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Big in Japan 7
View towards the western mountains from our friends’ apartment We said goodbye to Kanazawa, and headed back to Tokyo, where we changed to the suburban train to Fussa, where our friends were living. Fussa is a fairly ordinary place, a city of about 60,000 people west of Tokyo, but with a huge American air force…
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Medium
I’m trying to keep this space for book reviews, cultural matters and travel. I thought I would try Medium for musings on other topics. My first post there is now online. Next here will be the latest instalment of the Japanologue.
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Big in Japan 6
I Kanazawa railway station is quite something. After the Shinkansen glided in, coming to a stop at precisely the correct second, we were soon able to see its bold modern design, dominated by the Tsuzumi-mon gate, shaped like the traditional Japanese drums, but also, we thought, reminiscent of a temple gateway. The main interest in…
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Big in Japan 5
Taxis in Japan, we found, were beautifully clean, retro-sixties style monuments to kitsch, replete with head-rest doilies and cute seat covers. For our day trip from Kyoto to Hiroshima, we needed an early start, and our helpful host arranged a taxi. Our man was waiting as we emerged five minutes before the appointed time from…
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Marina Warner at The John Rylands Library
To the John Rylands library to see Marina Warner (does the Dame come before or after the Professor?) give her lecture Oracular Narrative: Timing and Truth Telling. This was a very pleasant event, with a drinks reception beforehand, and then the lecture itself in the historic reading room of the grand neo-Gothic building: ( Image:…
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Big in Japan 4
Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, enchants the visitor at every turn. And it’s not just the temples and shrines. The modern buildings, too, command attention, none more so than the railway station, which we saw quite a bit of in our travels. It’s a massive glass-fronted edifice in the centre of the city, and…
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Dan Hicks
I suppose it will have been in late 1971 or early 1972. I was meeting my girlfriend, but had stopped on the way to pick up my monthly copy of Zigzag, an odd, rather amateurishly produced alternative magazine that featured articles and interviews about mainly American rock music. It wasn’t like Sounds or NME, which…
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Eric Ambler: The Levanter
I read, as I suppose many of my generation did, Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy when I was a teenager. They were exciting tales of action in a Europe on the brink of war, with heroes not of the John Buchan mould (I’d read the Richard Hannay books of…
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Entartete Musik
To the Manchester Jewish Museum, on Holocaust Memorial Day, for a concert of music condemned and banned by the Nazis as “degenerate.” This was a bold move by the museum, which has decided to host more events to gain attention ahead of a big rebuilding programme. After a glass of (kosher, of course) wine, we…
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Big in Japan 3
Onto the Philosopher’s Walk in Kyoto. Note the position of the apostrophe: we are talking about one philosopher here, Nishida Kitaro, a professor at the university, who walked here daily in the nineteen twenties, and whose work, rather pleasingly, is described as “path-breaking.” Nishida’s best-known philosophical concept is “Absolute Nothingness” but it’s difficult to imagine…