Japan Society Chairman's Blog (49)

Dear Japan Society members and friends

We can all agree that after two such difficult and demanding pandemic years Russia’s decision to invade and seek to conquer its neighbour Ukraine has come as both an outrage and a vast setback. The outcome of this tragic war is unknowable, as is the impact on all our economies of the resulting energy and commodities shocks and of the progressive isolation of Russia through sanctions. The future relationship of China to Russia, and thus to that punitive isolation, is a particularly significant unknown. We are in new territory, in so many ways. It is perhaps apt that a widely used historic quotation about this kind of transformative event comes from none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” It has certainly felt as if decades have been happening since 24 February, when the Russian invasion began, even if life had been far from uneventful over the previous two years. What those years had been for the Japan Society was highly active but largely online. By 9 March it had been almost exactly two years since the Japan Society’s last major in-person event, the annual lecture by the British ambassador to Japan, which in 2020 was delivered by Ambassador Paul Madden. So it was a very special pleasure on that day to be able to welcome his successor, Ambassador Julia Longbottom, to join society members at Nomura International in London (and online) and thus to resume this excellent tradition. The world surrounding us felt far from normal, so to gather together in this way in such large numbers was reassuring as well as in some senses therapeutic.While her lecture covered developments in Japan and in UK-Japan relations during 2021, including notably the delayed Tokyo Olympics last July-August and the visit to Japan by the UK aircraft carrier strike group last September, the war in Ukraine naturally cast a dark shadow over her, and our, deliberations. Nonetheless, that tragic development also provided the strongest and most real evidence of the close ties and collaboration between Japan and the UK, and the whole of the western alliance. Unlike in 2014 when Russia annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea and fostered conflict in the eastern Donbas region, or in 2018 when Russia used the Novichok nerve agent in an attempted assassination on British soil, this time Japan and the West have acted in unison, collaborating over the imposition of severe economic sanctions. Our political leaders often talk about shared liberal values, but when tested on what that really means do not always walk the talk. The war in Ukraine has provided such a test, and as Ambassador Longbottom’s lecture showed, this time the values truly have been shown to be both real and shared between the UK and Japan.The test is far from over, of course: tough issues lie ahead for both countries, especially for our respective companies doing business with Russia, particularly in energy and other natural resources. Nor has either country’s record since 24 February been unblemished: as Ambassador Longbottom would rightly have been too diplomatic to say, but I am not, both the UK and Japan are currently well behind other G7 countries in terms of their humanitarian responses to the vast numbers of refugees fleeing from the conflict. Hopefully that can only improve. In coming weeks and months, we at the Japan Society will do our best to set up events, both online and in person, to explore and discuss this disturbing, challenging but also ever-changing global political and business environment. Meanwhile although we all have more than enough to read on the conflict, and have our own preferences and views, I just want to share a few personal recommendations, in case they are of interest. The British scholar I find most thoughtful and perceptive about the war itself is Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, who has been writing regularly in the Substack service he shares with his son Sam, a fellow at the Institute for Government. He hasn’t written now for a few days, probably because the conflict hasn’t altered shape lately, but his latest can be found here. Secondly, also on Substack can be found the writings of the leading English-language historian of Ukraine, Timothy Snyder of Yale University. I am not sure how much of what he writes is free to access, but I have found him especially good in recommending ways to help Ukraine through donations, on which this was his latest list of suggestions. Third, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker and a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, just published a long and illuminating interview with Stephen Kotkin on what this eminent professor of history at Princeton sees as the continuities in Russian history from tsarist times through Stalin to Putin. On a different vein, my eye was drawn by a lovely article in the New York Times, which many may also enjoy, about a rather poignant poem by the British author W.H. Auden about how artists through the centuries have depicted the sort of suffering we are now seeing in Ukraine. Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts takes a kind of sideways look at that suffering and how while it occurs quotidian life goes on, which I thought the New York Times author analysed rather well. Members may be more familiar with Auden’s more direct and despairing wartime poem, September 1, 1939. Finally, given that the issue of how China will react is so important for both Japan and the UK, I thought this translation by the US-China Perception Monitor of an analysis by a Chinese scholar, Hu Wei, which I just came across, was fascinating. I have no idea even as to whether it is genuine, let alone representative, but compared with all the speculation I read about Chinese thinking I found this analysis plausible enough to be worth reading.Just one week before the war in Ukraine began we hosted Noriyuki Shikata, Cabinet Secretary for Public Affairs, for an online presentation and discussion about Japan’s agenda this year, at home and abroad. Since one element of that agenda was to be the redrafting of the country’s National Security Strategy, we can be sure that plenty of new thinking will now be under way. The video of the event can be found here. To mark International Women’s Day we partnered on 8 March with the British Chamber of Commerce and held a very enlightening discussion between Yoko Makiguchi, CEO of Revolut Japan, and Andrijana Cvetkovikj, head for North Asia of the Economist Corporate Network and a former ambassador in Japan for Macedonia, about their respective experiences and advice to businesses and individuals on how to “break the bias”. It was also noteworthy that Revolut, a British-based fin-tech company, was co-founded by a Russian and a Ukrainian, and has made a big donation, and efforts, to provide humanitarian assistance in Ukraine. Further on the theme of gender, Gill Steel, from Doshisha University, gave an online lecture on 19 February on Gender and Voting Preferences in Japan and Britain. Read more on the topic in Gill's book What Women Want.I am going to close with a somewhat off-beat item, rather different from the world picture about which we are so rightly pre-occupied. It is a surprising example of “soft power”, or perhaps it is better described as mutual cultural influence. Our member Warren Stanislaus, whose scholarly life bridges Oxford and Rikkyo universities, recently sent me his article “From Cool Japan to Cold Japan: Grime Cyborgs in Black Britain”. While at first I wondered whether at my age I could possibly understand it, as I read it I found his analysis fascinating on how popular cultural expressions of social alienation in Japan, from manga, anime or video games – what he calls “Cold Japan” – had been adopted by inner-city London black “grime” musicians, producing an “underground layer of black-Japanese transnational connectivity.” Unlike me you may already have been a fan of grime, but in any event I am sure you will also enjoy the verses in Warren’s article by the fusion rapper AJ Tracey which were inspired by the manga and anime series Naruto. Orochimaru, you snakes can’t gap…Bill

Japan Society Chairman's Blog (49)

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