Articles

06.10.20 Publication: Project Syndicate

DUBLIN – Japan’s new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, has arrived with a suite of ambitious policy ideas, including plans to digitize government services...

02.10.20

Every generation, as they get older, sees things happening among younger people that allows them to conclude that society must have gone mad. For me, in recent...

25.09.20

I cannot pretend that these are not turbulent times, when an American president refuses to confirm that there will be a peaceful transfer of power after the US...

20.09.20 Publication: AVANTI

The American election always matters to the outside world, for whatever anyone may claim about the decline of US power or the demise of US hegemony, the...

19.09.20 Publication: Mainichi Shimbun

Historians are divided by one quite fundamental debate. One school, who believe in what is often known as “the great man theory of history” holds that...

18.09.20

I have to begin with a confession. In the blog that I wrote on August 31st, perhaps still feeling overly relaxed thanks to the summer, I said something foolish...

09.09.20 Publication: Nikkei Business

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has combined forces with the already ongoing clash between the United States and China about trade and technology to give new...

29.08.20 Publication: La Stampa

All political careers end in failure. That saying, by a famous British Conservative politician of the 1970s, Enoch Powell, applies especially to those...

29.08.20

With Abe Shinzo’s sudden resignation as prime minister, again on health grounds as after his first short period in office in 2007, it is right to ask what...

28.08.20 Publication: Project Syndicate

DUBLIN – Shinzo Abe’s sudden resignation (on health grounds) ends the tenure of Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. The country’s most...

15.08.20 Publication: AVANTI

One of the great paradoxes of the covid-19 crisis is this: the United Kingdom, where a charismatic prime minister, Boris Johnson, recently won a powerful...

24.07.20

Historians will tell us that four months is far too short a time for permanent social or behavioural changes to occur, even if the pandemic already feels as if...

22.07.20

  Japan Society: Webinar Series 13: The Pandemic and its Impact on Gender Equality in Japan and the UK with Yoriko Goto and Heather...

05.07.20 Publication: Mainichi Shimbun

After nearly three and a half years in office, we all know far more about how the Trump administration functions or doesn’t function than we knew about most...

05.07.20 Publication: La Stampa

In June 1989 China used tanks and bullets to impose its will on young protestors in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, killing thousands. In July 2020...

03.07.20

As a boy I was always more interested in subjects like history and geography than in science, but for some reason I have always remembered watching Professor...

02.07.20

The View from the Korean Peninsula with Chung Minlee and John...

26.06.20

In a week when pleasure at the prospect of returning to something closer to normal life has been balanced by concern about crowded beaches and a stubborn...

19.06.20

The Future of Travel and Tourism in a Post COVID-19 World with David Atkinson, Timothy Jenkins and Martin...

19.06.20

The news, from this week’s webinar, that in the year when our speaker and Japan Society veteran Martin Barrow first visited Japan in 1964 the country...

12.06.20

If recent events have taught us anything, it is that in these British Isles we are rather nicer to our famous past writers than we are to the historical...

11.06.20

International Financial Centres: the Future for London and Tokyo with Michael Mainelli and Hiroshi...

10.06.20 Publication: Nikkei Business

It is the question every business and every policy maker is asking themselves: among the many changes forced on us and on society by the covid-19 pandemic,...

05.06.20

In cricket, that English national sport that arrived in Meiji Japan a good decade before baseball but sadly was superseded, there is a saying called “the...