Hiroshima

How to spend 48 hours in Hiroshima

Tourism is well and truly back in Japan, with packed flights and full hotels during the popular sakura (cherry blossom) season last month. And from today, all eyes will be on Hiroshima as it hosts the 49th G7 summit – an event that Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised will showcase the ‘charms of our country’. So what can visitors expect from the city best known as where the world’s first atomic bomb was used in warfare in 1945? While Tokyo will no doubt be top of the to-do list for anyone on a flying visit to Japan, during a recent tour of the country it was western Honshu,

The power of the translator to break nations

No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ, since I’ve seen one: the handsome monument to the 12th-century scholar-physician Judah ibn Tibbon, ‘patriarch of translators’, beneath the Alhambra in Granada. But if the brokers between languages and cultures still lack many bronze or marble tributes, the books that celebrate their calling have begun to pile higher. A few of them retaliate against the downgrading of translation skills with a mystagogic tone which repels curious civilians. Which makes Anna Aslanyan’s wide-angled and reader-friendly tour of her profession’s many roles, in literature, politics, law, diplomacy, business and data science, all