Why Hagakure is Japan's Strangest Book

I recently ran a three part series in The Japan Times on Bushido (the Samurai code) and referred in Part Two to the Hagakure. As it is the beginning of the Rio Olympics this weekend, I thought I might offer a closer reading of this Bushido classic: Japan's Gold Medal candidate for 'Strangest Book Ever Written'.

Around 15 years ago, Hagakure enjoyed a small vogue amongst young men in the West due to its prominent role in the dire Jim Jarmusch flick Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). This film is set in the US and is about a hitman called Ghost Dog (played by Forest Whitaker) who receives the names of his targets from a Mafia goon by carrier pigeon landing on the rooftop where he lives. He is obsessed with the Hagakure and the portentous quotes from the book that dominate his thoughts are framed and voiced over at regular intervals throughout the film.

As a sincere believer in the 'Way of the Warrior', Ghost Dog attempts to live and die by the samurai code, requiring him to wipe a slew of Mafiosi who threaten the gangster who once saved his life. Jarmusch, like Tarantino, attempts to enfold the whole world into his films and piles into this one not only Italian Mafiosi and classics of Japanese literature such as Akutagawa’s Rashomon, but rappers, an exclusively French-speaking ice cream man, Chinese restaurants and The Wind in the Willows. It is the author of Hagakure however who tops the ironical ‘personal thanks’ in the credits.

Ghost Dog is really a very silly film, where too often ‘quirkiness’ tips into self-indulgence and cliché (particularly in its depiction of Italian Mafiosi), but it does have a few interesting aspects. One is that Ghost Dog regards Bushido as a complete value system to live his life. He even has the symbol from the front cover of the book embossed on the back of his jacket and constantly wears it as a medallion. At one point in the film, he passes another young man on the street wearing a cross as a medallion – as if two equal and complete value systems had met.

Another idea, somewhat buried in the film, and only obvious through Jarmusch’s pretentious thanks in the end titles to ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ is that Ghost Dog is a modern Quixote, attempting to live by a code of chivalry in an unchivalrous age. This is a perceptive observation about the way many Westerners relate to the code of the samurai and indeed to Japan itself.

And finally there is the pairing of gangsters with Bushido, which might seem weird, but to my mind is entirely apt, as the samurai were in fact the world’s ultimate gangsters, living by strict codes precisely because they had arisen due to the collapse of the authority of central government and were notorious for internecine conflicts and blood-letting.

But back to Hagakure…

Hagakure means ‘In the Shadow of Leaves’ indicating that the author was giving a whispering insider’s account of the subject. It is a collection of commentaries on Bushido (or, more precisely, what would later be called 'Bushido') by Yamamoto Tsunetomo who was a senior retainer of the Saga Clan in northern Kyushu in the far west of Japan. The commentaries were collected by Tsuramoto Tashiro and are based on his conversations with Tsunetomo between 1709 and 1716.

Hagakure was only published in full however in the twentieth century once the samurai themselves had long since disappeared. It was particularly prized as Japan turned to the extremes of nationalist and militaristic sentiment in the 1930s.

Hagakure divides opinion even in Japan between those who feel, like Yukio Mishima (who was a great fan of the book and wrote his own commentary on it), that Tsunetomo offered the most piercing insights into Bushido and those who feel that his opinions were completely crazy.

Yamamoto’s position is best summed up with the thought that, for the samurai, loyalty to the master is everything and that he must be prepared to instantly give up his life for his master at any time. Yamamoto even criticized the famous Forty-Seven Ronin. They took nearly two years to avenge their master’s death (before being ordered by the Shogunate to commit seppuku themselves), but according to Yamamoto they should have immediately attempted assassination on their master’s enemy even if such an attempt was doomed to failure.

A refrain throughout Hagakure is that the samurai must repress self-interest. ‘People think that they can clear up profound matters if they consider them deeply, but they exercise perverse thoughts and come to no good because they do their reflecting with only self-interest at the centre’, Yamamoto bewails.

Instead one must give obeisance every morning to one’s master, one’s ancestors, patron deities and guardian Buddhas. But amongst them the master is all-important. ‘For a warrior there is nothing other than thinking of his master.’

It is instantly obvious why this text appealed to Mishima so much and gave him such inspiration. Rather like Mishima’s tips on behaviour for so-called ‘modern samurai’, the text switches suddenly from lamenting the lack of skill at beheadings and cowardice (instead of resolve to commit suicide) to some handy tips on manners. ‘It is because a samurai has correct manners that he is admired’, Yamamoto points out, and proceeds to warn that one should not yawn or sneeze in front of other people.

Sometimes Tsunetomo reminds us of the sayings of his father Yamamoto Jinemon who said that you should look your listener in the eye, not put your hands in your pocket and throw away books after reading them. According to his father, a samurai with no group and no horse (i.e. a wandering samurai or ronin) was no samurai at all. Also, according to Yamamoto pere, a samurai should rise at four in the morning, bathe and arrange his hair daily, eat when the sun comes up and retire when it becomes dark. Mishima took none of this advice, routinely going to bed when the sun came up after writing throughout the night.

The whole book is washed with the hues of nostalgia and longing for an age before peacetime brought a general corrupting mood of idleness, luxury and triviality. ‘It is a wretched thing that the young men of today are so contriving and so proud of their material possessions...Every morning, the samurai of fifty or sixty years ago would bathe, shave their foreheads, put lotion in their hair, cut their fingernails and toenails rubbing them with pumice and then without fail pay attention to their general appearances. It goes without saying that their armor in general was kept from rust, that it was dusted, shined, and arranged.’

Yamamoto advises us to look for models of politeness, bravery, proper way of speaking, correct conduct and steadiness of mind. We are told that ‘a person who does something beyond his social standing will at some point commit mean or cowardly acts…one should be careful with menials and the like’. And yet, in a characteristic contradiction, we are told, ‘As for a person who has risen from the humble, his value should be prized and especially respected, even more than that of a person who was born into his class.’

Self pride and luxury are to be avoided; attaching cloves to your body will stop you being affected by colds; it is better to have some unhappiness when you are still young to stop you becoming giddy; drinking a decoction of the feces from a dappled horse is the best way to stop bleeding from an injury received by falling from a horse; look for the single purpose of the present moment as loyalty is also contained within single-mindedness; apply powdered rouge carried in your sleeve if your complexion is poor.

Intertwined with all of these ideas runs the constant refrain about preparing for death, dreaming of dying in battle or committing seppuku. ‘The way of the samurai is, morning after morning, the practice of death, considering whether it will be here or be there, imagining the most sightly way of dying, and putting one’s mind firmly in death.’ But there is, it seems, a silver lining. ‘With martial valor, if one becomes like a vengeful ghost and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he should not die.’

A highlight of the book is its description of various Sicilian-style revenge killings among the samurai. Often these would start as drunken brawls in bars, or sometimes be over nothing at all, and yet end up killing lots of innocent people. For example, a boy accidentally steps on a ronin’s foot while putting on his sandals. The ronin instantly kills him and his grandmother. The boy’s uncle then kills the ronin, but is in turn killed by the ronin’s younger brother. Another uncle, a Buddhist priest, then plans to kill the ronin’s younger brother, but kills the ronin’s father instead…and all this over treading on someone’s foot.

The samurai were also pretty nasty in their tortures. This is the punishment meted out to one robber: ‘all the hairs on his body were burned off and his fingernails were pulled out. His tendons were then cut, he was bored with drills and subjected to various other tortures. Throughout, he did not flinch once, nor did his face change color. In the end his back was split, he was boiled in soy sauce and his body was bent back in two.’

Once Yamamoto gets going with his tales of revenge killings and seppuku, there is really no end to them. There are tales of adultery leading to seppuku; of fathers acting as kaishakunin (assistants who behead the person committing seppuku) for their sons; of revenge killings leading to seppuku; of retainers crucified for not finishing off a fight or banished for intervening.

The slightest slip could lead to your death. One retainer is scolded for daring to put gold coins before his lord: ‘To place such base things before a person of importance is the extremity of carelessness’. (Given that the samurai class were created in the first place by ambitious warlords annexing land and appropriating taxes for themselves, and hiring gangs to protect them, this absurd denial of their own covetousness is truly breathtaking).

At this point, we get more handy tips from Yamamoto pere: ‘If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it, and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off. This was heard by the priest Gyojaku when he was in Kyoto. It is information to be treasured.’

Tsunetomo relates how a samurai was dismissed from trial for having the bravery to cut down opponents of his clan and thereby uphold the way of the samurai and Tsunetomo gives us many instances of exemplary retainer behaviour such as the samurai who rushes into a burning house to save his lord’s treasured genealogy. The samurai dies in the flames, but when his corpse is found, it is discovered that he has cut open his stomach and put the genealogy inside.

Tsunetomo was very enthusiastic about the recuperative, blood-clotting powers of horse feces, but surprisingly very down on the value of tactics. ‘On the battlefield, once discretion starts it cannot be stopped. One will not break through to the enemy with discretion. Indiscretion is most important when in front of the tiger’s den. Therefore, if one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts, and there would be an end to the matter...there are no military tactics for a man of great strength’.

We are shrewdly told that ‘one should not show his sleeping quarters to other people. The times of deep sleep and dawning are very important’ and that ‘underwear should be made from the skin of a badger’.

There are occasional flashes of wit between the samurai:

Matsudaira Izu no kami said to Master Mizuno Kenmotsu, ‘You’re such a useful person, it’s a shame that you’re so short.’

Kenmotsu replied, ‘That’s true. Sometimes things in this world don’t go the way we would like. Now if I were to cut off your head and attach it to the bottom of your feet, I would be taller. But that’s something that couldn’t be done.’

However the odd snippet of humour is far outweighed by general insanity, with lots of tales of heads being cut off and invocations to always think of your master.

'The warriors of old cultivated mustaches, for as proof that a man had been slain in battle, his ears and nose would be cut off and brought to the enemy’s camp. So that there would be no mistake as to whether the person was a man or a woman, the mustache was also cut off with the nose. At such a time the head was thrown away if it had no mustache, for it might be mistaken for that of a woman. Therefore, growing a mustache was one of the disciplines of a samurai so that his head would not be thrown away upon his death.'

In Yamamoto’s view, boys should be taught valour, forbearance, politeness and etiquette. For girls however, the most important thing is chastity. They should be always kept six foot from a man, never look them in the eye, or receive things from them by hand. And heaven forbid that they ever go sightseeing or on trips to a temple.

Yamamoto is firm in the belief that all identity should come from the clan. All worship and respect should be given to clan elders and ancestors rather than such things as Buddhism, Confucius or famous warriors of other clans. ‘One worships the head of whatever clan or discipline to which he belongs. Outside learning for retainers of our clan is worthless.’

One should serve the clan, even committing seppuku whenever required by the lord, is Yamamoto’s message. In this way, Yamamoto vows never to be outdone in the Way of the Samurai.

Albeit that Hagakure has found fans in such people as Yukio Mishima and Jim Jarmusch, and is undoubtedly a superb illustration of an extremist samurai mindset, there is surely no question that Yamamoto is insufferably pompous. There is no real consideration of why you should devote your life to your lord – this is merely an a priori assumption, endlessly reinforced like a Buddhist priest chanting a sutra.

A while back I was watching Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and istening to the declarations of the Nazis at the Nuremberg rallies (‘We know of nothing but to follow the Fuhrer’s order and show our loyalty!’) and Hitler’s own declaration that the spiritual tenets of National Socialism would be like that of a religious order, you can see that the guiding principles of fascism and the more extremist samurai – the blind cult of loyalty, the yearnings for militaristic order, the nostalgia for the past, the xenophobia – had a good deal in common.

The resurgence of Bushido in the 1890s, accompanied by Nitobe Inazo's book Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) becoming an international bestseller, clearly created in Japan an intellectual framework in which fascism and dictatorship could quickly take root (ironically this development was not foreseen by the internationally urbane Nitobe Inazo, who was horrified by Japan storming out of the League of Nations in 1933 after the Lytton Commission’s critical assessment of Japan’s culpability in the invasion of Manchuria. Nitobe died shortly thereafter in Canada.)

I appreciate Hagakure in the same way as I appreciate Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films – as a fascinating insight into what is now a barely comprehensible mindset. Yet while delighting in its Gothic nastiness, I can’t but help feel that if is this is the Way of the Samurai, I won't be joining Ghost Dog and his pigeons on the rooftop anytime soon.

Ryotaro Shiba, 'Gone With The Wind' and Ireland

The other week I happened to hear that the novelist Minae Mizumura and her distinguished American translator Julie Carpenter were coming to the UK to attend the Bradford Literary Festival so I invited them over to have a look round a Georgian property I am currently restoring. I recommended to them a classic book called 'Irish Journey' ('Airurando Kiko') by the prolific Japanese historical novelist and travel writer Ryotaro Shiba (1923-96, pictured above).

Shiba is a wildly popular Japanese author whose long historical sagas such as 'Ryoma Sets Out' ('Ryoma ga Yuku') and 'Clouds Above the Hill' ('Oka no Ue no Kumo'; co-translated into English by Julie Carpenter) have sold 21 and 15 million copies respectively. I must confess that I have never read either of these best-selling books, but I am attracted to Shiba's voluminous travel writing - contained in a series called 'On the Road' ('Gaido o Yuku') - which describe both his journeys within Japan and to destinations across the world.

Despite its title, the two volume 'Irish Journey', written in the late 1980s, actually spends much of the first volume in England, as Shiba mills about London and Liverpool, before finally crossing over to Dublin. What Shiba correctly appreciated was that to understand Irish history, you first have to grasp how it stands in counterpoint to English history. Shiba discusses such things as the historical difference between the clannish nature of Celtic society and the centralised power of the English state, making the Irish susceptible to invasion and subjugation, while still retaining their distinctive identity.

One of the great interests of the book is noting the way a Japanese writer observes Britain and Ireland. For example, Shiba picked up on the way that the waiters in London always say 'sir' to him, but the waiters in Dublin never do. Many of his observations are so fresh it's sometimes hard to tell whether they are insightful or absurd. In Liverpool, Shiba speculates whether the city, situated at the basin of the river Mersey, derives its name from 'River Pool' (the Japanese language has only one sound for both 'r' and 'l' so this blurring is more obvious to a Japanese person, but I must admit it's something that never occurred to me before.)

When Shiba finally gets out to the West of Ireland and the Famine Road, he looks down at the sea and ponders why there was such a terrible famine when there were fish in the sea and such delicious seaweed to eat. Perhaps a fatuous observation, but one that highlights the profoundly different culinary heritages of two island nations like Japan (whose cuisine is based around a profusion of fish) and Ireland (where the potato was king and where fish was always considered a poor substitute for rarely eaten meat). And of course back in the 1850s the seaweed wrap had yet to be invented...

Shiba was particularly interested in the resonances Irish culture had around the world and discusses for example the Irish roots of the great Western director John Ford, who would return to depict his parents' birthplace of Galway in the 1952 film The Quiet Man (poster, pictured left).

It's of course well-known that festering grievances about dispossession of land in Ireland between Irish natives and British settlers would be exported and play out on the much bigger canvases of the new worlds of America and Australia throughout the 19th century. Since the establishment of Anglo-Scots settlement in Ulster in the 17th century, the native Irish had been pushed back to poor quality bog lands of the West of Ireland ('To Hell or Connaught') and from there suffered yet more dispossession and famine and so emigrated in their droves in the 19th century.

The bitterness about land dispossession in Ireland lingered long in the memories of Irish emigrants to the New Worlds of America and Australia. Many of the stories which we today think of as quintessentially American or Australian - such as the sagas of Billy the Kid in the Lincoln County War in the US or Ned Kelly in Victoria, Australia - are at heart the stories of Anglo-Irish rivalries. It might also be noted in passing too, the fact that many dispossessed Scots and Irish suffered brutality in their native lands sometimes led in turn to their meting out brutal treatment to the Aborigines and Afro-American slaves in the lands they moved to.

I'd never quite realised until I read Shiba's book however just how crucial the Irish dimension is to 'Gone With the Wind' (though since the heroine is called Scarlett O'Hara perhaps this should have been obvious).

As a child, I always found the much-lauded film of 'Gone With the Wind' frankly boring. I could muster no sympathy for the fiddle-dee-dee, spoil-brat heroine and had not the slightest interest whether she finally hooked up with Ashley, Rhett Butler or whoever. It seemed to me the American Civil War equivalent of a Jane Austen novel - and I don't mean that as a compliment.

More interesting than the film itself seemed to be the stories surrounding it such as the famous quest by producer David O Selznick to cast the right actress as Scarlett O'Hara (eventually given to relatively unknown English actress Vivien Leigh, pictured above, after just about every Hollywood leading lady from Lana Turner to Paulette Goddard had tried and failed to land the part). Or there was the fuss about the prissy Hayes Code censorship exerted on Rhett Butler's parting line, 'Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn', demanding that the emphasis be bizarrely placed on the word 'give' rather than 'damn'.

Once in my early twenties I made a road trip with my sister from Key West in Florida up to Atlanta, Georgia. As we approached the city I picked up a copy of 'Gone With the Wind' in a store and read the first 50 pages in the car. What has always stayed with me is the extraordinary description of blood-red earth around Atlanta. If you were reading this on your sofa in the UK or California, you might tend to think that this was a trope - that the soil is described as red because of the blood-letting in the Civil War which is about to begin. But what's worth noting is that the soil around Atlanta is literally, strikingly red.

Still, I have to admit that after I left Atlanta, the book mark went in Mitchell's novel and I never returned to it. But after reading Shiba's commentary on 'Gone With the Wind' I began to see the book and the film with entirely new eyes.

The most important line in the film is not the iconic 'frankly, dear, I don't give a damn', but the words of Scarlett's first-generation Irish father to his daughter at the beginning of the film when he teaches her the importance of their land-holdings at their farm at Tara: land is the one thing that truly matters, he says, 'because land is the only thing that lasts'. That blood-red land, even before the Civil War starts, has a blood-soaked heritage harking back to land dispossession in Ireland. In the film, Scarlett's father is depicted as a sort of cod Irishman, a twee leprechaun, but there is true cold steel in those words: we have lost everything before and we are never, ever going to let that happen again.

But spoilt American Miss Scarlett does not understand that blood-soaked legacy of the land even though her very name alludes to it: the farm name 'Tara' crucially refers to the ancient site of the Kings of Ireland.

It's only when Scarlett has lost everything - her mother, her husband, her daughter - when the war itself has been lost and Atlanta burnt to the ground, that Scarlett, seemingly without hope, begins to hear her father's words echoing inside her head. Crucially, she still possesses the land and with that, everything is indeed not lost. This final scene of 'Gone With the Wind' can have a trite 'I Will Survive!' feel to it, but it really is communicating something powerful. This is the moment that Scarlett O'Hara actually comprehends who exactly she is, she finds her true inner Irishness and where she came from. What is lauded as a 'great American novel' is also on a more profound level a contemplation of the very nature of Irishness and its enduring effects.

When I heard that Minae Mizumura was also visiting Ireland on her recent trip, I became positively insistent that she read Shiba's 'Irish Journey', and I'm pleased to say she took me up on it. There's a particular phrase that Shiba used to describe the Irish which I have never forgotten. He said that the essence of Irishness was 'Hyakuhai Fumetsu' (百敗不滅), which literally means 'To be defeated a hundred times and yet be indestructible'.

There is surely no work of art which better captures this quality of 'hyakuhai fumetsu' than 'Gone With The Wind'.

The Death of Euro

To Brexit or not to Brexit, that is the question...

Today I was leafing through a book of myths and came across this piece called 'The Death of Euro' and was struck by how uncannily prescient it seemed to be. I felt as if it could almost have been written yesterday...

In the beginning, the universe was dark and Chaos roamed the earth. The gods grew weary of their strength and fell to fighting with one another. Marcus rushed out of a forest and slew Francus and declared his hatred for Rubus. For three long winters, he tortured Rubus and starved and bludgeoned him so that his howls reached up into the heavens and caused cataracts in the sky. Pondus hid in a corner and prayed and waited. Then on a golden chariot Dolarus descended from the clouds and swept Pondus into his embrace. The two gods charged forth at Marcus, who tired and blood-soaked with the battle against Rubus, was overwhelmed and slain. And Rubus then exacted a great punishment on the body of Marcus. And then the universe was quiet once more.

But gods may never be slain forever, and Marcus stirred once more, and now wooed Francus whom he had slain and their sister god Lira and the three gods danced in a circle and embraced and constructed a great tent around them. And all whom the gods had once slain from the northern lands and the warm southern sea came together and washed their blood-soaked hands and kissed and made love to one another in the tent. And then they made a great fire and Marcus and Francus and Lira and many other gods stepped into the fire and were consumed in a blaze of light as a new great god was born who all bowed down and worshipped. And this god of gods was called Euro.

Pondus had slipped into the tent before Euro was born, but his body had not been caught in the flames that had extinguished Marcus and Francus and many other gods, and now when he first laid eyes on the beast god Euro emerging like a dragon-phalanxed phoenix from the bodies of his fathers and mothers, Pondus ran into a corner of the tent and cowered in fearfulness. But Pondus was alone. Pondus wanted to be part of Euro and enter into his body, but he feared to do so for he still clung to his own life. And the Heavens rang with laughter as they watched Pondus shiver in the darkness.

Now outside the tent Dolarus, god of Victory, ruled supreme in the West and in all the lands of the earth and did not fear Euro for he saw the mischief which Marcus and Francus and Lira had caused to the peoples of the Earth, and when Pondus cried to him for protection, he laughed and ordered Pondus to run back and enter into the body of the beast, that Pondus might best serve Dolarus if he gave up his life and entered into the spirit of Euro. But still Pondus feared and secretly wished that Dolarus might yield him protection from Euro for such a beast god had never existed in the firmament before, a god with a hydra head and the belly of a horse and the feet of a duck. But the voices in the heavens told Pondus to wait and see what new shapes the beast god Euro would assume, and from that he might know whether he too should enter into the beast. So Pondus waited in a corner of the tent and watched the new god begin to metamorphose.

Euro first assumed the shape of a bear and roared forth in a rage. And the bear grew larger and larger until everyone in the heavens said that such an enormous bear could not grow any further, but on and on and on it grew, and Pondus quaked in fear, and felt all life draining away from him, but swore that he would never enter into the body of a bear. Then night came. And when Pondus awoke, he saw that the bear god was no longer writhing, but slowly shrinking. Then Pondus looked again and saw the features of Euro seemed more like a bull than a bear that the head was ox-shaped and the claws on the feet were slowly turning into hoofs. And of all animals Pondus loved the bull the most for he loved to ride a bull and he had heard the words of a prophet telling him that he would be swooped up in the clutches of a great bull who would entrance him and together they would sweep into the sky and take away Dolarus' golden crown and subjugate all the peoples of the world.

Pondus watched and waited and the voices of the universe were in a torment, and there were voices shouting that Euro looked most bear-like and that Pondus should 'beware!' and fly with all dispatch out of the tent and into the forest because the bear would surely eat up Pondus; and there were voices in the firmament telling Pondus that no, the features of the beast were more bull-like than bear, and that the bull was the animal on which Pondus would ride in triumph across the whole world.

Pondus thought that he would go mad and that every part of his nature would be cleft in two by the voices shouting for him to go in or out of the beast. He shivered with fear and watched and waited as the bear's claws extended towards him. And somewhere in the features of the beast, in a shape neither bull nor bear, Pondus thought he spied the features of Marcus, whom once he had slain, but who had lived to be born anew in the innards of the beast.

(My translation from Old Norse; illustration by Karen McCann)

Mishima Returns to Tokyo

In November last year I spent 10 days in Tokyo attending a conference: that might not sound like the most exciting of opening lines but for me it represented a double revolution. Until last year, 'conferences' and 'Tokyo' were two things I simply did not do. 

Before last year, I had only been to one conference in my life when, as a hard-up post-grad student in the mid 1990s, I was encouraged to attended a two day literary conference in Nagoya. Bereft of funds, I took an achingingly slow bus from Kobe to get there and then slept through two days of excruciatingly boring papers on such exciting themes as 'Post-Lacanian Stream of Narrative Correlatives in Polysemic Discourse: A Multi-textual Consideration of the Early Poems of Obscure Japanese Poets'. 

Soon afterwards, I pulled the escape cord on my fledgling university career and consequently failed to register the blindingly obvious: that conferences - preferably in as exotic and luxurious locations as possible - are what scholars consider their reward and their raison d'etre. 

Meanwhile there was my Tokyo phobia: when I was 20, I spent a term at the International Christian University in Tokyo and lived in a little shack by a railway line under some electricity pylons, which every day I imagined falling on top of me when the long-overdue calamitous 'Big One' struck. Leaving Tokyo (or more accurately the suburb of Kichijoji) after four months, I disappeared to Kansai and thereafter for the next 25 years studiously avoided returning, believing that to do so would cause the deaths of millions of innocents. 

In truth, extreme circumstances did force me on two occasions to spend a few days in Tokyo and I had the time of my life, partying with Bacchanial excess in the bars and clubs of Roppongi and Shinjuku, giving myself over to end-of-world abandon like the guards in Hitler's bunker. 

'Would I like to appear on national television?', I was asked once or twice. No, not if it meant going to Tokyo (of course it did). Would I like to be the keynote speaker at some Tokyo university event? What? And cause a devastating earthquake! NO WAY!

What changed my thinking was coming to realize how monumentally unsafe every part of Japan is (as painfully evidenced by events in Kyushu in the last week). A double page spread in the Asahi newspaper recently showed 30 metre waves striking the entire southern seabord of central Japan when the Nankai plate moved. In the circumstances, could I really maintain a resistance to Tokyo? 

And as for conferencing, I happened to be invited last September to speak at a three day conference in Durham (see my blog: 'Celebrating the Life of Lafcadio Hearn') which I enjoyed enormously. This was conferencing at its very best with expert contributors from Ireland and Greece offering multi-faceted perspectives on the complex Irish-Greek background of Lafcadio Hearn. 

Then, an invitation to a Mishima Conference in Tokyo came in. Taking a look over the starry assemblage marshalled for the conference - including novelists, theatre directors, photographers, distinguished academics - I could only conclude that this conference was likely to be rather different to the dull affair in Nagoya I had endured 20 years earlier. 

In mid November I emerged blinking out of Tokyo Station as bewildered by my surroundings as any first time visitor to Japan. I clutched in my hand a copy of Baedeker's Tokyo circa 1990 (nothing has changed, right?) and discovered I had not a clue where I was, the Tokyo of my mind being confusingly at variance with the overwhelming vista of skyscrapers and indecipherable subway maps before my eyes. With a little difficulty - and determined come what may I would never suffer the indignity of hailing a taxi - I eventually found my way to Shibuya and on from there to the Komaba Campus of Tokyo University. 

So complete was my Tokyo alienation that until this trip I never actually knew that Tokyo University had any campus apart from its central Hongo one and was surprised to discover how wooded and leafy Komaba was despite being only a couple of stops from one of the busiest traffic centres in the world. I'd been booked into Tokyo University's guest house and somehow took it into my head that all the conference participants would all also be staying there. I imagined that when I pulled through the doors with my bags, dozens of heads would swivel on bar stools and a greeting of 'Yo, Damian! What kept ya?' would go up.

In fact the guest house was entirely deserted apart from an old man on reception who informed that there was no wifi on the campus and in 1990s fashion offered me a long ethernet cable. From that point on, for the next week, I was effectively cut off from the outside world.   

Again contrary to expectation, I discovered I had been allocatted a spacious suite with a walk-in closet and views of trees on all sides. I descended to a sleepy French bistro on the ground floor and discovered only one table occupied with some musicologists and a solitary Russian lady. 

The conference was a three day event stretching over two consecutive weekends. The first day's gala proceedings were held in the very hall where Yukio Mishima himself had engaged in a famous debate with left wing student radicals in 1968 (picture of me above in front of the hall), which from the beginning lent the event a considerable aura of authenticity. I was slightly confused to be greeted at the entrance by all types of Japanese people who somehow seemed to know who I was, so after collecting a plethora of Mishima merchandising and goodies (posters; DVDs; a book; flyers) made my way to the front of the main hall and settled down in the 'participants enclosure' at the front, a couple of rows back from the stage. 

The whole day had a distinct air of opera about it in the sense that people-spotting in the audience was at least as fascinating as observing what was happening on the stage. I was sitting on the right, but looked over to the left of the hall and noticed some of the American scholar participants including Dennis Washburn of Dartmouth College, whom I had never met but had recently interviewed by email for the Japan Times in connection with his new translation of The Tale of Genji. I saw that I was sitting quite close to Professor Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit of Berlin's Freie Universitat and began to mentally amuse myself with the idea that we should set up a Ryder Cup of Europe vs America Mishima scholars.

The conference organizer bustling about the front was the redoubtable Takashi Inoue (pictured with me, above right) and it gave me a little frisson of pleasure to greet him. About 4 or 5 years earlier when I had commenced research on Mishima, the first thing I did was to go to a bookshop and randomly buy some Japanese books and take them home and read them. The first book I read was by the very same Takashi Inoue: it's a little bit of magic when you go from contemplating someone's work on your sofa in the UK to being invited to hook up with them in Tokyo. The other author I particularly enjoyed when researching Mishima was Naoki Inose, the former governor of Tokyo, whose biography of Mishima I read both in Japanese and twice in English (the English version is majorly expanded by Hiroaki Sato). I wondered whether I would also meet Naoki Inose at this conference. 

Things got off to a fairly unremarkable start, but then the Ryder Cup round commenced when Professor Hijiya-Kirschnereit (pictured below) took to the stage and read out in Japanese a paper discussing Mishima's modelling of his novel 'Forbidden Colours' on Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice'. At risk of invoking every Germanic stereotype, this was rather like watching a precision instrument Audi roll over the production line. 

I'd been looking forward to meeting Keith Vincent of Boston University, who has been regularly posting on Facebook a series in which he translates and contextualizes the poems of haiku master Masaoka Shiki. Keith arrived a little bit late, having only just flown in, and assumed a central position. As I strained to follow the stream of Japanese speeches on the stage, I watched him flip open a tablet and start furiously tapping away at something, as if having decided to quickly hack into the Pentagon before being distracted by anything else. 

At that moment, the doors at the right hand side of the stage opened, and the figure of the venerable Donald Keene - 93 years young and undisputed don of Japanese Literature scholars - appeared and was escorted to a place in front of the stage. Soon after he assumed the stage and made his presentation (pictured below), recalling the very first time he met Mishima back in the 1950s, in the days when Mishima used to see him off at train platforms. I've always felt that Donald has probably got a few revelations about Mishima tucked up his sleeve, but he certainly wasn't revealing them on this occasion. 

Decorum is of course important, or at least I thought so until the day's proceedings were electrified by the appearance on stage of Masahiko Akuta (pictured below), one of the erstwhile student radicals who had engaged Mishima in such heated debate back in 1968. If there is any way to grow old, this is how to do it. Akuta, now in his 60s, sported long hair, swivelled about manically on a chair on stage, ranted about how the emperor was nothing more than an ordinary man and generally displayed a refreshing take-me-as-I-am attitude. We also got to see some footage of him in debate with Mishima in 1968 and you only regretted that Mishima himself could not now be called to stage for a 47th anniversary riposte. 

At the end of Day One, with it pouring rain outside, there was food and drinks party in one of Tokyo University's restaurants, but the American contingent, clearly having the worst of the day's golf, retired to their palatial hotels in central Tokyo while the Europeans drank themselves to oblivion with the Japanese guests. It's always my policy at such functions to completely ignore etiquette and work the room, meeting everyone. This generally works successfully and I was interested to meet both the poet Mutsuo Takahashi - an intimate of Mishima from back in the 1960s - and British scholar James Raeside of Keio University. On only one occasion did I present a name card only to be told, 'But I've received yours already...'    

On Day Two proceedings moved to less operatic, though still sizeable seminar room. There were the usual spate of acdemic presentations, though easily the most memorable was a talk that was so monotone that one after another heads in the room, after resisting as long as humanly possible, dropped forwards and backwards into sleep. Entire rows were sleeping but the delivery went on and on. A distinguished academic caught my eye and gave me the giggles and I only narrowly managed to avoid breaking into unwarrantable mirth. 

In the afternoon, I was due to make my own presentation, having frantically tapped something into my tablet the night before. A couple of Japanese friends had come up specially to Tokyo University for the afternoon. Keith was up first and delivered an entertaining piece comparing Mishima with Gore Vidal. I was considerably distracted however by Kozo Kyoizumi, a company president from Osaka with whom I am friends, suddenly dropping into the seat next to me. On this occasion, having surprised me with his unexpected presence, he nonchalantly said to me, 'Damian, I'll take you anywhere in Tokyo tonight you like. Let's go to some really great restaurant. Where do you fancy?'

At that point I had to hop onto my feet and make my presentation, a condensation of my argument about Mishima's lifelong obsession with time and time-keeping instruments and symbols. At the end a hand in the audience went up. It was the poet Mutsuo Takahashi. 'Here we go', I thought, half-wondering if he was about to attack everything I'd said. In fact, Takahashi told a little anecdote about how the first time Mishima had arranged to meet him on the Ginza, the appointment time was 6pm. Feeling nervous of meeting such a celebrity, Takahashi had got there early. As it got close to 6pm, a boy appeared with a message: 'Mishima-sensei says he is going to be 7 minutes late'. 'Why 7 minutes?', Takahashi thought, marvelling at the strangely precise number. Needless to say, exactly 7 minutes later Mishima appeared...

If you want to know the value of conferences, then you have it here in a nutshell. My personal theory of Mishima - dreamt up while reading books 40 years after Mishima's death - was here corroborated by someone with personal knowledge. I felt relieved, which is perhaps why I soon after acquiesced to taking early leave of the day's proceedings and departing in a taxi with Kozo Kyoizumi and my dear friend the calligrapher Misuzu Kosaka - specially up from Kobe - and heading up to a hotel in Shiba Park for a banquet meal. On a roll, I regaled my friends with my new 'killer theory' that is to be the subject of a new book.

I was sorry however to have missed the after-event drinks of Day Two with the other participants (letting down the European Ryder Cup team), but had the pleasure of catching up the next day with Keith and his Boston University colleague Sarah Frederick as they ransacked a second hand bookshop in the Kanda district, looting it of scores upon scores of literary works that were to be shipped back to the US east coast.

I now had a few days at my disposal until the climactic Day Three of the conference at Aoyama Gakuin University and took pleasure in rediscovering Tokyo, embarking every day on marathon walks that sometimes took me from Ueno to Roppongi and from Asakusa to Shinjuku. I also had the pleasure of dining at an exclusive ryotei in the government district of Nagatacho with some top government officials and advisors, whom I wasted not a second of time in attempting to convince of the need of creating an Arthur Waley Foundation dispensing an annual Arthur Waley Prize for the best book in English on Japan. (This project is ongoing, watch this space.)

One morning the buzzer went in my guest house room and Takashi Inoue appeared at my door bearing hot coffee and danish pastries. He also invited me to a conference within a conference, when I attended a commemorative event for the writer Hiroshi Noma, a left wing writer who wrote a monumental work called 'Ring of Youth'. After the event I grabbed some noodles with Keio University professor James Raeside who told me about the various books he had written that he had not 'got round' to publishing. James is an extremely modest person who speaks excellent Japanese, but told me that his French was 'quite a bit better'.  

By nice timing, on the final day of the conference, I was running a double page spread in the Japan Times on Mishima featuring the iconic pictures from Eikoh Hosoe's 'Punishment by Roses' so it was nice to show the veteran photographer his work in that day's newspaper as he regaled us with the story of how the photoshoot took place. There was much interest too when the stage director Amon Miyamoto, impeccably dressed, appeared and discussed his forthcoming production of Mishima's 'Temple of the Golden Pavilion'. James Raeside gave an insightful presentation on Mishima's abilities as a playwright, in which he quietly demolished Donald Keene's argument that Mishima was in the same league as Shakespeare and Racine as a dramatist: when Mishima's 'Madame de Sade' played on the London stage, he related, it was savaged by one critic as a torrent of purple prose. 

At the very end of the conference, there was a summation of all the talks and at a question and answer session, I observed a slumped figure in a chair, self-importantly criticizing both the day's event and the organizer. 'Who on earth was this presumptious little man?', I wondered. Afterwards we all went for dinner and drinks and to my consternation I discovered that the surly fellow had tagged along and was seated at the end of the table. Whatever happens, I thought, I do NOT want to sit next to him. Instead I seated myself at the other end of the table and embarked on a conversation with Mutsuo Takahashi about Mishima's shifting sexuality which somehow morphed into Takahashi's observations of the size of Mishima's penis.

'Flanagan Sensei, have you met Inose Sensei?', I was suddenly asked. What? 

Naoki Inose was here? 'Yes, he's sitting at the end of the table.' 

To my amazement, I discovered that the person I was most studiously avoiding was the person I had actually most wanted to meet. Thinking I had probably discussed Mishima's penis enough, I lifted myself up and transferred myself to a spot in the corner directly opposite Inose, who was chain smoking and still seemed to be basking in his own self regard. 'Who are you again?' he twice asked the charming Italian scholar of Butoh next to me. In such circumstances I always think it best to give as good as you get and so interrupted him by saying, 'You really need to remember her name!' Inose's eyes widened slightly and from that point on, conversation and sake flowed...(picture below with l to r, Naoki Inose, Takashi Inoue and Mutsuo Takahashi).

It was a glorious evening in Tokyo and I continued on to a hole-in-the-wall bar in Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho, where I enagaged in a bantering debate about the future of Kabuki. Then I remembered I had a flight the next morning and disappeared in a flurry leaving a hat behind. 

I am now a proudly conference-able species. Tokyo, my nemesis, inevitably calls me back for a return gig at the University of Tokyo in September, when I will be joining a distinguished panel. If you are a lover of literature, please come along. My fear of earthquakes has not gone away, but won't stop me: besides, I need to go back and rescue my hat.

 

My Star Wars Theory of Japanese Literature

The Japanese influence on the original Star Wars films is so well known that it hardly needs recapping. It's long established that George Lucas took many elements of the plot of the 1958 Akira Kurosawa film Hidden Fortress - about a couple of bickering peasants escorting a princess across enemy territory - and transformed it into a sci-fi spectacular, set in a distant galaxy, a long, long time ago, Kurosawa's peasants became C3PO and R2D2, samurai swords turned into lightsabres and the code of bushido somehow became subsumed into 'The Force'.

Almost as interesting as the films themselves is the story of how the films came about in the first place and the myriad of influences and chance happenings that shaped them. George Lucas set out to make a Flash Gordon-esque sci-fi film and was famously influenced by such writings on mythology as Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces'. His drafts of plots for the original film went through a dizzying array of rewrites with at one stage Luke having many brothers and a father supposed to appear in the film. At one point the film boasted the lengthy title, 'Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as taken from the Journal of the Whills'.

Yet for me the most fascinating moment in the original Star Wars is when Obi-Wan Kenobi after half-heartedly engaging in a lightsabre duel with his nemesis (and former pupil) Darth Vader allows himself to be struck down. 'Allows himself' are the operative words. The standard interpretation is that Obi-Wan sacrifices himself in order to let Luke, Princess Leia, Han Solo et al escape as they blast off in the Millennium Falcon from the imperial mothership.

Such an interpretation seems inadequate: Obi-Wan's final action appears far more calculating and significant. Pitted against Darth Vader, who could fail to notice how Obi-Wan deliberately looks across at Luke and slightly smiles, then willingly offers himself up for death? This is not someone who is resigned to oblivion, but who is intent on becoming reborn, more powerful than ever, in the mind of his young apprentice Luke.

The plot device of Obi-Wan dying in the middle of Star Wars IV was apparently a last minute re-write: originally Obi-Wan was supposed to not only survive until the end of the film, but also continue to be a major character in the subsequent two films. Sources disagree as to whether the plot change was a last minute idea of Lucas that displeased actor Alec Guinness or (perhaps more likely) a plot change suggested by Guinness himself to minimalize his commitments in the subsequent films after he had already tired of a film which would go on to make him extremely rich.

However it came about, like many last minute plot changes, it's crucial to the meaning of the film as a whole.

In the first half of Star Wars, we see some early examples of Obi Wan's adept use of 'mind control'. When he and Luke are stopped by Imperial troops, Obi Wan easily plants words into the mouth of the soldier-clone, allowing the party to continue on their way. Storm troopers are easy to manipulate, but when Obi Wan tries the same trick again in a raucous bar with a surly outlaw attempting to pick a fight with Luke, it has no effect, requiring Obi Wan to strike him down with his trusty lightsabre.

Obi Wan therefore clearly appreciates that to gain the upper hand on an opponent, sometimes you can use simple psychology, other times you need to resort to physical force. But to truly gain lifelong control of someone's psyche, you have to be prepared to lay down your own life. A lot of very calculated thought has gone into that life-parting, little smile.

This aspect of the film always connects in my mind to the most famous Japanese novel of the modern age.

Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (the Japanese word for spiritual 'heart' or 'mind'), written in 1914, is an overwhelmingly popular work in Japan, that has been recently serialized in its entirety in the leading national Asahi newspaper to commemorate its centennial anniversary. The novel was translated into English by Edwin McClellan in 1956 and a new translation by Meredith McKinney published by Penguin Classics in 2010.

The novel tells of the spell cast on a young narrator by a slightly older figure he refers to as 'sensei', the Japanese term for a respected teacher or elder（still from the 1955 Kon Ichikawa film below, narrator left and 'sensei' right). The character 'sensei' it turns out is harbouring a deep secret from his past which he reveals by means of a long letter to the narrator which comprises the second half of the book. It turns out that 'sensei' has been haunted by the suicide of his close friend K as a consequence of a love triangle back when they were students. The suicide has had the effect of K effectively seizing control of Sensei's heart ('kokoro') from beyond the grave.

Sensei understands the power of suicide to affect the heart of the person left behind and carefully bides his time looking for someone on whom to exert the same influence. Sensei indeed waits until the narrator has returned home to nurse his dying father before revealing his devastating secret and announcing his own suicide. The novel ends with the narrator fleeing his own father's deathbed as he rushes back to the place where Sensei lived. Sensei manages through a carefully staged suicide to create a bond which supersedes even the bond between father and son.

I've no idea whether George Lucas read Kokoro or watched Ichikawa's film, though Kurosawa, whom Lucas both admired and supported, was, like many Japanese, a great fan of Soseki. Kurosawa's 1990 film Dreams for example was a straightforward homage to Soseki's 1908 work Ten Dreams.

The aggressive nature of Sensei's suicide has tended to be overlooked by generations of fans in Japan, just as Obi-Wan's self-perpetuating suicide in Star Wars is mistakenly seen by legions of fans as noble self-sacrifice.

Famously, Alec Guinness when told by a fan that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times is said to have granted an autograph provided he didn't watch it again. Guinness, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, might not have felt the film worth as many repeat viewings as the Bard's great plays. Yet ironically it is Guinness' character whose influence resonates endlessly beyond the grave. As with Kokoro's Sensei however the true nature of Obi-wan's final action is strangely missed by viewers determined to believe in impulsive self-sacrifice rather than shrewdly calculated psychological manipulation.

What's the Most Re-readable Work in Japanese Literature?

In a Guardian article last year, author Stephen Marche coined the word 'centireading' in discussing the merits of reading a work of literature 100 times. This set me thinking: if you were to choose a classic of Japanese Literature worthy of being re-read 100 times which one would it be?

There's certainly plenty of Japanese books I'd love to go back and re-read two or three times: 'The Tale of Heike' or Junichiro Tanizaki's 'Makioka Sisters' or plenty of things by Edogawa Ranpo all spring to mind. But 100 times? For me, if it was even 5 times, that would immediately rule out both exhausting monster books like 'The Tale of Genji' and contemporary modern novels.

Indeed I think there could only be one answer: 'Botchan', the 1906 novel by Natsume Soseki. I'm confident that I could read 'Botchan' 100 times and never tire of it. Indeed, I suspect I would get something new out of it on every reading. Let me briefly explain the main reasons why.

Firstly, sheer readability. If you are going to read something 100 times, you don't want something that's difficult to get through, full of longeurs and in general need of an edit. You need a work where every word counts, that has an unstoppable driving momentum. Botchan is a novel that picks you up in the first sentence and after taking you on an exhilerating ride drops you off neatly at the end, leaving you wanting to do it all over again. And again. And again.

Botchan is like this because of the particular way it was written. Soseki wrote the novel in a period of less than two weeks in his 'spare time' while he was still holding down teaching jobs at three educational institutions and returning to a home with four small children. The following year Soseki would give up his teaching posts and become a professional novelist for the Asahi newspaper, but in 1906 works of genius were surging forth out of him like magnificent, irrepressible volcanic eruptions.

Reason Two: Botchan is (to paraphrase Woody Allen in 'Annie Hall') a 'full meal'. Were you going to read a book so many times, what genre would you wish it to be? Comedy? Tragedy? Satire? Memoir? Elegy? Botchan is all these genres combined.

Most people know it as one of the most brilliant comedies in Japanese literature and indeed the comic set pieces - Botchan being baffled by the impenetrable dialect of the locals for example and responding with his own Tokyoite beranme-cho; or his battling against grasshoppers left in his bed by mischievous students - offer some of the most laugh-out-loud moments in the nation's literature.

What people don't generally realize however is that elements of tragedy are just as prevalent in Botchan: the central story is of Botchan's love for the elderly house servant, Kiyo, a mother-like figure whom he has left behind in Tokyo. At the end of the novel, Botchan's very identity crumbles and his brief period of carefree abandon is over.

But Botchan contains so much, much more. The novel is a satire on the divisions which had arisen in Japanese society after the Meiji Restoration between those factions previously aligned to the shogunate and those who had overthrown the old order. The novel is also a satire on Soseki's own snooty colleagues at Tokyo Imperial University, whom he lampoons in the form of nicknames ascribed to the teachers at the provincial Middle School at which Botchan arrives.

Matsuyama and nearby Dogo Onsen, where Soseki taught as a young man in 1895-6, is generally thought to be where the novel is set, creating a tourist bonanza which continues to this day. Yet what most people don't realize is that many different aspects of Soseki's own biography are subtly entwined in the novel. Botchan's longing for Kiyo in distant Tokyo for example is actually a reflection of Soseki's experiences in Britain in 1900-1902, when he desperately longed for his wife - also known as Kiyo - back home in Japan.

Which takes us to Reason Three: inexhaustability. If you are going to read a book 100 times, it needs not just to be compulsively readable and a 'full meal', it also needs to be one infinite in its capacity for offering up new insights, where the tiniest details seem redolent with meaning. What is the significance of the tree whose chestnuts were 'more important than life itself' to Botchan as a child? Why does the arch-villain Redshirt always wear a red shirt? Why should it be so ironic that Botchan and his ally, 'The Porcupine', style themselves as 'Divine Avengers' for their final attack on Redshirt?

Botchan is ultimately the story of the modern world itself. Botchan is a proud scion of the samurai and looks down with lofty disdain at backward country bumpkins, without realizing that it is the very process of modernization and westernization sweeping away the past that has been responsible for creating a development gap between Tokyo and the provinces. Botchan speaks to a universal condition: we are proud of our sophistication and modernity and yet we still cling to the image of a less brutal, warmer-hearted past.

In truth, Botchan is the only Japanese classic which I think I could happily read 100 times. Short of being washed up on a South Pacific island that may never happen, but if you haven't done so already, I earnestly entreat you to read it at least once.

Five Things You Need To Know About Cecil Rhodes

(Warning: this piece contains a distressing image).

I've been following with some interest a debate which has raged over the last few months in the UK about the unlikely subject of the fate of a statue. The statue in question is of Cecil Rhodes (pictured above), arch British imperialist of the late nineteenth century, and endower of the Rhodes Scholarships at Oriel College, Oxford, allowing generations of outstanding students from overseas to study at Oxford. Beneficiaries of the Rhodes scholarships have included a president of the US (Bill Clinton), and numerous Prime Ministers of Pakistan, Canada and Australia.

Last year a successful campaign to remove a large statue of Rhodes (pictured left) from the University of

Cape Town spread to Oxford itself. The campaign 'Rhodes Must Fall' declared that Rhodes was a racist who had wrought untold damage on the native peoples of Africa and that the college should, belatedly, refund its ill-gotten benefaction to the people that Rhodes stole from in the first place. The campaign also sought to highlight inequality of representation for ethnic minority groups at Oxford and to decolonize the curricula. Oriel College took the campaign seriously and announced it would conduct a review process to see whether its own statue should be removed. This in turn prompted an uproar from those who felt that this was political correctness gone mad and many newspaper inches were filled with heated debate on the subject, with a former prime minister of Australia (Tony Abbott) and a former white president of South Africa (F W de Klerk), and perhaps more surprisingly the black former chair of the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips, all weighing in to say that the statue of Rhodes should stay in place, and that attempts to remove it were, according to Philipps, 'witless and wrong-headed'.

Other commentators pointed out however that consigning statues to oblivion - such as those of Queen Victoria in India or those of Communist leaders in eastern Europe - were all part of natural historical evolution. The 'should he stay or should he go' debate finally received a full airing at the Oxford Union in January where by 245 votes to 212 it was carried that the statue should indeed fall. By this time however disgruntled members of Oriel College had already threatened to cancel tens of millions of pounds in intended donations and seeing what a disastrous impact the debate was having on the college's reputation (indeed on Oxford's reputation as a whole), it was quickly announced that the statue would after all remain in place and the provost of the college responsible for the PR fiasco was besieged with calls to resign. As a sop to the 'Rhodes Must Fall' faction, it was announced that although the statue (hard to spot below, but high above the central arch of the college entrance) would stay, a plaque providing 'context' to Rhodes' questionable life would be installed. We wait to see what exactly that 'context' will be.

One of the many curiosities of this furious, much-publicized debate is that hardly anyone in Britain today has any idea who Cecil Rhodes was and what exactly he was responsible for. Most people tend to vaguely think of him as a personification of the worst excesses of nineteenth century British imperialism, with the row descending into a partition between those who think that more reparations and apologies are needed for imperial exploitation and those who think that enough is enough and that endlessly trying to judge people of the past by today's sensitivities and standards is self-serving and futile.

The one point of agreement between the 'Rhodes Must Stay' and 'Rhodes Must Fall' factions was that Rhodes' actions - his imperial plundering of vast swathes of southern Africa, including modern-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa and his firm assumption of white racial superiority - were unacceptable in today's enlightened age and were at the heart of the problem. The only question is how do we today judge people who lived in an age when moral assumptions were completely different. The 'Rhodes Must Fall' faction indeed argued that even in Rhodes' own lifetime his actions were judged by many to be greed-driven and immoral.

I want to argue here that both the 'Rhodes Must Fall' and the 'Rhodes Must Stay' factions are equally deluded - indeed utterly blind to reality - in their assumption that the assessment of Rhodes should consist of a morally enlightened present looking back on a morally challenged past. Indeed what is really important about Rhodes, and yet what is ignored, is the insight his extraordinary life story brings to us about the follies of the present age, indeed to what is a universal constant of human history.

Cecil Rhodes caused pointless misery to millions of people. This was not primarily caused by his 'racism', indeed he probably caused just as much disaster to white people as to any other variety (should such things be the subject of your interest). His influence was calamitous because he had a gargantuan flaw. But he was also a brilliant man, whom I in many ways admire. Polarizing debates demand that we cast people as straightforward 'heroes' or 'villains'. Rhodes was actually both hero and villain, but the important thing is to critically discern where exactly it was that a man like Rhodes went wrong and why.

Before coming to the calamitous flaw, I'd like to tell you first of four reasons why I really admire Cecil Rhodes. It all comes down to this: Cecil Rhodes was a truly brilliant businessman. He understood (reason one) that success in life involves calculated risk and technological innovation. If you wish to understand that principle, there is no better place to go than Kimberley in South Africa, home to the 'Big Hole' (pictured below), in the 1870s and 1880s the biggest diamond mine in the world.

Cecil Rhodes was the sickly son of a cleric in England who suffered his first serious heart attack at the age of 19 and was predicted to have 6 months left to live. Sent to South Africa as a young man of 17 he thought he might as well get a move on in life and when a diamond rush broke out in Kimberley headed out to join a multitude of other prospectors. What happened in Kimberley is a wonderful case study of entrepeneurship (aka capitalism) in action. Rhodes steadily bought out all the prospectors' strips and amalgamated them into his own holdings. He did in truth not exactly start from rags - he is known to have been given £2000 (worth about £200,000 today) by an aunt - so he certainly had a major head start. But he also had the courage to buy the land and take the risk: the prospectors who sold to him (and who were subsequently hired to dig for him) must have thought they were taking a fool's money. But Rhodes, not they, understood the golden rule of business/ capitalism that it rewards those who are prepared to invest in risky enterprises. Rhodes followed up the speculative purchases by introducing the latest technology to help make the mines more efficient. By the mid 1880s, when Rhodes was in his early thirties, he could boast an annual income of £50,000 (about £5 million in today's money).

Reason Two: Rhodes understood the importance of branding. You and your product are not the same, indeed you can create a separate brand identity by the simplest of methods. In Rhodes' case, his company De Beers was named after the Afrikaner farm on which diamonds had first been found. By this simple means he created a separate identity for all business activities: indeed for generations afterwards right up to the present day, people buying a piece of jewelry from De Beers often have no idea they are buying a product of Rhodes' former company.

Reason Three: Rhodes grasped the importance of understanding, adapting to and manipulating your market. Rhodes realized that the market for his diamonds - engagement rings in the West - was entirely governed by the number of couples in the West getting betrothed every year. Flooding the market with diamonds would simply mean that the price of diamonds would collapse so he shrewdly rationed supply.

Reason Four: Almost impossibly Rhodes somehow seemed to combine being a student at Oxford with being a young entrepreneur in South Africa. Later on he combined being a politician in South Africa with being a big society presence in the UK. He was I suppose what the long-established Afrikaner settlers in South Africa used to crudely refer to as 'salt-dicks', men who never wholly gave themselves to Africa but so straddled South Africa and Europe that their genitals were supposed to have dipped into the briny sea. For the Afrikaners it was a term of abuse, but it seems inspirational how Rhodes back in the 19th century managed to achieve so much on two opposite sides of the world (famous image of Rhodes bestriding Africa below).

Which leads me to the fifth thing you need to know about Cecil Rhodes, where it all went disastrously wrong. This can I think be summed up quite simply: Rhodes believed that the same principles with which he had achieved success in business could be equally applied in politics. As a young man of 27, Rhodes became a member of parliament of Cape Colony (most of current South Africa) and rose up from there to be Prime Minister by the age of 37. Business and politics for Rhodes went hand in hand. As a politician he dreamt of extending the British Empire in one continuous block through the whole of Africa from Cairo to the Cape and successfully schemed to add present day Botswana and Zimbabwe to the British Empire, famously signing numerous concessions with tribal chiefs which ceded rights to areas the size of modern African countries for a relative pittance in return.

Rhodes was here acting on a modus operandi of the British Empire which had been in evidence for generations, stretching back to the nefarious activities of the East India Company in Bengal and many other places. Servants of commerce and governors were encouraged with a nod and a wink from the government in London to grab what they could, then administer it from their own profits, and if any outrages occurred, the government back home could then loftily announce that Her Majesty's Government was now taking direct control to restore order.

In the case of Rhodes, the whole of southern Africa appeared like the diamond mine at Kimberley, something which he desired to have monopolistic control over. When vast gold deposits were discovered in the Afrikaner republic of Transvaal, it drove Rhodes to distraction that he (and by extension the Empire) did not have control of it. Here he employed his second principle of business - what I would characterize as the 'De Beers feint' - in which he attempted to use a front for his political ambitions. Famously in 1895 he backed the disastrous Jameson Raid in which his close friend Leander Starr Jameson and 600 horsemen, mostly policemen from the Matabeleland Mounted Police, attempted to ride into the Transvaal and seize control for Rhodes. Instead Jameson and his accomplices were captured and the scandal forced the end of Rhodes' political career. But behind the scenes he still would not give up and four years later engineered the Boer War by encouraging the British Government to provoke war on the Transvaal and the Orange Republic on the utterly specious grounds that they would not grant voting rights to Uitlanders (foreign workers in the Tranvaal, whom Rhodes hoped would effect a coup d'etat on his behalf).

The Boer War would last for three long years and pointlessly sent 21,000 British soldiers to their deaths. It caused misery and deprivation for the British, white Afrikaner and black African population of South Africa and eventually saw 27,000 white Afrikaner women and children, and a slightly lower but comparable number of black Africans, perish in concentration camps introduced for the first time by the British that became the scandal of Europe (horrific image of Lizzie Van Zyl below who died in Bloemfontein Concentration Camp). Ironically, Rhodes himself - a major architect of the conflict - died at the end of it, from his long-standing heart complaint, at the age of 48.

The lesson I take from Rhodes' life is the utter devastation that can be unleashed when a hugely talented man of business is let loose upon the international political stage believing that the same principles that guide one in business apply to politics. This is something which is still at the very heart of world affairs today.

Take for example the disastrous US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It fascinates me how many similarities there are between that calamity and what transpired in southern Africa in 1899. In his desire to get his hands on the gold of the Transvaal, Rhodes and his associates concocted a narrative of outrage about an oppressive Afrikaner government suppressing democratic rights. The war that broke out as a result devastated southern Africa. In the case of Iraq, a desire to assume control of Iraqi oil led to the US and UK talking up a terrifying narrative of 'weapons of mass destruction' mixed in with emphasis on genocidal atrocities. Famously, the Americans having conquered Iraq, had no plan whatsoever on how to govern the country. It was confidently assumed that the influx of Western capitalism - a gold rush of American companies eager to grasp the mineral wealth of Iraq - would inevitably lead to a glorious age of democracy. It was, and is, a truly Rhodesian delusion.

If there is a lesson to be learnt from the life of Cecil Rhodes then it is that capitalism should learn humility and know its limits. It should work within political frameworks not attempt to drive political ambitions, where its influence is often catastrophic. For me, this is the important, universal 'context' which should be written loud and clear in any assessment of the life and achievements of Cecil Rhodes, not some deluded trumpeting of our supposed moral superiority over our Victorian ancestors.

(For more information on the shocking image of Lizzie Van Zyl, click here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_van_Zyl)