Were does Europe end and Asia begin? “If someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it’s part of Asia”, the American North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers once quipped. Michael Booth doesn’t pose as an authority on the Koreas, or on the other countries in Three […]
After overseeing the postwar occupation of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur made a blunt assessment of the cultural and emotional state of the defeated people. “If the Anglo-Saxon was, say, 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature,” said the former Supreme Commander of […]
Last year, Ian Buruma succeeded Robert Silvers as Editor of the New York Review of Books. The long journey that brought him to that position began in his native Netherlands and passed, for six years from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, through Japan. Though he went there in his early twenties, the period constituted something […]
“Everyone lies to you in Thailand”, a former Bangkok resident told me at a recent gathering of Asia correspondents. When you ask a local when the next bus arrives, for example, they’re likely to tell you five minutes even if it went out of service years ago. They do it not out of malice towards […]
Not long ago, a curious artefact of American culture suddenly went viral: a short promotional video for a casual dining chain called Sizzler, once one of the most popular in the country. “All across America, a song of freedom rings, a song that’s growin’ stronger every day”, declares its soaring ballad. “That’s the Sizzler way: […]
The Korean word for South Korea is hanguk, but South Koreans more often refer to it as uri nara, “our country”. The equivalent term in Japanese is mainly used by octogenarian ultraconservatives, but in South Korea everyone says it. They also speak of uri mal, uri eumshik, uri ddang, uri minjok – “our language”, “our […]