Philip Patrick is an exiled Scot, who lectures at a Tokyo university and contributes to the Japan Times
Should Ukraine be given a free pass into this year’s football World Cup? Boris Johnson has given his support to the idea, but there’s one downside: their entry into the tournament could come at the expense of Scotland or Wales. This hardly seems fair: Scotland will tonight feature in their first World Cup draw in 25
Contemplating leaders and their heroes can be a revealing business. Churchill had busts of Nelson and Napoleon at Chartwell (and a portrait of John Churchill by his bedside). Ronald Reagan had a bronze head of an anonymous cowboy in the Oval Office; Boris Johnson has a bust of Pericles (who took advice only from his
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On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Freddy Gray on his time spent on the Poland–Ukraine border. (00:52) Next, Lionel Shriver on the return of actual badness. (06:28) And finally, Philip Patrick on the strange east Asian practice of hiring a ‘White Monkey’. (15:13) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes Subscribe to The Spectator today
About ten years ago I was interviewed in Tokyo for a job as a fake Catholic priest, performing wedding ceremonies for Japanese couples who wanted the aesthetics of a Christian service without all the hassle of actually being Christian. In a room cluttered with tacky plastic religious paraphernalia I watched a training video of the
‘There are more important things in life than football,’ said the Polish football federation as they announced their intention to boycott a crunch World Cup qualifier against Russia next month. Sweden and the Czech Republic, who meet on the same night for the right to meet the winner of that now severely at-risk tie, have also indicated their
‘Hate is not welcome in Scotland’, apparently, at least according to a public information film released in 2018 by the Scottish government. ‘We believe in acceptance, and it’s time you accept that’ continue the bright-eyed young people featured in the ad. Anyone who believes in this uplifting message might be puzzled if they pop into
A colleague has posted on the ‘Return to Japan’ Facebook page that his hotel quarantine at Tokyo’s Narita airport is set to be extended by ‘at least a week’. This is after testing positive with symptomless Covid on the point of his supposed release. He’s already spent six days locked up in a tiny room with
The two leading candidates for South Korea’s presidential election in March, Lee Jae-myung of the incumbent Democratic party and Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power party, have both made men’s rights central to their campaigns. They hope to appeal to the growing constituency of outraged men’s groups who vent their frustration at feminist overreach
John Updike described America as a ‘vast conspiracy to make you happy’. Japan, a wonderful place to live in many ways, at times seems like the opposite; if not a vast conspiracy to make you unhappy, at least anxious, uncomfortable, and exhausted. This is especially true for those legions of salarymen and women sighing inwardly
King coal is dead, long live king coal! That might be a fitting epitaph for COP26, which mercifully ended last Friday. It culminated with an agreement, which had not so much been watered down as to have virtually evaporated. Fossil fuels, it seems, are here for the foreseeable. What went wrong? That’s a question the
Fumio Kishida, the newly-installed Japanese prime minister, could have been forgiven for giving COP26 a miss. The opening ceremony in Glasgow coincided with the general election he was fighting back home. But Kishida, having won the election, did make the trip, where he gave a speech broadly but not unreservedly supportive of international efforts to
Tokyo It is now 26 years since the doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyu (‘supreme truth’) carried out the worst domestic terrorist attack in Japanese history. Led by their leader Shoko Asahara, Aum released sarin gas on to the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring 6,000. It remains the only time a weapon of mass
A young royal, seen as a potential future star, falls in love with a commoner and chooses to leave the gilded cage and a life of dutiful service to marry and live a ‘normal’ life in America. The match is controversial for various reasons, not least the royal’s mental health and the non-royal’s family problems;
Japan will soon have yet another new prime minster: Fumio Kishida. He will be the country’s third leader in as many years, and news of his appointment has been met with neither enthusiasm nor much concern – mainly because nobody really knows who he is, or what to expect from him. Kishida, the 64-year old
While Taliban posing with newly acquired US military hardware has been a searing humiliation for America in recent days, here in Japan the debacle in Afghanistan has led to a different source of embarrassment. A recurring image of coverage from Kabul is of Toyota pick-up trucks ferrying gun-toting fighters around the city. It has given
Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga has fallen on his sword. Suga announced today that he will not be seeking reelection as leader of his party (the LDP), in effect resigning as prime minister in the process. The decision came without warning but wasn’t a huge surprise: Suga’s government is polling horribly at the moment and it was feared
For the first time in history, an organised crime ‘yakuza’ boss has been sentenced to death in a Japanese court. Satoru Nomura, head of the Kudo-kai group in Fukuoka, was found guilty of murder and three assaults after a trial held without a jury due to fears of possible intimidation. If a planned appeal fails,
Just like the Olympics, which ended a fortnight ago, the Paralympics is set to commence amid a drumbeat of doom. Japan appears to be in the middle of a Covid renaissance, with around 5,000 new cases a day in Tokyo. The games will take place, like the Olympics, in a ‘state of emergency’ that now
Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s Prime Minister, is a hard man to read. He has a sum total of one facial expression and lives up to the national stereotype of inscrutability. Still, I’m pretty sure I know what was going through his mind at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics on Sunday night: ‘Thank God, that’s
Spain takes on Brazil today in the final of the men’s Olympic football tournament. Not interested? Well, if so, you’re probably not alone — Olympic football has a popularity problem. For decades it has suffered from unfavourable comparisons with the big Fifa and Uefa behemoths to the extent that many see the whole thing as
