hird book I have read by Ian Buruma.  He could have been a devastating advocate.  He has the knack – he sees the point, and articulates it, in a way that commands intellectual assent.  And that is that.

Buruma has lived in Japan.  This book gives its history for a century after 1863.  It does so in 170 pages – with one footnote (to name a source for a quote).  It is an extraordinary intellectual achievement.  It should be prescribed reading for intellectually deprived lawyers who believe that more is better.

So, we start with the Americans arriving in their demanding manner on this closed enclave.  We have the fad-like adoption of the West in the Meiji restoration.  Then, nativism of the crudest and most racist kind takes hold with the corruption of German philosophy and Buddhist teaching.  Crimes against humanity are committed at Nanking and elsewhere.  The Japanese are worse than animals.  Person to person, they look more savage than the Nazis.  The horror only ends with the bomb – and even then, reluctantly.  The American occupation makes difficult judgment calls – they allow the Emperor to remain – but when MacArthur leaves, he gets a heroes’ send off.  By the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 – when I first visited Japan – the Japanese are ready to rejoin the world order.  They are a very necessary ally for us, and their culinary intervention here grows by the day.  They are, like Germany, a leading nation – even to the point of talking of re-arming.

It is a gripping story – and a necessary one.  It deserves to be read – if just for the observation that uniqueness cannot be exported.  That should be put up in neon with the suggestion that no one likes armed invasion.  Just look at the history of the great European powers in Africa, Asia and the Americas. 

I cannot recommend the book too highly – it is up there with the author’s recent history of Berlin during the war, and his book about Spinoza.

By chance, the next book I read was about Vermeer by Andrew Graham-Dixon.  It is a big book of industry and learning.  But I fear that Vermeer may be as singular as Shakespeare.  We know very little about his life and it tells us nothing new about the art.  We are left with the few paintings that survived, and a lot of probabilities.

The Buruma book of course deals with Pearl Harbour.  It was the subject of an appalling lapse of taste by Trump with the Japanese Prime Minister.  But perhaps it was warranted.  What Iranian would have looked on that unheralded attack and the killing of the leader of Iran as anything other than ‘a date which will live in infamy’. 

As for the reasons for what is sometimes called a ‘war’, have we moved on from the remark of Thucydides (1.23) that ‘what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.’