PREAMBLE

IN THE 28 years since I left Japan in 1974 until I returned to live here again with my wife in 2003, I visited the country 25 times. My second banking career — which started in 1976, two years after I had traded the first for the pleasures of English country life and the pains of trying to become a writer — saw to that, as did personal ties to friends, relatives and, after my mother-in-law's much-lamented death in 1985, the family tomb in Nagoya.

Thanks to the intention of my new employer, Pierson, Heldring & Pierson, to expand business with Japan, I made a number of trips to Tokyo and Osaka, first from a base in the Canbbean, then from Amsterdam. In 1981 I accepted a post in New York where I spent seven fruitful years building up a credible banking presence for my last employer, the Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank, known as AMRO. As I concurrently chaired for a year the 240-member New York-based Institute of International Bankers — which looked after the foreign banks’ collective interests in the US and lobbied in Washington against any lurking discriminatory treatment — I naturally had frequent professional occasions to meet Japanese bankers and dignitaries.

Although there was therefore always some business reason for my visits to Japan, it was mostly my ongoing interest in the country's culture and social structure that kept luring me back. As did the prospect of delectable meals, deep baths, and meeting old friends to catch up with local gossip and developments.

When in 1988 I said farewell to banking for the second and final time and moved back to London, I turned to part-time journalism as a way of venting my thoughts on a range of subjects. For the next 6 or 7 years two Dutch newspapers ran my articles, which — apart from the occasional exception like the tragic death of Princess Diana — often were about Japan. Topics I covered included social change, life and art, the case for structural reform, the country's struggle to deal adequately with its wartime behaviour, etc.