Page 125 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Most of my early encounters, influential ones, with foreign lands
came through the medium of cinema (the Streatham Odeon) and

its colourful visions of exotic otherness. More specifically, and
embarrassingly, James Bond films had an outsized influence on

my views. Istanbul and Venice will always be awkwardly lodged
in the same brain compartment as From Russia with Love. With

Japan it has to be—more queasily—You Only Live Twice. The

Roald Dahl-screenplayed movie is bad enough, with Sean
Connery’s Bond impersonating a Japanese fisherman; the novel

is even more peculiar, with its resurrected villain, Ernst Stavro
Blofeld, creating a suicide garden of exotic botanical species to

cater to what Ian Fleming imagined was an ingrained Japanese

taste for self-annihilation.

♦♦♦

By the time I reached adulthood, helping to make current affairs

programmes for Channel 4 in London, Japanese economic

prowess was a thing of wonder and the talk of the town. How
had Japan emerged from the catastrophe of wartime defeat to

teach the rest of the developed world how to rebuild from ruins?
The fabled MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and

Industry) bridged the gap between freestyle capitalism and long-

term planning. Japan developed a dazzling electronics sector and
formed the avant-garde of just-in-time and robot manufacturing.

Miniaturisation was a natural pursuit for the land of the bonsai
tree. The story at the peak of the Japan craze was that the

notional value of the land on which the Imperial Palace in Tokyo

stood could be equated to the entire state of California.

Japan’s so-called Lost Decades began in 1990, just as we were

planning a fashionable documentary centred around Sony chair
Akio Morita and Tokyo governor Shintaro Isihara’s notorious