Japan

Tokyo is visual chaos everywhere, the antithesis of the Japanese interior. It is a multilevel jumble of overpasses, neon signs, electric pylons, railway lines and traffic lights. The pavements are empty, not a pedestrian human in sight. And the leader of North Korea is still lobbing ballistic missiles right over Japan and cackling away about his collection of nuclear warheads. Drinking beer in a sushi bar in Ginza on our first night, I ask my neighbour whether people are worried by the behaviour of the lunatic child across the water. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I am far more frightened by our prime minister. He really is dangerous.’ Shinzo Abe is proposing to repeal

I’m jittery and fragile but free of plaster and in the dojo, slowly turning lean and muscular. Never listen to your doctor is my message. Instead of two months in a cast I spent only five weeks, and I’ve just finished a brutal three-day course of karate with both the leg and elbow still intact. Yippee! The message was loud and clear. If you’re drinking vodka at 4.30 a.m., don’t lean backwards while sitting on a ledge. When the doctors sew you up and place you in a cast, don’t listen to them; take it off early. You have nothing to lose but the plaster. And the moment you’re free,

What should we think about negative interest rates? What kind of Alice in Wonderland world are we living in when companies and households are paid to borrow and charged if they save? Seemingly crazy, negative interest rates are spreading nonetheless. Implemented by central banks in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, they now apply in countries accounting for a quarter of the global economy. Should we be worried? Could we see negative rates in Britain? Earlier this month, the Bank of England cut interest rates for the first time in seven years, from 0.5 per cent to a new record low of 0.25 per cent. Quantitative easing was also restarted, with the

Japanese housewives are so convinced of the value of office work that they get angry if their husbands come home early in the evenings; and this is why many Japanese husbands, fearing assault by the rolling pin, spend long periods at the pub before heading home very late. Japanese wives are deluded, however, if they believe that offices are places in which much work is done; on the contrary, they are places in which time is constantly being wasted. Offices are not conducive to long and concentrated effort; they offer far too many distractions. You aren’t alone in an office, but amid people with whom to converse and to intrigue,

Home The collapse of BHS after Sir Philip Green had extracted large sums and left the business on ‘life support’, with a £571 million pension deficit, was ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism,’ said a report by the Business and the Work and Pensions select committees of the House of Commons. The British economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the quarter ending in June. A man was shot dead at a commercial pool party in Headley, Surrey, organised by Summerlyn Farquharson, known as the Female Boss Krissy, and the Jamaican reggae artist Jason White, known as Braintear Spookie. HMS Ambush, a Royal Navy Astute-class nuclear-powered submarine, was in a ‘glancing collision’ with

I have never been to the island of Guernsey. This is a large world and we have a finite amount of time on it and must make our decisions about where we visit based on necessarily limited information. We cannot know everything. I have never been to Japan, for example, because I do not wish to be crushed to death by a mass of jabbering humanity, nor take part in unpleasant sadomasochistic sex acts, nor watch people disembowelling themselves in order to affirm their masculinity. I realise that this is not all that Japan has to offer. There is also sushi, for example, and buttock-clenched politeness. I could get both

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spent time in Brussels before a meeting of the European Council to see what it would allow him to bring home for voters in a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The board of HSBC voted to keep its headquarters in Britain. Sir John Vickers, who headed the Independent Commission on Banking, said that Bank of England proposals for bank capital reserves were ‘less strong than what the ICB recommended’. The annual rate of inflation, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, rose to 0.3 per cent in January, compared with 0.2 per cent in December. Unemployment fell by 60,000 to 1.69 million. A

In recent weeks, North Korea allegedly developed a hydrogen bomb and hangover-free booze. This would be a worrying combination in any government not widely thought to have the force projection of an aggressively drunk toddler with a bag on its head. North Korea is often portrayed as a cartoon state — something sustained by Kim Jong-un’s propensity to execute rivals using anti-aircraft guns. Announcing the discovery of unicorns in 2012 didn’t help, though it was comparatively mild for a state media agency partial to statements like: ‘South Korean President Lee Myung-bak is a rat who should be struck with a retaliatory bolt of lightning.’ North Korea’s Punch and Judy bluster

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that Muslim women must learn English, and that those who had entered on spousal visas would be told halfway through their five-year spousal settlement: ‘You can’t guarantee you can stay if you are not improving your language.’ He said that learning English had ‘a connection with combating extremism’. A heterosexual couple went to the High Court to claim the right to enter into a civil partnership. MI5, the security service, was rated as Britain’s most gay-friendly employer, following a survey by the organisation Stonewall. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said: ‘Now is not the time to raise interest rates.’

Frankly I don’t know why the British media made such a big fat fuss last week when I accidentally flattened a ten-year-old Japanese rugby player called Toki. He got to his feet. He smiled. Everyone applauded. That’s rugby, isn’t it? You get knocked down, you get up again. And yet I have to admit that I offered a silent prayer of thanks that I didn’t actually hurt the little guy. They aren’t making many kids like Toki these days; in fact they aren’t making enough kids at all. If you want proof of the rule that nobody knows anything, look up a 1988 bestseller called Yen! Japan’s New Financial Empire