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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.

Watch the video of our webinar on Thursday 8 October with two pioneers of women’s football, Kikko Okajima Murray and Kelly Simmons, who join Japan Society board member Yuuichiro Nakajima, to discuss the professionalization of the game, the impacts of the pandemic and the role of football as a force for social change.

Watch the video of our webinar on Tuesday 29 September with NHK’s Aiko Doden and John Simpson of the BBC, who join Japan Society Chairman, Bill Emmott, to discuss how our countries’ media’s approaches to foreign news and foreign correspondents is evolving.

Every generation, as they get older, sees things happening among younger people that allows them to conclude that society must have gone mad. For me, in recent years one of those signs has been the growing popularity of tattoos.

Watch the video of our webinar on Wednesday 23 when Japan Society Chairman, Bill Emmott, was joined in the UK by Bronwen Maddox, director of the Institute for Government, and by our old friend Ambassador Koji Tsuruoka in Japan to consider the course of governmental reform and the politics around it.

I cannot pretend that these are not turbulent times, when an American president refuses to confirm that there will be a peaceful transfer of power after the US election on 3 November, when in the UK plans emerge to require access permits for trucks entering the county of Kent so as to control post-Brexit congestion [...]

Watch the video of the special online talk on Katagami with researcher Mamiko Markham, Head of Collections at the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (MoDA) Zoë Hendon, and practitioner Sarah Desmerais.

Watch the video of our webinar on Wednesday 16 September with economists, Noriko Hama in Japan and Gerard Lyons in the UK, who joined Japan Society Chairman, Bill Emmott, to take stock of the economic positions of our two countries, and consider the future.