan Buddhist leaders living in Tibet and China. Some of these have made converts among Han Chinese who find the drama of Tibet’s landscape and esoteric religious traditions a refreshing — perhaps even a countercultural — alternative to urban Chinese life. For Tibetan monks and lamas ministering to these Han Chinese Buddhists, the backing — or at least the tacit permission — of the Chinese state is essential in going about their work.

The countdown, then, is on. A Hindu leader in India, an atheist one in China and their Christian and secular counterparts around the world must soon decide how to respond to what a nonagenarian Tibetan Buddhist will say about his forthcoming reincarnation. Perhaps this strange moment will be the last of its kind. The next Dalai Lama may well lack their predecessor’s charisma, gift for communication and international status. The lineage may fall into semi-obscurity as geopolitics moves on. China’s leaders may well be hoping for just such a turn of events. For Tibetans in exile, it would be a disaster: their greatest spiritual and diplomatic asset gone, with no-one to take his place. Lacking a homeland and having lost a powerfully symbolic leader, the challenge will be daunting of retaining — perhaps remaking — Tibetan identity.

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.

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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.

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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.

The spectre of the “woke academic” has haunted public discourse, on and off, for years. It grew out of an older, broader disdain for humanities staff in particular: purveyors, it was said, of a pointless and politically-motivated education, in exchange for which students racked up enormous debts. Prominent, now, on the charge sheet is the claim that we confuse, in our writing and teaching, the encouragement of critical thinking with the preaching of a particular line on vexed questions of identity politics and social justice. Worse still, we do it using the linguistic equivalent of what my old headmaster used to call a “notice-me haircut”: a stream of fussy, high-sounding abstractions, infused with a sense of moral superiority.

The new SOAS guidance offers up plenty of red meat for those committed to this view. The prose is a little portentous in places, and the usual linguistic suspects are all present and correct: heteronormative, whiteness, coloniality. There is also the old trick, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, of pre-emptively defending your ideas by making opposition to them a symptom of psychological deficiency — in this case we find “institutional gatekeepers” potentially locked in a “subconscious struggle” to avoid sharing their power.

And yet the clever thing about Freud’s trick was that sometimes he was right: one really might oppose an idea on apparently intellectual grounds without recognising the emotional charge involved. Beneath my frustration with some of the toolkit’s prose (“coloniality’s operational life” — was there really no other way of putting that?) lies a certain amount of wounded pride at what can feel like undergraduates schooling me on how to teach.

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If I had a criticism of efforts to decolonise university curricula, it would be that they rarely give enough space to defining “colonial”. The historical insight at the heart of efforts to decolonise this or that aspect of contemporary Western life is that modern European colonialism was about much more than boots on the ground. Cultural seeds were sown via colonial and missionary education systems, the ways that colonial bureaucracies categorised people, the respect in which Western intellectual output came to be held and the felt need among some colonised people to acquire certain skills or adopt certain ideologies in order to get ahead — or even survive — under colonialism.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of which of the Western ideas involved were good or bad, the point is that they put down deep and stubborn roots, becoming a kind of cultural knotweed. Colonisers were affected too, as people in countries such as Britain and France were fed warped understandings of the non-Western world and were encouraged to take it for granted that their own ideas and standards — moral, political, civic — enjoyed universal applicability.

A good historical and moral case can be made for decolonising our knowledge in this sense: recognising and tackling entrenched habits of thought, sometimes in painful and humiliating ways where difficult topics including racism and religion are in play. If that case is not made, or is made badly, then public sympathy beyond our universities may be in short supply — especially if the word “colonial” is misconstrued in some quarters in terms of anti-white racism, anti-capitalism or Western self-hatred.

What does all this mean for philosophy? What it clearly doesn’t mean is getting rid of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato on account of them being pale, male and stale. It is more about treating them as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries. What we need is a more comparative approach to philosophy, putting different traditions and individuals from around the world in conversation with one another. As one of the creators of the toolkit, Paul Giladi, tells me: “Good ideas are not restricted to any particular geolocation.”

This is harder than it might sound. It is surprisingly difficult to avoid using familiar categories when approaching new ideas or cultures. Students of religion find themselves tempted to use the Abrahamic faiths as a yardstick in exploring other traditions: looking for a personal God, a holy book, a set of beliefs. Mental health professionals trained in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as anxiety and depression likewise find that applying these terms too hastily in unfamiliar contexts means they miss something about the nature and meaning of the distress they encounter.

For Western students of non-Western philosophies, similar challenges lie in store. Across much of the Western tradition, being is the supreme principle of reality and self-consciousness the starting point of all our knowledge. In parts of Japanese philosophy, by contrast, nothingness is the supreme principle and self-consciousness a can of worms. Nishida Kitarō features in efforts at SOAS to decolonise philosophy, and he’s a good choice. Besides being a founding figure in modern Japanese philosophy, he serves as a warning against tokenism in decolonising our curricula. His Kyoto School of philosophy in fact owed much to German philosophy, and vice versa, encouraging us to think cross-culturally about how ideas are generated. The Kyoto School has also been subject to a great deal of opprobrium in Japan throughout the years, for what critics claim are its links to Japan’s own colonial project in the first half of the 20th century.

It’s good to see Confucius make the cut, too, at SOAS and elsewhere. Even that name tells a story. The man himself was “Kongzi”, christened “Confucius” by Jesuit missionaries who were among the first Europeans to explore Chinese thought back in the 1600s and 1700s. They did so, inevitably, through their own lens: making comparisons with ancient Greece and Rome, praising the idea of ethical action as a good in itself — as opposed to a means towards heavenly ends — and enlisting Confucius in their attempts to portray China to their compatriots back home as a sophisticated society that was ready for the gospel.

Takeshi Morisato, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, tells me that most universities cannot yet support the small classes required to really make the “open dialogue” approach required for decolonising the curriculum work well. Nor, he says, do most universities have enough staff who speak the languages and possess the life experiences out of which non-Western philosophies emerge. “Nothing,” he says, “beats having a few friends from diverse backgrounds who can be patient about each other’s intellectual blind spots.”

Decolonisation efforts in universities are big on “lived experience” and critics enjoy giving them a pounding for it: pure narcissism, or an abyss of “my truth, your truth” relativism. And yet surely the lives and experiences out of which philosophical ideas emerge are part of their richness. Arthur Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of human life somehow makes more sense once you know that he suspected the worst whenever the postman called and slept at night with loaded pistols by his bed.

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If we instead treat philosophical ideas in the abstract, we lend them an aura of universalism and authority that they don’t necessarily merit. All we learned at school about the life of Immanuel Kant was that he ate cheese sandwiches because he was too busy thinking to cook. And perhaps even that wasn’t true. Paying attention, instead, to the roles of identity and lived experience, including those of students, in generating philosophical ideas and arguments needn’t mean giving up on evaluating those ideas and arguments.

Involving students in the creation of such curricula is surely a good thing, but here as elsewhere there’s a balance to be struck. At one point, the SOAS toolkit talks about “enabling [students] to identify what they need to learn”. In my experience, some students enjoy this challenge of co-creating a syllabus. Others wonder what they are paying upwards of £9,000 a year for if they’re required to do so. As Bill Murray puts it, eating shabu-shabu with Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation: “What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?”

One of the challenges for the decolonisation agenda is to avoid conflating a healthy inquiry into the conditions of our knowledge — historical, political, racial — with the pushing of a particular political agenda. Another, says Morisato, is to avoid simply making a pretence of decolonising the curriculum — “complying with liberal language on campus” — as opposed to embracing the radical nature of the project.

I think he has a point. Much of the culture-war hand-wringing over decolonisation stems from a sense that the other side is speaking or acting in bad faith. But if us woke academics can invest some energy in generating a quality of trust with our students that overflows beyond the classroom, then our ivory towers may be good for something after all.

The reaction among most Japanese to Mishima’s speech and subsequent ritual suicide — he plunged a samurai sword into his belly back in the commandant’s office, before one of his comrades beheaded him — was one of mystification and sadness. Others, both in Japan and around the world, found that Mishima’s message resonated.

Among them was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, by this point in his early-70s. Disappointed by the demise, 25 years earlier, of what he regarded as the “miracle” of Japan’s fascist theocracy, Evola saw in Mishima’s final act a courageous call for his country to awaken from the prosperous slumber into which it had been cast by the United States, first as post-war occupier and then as partner in an uneven alliance.

Born in Rome in 1898, Julius Evola frequently looked to Asia for inspiration in helping to rescue the Western world from its malaise. In this, he was not unusual. Any number of Romantics, from Goethe through to Coleridge, found in Indian drama and philosophy a depth and vitality that Europe appeared to have lost. And from the second half of the 1800s, Japan became a source of inspiration: its people and landscape, paintings and woodblock prints, calligraphy and kimono, Zen Buddhism and tea ceremony.

But where much of this interest was focused on spiritual and aesthetic renewal, Evola’s engagement with Asia was defined by the intertwining of the spiritual with the political. And where the personal politics of many Western enthusiasts for Zen or India’s Vedanta philosophy skewed towards the progressive, particularly in the post-war era, Evola was a leading thinker of the far-Right, whose ideas inspired figures within Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (albeit to a lesser extent than he would have liked) and later many others around the post-war world.

Although often overlooked amid the peace-and-love associations of “the East”, Asian ideas and practices have been used to buttress Western ideologies with elitism, racism and conflict at their core. Much depended on what a given commentator thought was wrong or lacking in Western life in the first place. Where many a 20th-century critic of the modern West focused on the recent past, and on the damage done by industrial capitalism to European scenery and souls, in countries such as Germany and Italy one could find writers reaching back further: beyond what they regarded as the disaster of Europe’s Christianisation and into the realms of Nordic myth, ancient German folklore and Imperial Rome. They managed to combine these interests with investigations into the occult and Eastern thought, as additional sources of inspiration in battling modernity and recovering lost values and human capabilities.

In Germany, an emerging theme in the country’s search for its cultural and racial roots was a peaceful, bucolic past, full of life, from which Germans had since become alienated. In fairy tales collected and published by the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, German peasant life was depicted as happy and wholesome yet constantly under threat from violent interlopers: witches, vampires and demons. India became woven into this tapestry as a pastoral paradise — German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder lauded “gentle Hindus [who] nourish themselves with the most innocent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses” — and as one of the supposed homes, long ago, of an Aryan civilisation from which Germans could rightly claim descent. In the hands of Nazi ideologues, all this congealed into the drama of an Aryan race in the here-and-now, pitting itself against decadent, vampiric Slavs and Jews.

In Italy, Evola’s particular sense of Western decline was shaped by his aristocratic Sicilian background and his experience, as a young man, of a yearning to transcend the emptiness of everyday life. He volunteered for the army in 1917 and briefly saw active service before turning to Dadaist painting and poetry after the war. He studied engineering at university but did not complete his degree — on the basis, he claimed, that academia’s bourgeois conventions were not for him.

Having rejected his Catholic upbringing, Evola tasted something of the transcendence he sought via hallucinogens, magic and what he understood of Buddhism and Taoism. His reading of Buddhist scripture helped him through a period of feeling suicidal in 1922. And in the teachings of Lao Tzu, Evola found the path to becoming what he called an “Absolute Individual”. This was a state, he wrote, of “magical, luminous impassability”, in which a person becomes strong, purposeful and free from material and cultural constraints.

The French philosopher René Guénon helped to give shape to Evola’s ideas, through his reading of global history as shot through with cosmic purpose. Guénon claimed that primal truths about the “Absolute”, from which the rest of reality emanates, had been transmitted down the ages via initiates within the world’s religious traditions. Those truths had been lost in the modern West, he argued, because of an over-emphasis on materialism, reason and progress. They could still be found in places like India, however, in particular the Vedanta school of philosophy, which was also much beloved of German Romantics including Herder and Goethe. Guénon hoped to see a new elite of spiritual intellectuals trained in primal truths via “Oriental doctrines”, going on to restore the West as a civilisation centred around the sacred.

Guénon’s ideas and programme came to be called “Traditionalism”, from the Latin tradere, suggesting something — in this case wisdom and a particular way of being in the world — that is “handed down” from one generation to the next. Evola became an important voice in the movement, but unlike Guénon his vision of a future spiritual elite — comprised of Aryan-Germans and Romans — owed a great deal to Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch.

Evola believed that hierarchy within humanity is part of the order of the cosmos. It takes physical, racial and social forms, but its roots lie in the spiritual realm. Some — himself included — are born into a spiritual elite, and must use a variety of demanding spiritual and physical disciplines to progress in wisdom and move ever closer to the Absolute.

Europe’s tragedy in recent centuries, for Evola, was the steady undermining of this cosmic hierarchy. Power had been passed to ever-lower levels: from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie and latterly to the masses via an expansion of the democratic franchise. He held Christianity largely responsible. Imperial Rome had been a far closer reflection than Christendom of the true cosmic order. The rise of Christianity, with what Evola called its “proletarian spirituality”, marked a victory for the forces of disintegration and disorder. Evola found this expressed so well in the Hindu idea that we are living at the lowest point in the cosmic cycle of time — Kali Yuga, or Dark Age — that he included the term in the title of perhaps his best-known work: Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion and Social Order in the Kali Yuga (1934).

Evola’s radical elitism shaped the inspiration that he drew from Buddhism. From the late-19th century onwards, Western writers had conjured the historical Buddha variously as a Victorian gentleman, an Asian Christ, a gifted psychologist and a trailblazing democrat who rejected India’s caste system. Evola, by contrast, emphasised the Buddha’s noble origins as a member of the kshatriya (warrior) caste. It was from this noble birth, claimed Evola, that the Buddha — or “Prince Siddhattha”, as he refers to him in The Doctrine of Awakening (1943) — drew the strength required to engage in the asceticism that led to his enlightenment.

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The Buddha’s accomplishments were also, for Evola, a matter of “blood and spirit”. He regarded Buddhism as an Aryan doctrine, an expression of the genius of the “ancient Aryo-Mediterranean world” whose stand-out figures included Plato and the Roman Stoics. He also had great admiration for Zen. Here, for Evola, was a path characterised by serious individual effort, master-disciple transmission and strong links with Japan’s “warrior nobility”. Across long centuries, the samurai had been able to impart their vigour and imprint their values upon an entire people. Unfortunately, Zen had been introduced to the West by teachers, including D.T. Suzuki, who were too keen to connect it to modern Western thought and preoccupations. The result, thought Evola, was a concern with psychology over spiritual realities — self-improvement over transcendence and the awakening of the Absolute Individual — and with the misguidedly egalitarian notion that enlightenment is available to all.

In the end, Evola failed to sell either Italy’s Fascists or Germany’s Nazis on the Traditionalist project, not least because the deep elitism within Traditionalism made it an awkward partner for populist ultra-nationalism. He remained influential, however, in the post-war world. After a series of attempted bombings by Italian neo-fascists in 1949-50, some of them with links to Evola, he was arrested and charged under new laws against glorifying Fascism and promoting the revival of the Fascist Party. At his trial in 1951, Evola denied any links to Mussolini’s Fascist Party (he never joined it), but said that if one defined fascism in terms of being against democracy then Dante Alighieri would stand condemned and Evola himself could be regarded as a “superfascist”.

Evola was acquitted, but questions remained over whether he bore responsibility for terrorist attacks inspired by his ideas, when so many of Italy’s neo-fascists praised his writings and visited him at his apartment in Rome. Those questions became particularly pressing during and after Italy’s “Years of Lead”: a period running from 1969 to 1988 during which extremists on the Left and Right mounted thousands of attacks and killed more than 400 people.

Sales of Evola’s work received a boost in the mid-2010s, when Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon revealed himself to be a fan. Evola would have had little time for Bannon’s advocacy of Judaeo-Christian values and the free market. But part of his enduring appeal seems to lie in the big-canvas case that he made against modernity: the wrong people are currently in charge, and the right people have not just history but some combination of a racial-biological, moral and even cosmic order on their side. Sympathetic readers in an age of algorithm-driven anger — righteous, performative or some combination of the two — can draw on Evola’s outspoken confidence and chauvinism here while cherry-picking the details. Contemporary fans of his include Right and far-Right European political parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik and Greece’s Golden Dawn. He also appears to be an influence on writers including Bronze Age Pervert, author of the influential Bronze Age Manifesto (2018).

This weekend’s European elections have become a focal point for fears that disaffected young men seeking radical change — much the same demographic as the neo-fascists nurtured by Evola in his final years — are helping to drive a surge in support for far-Right parties. Europe’s Right-wing parties differ among themselves on some things: economic libertarians versus protectionists, pro-vs anti-Putin. But on migration and culture-war issues, they have much in common and plenty that they might draw from Evola’s thinking on tradition, race, the threat of social collapse posed by modernity, and politics not as technocratic tinkering but as a grand salvation project — witness the frequency with which the need to “save” a country or Europe as a whole is now invoked in political rhetoric.

Fans of the softer, more recessive side of Asia’s influence on the modern West should not get too comfortable at this point. The appeal of Asian ideas and practices to Evola in many ways resembled their attractions for Beats, hippies and contemporary practitioners of mindfulness, yoga and wellness more generally. They offer, we have been told, an enhanced clarity of seeing, beyond our tarnished cultures and ailing institutions. They promise to take a person beyond the mere accumulation of yet more knowledge, and instead to transform them — mind, body and spirit. It would be a stretch to say that yoga risks turning you into a fascist. But take a look at how wellness shows up on social media — exalting strength, suppleness, focus, vigour, stoic calm and a sense of superiority — and suddenly here, too, the darker sides of the 20th century don’t seem quite so far away.

This is clearly not a conventional Christian nativity. The epic poem of which these lines form a part tells another story altogether: peer into this particular cradle, and you would find not Jesus but the Buddha. Drawing on miraculous accounts of the Buddha’s birth, tales of his previous incarnations (Jatakas, or “birth stories”) and Matthew’s gospel, the journalist and poet Edwin Arnold conjured glorious and exotic scenes for what turned out to be a large readership. Published in 1879, The Light of Asia sold up to one million copies by the early Fifties, putting it on a par with Mark Twain’s Adven­tures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Christian critics accused Arnold of giving Buddhism a misleading makeover. Didn’t he know that Buddhists believed in rebirth? If his readers found Darwinism disturbing, how would they feel about waking up as an animal in the next life? And didn’t Arnold know that Buddhists were atheists, whose ultimate goal was annihilation? One of the things that most worried Arnold’s critics was how Christ-like his Buddha seemed to be, adding fuel to speculation that key elements of Christianity were derived from the older religion of Buddhism: the miraculous birth of a central figure, the contours of his life, and his ethical teachings.

A general rule observed by most practitioners of comparative linguistics, mythology and religion up until this point was that the special status of Christian revelation be respected. In the late 1700s, the pioneering linguist Sir William Jones had tried to protect the idea that all the peoples of the earth were descended from the sons of Noah after the Flood — even though his own nascent discipline made that difficult to sustain: Latin, Greek and Sanskrit clearly shared a common ancestor, but languages such as Hebrew didn’t fit the theory so neatly.

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When it came to stories of gods and goddesses around the world, all sorts of reasons were offered as to why they fell short of Christianity. Tales of Zeus turning himself into a bull and whisking away the princess (for some, goddess) Europa on his back was simply a fable, perhaps inspired by some historic event now forgotten. Myths might be interpreted, too, as revelatory of a culture’s ideals and preoccupations, or as proto-scientific attempts at explaining how the world works.

Similar myths could be found around the world, it was said, because a good story travels fast and because common threads in human experience inspire similar imaginings: a god who takes on human form, or who dies and rises again. But as ever more news about Asian religions circulated around the West in Arnold’s day, protestations of Christianity’s uniqueness became less a matter of real conviction than social or professional self-preservation — or else basic good manners.

There are those today who would give anything for this still to be a live public debate — but our annual tut-tutting about the “real meaning of Christmas” seems to be more a nostalgia for the world of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: snowy, cobbled streets; candlelight through frosted-up shopfront windows; the deserving poor; and a rich man who gets frightened into being nice.

This year, though, marks the 60th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963). It’s a reminder both of his Christmassy classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and of his own intriguing experiences with “myth”. A fan of Norse and Greek mythology as a child, and later a scholar of English literature, Lewis found that the joy he derived from myths sat painfully at odds with his rational, materialist view of reality. As he later recalled it: “nearly all that I loved, I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.”

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Across the Twenties, Lewis journeyed through philosophical idealism and pantheism before arriving at theism. He was not yet a Christian, but one evening in September 1931 he took a stroll along a section of the River Cherwell known as Addison’s Walk in the company of a couple of friends. One of them was J.R.R. Tolkien, a Catholic. “Tollers”, as Lewis called him, suggested that his friend approach the New Testament not as philosophy or history, but as myth. Lewis should give his imagination free rein — and see what happened.

Taking Tolkien’s advice, Lewis found himself caught in the “imaginative embrace” of Christianity. From within that embrace, he reconsidered the historical evidence for Christianity and concluded that it was a “true myth”: the Gospels spoke to deep human yearnings and were rooted in historical events. One of the 20th century’s most persuasive Christian apologists was born, and millions of children were in time gifted the imaginative world of Narnia — discovering as adults, to their joy or horror, that a Christian thread runs through it.

Lewis’s willingness to act on Tolkien’s advice seems remarkable given the taboos against doing so for an Oxford don 100 years ago. Then, as now, there was a common-sense notion that seeking reliable knowledge requires objectivity: you take yourself — and especially your emotions — out of the picture. Deliberately to engage the emotions, imagination and intuition, and then claim objective status for the results, was folly.

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Lewis lampooned this mindset by populating works of apologetics such as The Screwtape Letters with haughty gentleman-intellectuals. In their lives, narrowness of vision or hardness of heart can be found masquerading as critical acumen. They declare atheist materialism to be “true” when they really mean “convenient”, because it removes the sorts of constraints on lifestyle that are beneath a chap’s dignity.

As well as being a writer, Lewis was also a reader who knew a thing or two about stories. For him, as for other literary converts of his generation, bad stories were often the product of sick or desiccated societies. Graham Greene declared that characters in books by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster seemed to “wander . . . like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin”. Such writers were part of a milieu which had lost touch with reality, or had determined to live at an ironic remove from it.

Carl Jung broadly agreed, insisting that the deepest and most precious stories arise out of patterns in the human mind that run too deep to be articulated. This explains, thought Jung, why similar myths appear around the world and are echoed in people’s dreams. It also suggests, he claimed, that on occasion we ought to ask not whether a religious myth is true but whether it works: whether it channels some great truth beyond itself, preparing and opening us up to it.

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Drawing inspiration from these ideas of myth, the philosopher Herbert Fingarette set out what he called the “special fate of modern man”: “He has a ‘choice’ of spiritual visions… Each requires complete commitment for complete validity [and yet today] we see that no one of them is the sole vision. Thus we must learn to be naive but undogmatic. That is, we must take the vision as it comes and trust ourselves to it, naively, as reality.”

The word “naive” might appear to play into the hands of religion’s critics. But Fingarette noted, as did many others across the 20th century, that the modern West is somewhat unusual in relying on forms of religion that expect the intellect to do all the heavy lifting. Elsewhere, in traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, a great deal of attention is paid to adapting the style and content of religious teaching to fit the full range of people’s capacities: drawing them out via their imagination, intuition, emotions, memory, sense of beauty, even the bodily postures of prayer or yoga.

This sometimes gets interpreted as palming the masses off with fairy-tales while concealing some elevated truth for the educated — in the words of Alan Watts, “put[ting] the pearls in a place where the swine can’t reach them”. Ideally, it is more about involving the whole person in reaching out to the divine, expanding the notion of “knowing” from being able to articulate an idea in words to something more akin to swimming in the sea. It is knowledge via immersion, or participation, and the way to it can be opened by the imagination.

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Having recently finished reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with my daughters, I wonder whether we are losing our collective ear for myth, such that we treat as a nice piece of artwork hanging on the wall what is really a window waiting to be looked through — from both sides. What if some things really do only make sense, at first, from within an “imaginative embrace”?

I expect to spend a certain amount of Christmas on a sofa with my children, immersing ourselves in the ever-more complicated — and deeply mythological — Marvel universe. If it can be done from a sofa, perhaps it can be done from a pew on Christmas day. I wouldn’t equate these two worlds, by any means, but something of Fingarette’s naivety and trust is surely required in encountering both. Who knows, maybe there will be more than coats at the back of the wardrobe.

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.

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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.

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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”.

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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?

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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.

The New Atheism of the 2000s and early 2010s had serious flaws. And yet Richard Dawkins was surely onto something when he sought to shake religious traditions by their metaphorical lapels and demand that they explain what exactly they are doing when they use religious language. Is it history, proto-science, poetry or something else entirely? For all that Christian commentators enjoyed depicting the likes of Dawkins as wading out into deep theological waters and promptly drowning, this basic question was manifestly a good one — one on which there has long been disagreement among Christians of varying stripes.

This is part of what intrigues me about Paul Kingsnorth’s and Martin Shaw’s conversions to Orthodox Christianity, in both cases via paths that ran through the natural world — Kingsnorth as an environmentalist and one-time Wicca priest, Shaw as a wilderness vigil guide. The two friends claim to be feeling their way towards what they call a “wild Christianity” — which could represent a new turn in our relationship with religion.

Somewhere near the heart of wild Christianity appears to be a powerful sense of numinous presence, within nature and within the Orthodox liturgy, which is at once compelling and strange. In an age of endless cultural recycling, the two men are calling for the cultivation of an attentive silence, in natural surrounds. We have all but lost this ability to listen, but we can re-learn with the help of others: the medieval saints of Ireland, where Kingsnorth now lives, alongside cultures around the world who understand the value of what Shaw calls “putting your great and ancient ear to the dark soil of circumstance and listening”.

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Is there anything left to conserve?

By Paul Kingsnorth

The pair are not the first to make the case for a radical, untethered Christianity, free from the trials of institutional religion. In many respects, Kingsnorth reminds me of an English Benedictine monk by the name of Bede Griffiths (1906-1993). His attempt to revitalise Western Christianity, alongside that of the English philosopher and counter-culture guru Alan Watts, who died 50 years ago this month, turned on the question of how language and inner experience shape one another. I suspect that this may end up being true, too, for wild Christianity.

For Watts, as a child, life’s magic could be found in the beauty and fecundity of the family garden — tomatoes and raspberries hanging off vines like “glowing, luscious jewels” — and later in East Asian landscape painting, Zen Buddhism, and yoga. Griffiths, too, was drawn in by nature — in his case, a spiritual awakening one evening on the school playing fields, set off by the sound of birdsong: “Everything… grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth… I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel.”

Watts and Griffiths regarded the general drabness of mid-20th century Britain as evidence of a fundamental disconnect from life at this deep level: the funereal black suit that Watts’s father wore for work; the “boxy, red-brick quiet-desperation homes” to which Watts saw such men returning home at night.

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Unsure what to do about all this, Griffiths and some university friends experimented with living a simple life in a Cotswold cottage: no running water; no technology or literature produced after the 17th century; and candlelit debates about whether, if the village blacksmith could somehow craft an X-ray machine, it would be acceptable to use it.

But Griffiths soon realised that his venture failed to get to the real problem, which was the placing of human beings — and, in particular, a discriminating human intellect — at the heart of reality. Having quit the Cotswolds, he spent a traumatic night of prayer in Bethnal Green, where he found his still-tentative personal philosophy — Christianity with a dash of Eastern wisdom — completely destroyed, as an “abyss” of darkness and unreason overtook him. Out on the street the next morning, London’s buses appeared to “have lost their solidity and [to] be glowing with light”. God, he concluded, had “brought me to my knees, and made me acknowledge my own nothingness… out of that knowledge I had been reborn”.

Watts came to a similar conclusion one evening in his boarding school dormitory, where frustration at his failed practice of yoga and zazen boiled over and he decided to drop both — at which point, quite unexpectedly, “Alan Watts” got dropped instead. Anxious little Alan was, he realised, no more than a case of mistaken identity. The real Alan Watts was part of an immeasurably greater and inextinguishable whole. The release was profound, and its memory never left him.

Watts went on to make a name for himself on America’s West Coast in the Fifties and Sixties, as a gifted communicator of Eastern wisdom — to young Americans especially, often on college campuses — and a progressive thinker on everything from psychotherapy to sex and LSD. For a few years before that, however, he served as an Episcopal priest in America’s Midwest. There, he observed that, unlike in India where Shiva dances and Krishna plays the flute, Midwestern church-goers sit amid heavy courthouse furniture — pews and pulpits — apologising to God, “asking him not to spank” them, praising him in formulae, and engaging in enforced folksiness and “fake joy”. An institutionalised pride is at work here, Watts declared. Everyone talks about grace, but most people want to work for their own salvation — and to see it denied to people who don’t put in the hard yards.

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This, he thought, gives rise to a narrow notion of “meaning”: an endlessly deferred happiness. The idea that play might be a more accurate analogy than work for the divine life and our participation in it would, Watts felt sure, strike most congregants as blasphemous. And yet, this was what one of his later LSD trips revealed to him: reality as a giant game of hide-and-seek, with the universe playing at being lots of different things and people. It is not dissimilar to the Taoist philosophy of “flow”, in which reality is akin to breath or water.

Some of Watts’s ecclesiastical colleagues suspected him of being little more than a pantheist with a gift for semantics. And therein lay the challenge. No doubt Watts’s pioneering church services were lots of fun to attend: conversation and jokes, Gregorian chant and piano improvisations, smoking and drinking, sermons capped at 15 minutes. But where was Jesus Christ in all of this? Watts suggested that God is “personal” in the sense of being “immeasurably alive”. Yet wasn’t his image of God just a little too convenient: personal enough to be lively, interesting, and joyous, but not so personal as to make demands of him or censure his behaviour — his “boozing and wenching”, as Watts put it?

Griffiths eventually faced similar questions. Having become a Catholic and a Benedictine in the Thirties, he moved to south India in the mid-Fifties and began to pioneer new forms of monasticism and inter-religious dialogue. He ended up developing a deep fondness and respect for Hinduism, and in particular the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Advaita Vedanta philosophy. His ecumenical work was widely praised and seemed well-suited to the post-colonial era. And yet, asked his critics, was this still Christianity?

Still, Watts’s fanbase seems to renew itself in every generation. Where once they thumbed through his paperbacks on the hippie trail, now they have podcasts and YouTube videos of his talks. Read the comments underneath those videos, and liberation remains the key to his appeal decade after decade.

There is much here that might contribute to a “wild Christianity”: Watts’s warnings about safe, nostalgic religion as a kind of collective clinging; his intuition of a God who is “immeasurably alive”; his self-confessed “rascality”. I’m not sure, however, that liberation by itself is enough. Don’t we soon find ourselves back where we were, and in need of liberation once again? Griffiths, who defined faith as “utter receptivity to the divine”, thought that real liberation was a matter of attentive, committed listening, moving step by step according to what you hear as you go. A Christianity built on that, and capable of generating community from it, is a wild idea indeed.