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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.

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.