Tokyo
The rollercoaster ride of the world’s most reckless investor
The Korean-born Masayoshi Son – who lost $58.6 billion in 2000 – has a fascination with Napoleon, compares himself to Genghis Khan and is now reinventing himself as a futurist
Man for hire
Shoji Morimoto offers himself to strangers in Tokyo to queue on their behalf, make a fuss of their dogs or simply provide a human presence
Too close to home
Life in a comfortable modern flat with her husband and two young sons leaves Natsumi so depressed she thinks she’s losing her mind
Farewell, Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s unloved leader
Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga has fallen on his sword. Suga announced today that he will not be seeking reelection as leader…
Was the Tokyo Olympics a success?
Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s Prime Minister, is a hard man to read. He has a sum total of one facial expression…
The new insularity
There is something bizarre about a sporting event designed to bring people and nations together but from which spectators have…
Barometer
Waiting Games What did Japan, and the world, look like the last time Tokyo held the Olympics in 1964? —…
No time for losers
Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the…
Murder and a moral truth
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Tokyo drift
Understanding Japan is a life’s work
Japan Olympic chief resigns over sexism. But did he have to go?
Yoshiro Mori the 83-year-old former Japanese prime minister has resigned from his position as president of the Tokyo Olympic Organising…
Is it all over for the Tokyo Olympics?
Any long-term resident of Japan will know that ‘reading the air’, as the locals put it, is an essential skill…
Anything but a quiet life
Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the…
Japan’s Covid success is a mystery
Japan’s Covid ‘State of Emergency’ is now officially over. Tokyo, the last of Japan’s 47 prefectures to be officially released…
Two gone girls
The plot of Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four begins in 1989, with the murder of Shoko, a seven-year-old girl. Fourteen years…
Cheer up: we’re robust enough to withstand a shock from China
Home from the hot Aegean, huddled by the fire as rain ruins the bank holiday weekend, I’m thinking: what gloom…
Remaking history
What does freedom mean to you? That’s the question the BBC World Service has been asking of us through its…
