Somewhere between Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, I decided that there was a certain affinity between the Land of the Rising Sun and “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” A namby-pamby assertion of ineffable spiritual kinship, however, will not make you any friends or apostles (except in academia). No, what I needed to bolster my quixotic pursuit of a probably inane thesis were cold, hard factual similarities—ones you might sprinkle on your tonkatsu or your toad-in-the-hole, ones that might keep you dry in a rainstorm. Frivolous it may be, but tell me after reading my list that you do you perhaps feel a little more hopeful about a key to all mythologies? Here they are, in no particular order:
- hereditary royal families
- island nations
- love of tea, ceremonial and otherwise
- white pepper instead of black pepper
- fish for breakfast
- bad teeth (few NHS dentists in Britain, don’t know about Japan)
- gardeners, landscape painters (Turner, Constable; Hasui, Hokusai)
- excellent makers of umbrellas (Maehara, Hiyoshia; James Smith and Sons)
- colonialism/profound sense of racial superiority in the 19th /early 20th centuries (simultaneous colonial ventures in China)
- English meat pies (Cornish pasties) / Japanese curry bread (curry doughnuts)
- Worcestershire sauce /Fruit & Vegetable and Tonkatsu sauce
- drive on the left-hand side of the road
- national characters associated with repression, propriety, interpersonal chilliness
- lovers of baths (shared bath water)
- uniformed school children
- makers of superior packaged foods/remarkable supermarkets
