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So how was it for you? No prizes for guessing to what I am referring. Obviously, it was pretty good in the end for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, less so for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, though better than expected for the Republican Party as a whole.

Watch the video of our webinar on Wednesday 5 November when Japan Society Chairman Bill Emmott was joined by two experts on international business, Glen S Fukushima and Lord Jim O’Neill, and Professor Toshihiro Nakayama, to share their views on the election’s implications for both the UK and Japan.

It feels a bit early to quote a Christmas carol, with Hallowe’en only just behind us and the weather not even very cold. Mind you, to an Englishman of my generation the celebration of Hallowe’en feels rather alien, since although Japan long ago adopted this American festival of pumpkins, ghosts and ‘trick or treat’, it is a much more recent import into the United Kingdom.

Watch the video of our webinar on Wednesday 22 October when we were delighted to welcome two expert observers and analysts David Runciman and Hitoshi Tanaka to join Japan Society chairman Bill Emmott to discuss the future of democracy in the USA.

Freedom of speech is one of those aspects of our modern, thankfully democratic, life that we have come to think of in Britain and Japan as being as natural as sunshine or water, but the merest glance at history tells us that this is far from so.

Registration are now open for our annual Japan event for Sixth Form students. This year the event goes online, with a mix of live sessions and flexible on-demand content.

Watch the video of our webinar on Wednesday 14 October when we were joined by Kathy Matsui in a two-header discussion with Bill Emmott on the important issues of gender equality.

Politics is a distinctly unedifying process. The quote usually, perhaps apocryphally, attributed to Otto von Bismarck gets it about right: “laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made”.

Part personal memoir, part professional flashback, part socio-cultural commentary, The Call of Japan chronicles the author’s experiences during his 40 years of living in Japan, from 1950 to 1974 as a ‘reluctant banker’, and from 2003 to the present as a writer.

A key text from my long-ago student days was Walter Bagehot’s “The English Constitution” from 1867, in which this great Victorian writer and editor laid down, unofficially but ultimately influentially, some of the fundamental principles by which this country’s unwritten constitution functions.