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.
♦♦♦