Japan
Does the great Bach conductor Masaaki Suzuki think his audience will burn in hell?
Damian Thompson talks to the great Bach conductor — and strict Calvinist — Masaaki Suzuki
Why are children in Guernsey extolling Islam to their parents?
I have never been to the island of Guernsey. This is a large world and we have a finite amount…
Whether or not Britain leaves, the EU must change or fall apart
David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership has served as a powerful reminder of the case for leaving. The…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spent time in Brussels before a meeting of the European Council to see what…
Portrait of the week: English lessons, civil partnerships, the price of oil
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that Muslim women must learn English, and that those who had entered on…
The rise and fall of Sony
Sony was the Apple of its day and more. Stephen Bayley charts its years of creativity unrivalled in the history of consumerism
Boris Johnson’s diary: Amid the China hype, remember Japan
Frankly I don’t know why the British media made such a big fat fuss last week when I accidentally flattened…
The polyphonous Babel of global music
‘Following custom, when the Siamese conquered the Khmer they carried off much of the population, including most of their musicians,…
What is it about Bill Viola’s films that reduce grown-ups to tears?
What is it about Bill Viola's films that reduce grown-ups to tears? William Cook dries his eyes and talks to the video artist about Zen, loss and nearly drowning
The good economic news that we forgot in the China panic
Home from the hot Aegean, huddled by the fire as rain ruins the bank holiday weekend, I’m thinking: what gloom…
A.N. Wilson’s diary: VJ Day and the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar
Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…
The triumph of nuclear weapons – and the defeat of nuclear power
‘I visited the black marble obelisk which marks the epicentre of the explosion, and I saw the plain domestic wall-clock…
I remember Nikkei’s journalistic values – and I’m not sure they’re much like the FT’s
It’s nearly 30 years since I worked in Japan, but I still have a few words of the language and…
Hirohito, MacArthur and other villains
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
Welcome to Japan’s best kept cultural secret: an art island with an underground museum
In his introductory remarks to the Afro–Eurasian Eclipse, one of his later suites for jazz orchestra, Duke Ellington remarked —…
What Samsung’s new TVs owe to Jeremy Bentham
Watching brief Samsung warned users of its voice-activated televisions that what they said in front of the TV could be…
Don't believe the gloom-mongers: deflation will be good for Britain
Campaigning in Putney in 1978, Mrs Thatcher famously took out a pair of scissors and cut a pound note down…
Let’s all become Japanese for a while
This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to…
Onsen: dive into another side of Japan
Kate Crockett wallows happily in the natural hot baths of Kyushu
How to fight Europe’s demons of deflation
The new fear haunting Europe
Peter Phillips is mugged by a gang of Praetorius-loving six-year-old girls in China
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Proof that the Japanese know how to make great Bordeaux
Château Lagrange, a St Julien third growth, has the largest acreage of any Bordeaux classed growth. For much of the…
My addiction to the bullet train
Stephen Bayley explains why he has become addicted to Japan’s Shinkansen
When a Chinese and a Japanese visit Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine
What does freedom mean to you? That’s the question the BBC World Service has been asking of us through its…
Is there a way to live without economic growth?
During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks…
