‘Tokyo: Art and Photography’ at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

29 July 2021 – 3 January 2022

Ahhh… Edo, Edo, Edo… …city of dreams, and occasional nightmares… …as Kumagai Jiro Naozane in the final part of the Kabuki play ‘Kumagai Jinya’ (Kumagai’s Battle Camp) says about the fragility of human existence “Juroku nen wa hito mukashi, aa, yume da yume da” (Sixteen years, like a day. Ahhh! It’s a dream, a dream). And if any phrase best represents both the negative and positive potentialities that have emerged from the natural and man-made adversities that have afflicted Tokyo and best reflect, at least in the mind of this reviewer, its impermanence, of almost continual destruction and re-construction since its inception as Edo, it is this one.

Review: Brave Blossoms – The History of Rugby in Japan

As with any activity in Japan once it gains the Imperial seal of approval, formally or implied, it goes from strength to strength!

Not having been a rugby fan and only really actively interested in the two larger tournaments, the Six Nations and the World Cup, and the more famous National sides from Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, it came as something of a pleasant shock whilst on a visit to Japan in September 2015 when, with very little warning, the news media in Japan was suddenly flooded with images of their National Rugby Team dealing out a shock 34-32 defeat to South Africa’s Springboks in Brighton at the 2015 Rugby World Cup which was