JAPAN, MAY 2026

In the three years since my first trip to Japan, there has been extensive coverage of Japan's overtourism problem – how even the famous Japanese hospitality, as robust as one of their earthquake-proof towers, is finally starting to buckle under the sheer weight of numbers – how visiting Japan is now such a cliché for the Perfection set that the really cool people are all going to China instead. So what was most striking about this, my second trip, was how many breathtaking experiences I had completely to myself. This is because I went to Kyushu, the southernmost part of Japan.

I'm not presenting myself as some kind of genius for realising that Japan has places to go outside of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. Actually, what first inspired me in this case was that several years ago I met Tom Downey, author of some of my favourite travel writing about Japan, and he had a lot of praise for Fukuoka, Kyushu's largest city. And the thing is, while everyone and their uncle is going to Japan now, most people only go to Japan once, and Kyushu pretty much never makes it on to anyone's debut itinerary. So there were really not a lot of Westerners in evidence.

Which is not to say there were not a lot of tourists. On the contrary, there were plenty of Koreans, because Fukuoka is closer to Seoul than it is to Tokyo (and indeed it's less than 150 miles across the water from Busan). Plus, Kyushu gets domestic tourists from further north. But even with all these short-hoppers, most of the places I went were somewhere between uncrowded and dead quiet. The kind of saturation point one reads about in Kyoto is a very long way off. (It may also have helped that the Chinese have been urged by their government to stop going on holiday to Japan.)

Before I go any further, I know there's one question you're all desperate for me to answer: did I use take same anti-jetlag measures as last time, and did they work as faultlessly? I did, and they did.

Private island

The island of Yakushima, where I spent four days, doesn't have an overtourism problem. If anything, it has an undertourism problem. Well, problem isn't the right word, but I did find myself in a state of continual disbelief. How can somewhere that's this magical, but also pretty easy to get to, and replete with tourist infrastructure, and not in any way a secret, possibly be so empty????? No doubt this would be less extraordinary for people of my parents' generation: my mental image of tourism in the 1980s is that if you took a ferry to any Greek island that didn't have a page in the Rough Guide to Greece you would be the first foreigner to walk down the beach since the German occupation. But for someone like me, who has done almost all of my travelling in the internet era when absolutely nothing can survive undiscovered, it felt uncanny.

What makes Yakushima so wonderful is as follows. The island is a thickly-forested massif surrounded by a 60-mile ring road. Travel a few miles anywhere along this ring road, and you will find a site of staggering natural beauty. A few more miles, and there will be a restaurant selling burgers made of local venison. Then another site of staggering natural beauty. Then a cafe selling gelato made from local fruits. Then another site of staggering natural beauty. Then a hot spring bath. And so on. All the way around the island. Is there anywhere else like this on earth? A place that is simultaneously so sublime and so convenient? I rented an ebike and went clockwise around the whole island over the course of two days, and I have never had a higher rate of experiences that left me almost tearful with awe. Not only that, but for much of the time I was the only human being in sight!

The first was the Sarukawa banyan tree, a sprawling network of entangled branches in the middle of the woods, one of a number of places I went that felt like something from a video game – maybe one by FromSoftware or Naughty Dog – in the sense that only in video games do you have the chance to explore these environments that are inspired by real places but are heightened, curated, optimally angled for the best view, in a way that no real place could ever be – or so you think, until you come somewhere like this. Next was the Kozue Corridor canopy walk. The ostensible substance of this experience, seeing the treetops from a wooden walkway, sounded like it would be mildly diverting at best. Yakushima has plenty of opportunities to see treetops; you don't really need to go out of your way for that. Yet this turned out to be one of the most beautiful hours of my entire life, not because of the treetops but because of a kind of fairy-tale ceremony that you are guided through by the elderly couple who built and operate it. I won't describe this any further, partly because I don't want to spoil it for you in case you ever go, and partly because I think in my attempts to convey its magic I would just sound tedious and incoherent like someone going on about their ayahuasca trip.

Then, after stopping to marvel at the Senpiro Falls, I dropped my rucksack at my Airbnb just in time to head back out to the Hirauchi Kaichu Onsen, which you can only visit when the tide is out, because it consists of rock pools fed by warm water from underground, close enough to the sea that if you want to cool off you can just move to the next pool down and feel the spray on your face while you watch the sun set. Dinner was at an anomalous but lovely Indonesian restaurant, which I include among the very emotional experiences of the day because if the owner hadn't cheerfully agreed to cook a plate of mie goreng for me after the restaurant's ostensible closing time I would have had to go to bed hungry. Then I got up very early so I could bike up to the Seibu Rindo Forest Path while it was still thronged with macaques and deer... This was all in less than 24 hours and I haven't even mentioned everything!

I don't want to overstate how unspoiled Yakushima is. Miyanoura, the main town, has three large gift shops and a North Face, all with parking for coaches. But I almost never encountered more than a couple of other tourists at a time. So why isn't the place more overrun? Actually, there is one obvious answer. The rain. Yakushima is the rainiest place in Japan. I was there for four days, and it rained for two of them. If it had rained for all four, I imagine I would be a lot less effusive (especially considering I was on a bike), and during my four-hour hike up a former logging trail to Taikoiwa Rock, through the forest that inspired Princess Mononoke, the continuous downpour did grave damage to my phone, my trainers, and my spirits. Plus, although Yakushima does have a few small museums, there is very little to do there when you aren't outdoors. The ideal strategy might be to arrive in Japan with a somewhat flexible itinerary so you can time you trip to Yakushima for when the short-term forecast is good, except this probably isn't possible because there aren't that many hotels and guesthouses on the island and they all fill up in advance. So I think you just have to hope for the best and take a good rain jacket.

Disaster area

The idea of going somewhere just because it has an interesting history puts me in mind of school trips to Ypres. If you find an old bullet casing or something, great, but otherwise you are just looking at a field. However, Nagasaki is really worth it, because you get such a visceral sense of all the threads twining through its history. You can visit the reconstruction of Dejima, the Dutch and Portuguese trading post which David Mitchell evokes so well in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Because of this European influence, Nagasaki was one of the early centres of Christianity in Japan, with even the local warlords converting before they later turned against it. Jacob de Zoet I read years ago, but on this trip I read Shusako Endo's Silence, which mentions Jesuit priests being boiled alive in Mount Unzen's volcanic springs in the aftermath of Shimabara Rebellion. I didn't see Mount Unzen, but I did visit Shimabara, where you're aware of its brooding presence: several houses that were buried by pyroclastic flow in 1991 have been preserved as memorials. (Like the hundreds of stones I saw laid out in a moat as part of the reconstruction of Kumamoto Castle, this felt like a piece of Land Art.)

Nagasaki's prosperity as a trading centre resulted in a lot of shipyards, which ultimately made it a prime target during the Second World War. And the second atomic bomb (tested by Oppenheimer at Trinity) happened to drop almost directly on top of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, built only a few years after the ban on Christianity in Japan was finally lifted, and in 1945 still the largest church in Asia – leading the writer Takashi Nagai to suggest that the Christians of Nagasaki had become martyrs to peace, burned in the heat of the bomb almost like the early Christians burned in the heat of the volcano... All these themes feel so interconnected and tangible, whether you're at Shimabara Castle seeing the crude little crosses that the rebels made while they were under siege, or at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum seeing the melted remains of Nagai's wife's rosary, or even just at the Fukusaya bakery eating a sponge cake called castella that was invented because Nagasaki was the very first place in Japan to import sugar. (And I haven't even mentioned the ubiquitous local porcelain: though I still think of myself as a young man, on this trip I found myself developing what I can only describe as a sincere interest in the history of ceramics.)

Eight generations of a family called the Nakayamas worked as translators at Dejima, and one of them compiled an early Dutch-Japanese dictionary. The whole dynasty is buried in a cemetery that sprawls down a hill overlooking the city, the paths and terraces of its south side now crumbling and overgrown. I hate to repeat myself, but this was one of the most gorgeous places I've ever been in my life, and yet it's not remotely on the tourist trail: as someone notes on Google reviews, 'This is such an incredible place, I'm baffled there weren't more visitors (none, actually). Well, it means I had the place to myself.' That's one of only two Google reviews for the cemetery. Two! Even the Kozue Corridor canopy walk has 53 Google reviews!

Other star systems

The very idea of using Google reviews for sightseeing still feels a bit odd for me. Isn't it supposed to be for reviewing restaurants? Isn't it a bit absurd to give a banyan tree a rating out of five stars? But the reality is, when I'm travelling, I find out about more interesting things just by scanning the area on Google Maps than I do from any other source, and in many cases the actual reviews function like a wiki where people are helpfully sharing whatever might be useful to know. As hesitant as I am to lavish praise on the company at a time when Google search has degraded to the point of total uselessness, Google Maps is a gift to humanity. This is one benefit we do have over previous generations of travellers: yes, they were able to go to places that weren't completely picked over already, but they also must have strolled obliviously past a lot of cool stuff.

And although I do now use Google Maps for waterfalls, it also continues to be very good for restaurants. In fact, I am going to suggest it's better than Tabelog, the Japanese equivalent. This is a heretical opinion among Japanophiles. For instance, the Sydney Morning Herald writes, 'Tabelog is absolutely not like TripAdvisor or Google reviews. Tabelog is actually useful. It’s reliable. It’s trustworthy. And the reason it is all those things is because Japanese people really know food, and they really know how to review restaurants... If a restaurant in Japan scores more than 3.5 stars on Tabelog, you know it’s seriously good. If a restaurant in Japan scores more than 4.5 stars on Google, meanwhile, all you know is that it’s popular with foreigners.' This is what most people on the internet will tell you, but after two trips to Japan, I increasingly think it's bullshit.

One issue is that once a restaurant is well-known enough that out-of-towners go there for a specific dish, it becomes hard to dislodge. For instance, Ramen Kokutei in Kumamoto is famous for its black garlic ramen, and Kurobota in Kagoshima is famous for its (coincidentally) black pork cutlets. Both are near the top of the Tabelog rankings, but in both cases I detected an unmistakeable whiff of tourist-trap complacency. The problem, I suspect, is that although Tabelog ratings reflect Japanese opinion, they don't necessarily reflect local opinion. Yes, the Japanese have high standards, but they're in a good mood when they go on holiday just like everyone else. A lot of domestic tourists probably come to Kagoshima on holiday and they go to Kurobota because it's where everyone tells you to go and they have a nice time and they give it a generous rating, so it maintains a score it does not really deserve.

Whereas many of the very best meals I've had across my two trips to Japan – especially the ones that really came out of nowhere – I came across on Google Maps. The sweet spot, I've discovered, is a place with a 4.5 to 5 star average based on about 30 to 90 ratings (not more, not less). Jeer all you want, but I have found that to be more reliable than any Tabelog data. One example on this trip was Todoroki in Nagasaki – 32 reviews, 4.6 average – a yakitori joint which, like many restaurants in Japan, refutes the old saw that the best places to eat are always the busy ones: there was only one other table occupied while I had an absolutely unforgettable meal of chicken hearts, pork ribs, beef diaphragm and the like. In the West, if a grill or BBQ restaurant has over a hundred dishes on the menu, you expect the bulk of them to taste pretty much the same, but here every single little plate had its own distinct identity. Another example was Azuma Sushi in Fukuoka, where I walked in one lunchtime, was served a superb eight-piece omakase at the counter for 3,300 yen (£15), and walked out feeling stunned that a meal so good could be had so cheaply and so casually. I mean, people will pay £15 for a couple of things from the fridge cabinet at Itsu!

Propping up the bar

Nobody is ever going to tell you that in Japan the best places to drink are the busy ones. How busy can a six-seat Shinjuku cocktail bar possibly get? Still, I was a little bit disconcerted in Kyushu by how often I was the sole patron in bars. Yes, I was often going in on a weeknight, but that was true on my last trip too, and it wasn't nearly so noticeable in those cities. Famously the economics of Japanese nightlife allow for much smaller, quieter bars, but with a lot of these places I did wonder if they can really tick along forever selling just a few drinks a night or whether they are vestiges of a model that for whatever reason has ceased to add up. This is the flipside of the overtourism issue: there are parts of Japanese culture – high-end sushi counters being another – that now lean on foreign subsidy to survive.

At Bar&Records Ambient in Fukuoka – so-called because it's a music-focused bar but instead of playing jazz or rock it plays electronica – the bartender acknowledged my intrusion with what seemed at first like a chilly gaze. But after I'd drunk some of my whisky, he asked where I was from, and from then on he put on only British music. When he played 'Roads', I said, 'Oh, I love Portishead!' and he told me it was his favourite of their songs. After that we just listened without speaking, two diffident men on opposite sides of a bar, mutually but separately moved by a beautiful piece of music on an expensive sound system. Then I finished my drink and once again left him alone in his bar. A lot of Japanese people combine a profound hospitality with a profound reserve, and I suppose one way of resolving this paradox is by opening an extremely cool bar that almost nobody will ever come to.

MY OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

Sushi: my big final-night meal was an 18-course omakase at Sushi Ryori Ichitaka in Fukuoka. I was seated next to a guy from Seoul who was there with his wife and daughter. He was wearing what I later identified as £20,000 Hublot Big Bang, and he'd paid the corkage to bring in a bottle of Yamazaki 12 Year. The moment I offered even the smallest pleasantry he called for another glass so he could pour me what must have been a quadruple shot of Yamazaki, and then proceeded over the course of the meal to finish most of the rest of the bottle before briefly passing out on his stool. I'm not complaining about this – it was funny, and dispelled the stifling feeling of ceremony that can sometimes descend upon an expensive omakase counter – but all the same I regret it on his behalf, because this was breathtakingly good sushi, certainly the best I've ever had. Even at Sushi Udatsu in Tokyo, I still had misgivings about how much can be wrung from what is after all a single bite of food flashing momentarily across your senses. But here a piece of baby squid or smoked bonito resonated like a temple bell, the taste staying with you for pretty much as long as you focused on it.

However, I also have to note that this omakase cost about 40,000 yen, or £190, whereas my lunch at Sushi Udatsu in 2023 was only 13,000 yen, or £60. I've never had high-end sushi in London, but my guess is an equivalent meal to Sushi Ryori Ichitaka, if such a thing even exists, would cost £300 to £400; so in that limited sense it's "good value", but for any sane person Udatsu would remain my recommendation for where to eat sushi in Japan.

Bar: I did go to one bar where every single seat in a good-sized room was filled, and that was Bar Ishizue in Kagoshima, which serves the sweet-potato shochu for which the region is famous. Ishizue has over 1,600 types, more than any other bar in the world, and the English-speaking owner will personally help you choose one. I'll also mention Milestone in Nagasaki, a jazz listening bar with a view of the Nakashima River which has been run since 1986 by Hideyuki Natsume, the son of two atomic bomb survivors.

Ramen: Kyushu is famous as the home of tonkotsu ramen, and the best bowl I had was at Ramen Tontoro in Kagoshima. Here, the pork is served not sliced but rather shredded, so it disintegrates into the broth when you so much as look at it.

Patisserie: Grandir, a well-known bakery from Kyoto, now has a branch at Tenjin Station in Fukuoka. I had a fermented butter brioche bun, which was like what croissants might eventually turn into after fifty million years of evolution on a low-gravity planet with no predators.

Gelato: As alluded to above, Gelato Sora-Umi on Yakushima, which uses locally grown citrus such as the daidai, the loquat and the tankan. Obviously, this place is going to have an aura of specialness just for existing, but I promise it was objectively first-rate gelato. And, yes, we're talking about a roadside gelato shop open four hours a day that even by the standards of this remote Japanese island is located quite a long way from anything, so this may not appear to be one of my more actionable recommendations, but all the same I simply INSIST that you MUST go.

Rick Owens SS24 Lido at Paris Fashion Week

Off the back of my interview about Rick Owens in the Financial Times I managed to score an invitation to his womenswear show at Paris Fashion Week. Obviously there wasn't the slightest possibility that I wasn't going to go, but all the same, Eurostar prices being what they are these days, the trip felt like a bit of extravagance: I’ve been to a handful of fashion shows before and generally it’s a lot of rigmarole just to watch people walk back and forth for ten minutes. (See also my recent misgivings about travelling eighty miles to glimpse a flying squirrel.) As it turned out, though, none of that prior experience was relevant, because a Rick Owens show is an entirely different beast.

The woman sitting next to me on the Eurostar worked for Alexander McQueen, and I kept wanting to ask her: how early can I get to the Rick show without looking like the kind of loser who get tos a nightclub right when the doors open? I often watch the livestreams of the shows, so I knew that they begin at least half an hour late and nobody who matters gets there on time, but I also wanted to be there soaking up the atmosphere for as long as possible. In the end, I headed to the Palais de Tokyo for about 5:10pm, i.e. twenty minutes early, thinking that if the place was empty I could just turn around and wander along the Seine for a while. From a distance, I saw a huge throng milling around outside, and thought to myself “Wow, I really didn’t expect the door situation at a Rick Owens show to be so disorganised, I'm surprised the fashionistas put up with this, and also why are they here so early?” Then as I got closer it dawned on me that this wasn’t the door situation — this was just the people who’d come to gawk at everybody coming in, like at a film premiere — i.e. they’d come to gawk at ME!!!!!!!

I had no idea this happened at Rick shows, but it probably helps that (unlike most brands) they’re in the same location every season, so everybody knows where to go. Of course, I can’t help but have mixed feelings about it, because that throng is the physical embodiment of Rick becoming a celebrity fashion designer; I’m pretty sure nobody was waiting outside his shows a decade ago when I first got into him. I don’t have any inherent objection to Rick breaking through into the mainstream — he deserves it, and it hasn’t diluted the work — except for the fact that it’s caused a huge rise in prices, both retail and second-hand, that has made it impossible for me to actually buy the clothes. Thinking of that throng as the people I am now competing with to snag a pair of trainers off Grailed makes me somewhat more coolly disposed to them.

So I showed my invitation at the door and strolled in past the slathering looky-loos, honouring one or two of them with a regal glance which they will no doubt cherish to their deathbeds. I found my seat, but I was reluctant to sit down right away, because the seat was a long way from the entrance, and the truth is… I too am a slathering looky-loo! I wanted to gawk at everyone coming in as well! So I hung around at the front for so long that two different staff members asked me if I needed help and then a third had to politely instruct me to sit down because I was getting in the way.

But it was worth it. A Rick Owens show is the only place in the world you can go wearing head-to-toe Rick Owens and still feel abjectly underdressed. There were lots of gorgeous new-season outfits, and it was fun seeing how different people dealt with the impractically long trails of their Luxor gowns: one woman carried hers in her hand while another just let hers drag on the ground. But I also noticed archival pieces dating back fifteen-ish years. Obviously for a Rick obsessive all this was a thrill to see in person, but even if you didn't know a Geobasket from a Mega Creeper I think it would still be dazzling: it was, in the best sense, an absolute freak show. The single funniest look I saw was a guy dressed all in black Rick except for his bright purple Neon Genesis Evangelion baseball cap. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon and a lot of people must have been melting inside their leather tunics, but what are you going to do, take off the outfit you’ve been planning for weeks??

Finally I did sit down, and fell into conversation with my friendly seatmates. I am not usually a person who either takes or posts selfies, but the thing is, people often ask me what the life of a novelist is really like, away from the readings, away from the literary festivals…

And the answer is, it’s like this. This sums it up. This is the bread and butter, the basic situation. Fundamentally this is what we are referring to when we talk about 'the writer's life.' In fact the one sense in which this image fails to reflect my everyday existence as a literary novelist is that it shows me next to only two beautiful women wearing the famous Rick Owens Prong dress whereas normally I am with upwards of five or six beautiful women wearing the famous Rick Owens Prong dress.

The show began with pink smoke, a Diana Ross remix, and confetti cannons showering us in rose petals. Now, as Rick shows go, this wasn’t one of the historic spectacles, either in terms of stagecraft or in terms of the clothes themselves: in this later period of his career we more often see incremental changes from season to season, and so it was here. Nevertheless, it was a gorgeous collection and to be there watching it in person was, for me, heart-stopping. No doubt a lot of the fashion-industry people had been to dozens of these and were a bit numb to it, and I’m happy that will never happen to me. Also, numbness was not at all the prevailing atmosphere. Unless I was imagining it, there was a shared awareness and excitement amongst the audience that we were in the presence of genius: obviously I believe Rick is the greatest fashion designer of modern times, but even if you aren’t as much of a cultist as I am you could not with a straight face put him outside the top five.

One thing you really don’t get a sense of in the livestreams is the way the models at a Rick show walk, which is totally different from the pouty arm-swinging stride you might imagine when you think about models on a catwalk. These shaven-headed figures in their veils were slow, sepulchral, their faces at once vacant and grim, their gaits at once shambling and steady, like a zombie in a deportment class, or a sleepwalker dreaming only of revenge. Of course as an onlooker you know on some level that they are not these things, in fact they are just nice young women thinking about where they’re going for apéro, but I suppose walking the runway is a bit like sex: above all it’s about maintaining the persuasive illusion that there is nothing going on in your head beyond the physical act that you’re engaged in.

The show ended, but, again, I wanted to stretch the experience out for as long as possible, so I just hung around. And under the auspices of a shockingly nice Rick Owens PR woman — I say shockingly because the Paris fashion industry is not exactly known for its friendliness; then again, the PR team is based in New York, and the Rick Owens store in SoHo is famous for being by far the most welcoming experience of its kind even if you wander in dressed like a normal person with no intention of buying anything, so maybe there’s some special penumbra of interpersonal warmth around the whole Rick Owens NY operation (sorry, I may be getting too deep in the weeds here…) — because of her, I managed to get into the post-show drinks, which take place in the area where the models are dressed and styled. By this point, Rick himself had left and the champagne had run out, plus I didn’t know anyone so once again I found myself just sort of loitering around, but it was still extremely cool to be in this place I recognised from so many backstage photos. And then the afterglow continued even down in the Métro afterwards, because the same way when you’re going home on the Tube you can tell who’s just been to the same gig as you, I could easily pick out the stragglers from the Rick show.

During my trip to Paris I also went for the first time to both the Fondation Cartier and Francois Pinault’s refurbished Bourse de Commerce. Both of these buildings are in some sense monuments to how luxury goods companies, which have some of the most outrageous profit margins in the world, keep piling up so much money that they barely know what to do with it all. Of course, I’d rather the money was spent that way than on another super-yacht, but all the same I don’t see how you could walk into the Bourse de Commerce carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag without thinking ‘Am I a chump? Am I being milked?’ And yet the Rick Owens show is the same. Who’s paying for all that spectacle? Me! I've been paying it for ten years! All I am is a goth chump! But after experiencing it for myself, I never want to be anything else.

JAPAN, MAY 2023

Arrival

I have conquered nature. I have trampled the laws of earth and heaven. I have stared God in the face and laughed. By this I mean that I managed to get from London to Tokyo without any jetlag. None. None! On my first morning there I woke up refreshed at 7am local time after exactly eight hours’ sleep. Although this was my first flight in nearly five years, I remain a jetlag obsessive, and so nothing could be more satisfying to me than this peerless triumph. And my method was a trifle: I simply prepared for two weeks in advance by moving back my morning alarm time 15 minutes a day until by the day of my flight it was 3am, whereupon I ate a protein bar for breakfast and then consumed nothing but glass after glass of water for the next 25 hours until I was in Shinjuku eating ramen.

OK, maybe you hear that and think the cure sounds worse than the disease. But it’s worth noting that I overshot. The fact that I experienced no jetlag whatsoever actually makes it harder to gauge the success of my technique: could I have carried on to Papa New Guinea and still been fine? Scientists are desperate to know, but I don’t have the data. However, I am reasonable person (what could be more reasonable than shutting the blinds at 6pm as outside England was experiencing its first sunny evening in about eight months, incidentally leaving my dog stranded on Central Asian time even though he wasn’t travelling anywhere?) and I would be perfectly willing to tolerate, say, a day of mild jetlag. So maybe next time I could just prepare for one week in advance. Regardless, the depth of my satisfaction here was such that it didn’t really matter what else happened while I was in Japan, this was already definitively a great holiday.

The Japanese: their habits, their national character

I went a place in the Sendagi neighbourhood of Tokyo called Players Bar R. When you walk in you see a gleaming mahogany bar; a record player connected to a vintage tube amp and two huge speakers; an enormous collection of jazz records; and a shelf of rare Japanese whisky, unfortunately unavailable for purchase because each bottle is tagged with the name of the regular it belongs to. In other words, it’s the coolest place in the world, except in Tokyo it’s not the coolest place in the world, in Tokyo it’s just another neighbourhood bar.

As I ordered a beer, Nina Simone was playing, and the barman, who was in his sixties, asked me ‘Do you like jazz?’ He didn’t speak much English, so rather than equivocate — ‘Well, yes, there are some jazz albums I’m into, but most of them are fairly recent and I wouldn’t say I like jazz in the way that the people who come here probably like jazz…’ — I just said yes. Whereupon he passed me the catalogue of records in his collection and told me to make a request. Seeing the names of dozens of Blue Note luminaries who I had heard of but knew nothing about, I panicked: vaguely I remembered that at some point I had enjoyed an album called Out to Lunch by Eric Dolphy, so I asked for that one, and he put it on.

Unfortunately, what I had not remembered is that Out to Lunch is a transmission from the 1960s avant-garde that has been described as ‘an effort to break our expectations about the very nature of jazz’. In other words, very much not Nina Simone. As Dolphy and his saxophone began assaulting some expectations over the very loud sound system, I looked around thinking, ‘I’m not sure I even like this, so what do they think of it?’ — ‘they’ being the barman and the two patrons other than me — one of whom, to my horror, soon got up and walked out, leaving the other guy, who was sort of nodding along a bit, but in a way that looked more polite than anything else.

I felt that leaving the bar before Out to Lunch had finished would make my choice look even more terroristic, and so, knowing that I was trapped there until all 42 minutes of banging and squawking were over, I ordered a whisky. It was at this point that the barman looked up something in a translation app on his phone, scrupulously copied it out into a notebook, and passed it to me to look at. ‘Please make yourself at home,’ it said.

This incident sums up my time in Japan. I wouldn’t care in the least if some French waiter didn’t like me, but here I was gripped with anxiety because I felt I would rather die than have a single Japanese person find me rude or clumsy… which is completely perverse, since the Japanese are so fathomlessly hospitable and forgiving. It’s very funny to me that Japanese culture is often compared to English culture: sure, maybe both countries are repressed and hierarchical, but the Japanese are repressed and hierarchical and also helpful and nice, which is a really quite significant difference!!! Significant enough in fact that I think the analogy has to be left for dead.

I concede that people who’ve spent more time in Japan, and indeed the Japanese themselves, don’t have such a rosy view of the culture. Scratch the surface and it’s much more complicated. But surfaces are not nothing. By contrast, a well-educated French person may seem quite snooty at first but when you make the effort get to know them you find out they’re really snooty. (I realise the French are coming in for a lot of attacks here, and to any French people reading this, I apologise. Croissants and Jacques Becker are good.)

My terror of putting a foot wrong in Japan came not, I think, from any sense of the country as a minefield of rules and expectations, but rather from the feeling that it would be horribly ungrateful to test the good graces of these people who’ve already given us so many gifts. By which I don’t just mean Masaki Kobayashi and Elden Ring, Tadao Ando and Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rei Kawakubo and shiba inus, but rather a much more general impression that the Japanese improve everything they touch — an impression that is compounded with every minute you spend in the country (including even the time you’re in the airport, a place that we tend to bracket off from our first impressions when travelling, but in this case an opportunity to experience the unbridled joy of operating a Japanese ATM).

Again, even as a Japanophile, I know it’s important not to pedestal-ise the Japanese too much. Otherwise you can end up shrinking them into something distant, untouchable, not fully human, the way men who haven't known many women growing up often regard women. (Not me, though — I'm actually the only living man who went to boys' schools for twelve years who ended up with a totally healthy attitude to the gentler sex. You can tell from my books!) On this trip I read Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami and Bending Adversity by David Pilling, both in their different ways good antidotes to this caricature of modern Japan as a place which has optimised all dysfunction out of existence.

One such dysfunction, as Pilling discusses, is the country’s somewhat gouty economy. Teizo, a volunteer tour guide and former banker who spent a few hours with me one Saturday, explained to me that the Japanese pursuit of perfection, though so attractive to outsiders, is from some angles a symptom of their economic problems; Japan must improve its worker productivity, and in a higher-productivity economy, it may no longer be realistic for someone living in Tokyo to devote himself completely to serving the finest imaginable bowl of miso ramen at an eight-seat ramen bar that’s open five lunchtimes a week.

Of course, that sounds like a tragedy to me, and I won’t be the first person to point out that certain economic metrics seem to miss the point of human existence. All the same, I suppose a high-productivity economy with robots cooking the noodles is still better than what we have in the UK, a low-productivity economy and Pret for lunch, all of the downsides with none of the upsides.

Above: wax models of parasite eggs at the Meguro Parasitological Museum

My grandmother’s soba

I was a bit disappointed by the food in Japan. I know, I know, that’s blasphemy! Part of it is, my expectations weren’t just sky high, they were out past Neptune, and Japanese food for me was merely somewhere in Saturn’s rings. I’m not saying the food I had was bad — of course I’m not saying that — Japanese food culture is clearly wildly superior to anywhere in the white Western world. But I didn’t feel the same sense of blinding revelation that I did when I first visited Thailand or Mexico or South Korea. I don’t know to what extent this was just personal taste (I happen to prefer khao soi to ramen etc.), to what extent it was bad luck (although it will surprise no one when I say that I do research where I’m going to eat pretty extensively) and to what extent it was that Japanese cooking just exports better, leaving less room for revelation — by which I mean that (for instance) before I visited Mexico for the first time I’d never had anything remotely resembling the barbacoa tacos they sell in the Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca, but before I visited Japan for the first time I’d already had some pretty good ramen, some pretty good sushi, and so forth. Yes, nearly every bowl of ramen I had in Japan was better than any bowl of ramen I’ve ever had in the West, but it didn’t feel like an entirely different category of thing.

My favourite meal was at Dosanjin, a soba restaurant not far from the famous Gotojuki Temple where they have all the cat statues. Dosanjin is almost a parody of what you want a restaurant in Tokyo to look like: a beautiful room looking out through floor-to-ceiling windows on to an even more beautiful private garden. Along with your basic scallop and vegetable tempura I had two seasonal specials: minced duck in burdock miso and their famous sudachi soba, sudachi being a citrus fruit from Tokushima prefecture in the south of Japan. All of that was great (it’s true what they say about tempura being different in Japan; it didn’t feel like the vegetables had been deep-fried so much as they had just grown like that). But the high point was after I’d finished the food.

Because that was when they brought me a little teapot full of the water the soba noodles had been cooked in, and told me to sip it from a cup, adding, if I wanted, some of the soy sauce I’d been dipping my tempura in. Now, when I say Dosanjin is a soba restaurant, I mean in this case that they source buckwheat seeds directly from a farm on the coast, then shell them, grind them, and make the noodles fresh each morning (I could see the machine from where I was sitting). And this soba water — well, it took me straight back to my childhood in Shinshu in the 1950s, when my doting grandmother would make soba noodles for me even as I could see her arthritic fingers were growing more and more…

No, obviously I didn’t have a childhood in Shinshu. In fact I have no nostalgic connection to soba whatsoever. But at that moment, it felt like I did! This soba water hit me on what I can only describe as an autobiographical level. It made me want to start writing earnest personal essays. I could not believe how good it was, given that it was basically just pasta water! The only other time I’ve experienced this was in Xi’an, another place with a big emphasis on hand-making the noodles on site, where at one hole-in-the-wall restaurant they, likewise, brought me a cup of wheat broth afterwards; I would love to know if this practice has a common ancestor somewhere or whether it developed independently in China and Japan. Anyway, that was fantastic too, but the Dosanjin one was even better, because adding those few drops of soy rounds it off so perfectly.

This was only my second full day in Japan so it did cross my mind that I was just getting carried away with the excitement of it all. But a few days later, in Takasaki, I had lunch at a well-liked local soba restaurant, where they also gave me a teapot full of soba water afterwards, but this time the soba water tasted of absolutely fuck all! So I know I wasn’t just imagining how special Dosanjin was. Meanwhile, in Osaka I went to yet another excellent soba place called Enishi, and there they bring you your cup of soba water at the beginning of the meal and then top it up as if it were a cup of coffee, but that wasn’t as good as either.

There’s one more thing to add about Dosanjin: how expensive are you imagining this meal to be, what with the hand-made noodles, the seasonal specials, the immaculate room, did I mention the restaurant is decorated with ceramic works by the late master potter Yukio Kinoshita etc. etc.? Well, guess what — my lunch cost me the equivalent of £23.64 all in. Unbelievable!

Above: the Shibakawa Building in Osaka (1927) with its Mayan Revival architecture

Fleeting pleasures

After Tokyo I travelled up to Karuizawa, a resort town in the mountains where a lot of wealthy Tokyoites have second homes. I was there because the Picchio Wildlife Research Center run flying squirrel tours in the bird sanctuary nearby. The tour lasted an hour and in my imagination that entire time would be spent standing in the pine forest gazing up in wonder as dozens of flying squirrels soared and swooped and looped-de-looped. But after we arrived at Picchio (a low curved building with panoramic windows overlooking an artificial lake; of course the Japanese make their wildlife research centres look as elegant as their soba restaurants) our guide sat us down for enjoyable but quite protracted lecture on the world of the flying squirrel, using both videos and props. And I started to feel suspicious. Because it almost seemed like stalling for time. Why were we not already out there watching as the very stars were extinguished by the unbroken canopy of airborne mammals? Well, I soon found out. The guide led us to one of the nest boxes that Picchio have placed in the woods, where a video feed from inside showed a flying squirrel nursing her two kits. Flying squirrels are, like Japanese trains, extraordinarily punctual, so we only had to wait a few more minutes until the mother left the nest box to gather food, as she does every night exactly half an hour after sunset. And then…

The briefest image that the human eye can perceive is one that lasts for about 13 milliseconds. I don’t know how long it took that flying squirrel to glide from that nest box to the nearby copse of trees into which she immediately vanished forever, but I don’t even really have any memory of motion in that drizzly half-light, just of two or three flashes of something overhead. It’s one of those memories so gossamer-thin that I can now never even risk watching a YouTube video of a flying squirrel because I know the video would irreversibly overwrite whatever I have in my head. I had made a 24 hour round trip to Karuizawa for this experience that lasted well under a second.

Was it worth it? Three days earlier I’d had lunch at Udatsu Sushi, a Michelin-starred sushi counter in Nakameguro. Udatsu Sushi offers a lunchtime omakase menu for 13,500 yen, which sushi obsessive regard as a fantastic deal for a restaurant of this quality. I’m inclined to agree because unfortunately I had a second omakase in Tokyo that much more expensive and nowhere near as good. Just seeing Hisashi Udatsu make nigiri was riveting; it had a prestidigitatory quality where no matter how closely you watched you simply could not follow what he was doing with his fingers. And somewhere in the middle there was a run of four of these nigiri — mackerel, sea urchin, squid and lean tuna — that were by far the best pieces of sushi I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have. But everyone knows nigiri has to be eaten in one bite. And so I found myself hunched over, staring at nothing, desperately trying to prolong the experience of each of these mouthfuls, gripping them like a clenched fist, the full unfolding of each taste almost more agonising than pleasurable because that unfolding only heightened the anticipation of its loss. The rest of the meal was pretty good, too, but it didn’t really stick in the mind, so in effect I booked a month in advance and sat there for almost two hours in order to eat four mouthfuls of food.

Well, this is what holidays are about, right? In a recent Vogue interview, Margot Robbie reveals that she queued for three-and-a-half hours to eat at an udon place in Tokyo (which is not named in the article but probably has to be Shin Udon in Shinjuku). Although I am certainly the type of person who might do that kind of thing, I actually, in practice, don’t do that kind of thing, because I can’t imagine queueing all that time for something that’s over so quickly. And yet you get to enjoy your bowl of udon for at least a few minutes, so arguably it’s more rational than either the flying squirrel tour or Udatsu Sushi. The Japanese are known for their appreciation of fleeting pleasures; the reason to value cherry blossom season so highly is precisely because it’s so ephemeral. In the words of the eighteenth-century poet Yosa Buson, ‘The cherry-blossoms having fallen/ The temple belongs/ To the branches.’ But even cherry blossom season lasts a couple of weeks, which is plenty of time to write a haiku! I think my rule in future is that I’ll consider any fleeting pleasure that lasts at least fifteen syllables. But nothing that lasts less than one.

The Sanja Festival in Asakusa

I haven’t seen that many tabis since the last time I had dinner at Toklas!!!!!! (Sorry, I just really wanted to make that joke.)

Above: chicken sashimi at Matabei at Okayama

MY OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

I do want to note here, for anyone wondering how all this extremely carnivorous content fits with the novel I’ve just published, that at home I eat no more than two or three non-vegan meals a month. But when I’m travelling, all bets are off. If that makes me a moral weakling, so be it.

Soba: Dosanjin in Tokyo and Enishi in Osaka, as described.

Sushi: Sushi Udatsu in Tokyo, as described.

Ramen: my favourite of the many bowls I had, bearing in mind that for reasons outlined above I didn’t go to any of the famous and oversubscribed ones, was probably at Do Miso in Kyobashi, Tokyo. I also want to mention a place called Kubo Champon in Tottori, which had the richest chicken broth I've ever tasted, although as it says in the name, it's champon, which is technically a different dish that I've never tried outside Japan.

Yakitori: Toriki in Shinagawa, Tokyo. If I’ve ever had better fried chicken it’s not coming to mind. Please note that there is also a Michelin-starred restaurant called Toriki in Kinshicho, and that may well be good too but it’s not the one I’m talking about. At this Toriki, which is very much not Michelin-starred, they don’t have room for a deep fryer behind the bar so when you order karage a phone call is made and some time later a woman comes through the front door with a plate of it under some newspaper. I also want to mention Sumisu in Osaka, not so much because of the food — although the tsukune I had was excellent — but because it’s open 7pm to 5am and even at 7:30pm on a Saturday the atmosphere was effervescent so I cannot even imagine how much fun this place is at 2 in the morning. Osaka and Tokyo, like Seoul and New York, are cities that very much seem built around giving people what they want, as opposed to London, a city built around grimly withholding it.

Ice cream: Hio Ice Cream Atelier in Setagaya, Tokyo. This place is only open Saturdays and Sundays between 1pm and 6pm, so in addition to the terrific ice cream there is a considerable sense of accomplishment in having managed to get some.

Patisserie: Acidracines in Osaka.

Bar: Players Bar R in Tokyo, as described. Rogin’s Bar in Osaka, which you can read about here. Bar Comptoir in Okayama.

Three places to go if you like feeling like you're in Denis Villeneuve's Dune:

The Metropolitan Area Underground Discharge Channel in Saitama, north of Tokyo; if you're doing this, do also go to the Omaya Bonsai Art Museum

The Night Factory Jungle Cruise in Yokohama, south of Tokyo

The Osaka Prefectural Sayamaike Museum

Julie Hankey on Othello:

"In fact, so intense has been the sympathetic engagement of audiences, that it has spawned a mass of anecdotes about people fainting, calling out, warning the characters, and threatening Iago. It is as though Othello bursts the limit between reality and fiction more readily than Shakespeare’s other tragedies. In 1825, when the American actor Edwin Forrest played Iago to Edmund Kean’s Othello, a man in the front row was heard to say, ‘You damn’d lying scoundrel, I would like to get hold of you after this show is over and wring your infernal neck.' Margaret Webster heard a girl in the audience whispering to herself over and over again ‘Oh God, don’t let him kill her . . . don’t let him kill her . . . ’ On the whole, it’s the women who cry out for Desdemona and the men who offer to fight Iago. As for the soldier on guard duty at a Baltimore theatre in 1822, it was presumably some potent combination of his profession and his racism that made him shout, as Stendhal reported: ‘ “It will never be said in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman” ’. Whereupon he shot the white actor of Othello and broke his arm."

From Revelations of a Boston Physician by Charles Wistar Stevens:

"Mr. Blenkinsop watched attentively the scenes, and seemed to feel the reality of the fiction. I spoke to him several times; but he made me no answer, so much he was absorbed. And when Othello, having taken off his sword, takes up the feather-bed to smother the traduced Desdemona, and she, with the pathos of innocence, exclaims, “Kill me to-morrow, but let me live to-night! ” young Blenkinsop suddenly leaped over the railing (we were in the lowest box) and jumped over the footlights upon the stage. He then ran forward, and seizing Othello’s sword, which he had laid down, rushed at the jealous Moor, with murder in his eyes. Othello was at first stupefied, and gazed speechless at the intrepid avenger of Desdemona. Blenkinsop made a lunge at the actor and wounded him in the arm, while the actor, now starting up from his panic, took his only weapon, the feather-bed, and throwing it with full force and pressing it home, brought the madman to the ground; then following up his advantage, jumped upon it, and would have accomplished upon the poor maniac what he intended for Desdemona, had not the cries of the audience brought out the other actors,—lago, Gratiano, and Ludovico,—who drew away Othello and the feather- bed, and seized the supernumerary actor, who was playing in earnest. It was a terrible scene."

 Best non-2021 films seen for the first time in 2021

1. Bright Star (2009)
2. The Legend of the Stardust Brothers (1985)
3. Light Sleeper (1992)
4. I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
5. Blind Shaft (2003)
6. Midnight Family (2019)
7. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
8. Clifford (1994)
9. The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
10. A Touch of Sin (2013)
11. Welfare (1975)
12. The Assistant (2019)
13. Rosewood (1997)
14. Casque d'Or (1952)
15. They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)
16. Streets of Fire (1984)
17. Paradise: Love (2012)
18. Scarlet Street (1945)
19. Da 5 Bloods (2020)
20. Missing (1982)

 Best non-2020 films seen for the first time in 2020 (out of 113 total)

1. Babe (1995)
2. Matewan (1987)
3. Jane (2017)
4. Rachel Getting Married (2008)
5. Holy Flame of the Martial World (1983)
6. Minding the Gap (2018)
7. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
8. My Cousin Vinny (1992)
9. I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)
10. Déja Vu (2006)
11. Red River (1948)
12. Death Becomes Her (1992)
13. Unstoppable (2010)
14. Heaven Knows What (2014)
15. The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963)
16. Thunder Road (2018)
17. Birds of Passage (2018)
18. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
19. Contagion (2011)
20. King of New York (1990)

The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis is that changes in the way people are employed have facilitated the rise of Corporate Psychopaths to senior positions and their personal greed in those positions has created the crisis. Prior to the last third of the twentieth century large corporations were relatively stable, slow to change and the idea of a job for life was evident, with employees gradually rising through the corporate ranks until a position was reached beyond which they were not qualified by education, intellect or ability to go. In such a stable, slowly changing environment employees would get to know each other very well and Corporate Psychopaths would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.

Changing companies’ mid-career was seen as being questionable and inadvisable and their rise would therefore be blocked both within their original employer and among external employers who would question their reasons for wanting to change jobs.

However, once corporate takeovers and mergers started to become commonplace and the resultant corporate changes started to accelerate, exacerbated by both globalisation and a rapidly changing technological environment, then corporate stability began to disintegrate. Jobs for life disappeared and not surprisingly employees’ commitment to their employers also lessened accordingly. Job switching first became acceptable and then even became common and employees increasingly found themselves working for unfamiliar organisations and with other people that they did not really know very well. Rapid movements in key personnel between corporations compared to the relatively slower movements in organisational productivity and success made it increasingly difficult to identify corporate success with any particular manager. Failures were not noticed until too late and the offending managers had already moved on to better positions elsewhere. Successes could equally be claimed by those who had nothing to do with them. Success could thus be claimed by those with the loudest voice, the most influence and the best political skills. Corporate Psychopaths have these skills in abundance and use them with ruthless and calculated efficiency.

In this way, the whole corporate and employment environment changed from one that would hold the Corporate Psychopath in check to one where they could flourish and advance relatively unopposed.

from "The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis" by Clive R. Boddy

A fun Wikipedia loop

PJ Harvey –>

Ian Stewart (musician) –>

Exile on Main St. –>

Rolling Stones Mobile Studio –>

Stargroves –>

Sir Mark Palmer, 5th Baronet –>

Henrietta Moraes –>

Maggi Hambling –>

Vagina and vulva in art –>

Sheela na gig –>

Sheela-Na-Gig (song) –>

PJ Harvey

from Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance by Donald MacKenzie

"Apart from the general prejudice that the true driving forces must be grander things, there is a particular difficulty for those who are not intimately familiar with it in keeping the ordinariness of nuclear politics in mind. Like the politics of any office, to an outsider it seems intricate, devious, and boring, difficult to understand in comparison with the memorable but misleading simplicities of technological and macropolitical determinism. So it is perhaps worth substituting a single striking example for all the details. It may not even be altogether accurate, as it is not well documented, but if true, it vividly shows how the same sort of mundane considerations can shape nuclear war plans as can shape, for example, a local authority budget. If nuclear war had broken out early in 1961, Moscow was to have been the target for no fewer than 170 American nuclear weapons. This was not because that many were needed to destroy it: even a tiny fraction of that number would have been more than sufficient. Nor was it primarily because of worries that technical failure, a Soviet preemptive strike, or Soviet defenses might lead to attrition of the attacking force. The chief reason was the reluctance of the various branches of the armed services to give up the Soviet capital for a less prestigious target."

"The sad fact that few conservationists care to face is that many species, perhaps most, do not seem to have any conventional value at all, even hidden conventional value. True, we can not be sure which particular species fall into this category, but it is hard to deny that there must be a great many of them. And unfortunately the species whose members are the fewest in number, the rarest, the most narrowly distributed — in short, the ones most likely to become extinct — are obviously the ones least likely to be missed by the biosphere. Many of these species were never common or ecologically influential; by no stretch of the imagination can we make them out to be vital cogs in the ecological machine. If the California condor disappears forever from the California hills, it will be a tragedy: but don’t expect the chaparral to die, the redwoods to wither, the San Andreas fault to open up, or even the California tourist industry to suffer — they won’t."

from "Why Put a Value on Biodiversity?" by David Ehrenfeld

A faded and somewhat droll survival of ecclesiastical excommunication and exorcism is the custom, still prevailing in European countries and some portions of the United States, of serving a writ of ejectment on rats or simply sending them a friendly letter of advice in order to induce them to quit any house, in which their presence is deemed undesirable. Lest the rats should overlook and thus fail to read the epistle, it is rubbed with grease, so as to attract their attention, rolled up and thrust into their holes. Mr. William Wells Newell, in a paper on “Conjuring Rats,” printed in The Journal of American Folk-Lore (Jan.-March, 1892), gives a specimen of such a letter, dated, “Maine, Oct. 31, 1888,” and addressed in business style to “Messrs. Rats and Co.” The writer begins by expressing his deep interest in the welfare of said rats as well as his fears lest they should find their winter quarters in No. 1, Seaview Street, uncomfortable and poorly supplied with suitable food, since it is only a summer residence and is also about to undergo repairs. He then suggests that they migrate to No. 6, Incubator Street, where they “can live snug and happy” in a splendid cellar well stored with vegetables of all kinds and can pass easily through a shed leading to a barn containing much grain. He concludes by stating that he will do them no harm if they heed his advice, otherwise he shall be forced to use “Rough on Rats.” This threat of resorting to rat poison in case of the refusal to accept his kind counsel is all that remains of the once formidable anathema of the Church.

from The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by EP Evans (1906)

Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the founders of the London School of Economics, executes several porters during an expedition to Mount Kenya in 1895

Mackinder ‘practised with my Mauser in the afternoon against a tree trunk' and kept discipline within his own group of porters by regularly shooting off rounds from his gun. The 'moral suasion of my Mauser'  was for Mackinder an effective physical representation of the social contract on safari: '[i]t was a strange experience to be thus brought face to face with the ultimate sanctions of society'. Mackinder regularly rejected pleas from his porters to stop for the day with the observation that: “[i]n the interests of discipline I determined that my will must prevail'. When Mackinder refused to stop, he noted that the whole body of Kikuyu porters tried to desert, and were only checked by a display of firearms. His notebooks recorded that 'Cam[pbell Hausburg and the Swahili] Sulamani got ropes for a chain gang, I walked about with a loaded revolver, the Swahilis exhibited some 50 firearms, and at length we got the Washensi [Kikuyu) into line.' Another show of force accompanied negotiations for food with a village chief: 'our Swahilis cleaned their rifles ostentatiously and drilled one another.' Elsewhere, a village Chief, Ngombe, was kidnapped and held hostage until their food needs were met. A brother of Ngombe, Wangombe, killed two Swahilis who had been sent on another food foray. '[M]uch against natural impulse', Mackinder refrained from retaliating since he was not sure he had better than 'demoralised forces and, after all, [w]e were a scientific expedition, and had reached the scene of our work.'

In addition to the two murders and the death from dysentery, at least eight other porters were 'shot by orders'. We know this by the list supplied by Hausburg to the Zanzibar company, from which Mackinder had hired the Swahilis.

Mackinder's own journey down from the mountain, after the exhilaration of the final assault on the summit, was equally desperate. He had twenty-five African men (fourteen of the Swahilis from Zanzibar, an interpreter and two tent boys hired at Mombasa, and eight Kikuyus hired from Kikuyu Fort Smith) and four Europeans with him. During this part of the journey he reflected that 'I could not help comparing the Swahili to a human camel'. Mackinder had to cope with porters who, to conserve their strength, threw away part of their load. He ordered twenty lashes for one Swahili who had thrown away a bottle of specimens in spirit', adding that there was 'an epidemic of this'. On another day, two men collapsed and had to be 'forced to continue', and Mackinder said that the day had been spoiled by the sick man'. He recorded that he 'did not like this slave driving, for that is what it really was.'

His two alibis at this point were local custom and necessity: ‘[i]t was all done according to the dasturi (= custom) of the African safari, and we could not stay, for supplies were running short.' His threats perhaps escalated for he noted that the 'Swahili [...] did not cling to life'. A few days later, he found that three-quarters of the botanical specimens had been thrown on the fire to save carrying them further. This time he ordered a number of kiboko (lashes with a leather whip) unspecified, uniquely, in the typescript but given in the notebooks as thirty, the highest recorded. The lashings were for Musa, a Swahili who could speak French and that Mackinder trusted with a gun despite his not having been hired as a soldier, or askiri. Mackinder felt betrayed, referring to the culprit with surprise as 'the trusted Musa'. Musa was one of the porters recorded as 'shot by orders'.

On arriving at Naivasha, Mackinder telegrammed his wife that he would get back to Marseilles on 14 November, and this was in fact when the other Europeans got there, but the day after sending the telegram, Mackinder instead began a furious dash to the coast and arrived in Marseilles on 29 October. He was surely eager to get back to Oxford since he was in dereliction of his academic duties but, perhaps, he recalled the small print of the contract for hiring the porters. It allowed that in ‘a case of “grave emergency" ’, the leader of the caravan might go beyond flogging to whatever was required by the safety of the caravan or the members of the caravan”. However, it also reserved the right that ‘a competent Court may be called upon to decide whether (the leader had] improperly exercised their discretion'.

from Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder by Gerry Kearns