Is Japan Politically Correct?

Of course not, says Jean-Marie Bouissou in Les Leçons du Japon (2019). The spectacular arrest of Carlos Ghosn, (former) CEO of Renault-Nissan chipped the glaze of official Tokyo—politesse, cherry blossom and this year’s Olympics—partly because Tokyo criminal prosecutors enjoy an eye-watering 99 per cent conviction rate, and perhaps partly because the last prosecutor to have such a good run in France was Robespierre. In Brazil, by contrast, Ghosn’s country of origin, conviction rates in the Lava Jato corruption cases are less than 1 per cent.¹ Anglo-Saxons who prefer the golden mean hang little thieves and set the big ones free. Some things true in French are not so in ruder tongues. Are the French lessons true in English?

I

First, every language has its comparative advantage, so the language you want to use depends on what you want to do. English is excellent for practical life, good for swearing, inapt for philosophy; German is excellent for both philosophy and swearing, inapt for practical life; and French is excellent for practical life and philosophy but little or no use for swearing, which is may be why France is in an anxious state of mind.² According to the notably relaxed title character of The Good Soldier Schweik, Czech beats all-comers for rudeness, though Spanish and Russian apparently come close; anyone who knows Portuguese is welcome to send me a note. If consensus is what you want, Japanese at least makes everyone look as though they are trying hard.³ The truth is not so much out there as anamorphic.

French droit de seigneur in cultural arbitrage exists for good reason. Modern ideas of self-regarding individualism, wrongly seen as originating in Renaissance or Enlightenment times, began with Louis XIV and Versailles, which Tom Cruise once booked for a day with Kidman, and where Ghosn married. The Sun King’s fantasies remain hallmarks of today: fancy dress to impress, expensive perfumes to hide nasty body odours, eating and drinking without regard to health or the company budget. France exported these ideals, and still sells the pricey clothes, perfumes and drinks needed to live up to them. America helped. Part of its complicated relation with France stems from the fact that France once owned much of America but Napoleon realised too late the secret of property investment is long-hold, not selling on a weak market. Jefferson, a plain or shabby dresser, rejected the fancy clothes but kept the language, food and wine, to all of which he was a lifelong devotee.⁴ And sunny Californian villages still export films drenched in French memes, including to Japan, though Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, a crass movie of Oriental stereotypes, is not one of them.⁵

Caution, however, is required in defining national traits and character. This art became politically incorrect in 1915 when Richard Hannay told a Scottish electoral meeting on Free Trade all he “could remember about Australia, praying there should be no Australian there”. Aldous Huxley was “sceptical of those grandiose generalisations about racial and national characteristics so beloved of a certain class of literary people”. Recently, Michel Houellebecq announced that “Japanese society is more traditionalist than is often thought—without fear of contradiction as no one in the café, rue Ménilmontant, knew Japan or the Japanese”. And Jake Adelstein, an American crime reporter formerly living in Tokyo, has no time for “two-bit culture students of Japan who show that conformity and so on are ‘typical’ Japanese character traits”.⁶   

The more or less scholarly Edward Said fuelled the same kind of scepticism when his landmark Orientalism criticised three centuries of European narrative concerning conquest of the Orient and its peoples.⁷ According to Said, writers as different as Montesquieu, who opposed divine right in France, and Bernard Lewis, who supported divine right in America, all put about the same idea, namely, that “Orientals” were all the same—tradition-minded and therefore conservative; community-minded and therefore not self-regarding individualists; unquestioning of authority or—in the scientific sense—of the natural order of things. But after this, the list of the Orient lost focus. Orientals became, for example, at once too other-worldly—believers in religions—and too worldly—kleptomaniacs apt to steal from Europeans going about the honest trade of looting treasure.

Much anger fuelled Said’s book—which should have been called Anti-Orientalism—that proved oddly attractive to later Western scholars in search of career, stimulated more perhaps by what they hoped for than by what they knew. At this extreme, pre-figured by the UN Declaration on Human Rights (one of the world’s great unread documents, unread at least by Wes Anderson) postmoderns assert all humans to be one race.

Such theories are usually founded on the ideas of Rousseau, democrat in French, sociopath in English. Rousseau got his imaginary notions on noble savages from sanitised travel books, immensely popular in his day, which were plagiarised from explorers’ accounts, and which glossed over the miserable sex lives of real savages in the manner later adopted by Romantic poetry and sunny Californian villages.⁸ The theories are easily dreamed up sailing alone on Lake Geneva, lazing in the lagoon or filming for the mass market, but tend to dry out on land. To cut short a long debate over essence, existence and reality, one can easily agree that humans are of one race with the same rights, as Gandhi did endorsing the UN consensus on human rights, but dispute the inference of sameness, as Gerald Durrell did when he wrote My Family and Other Animals. Jefferson, who came from one of the loneliest places in America, famously followed Rousseau when he posited all humans were created equal, which seems correct if he meant before the law, but according to Bentham an obvious falsehood if he meant in fact.⁹ To set one French idea against another, differences of national temperament prove existence precedes essence—a contrarian view held by Sartre. And no one questioned La Bruyère when he said “the human spirit and its moods, passions, tastes and sentiments depend crucially on place”.¹⁰ At any rate, anyone who has had anything do with other countries will challenge the idea that all people are the same.

II

Bouissou has had to do with Japan for decades, and doesn’t think the Japanese are the same. He is a student of many bits: he married there, spent fifteen years living and working there and has by now a lifetime of thinking in Japanese. His daily experiences—walking a toddler to school, happenings in his community, work in Waseda University, Japanese media and business analysis, including of Japanese over-employment, and a (rare) brush with the yakuza—show him the Japanese are tradition-minded, deferential to authority, community-minded and less individualist than Westerners. Traditional attitudes, he says, are accepted by both sexes: both think a woman’s place really is in the home, a prejudice unknown in France where literature shows both sexes think a woman’s place is in bed. Children are divinised.¹¹ In Japan national myths are still accepted without question: the uniqueness of Japan’s creation, of Japanese people, quasi-divinity of the Emperor and so on. National stories are under question in many places around the world today but national culture disallows this in Japan, says Bouissou, possibly overlooking the statism of Louis XIV which disallows it in France. Japanese media are anodyne—controversial stories are by-lined from foreign papers—in contrast to the everyday truculence of Western media which thrive on exposing controversies, such as “bullshit jobs”, perhaps the West’s own form of overemployment.¹² Japanese exceptionalism means harmony, keeping the community together. Society is absolute.

On the conviction rate of Tokyo police, Bouissou agrees the foreigner may be targeted but points out innocent Japanese are treated the same way, and why. Besides shaming outside court, school, ministry or company building, “offenders” must put on an emotional public performance of contrition involving gestures of symbolic suicide and real tears. (How-to books on actual suicide rank among the most popular books sold in Japan every year.) The reason is that awareness of an individual’s crime floods the whole community, endangers its psychic well-being and must be purged. It is an ancient notion, cognate with the Hebrew idea of the scapegoat: innocence becomes secondary to preserving the community.¹³

Orientalist stereotypes of Japan, however, can go only so far. First, on religion, Bouissou shows that, as in China, there are no gods in Japan in the Western sense of a “jealous other-worldly God who will bear no other god”, a doctrine still resounding in post-Christian Western countries like radiation from the Big Bang, and equally unlikely to go away soon (on which more below).¹⁴ According to Bouissou, the Japanese worldview is a pragmatic mix of Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism, which in their ordinary practice in Japan are naturalist religions of ritual drawn up to allow the accident of life in this part of the universe to be carried on decently. None has to do with earning an eternal afterlife in a transcendental sphere, an ancient Indo-European idea to which Semitic peoples added intensity before passing it on to the West.¹⁵ It turns out to be the Westerner, post-Christian or not, who is obsessed with religion.

A book offering the English-speaking Westerner some feel for the Japanese mentality is Haruki Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase, a plot set among Japan’s earliest people, the Ainu.¹⁶ Despite its magical realism, or because of it, this book has a strictly non-transcendental worldview. Oddly, cultural references are not to Japanese philosophy but to European philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, much influenced by Asia.¹⁷ Yet the book could not have been written by either Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, or indeed by anyone working in European languages, no doubt part of the book’s foreign appeal, even in translation. Anything written on the Continent is soaked in the atmosphere of post-Christian Europe, while the English-speaking churches, more part of the informal social fabric and not naive enough to take up with philosophy, have never had any sort of French or German nineteenth century.¹⁸ Some corroboration comes from Houellebecq’s Sérotonine (2019), structurally similar to Wild Sheep but philosophically opposed. Murakami’s persona consumes endless Cokes (the drink) and beers just as Houellebecq’s consumes endless smokes and wines, and both punctuate narrative phases by accounts of casual sex. But for Murakami the world is what it is, while post-Christian Houellebecq cannot resist a final Christian trope, albeit an ironical one. For Murakami, the world is odd but without mystery; for Houellebecq it is odd and ultimately full of mystery.

The difference between writers lays bare the reason for the recent centuries-long gap between Eastern stagnation and Western energy. One view—often put about by door-stopping books from North America—has been that in the West science and objective reason displaced religious superstition to yield secularisation, dynamism and progress. This view gets cause and effect of Enlightenment in the West exactly the wrong way round.

Without going into Western Church history—the facts from the investiture of Pepin by Julian II to claims of full powers of government on Earth by lawyer-pope Innocent III can be got from any university reference—the main lessons are as follows.¹⁹ Theistic Middle Eastern religions, including Eastern and Russian churches and Islam, focus on a transcendental god “up there above”, while other Asian religions, including Shintoism, focus on an immanent “down here and now”, generally without much reference to gods. Absent interaction between transcendental and immanent, the here-and-now strikes that static, changeless note typical of Eastern Europe and old Asia. By contrast, the Western European Church was forced—more willingly than that sounds—to assume secular powers left in a vacuum by the fall of Rome, and to mix the transcendental with the immanent. As Marcel Gauchet shows, this combination is structurally unstable: the two can be mixed in any combination that pleases, and Church history from the Inquisition to Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and America’s notorious enthusiasts today shows it still pleases.²⁰ Setting aside details of interest to scholars, the essential point here is the structural tension which generated dynamism in Western European thought and the impetus that continues as part of the post-Christian inheritance. Creative instability, a defining feature of Western ecclesiastical history, made and makes movement and flexibility natural everywhere in the West, and under the demonstration effect, newly attractive in Asia. It is this dynamic that has spun off secularisation, science and progress, not the other way around.

Carpe diem is essential to understand the Japanese worldview, a worldview in English too of course, but lived far more intensely in societies of the immanent such as Japan. Japanese art, theatre and the entertainment district reveal that for Japanese, life is what it is and happiness a brief and transient moment which can be neither prolonged nor essentially improved in the vulgar manner thought by Adam Smith, Bentham and Western philosophers of worldly happiness down to Steven Pinker, an American psychologist, today.²¹ In this sense, those 1980s Japanese business books, think Kenichi Ohmae’s Mind of the Strategist, once to be spotted on the desks of self-improving Western trade policy strategists, were counter-cultural.

This general background may account for the unwritten rules of Japanese life that are liable to be missed or misunderstood by visiting Westerners, such as Japan’s sexual obsession free of Western complexes, not the same as libertinism, or Japan’s insouciance about population decline, not to be confused with fatalism. Japan’s unwritten codes on sexual politics are based not on transcendental values but on balancing the practices of Japanese office workers, who famously “over-work” far into the night, with the ultimate priority of family and community over individuals.²² Japan is changing, albeit slowly, says Bouissou, including allowing counter-cultural women to work. And Michel Houellebecq identifies little or no difference in the sexual appetites of Japanese women from those of other women on his lists. If these writers are correct, presumably the same unwritten rules will apply to the new services now reported to be appearing for the overworked Japanese businesswoman.²³

Post-Ohmae Japan goes about plans to stabilise its population at about 100 million (down from 128 million) without the national angst that would likely infect Western countries, and without the prospects of economic war once foreseen with Europe and America in the days when Japan was the world’s largest economy. Herman Kahn, an American futurist, predicted this battle, as did Lester Thurow, an economist, although Thurow was unlucky enough to do so at the very moment Japan slipped into four decades of economic crisis, still without end in sight. War has now been postponed or removed to a venue nearby with a new cast. Japan, meanwhile, seems endlessly under the tutelage of America, whose armed forces have in principle freedom of movement in Japan.²⁴

III

Frankly, with the exception of who should apologise for what over last century’s wars, writing in English on Japanese culture seems not to have troubled itself much about the political correctness of Japan and the Japanese. In part, this is because English has a natural immunity to abstract ideas, among which political correctness is the most abstract yet, present everywhere and nowhere, less graspable even than the previous title-holder, market forces. The other reason is writers in English ask other questions—whether Japan can pay its pensions bill, escape the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party or America … in short, whether Japan is “modern” or “normal”.²⁵

Problems of abstraction arise here too. A sore-thumb review of Japanese history shows its population is composite, a resolutely tradition- and class-bound people with language and culture imprinted by all her mainland neighbours; an island country on the surviving edge of a partly drowned continent, bathed by warm ocean currents and fog. But this could be Britain. Half-divine, half-human kingly figures, a Middle Eastern notion, used to exist most everywhere. And as the Earth’s crust continues to cool and shrink, more continents will flood—so a Treaty Against Earth-Shrinking may yet emerge from one of those glass-fronted rooms where earnest talk amid care breathed for the world’s young people ends in “Let’s do this thing!”

The real difference in history, as always, is luck.²⁶ Starting 2000 years ago, Japan lived in poverty and terror under incompetent rule until the Shogun seventeenth century, which inaugurated competent rule without changing anything else.²⁷ From not dissimilar beginnings, England evolved feudal stability, Tudor authoritarianism, then unexpectedly, modern government in the 1688 “Glorious Revolution”—glorious for oligarchs, later for the people, never much so for kings half or fully divine. Since this turning point, England has spent three and half centuries trying on the idea that countries have no friends, only interests—business interests, that is—and playing one neighbour against another, always consummately, often successfully. Here, Japan is in catch-up mode, though not from such a low base as usually thought—and perhaps only Aesop knows how the race may end. States which see themselves as businesses can only wish Japan and England good luck.

According to Ian Buruma, a Dutch scholar who works in English, Chinese and Japanese, Japan studied the West far more closely than it has been given credit for—and far more closely than China did, which he thinks was a bit slipshod about it. Here Buruma is certainly too harsh on China: where the study of Marx is concerned, thousands of pages of nineteenth-century professorial German, slipshod is not only good, it is perhaps the only way. For Japan, however, Buruma shows that eighteenth-century links to Holland led to some catch-up well before Commander Perry appeared in 1853. Holland, avatar of soft power as of countries that see themselves as businesses, had long been telling Japan that opening up to the West, modernisation and globalisation were inevitable and irreversible. With studied diplomatic intent, Holland sent the language and books by which modernity, the Western scientific culture and Dutch business excellence first entered Japan.²⁸

Japan thereafter chose carefully what it wanted to accept from the West. It scoured the nineteenth-century market for new politico-legal systems before giving the nod to Bismarck’s package, a tried and tested system which seemed to get better results than the organised chaos of British parliaments (which Stalin, who knew Britain well, also turned down for Russia). Its constitution and laws were drawn up along the top-down lines favoured—sometimes drafted—by German jurists until the end of the Second World War.

Famously, General Macarthur then tried to put an American individualist stamp on Japan. But nobody told Macarthur—although to be fair no record shows anyone could tell him anything—that tensions between the collective and the individual cannot be resolved by hard power. New laws, for example, abolished the ancient concept of family, replacing it with American nomenclature, yet the old idea still rules culturally—just as “caste”, which the British abolished by law in India, remains a nerve centre there today.²⁹ Every country’s worldview is deep-seated, shaped by place and time, centuries, if not millennia. A worldview amounts to what philosophers like to call a “systemic whole”, immune to partial tinkering. Hegel was following La Bruyère’s lead when he said: “all … elements of a nation’s actuality constitute one systematic totality, that one spirit creates and informs them”.³⁰

This is obviously true of England, a culture pickled in traditions, apt to take any foreign element and alter it until it looks locally made. Nyozekan Hasegawa showed this also true of Japan. And Buruma subsequently shows that cultural misunderstanding can arise over the gap between the cultural disciplines Japanese apply to themselves and the live-and-let-live approach they apply to the foreigner.³¹

Curiously, foreigners including libertarians seem to find it attractive to live and work in Japan, home of tight family and community norms. Amélie Nothomb, who is Belgian, wrote in her memoir of infancy in Tokyo that until she was three she believed herself to be Japanese and was distraught to discover she was not.³² Adelstein notes that Mark Karpelès, an eccentric French libertarian born and raised in Toulouse, city of revolutionaries, was never at home in France yet instantly so in Tokyo. This homing-affect has nothing to do with tolerance in Japan and everything to do with Japan’s worldview. According to Buruma, while the Japanese live in something of a communitarian prison, they will accept any conduct from the foreigner in the same way they accept any conduct from beasts in the zoo. Houellebecq agrees; he excused the zoo-like caprices of his anti-heroine, Yuzu, on the ground that, for her, sex with the foreigner was bestiality already. Bouissou says Japanese assume the bizarre ways of the foreigner are normal in the foreigner’s culture, not worthy of respect exactly, but like physical handicaps, not really calling for censure. If this reasoning is correct, Japanese people will not find Donald Trump grotesque.

The foreigner, it seems, is not part of Japan until it comes to messaging when he or she enters communitarian prison too. This at least is Adelstein’s view in his 2019 book, Sold My Soul for BitCoin, which narrates the staged arrest of Karpelès in 2017, after the failure of Mt Gok, a Bitcoin mining company Karpelès founded in Tokyo. Publication of the book coincided with Ghosn’s similar arrest a year later but the coincidence was not improbable. In Tokyo, says Adelstein, staged arrests are the norm.

But, he says, the foreigner is the ideal victim to accuse and convict when police want to get a “message” out to the decadent, libertarian West. Notable targets have been French, but others have been targeted—American and British senior executives were charged in the Olympus and Toyota scandals. Adelstein thinks readers in the decadent, libertarian West may want to brush up on Tokyo law, especially as Bitcoin, one flagship of contemporary libertarianism, seems to be unravelling.³⁴ He sounds a warning note about the attractiveness of Tokyo for foreign writers, executives, sportspeople—anyone else who finds the freedom of Tokyo more agreeable than life at home.

Fans of Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice and The Last of the Yakuzas will see in Sold My Soul for Bitcoin the same search for justice based on the idea the truth is in there somewhere. His style is straight Dashiell Hammett, shaken not stirred, hard-boiled but not indifferent, better adapted to modern tastes than, say, Dante or Dostoevsky whose existential angst is too solemn nowadays. He gives credit where credit is due, and lauds courage, sacrifice and professionalism among Tokyo police, who work in brutal, inhumane conditions. And he agrees the 99 per cent conviction rate is not a matter of national discrimination. The same rate applies to Japanese citizens accused of crime. For Japanese criminal investigators, any accused is “in nine out of ten cases … presumed guilty until proven guilty”.³⁵

Still, change may be in the air. Ito Shiori’s La Boîte Noire (2019) slates the muted tone of the “WeToo” movement in Japan where she claims sexual harassment is endemic and officially condoned.³⁶ She outlines cases, including her own, of police obstruction or failure to investigate let alone prosecute allegations of rape, despite overwhelming evidence. Like other writers, she sees sexual obsession in Japan and links to inner circles of political power. Adelstein’s obverse, she notes inaction and silence where he reports media-fuelled police prosecution. But her case is now in the courts and—perhaps further sign of change—is being carried in the Japan Times by its own reporters.

Conclusion

Successive waves of Western modernity have struck Japan but have they changed its worldview? J.K. Galbraith remarked that, like China, Japan knew well what it wanted to accept from the West and what to reject. Before him Aldous Huxley was more doubtful. He saw Yokohama and other great Japanese cities as dusty extensions of Manchester or Detroit dominated by smoky factories, not cherry blossom. Media reports now often suggest the decades of growth have brought more prosperity but not more happiness, more individualism but less community, more Bentham but less Confucius. Sixty years on from Galbraith, Buruma notes that the Japanese don’t think Japan a normal country, and that they worry why.

But worry about being normal may be the new normal. French anxieties show France in a similar case, and other countries casting a new look at how the genes of their history form them today may join in. Time will tell. Meanwhile an ageing Japan globalises further. The words of Balthasar Gracian, a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest who heard confessions during the last globalisation in Spain, speak to such times: “Be ye good, but if not, be careful.”

Notes

1 Three out of 404 cases: The Economist, April 13^th, 2019, p.36.

2 Shackleton found swearing vital for leadership and survival for Englishmen shipwrecked in winter in Antarctica: Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Philadelphia, 2007. On French intellectual history, see Theodore Zeldin’s France 1848 – 1945, Vol II, Intellect, Taste, Anxiety, Oxford, 1977, and Alain Minc’s La mondialisation heureuse, Paris, 1997, p.205, updated in Voyage au Centre du Système, Paris, 2019, p.18. Minc considered France, an archaic centralising state, too slow to respond to global liberalisation, which is irreversible, and has paid a price in national doom and gloom. Yet he marvels at French pessimism: Americans invest more in France than in Britain or Germany; and tourists, who vote with their wallets, still rate France the best patch of real estate on the planet; the foreigner’s only worry is that the French worry about France. Two excellent books in English on anxiety and joy in France are True Pleasures, A Memoir of Women in Paris, Sydney, 2004, by Lucinda Holdforth, a former Australian diplomat; and The Secret Life of France, London, 2009, by Lucy Wadham.

3 Ian Buruma, A Japanese Mirror, London, 1984, 2012, p.221. Written Japanese superficially resembles Chinese because of the script but is otherwise unrelated; Florian Coulmas/Judith Stalpers, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Japan, Munich, 2011, p. 59.

4 Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power, New York, 2012, p.191; p.464.

5 Edward O. Reischauer, former American ambassador to Japan, reviews stereotypes of Japan held by Japan’s neighbours, but asserts change has been as important as continuity, much (he thinks) as it has been in America which no one now expects to act like her Puritan forbears; The Japanese Today, Cambridge, 1977, p.125. But comparing America’s political conduct with its roots in seventeenth century England shows precisely the opposite; John Goodman, “The Global Ethical Mission of the United States,” Quadrant, May, 2017, p.29.

6 John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, London, 1915, 2011, p.53. Aldous Huxley, “Nationality in Love” in On the Margin, Notes and Essays, London, 1932, p.95. Michel Houellebecq, Sérotonine, Paris, 2019, p.130 (writer’s translation). Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice, 2019, p.247. In “Who do they think they are?”, The Economist, July 27^th, 2019, p.22, Banyan largely follows this line of thought about Japan.

7 Orientalism, London, 1978. Hamid Dabashi thinks Said more scholarly – “Edward Said’s Orientalism Forty Years Later,” Aljazeera, 3 May, 2018 – and William D. Rubinstein less – “The Middle Eastern Fantasies of Edward Said,” Quadrant, July-August, 2019, p.58.

8 The current state of historical scholarship on cannibalism seems unsatisfactory. Anthropologist Marvin Harris’ paradigm-setting Cannibals and Kings, New York, 1977, shows cannibalism’s role in the evolution of civilization; and modern Australasian genetic, linguistic, ethnographic and anthropological work, summarised in Stephen Oppenheimer’s East of Eden, London, 1998, shows Pacific history, presumably like cannibalism itself, goes back at least four to eight thousand years. Varieties of the practice have been surveyed in The Religions of Oceania by Tony Swain and Garry Trompf, London, 1995. Yet historians have been coy. Books written a century ago such as William Pember Reeves’ The Long White Cloud, 3rd edition, London, 1924, assume cannibalism without citing any sources; Anne Salmond’s modern histories – Two World’s: First meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772, Viking, 1991, and Between Two Worlds: Early exchanges between Maori and Europeans, 1773- 1815, Penguin, 1997, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, Penguin, 2003 – seem unaware of the new science, and her historical sources are hearsay or circumstantial – bar one which shows (decisively) Cook was carved up, barbecued and eaten by his captors. Histories by Maori writers such as Michael King’s Nga Iwi O Te Motu, 1000 years of Maori History, Auckland, 1997, or his Penguin History of New Zealand, Penguin, 2012, neither list the subject in indices nor treat it in text. Peter Fitzsimmons’ entertaining Mutiny on the Bounty, Sydney, 2018, sees the Pacific through a Romantic lens, and disguises the fate of Cook. But if science can now show the role of specific genes evolved over centuries and millennia in, for example, alcoholism, depression and the mentality of peoples, is this good enough today?

9 Bentham, who held the accountant’s view of reality, considered Jefferson (indeed most people) among the world’s dreamers, albeit a well-read one. Incidentally, Jefferson cut and pasted not only his Declaration but also – like Tolstoy in the next century – the New Testament letters in red, which he organised into what he thought was a more persuasive order. On this basis, had Jefferson been more accountant and less agreeable persuader, America – partial democracy and elected monarchy – might be in less strife today.

10 La Bruyère, Les caractères, Paris, 1688, 1965, p.145 (writer’s translation).

11 Amelie Nothomb’s Métaphysique des tubes, Paris, 2000, is an amusing personal recollection of this process as she grew from birth to a three-year old. Strictly, Nothomb’s “memory” of all this must depend on poetic licence and/or other evidence, family anecdotes, photos etc. According to research in Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion, New York, 2017, the memory function in the human brain is not formed until after three years, but Nothomb’s book reads none the less well for that.

12 Stanley Bing, 100 Bullshit Jobs, and How to Get Them, New York, 2007.

13 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, 1977, Chs. 1 and 2.

14 Among many paradoxes, for example, are those who refuse to identify themselves as Christian but who maintain their countries are. The best exploration of this group of ideas is still Marcel Gauchet’s seminal Le désenchantement du monde, Paris,1984. A recent English take is Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood, Religion and the History of Violence, London, 2014.

15 Henri Frankfort et al, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East, Chicago, 1946.

16 A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982, trans. Alfred Birnbaum, London, 1990.

17 Charles A Moore (ed), The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture, Honolulu, 1967; Peter Pörtner/Jens Heise, Die Philosophie Japans, Von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart, 1995. Graham Parkes (ed) Nietzsche and Asian Thought, Chicago, 1996.

18 George Eliot aimed to educate nineteenth century England but her voice from the English provinces is still to arrive in places of English authority. She translated David Strauss’ pathbreaking Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, but then as perhaps now, anything German was too German for England (also nowadays for once German-literature-friendly America). Equally, few other countries have had a Victorian nineteenth century, with decently clad piano legs, and its unintended consequence, the creation of a clandestine pornography industry, now global. though now less evident in public even in Japan as researchers note it has migrated on-line, available to everybody. Elsewhere, the erotic has been fully integrated into culture and/or religion; see for example, Devangana Desai’s Erotic Sculpture of India, A Sociocultural Study, New Delhi, 1975, which also draws on research elsewhere. On Victorian pornography, see, Steven Marcus’ The Other Victorians, London, 1967.

19 For example, Walter Ullmann, Medieval Papalism, London, 1949; R W Southern, The Middle Ages, London, 1970.

20 Gauchet, op cit.

21 Stephen Pinker, Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, New York, 2018. Pinker shows little or no awareness of the origins of Western dynamism, nor of the central question, which is not whether intensification of a civilization through technology is possible – the world is littered with the ruins of civilizations that were technologically successful over thousands of years – but whether intensification is sustainable for ever. History so far shows it is not.

22 With a view to helping foreigners understand this, Bouissou says new symbolic laws of restriction appear with each Olympics, first in 1958, more, shortly. The continuity of earthy folk attitudes to sex lies deep in Japan, among countries that never had an English nineteenth century, according to Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters, Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, Durham, 1999.

23 Ito Shiori, La Boîte Noire, (Tokyo, 2017), Arles, 2019; Michel Houellebecq, Sérotonine, Paris, 2019. Somerset Maugham famously reported in The Summing Up that a lifetime’s observation had shown him no difference between the sexes in the matter of sex; recent writing by or about women in both hemispheres perhaps bears him out today: Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, New York, 2014; Jacinta Tynan (ed), Some Girls Do, NSW, 2018; and Roland Moore, Land Girls, London, 2018. The prevalence of “MeToo’ in English-speaking countries may have to do not only with who gives offence for just punishment – for women may offend too – but with the battle of the sexes, possibly more culturally significant in the Anglosphere than in, say, France, Japan …

24 Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response, Englewood Cliffs, 1970; Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America, New York, 1992.

25 “Japan’s Broken Politics,” The Economist, July 20, 2019, p.19. Political correctness on war guilt, once seen to run one way only, may be changing: see Adam Wakeling, Stern Justice, The Forgotten story of Australia, Japan and the Pacific War Crimes Trials, Penguin Australia, 2018, p. 307; Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes, Durham, 2016, and T Fujitani et al (eds), Perilous Memories, The Asia-Pacific Wars, Durham, 2001. A recent book analysing interwoven risks in the China, Japan and America “security triangle” is Richard McGregor’s Asia’s Reckoning, The Struggle for Global Dominance, Penguin USA, 2017.

26 Once a standard criterion of interpretation from Thucydides to Machiavelli, who noted “great changes in affairs … beyond all human conjecture”, the concept of chance seems to have fallen out of favour, although in Luck, London, 2012, English cricketer Ed Smith has made a good start bringing it back, beginning with its role in cricket, a game history occasionally resembles.

27 Richard Storry’s A History of Modern Japan, Harmondsworth, 1960, remains a useful general history. Michele Marra’s Representations of Power, The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan, Honolulu, 1993, records centralized feudal repression based on the silencing and/or marginalizing (as in Noh plays) of dissent.

28 Ian Buruma, A Japanese Mirror, Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture, (1984), London, 2012; Inventing Japan, London, 2003. Taming the Gods, Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, Princeton, 2010. Buruma, a former editor of the New York Review of Books, recently lost the post over a matter of political correctness – ironically as his work shows he would be among those best qualified to identify and assess this nebulous and possibly dangerous concept.

29 Florian Coulmas, Die Kultur Japans, Munich, 2003, p.54.

30 Cited in Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, New York, 2008, p.184.

31Nyozekan Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, (1938) New York, 1966, p.5; Buruma, A Japanese Mirror, op cit.

32 Métaphysique des tubes, op cit.

33 Tokyo Vice, p.313.

34 The Economist, March 30, 2019, p.69.

35 According to Adelstein, Tokyo police procedures work as follows:

 “The police will come to look for you. They’ll make you run the gauntlet of journalists who will have been tipped off concerning the exact time to the minute that your arrest will take place so they can take all the photos and videos they want of you. You will be held in custody for a minimum of 24 hours. Then they will begin judicial proceedings. The prosecutor will have 48 hours to decide whether or not to continue the prosecution. He will probably ask to prolong your detention for ten days on the pretext that, insofar as you might otherwise try to leave Japan or destroy incriminating evidence, you represent a risk. Then they will invoke the same pretext to prolong your detention for another ten days All in all, the first round will last about 23 days. And if you don’t confess, they will arrest you again as soon as you are outside, and begin all over again from the start … .

 One can imagine the cops tell themselves: people accused of a crime are little inclined to confess especially if they haven’t done anything. In a famous affair …a hacker held in isolation was played by cops specialised in cyber security leading to the arrests of several innocent people, who nevertheless confessed.” Adelstein, Sold My Soul, (writer’s translation from the French edition, p. 14).

36 op cit.