Saigo Takamori stares out from a box of peanut cookies at passengers arriving at Kagoshima’s Central Railway Station. Saigo is probably the most famous son of Kagoshima: He played a key role in the Meji Restoration and was immortalized as Japan’s “last samurai” after taking a fateful stand against the new Meji government in 1877 but today, like many other historical figures in Japan, he plays a key role in selling his home town to tourists at the railway station gift shop.

Alongside Saigo in the gift shop you will find boxes of miniature cakes representing Sakurajima, the very active volcano that looms over the city from across the harbour, giant radishes grown in the mountain’s volcanic soil, air-dried ham and a wide variety of other meat products from the region’s famous black pigs and cattle, plus Satsuma shochu, made from local sweet potatoes. Continue reading →

Long before Hokkaido was a part of Japan, the indigenous people, known today as the Ainu, had developed extensive trading links with Russia to the north, China to the west as well as the ethnic Japanese Matsumae clan from northern Honshu that had gained a foothold in the southwest corner of Hokkaido in the sixteenth century. The Ainu were hunter-gatherers who traded salmon, kelp and other raw materials for rice, sake and lacquerware etc. They were culturally and linguistically diverse group of peoples but united in their reverence for the land, rivers and sea, and the plants and animals that inhabit them. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Ainu staged a rebellion against the increasingly repressive trade regime imposed by the Matsumae clan. The rebellion was crushed and Japanese traders reasserted their dominance, expanding their land ownership and reducing the Ainu to little more than indentured labourers. Continue reading →

At first glance, Japan’s urban landscape is not a particularly welcoming sight. Viewed from the train as it slowly decelerates into the station, all you see is a dull, desaturated blur of greys and muted pastels, devoid of primary colours or distinctive landmarks. The bright lights of Shinjuku that many people associate with urban Japan are hardly representative of the whole. In most cities, just about only splashes of colour you will see in the sea of grey are a few desolate flags and billboards promoting shops, restaurants and other local businesses.

It is only when you get off the train and start to walk down the city’s side streets and alleyways that colour and individuality start to emerge from the monotonous gloom. Many homes have small but meticulously tended gardens that bring colour and life into a sterile environment and showcase the individual taste or eccentricities of the proprietor. That said, you are unlikely to see anything too eccentric, most private garden displays are quite refined and understated, an elegant representation of nature at the micro level. Continue reading →

Bad things do happen in Japan and yet, when they are filtered through the medium of network television news, they don’t seem to be quite so bad. Earthquakes are reported with a calm reassurance, corruption scandals with concern and a sense of disappointment rather than censure, and when a huge sinkhole appeared in the western city of Fukuoka, the story became about the heroic efforts of engineers and construction workers to repair the damage and get the city up and running again.

Television news in Japan likes to accentuate the positive and focus on heart-warming human interest stories. In the autumn of 2016, the Japanese Paralympic team received extensive coverage, not only their success in Rio de Janeiro but their home coming parade and the preparations for the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. It was a story of striving against impossible odds to achieve glory for oneself and one’s country that played especially well to the Japanese audience. Continue reading →

For more than ten weeks at the end of 2014, tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of who previously had no real interest in politics, occupied the streets of Hong Kong to demand genuine democracy and the right to elect leaders of their own choosing.

The protests, which would come to be known as the Umbrella Revolution, were by far the most important and inspiring acts of civil disobedience I had witnessed since first coming to Hong Kong in 1988. I was in Admiralty when police first used teargas against the demonstrators on 28 September (see photo below) and spent many evenings at the Occupy Mongkok site, near my office, including the night police first tried and failed to clear the protesters.

On the first anniversary of the protests, I published a letter to then financial secretary John Tsang questioning the decision in his 2015 budget to compensate Hong Kong businesses HK$290 million for the alleged “losses” they incurred during the protests. The letter outlined my thoughts on why the movement had been an overwhelmingly positive development for Hong Kong as a whole.

A letter to John Tsang

Mr Tsang did not reply to the letter but nine months later I cornered him at a reception at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club. He was very polite but evasive, saying the HK$290 million was “just a small amount,” and a “gesture of support.” I suggested that the gesture was unwarranted and sent the wrong signal, at which point he started to look around the room for someone else to talk to.