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The Zojoji Temple is from a very different era: this Buddhist seminary has been on its site in central Tokyo since the end of the 16th century. Outside it are serried ranks of what look like baby buddhas, stretching for as far as I can see. Each of them is wearing a knitted red hood, and some are also kitted out with tiny capes. Most are accompanied by flowers in a vase, and all seem to have whirligigs that whistle in the breeze. I ask the guide who these mini-buddhas are memorialising. ‘Aborted foetuses,’ she says, pointing to a sign which says, baldly and in English, exactly that.
The thing is, in Japan there are very few births outside marriage. While there has been a spiralling increase in illegitimacy in the developed world over the past half-century, in Japan the rate remains as close to zero as makes no difference. At a breakfast meeting with Yoshimasa Hayashi, a candidate for the leadership of the LDP (the party which ruled the country continuously from 1955 until 2009), we discuss the Japanese baby shortage. I point out that one possible reason for the higher fertility rate in Britain is that single mothers are given high priority in social housing, as a matter of public policy. Some of the Japanese aides around the table put their hands in front of their mouths, they are so amazed. Or perhaps they were tittering at what they thought was a joke — traditionally, in Japan, it is rude to display your teeth when laughing.
In so far as I can understand anything at all, it is only thanks to a wonderful and highly experienced interpreter, hired by Keidanren. I learn a lot from this elegant woman. She tells me her father was a career diplomat: ‘He met Hitler a couple of times, even though he was then very junior.’ When was this, I ask. ‘1941.’ Ah yes, the Axis. Later, she tells me how she had interpreted for Margaret Thatcher, when the former prime minister visited Japan on a speaking tour soon after her eviction from 10 Downing Street: ‘She was nicer than I had expected, and much more feminine.’ This prompts me to ask her to nominate the Briton she had found least pleasant. ‘Jeffrey Archer,’ she replied, after remarkably little thought.
A visit to the north-eastern coastal towns flattened by the giant earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 reveals the Japanese at their most heroic and yet also most characteristically efficient. Despite the scale of the devastation, there is very little visible damage left. What can be seen, however, is the absence of homes: rows upon rows of footings, the reminder of where people once lived who are now dead. It is hard to find something to say to the young local guide, whose fiancée was among the 20,000 or so killed. At least I manage not to emulate Emperor Hirohito’s observation, when he first visited the atomic-bomb-blasted Hiroshima: ‘There seems to have been considerable damage here.’
After a bus and bullet-train journey of about six hours from rural Japan, I am back in the exquisite luxury of my room on the 24th floor of the Capitol Hotel, one of Tokyo’s newest. Then, at about 12.45 a.m., just after I turn out the light, I feel the vast building judder. It is, of course, an earthquake.
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