Anna Matsushita

There was a deafening bang, followed by a deep, rumbling tremor that shook the ground beneath me.   The elderly pedestrians all dropped to the pavement in unison, as if rehearsed.   Across the street, an old man lay flat on his stomach, waving urgently in my direction. “Down!” he bellowed.   Instinct took over. I flung myself onto the pavement without a second thought.   Moments later, the wail of sirens filled the air—fire engines, ambulances, police cars, all racing past in a blur of flashing lights.   And then, just as swiftly as they had dived for cover, the prone figures around me picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and strode away as though nothing had happened.   I had arrived in Britain in the 1980's at the age of fourteen, dragged along by my parents on account of my father’s job. I hadn’t wanted to come. Life had been perfectly fine back home, thank you very much. Germany was still split into East and West, Marga...

  Permit me a moment of reminiscence—an old woman’s soliloquy, if you will. This is a story from some forty years ago. For a brief three-year period, my family found itself living in Britain in the late 1980s. It was the height of Japan’s bubble economy, a time of exuberance and affluence. Britain, by contrast, was struggling with economic stagnation. The rapid growth of Japanese imports and the expansion of Japanese businesses were, at least in some quarters, a source of unease. For people who had grown up in an earlier era, Japan’s sudden economic prominence could be an uncomfortable sight. There was also, of course, the legacy of the Second World War. Britain, once a global imperial power with colonies across Southeast Asia, including Burma and Singapore, had fought Japan directly in those regions. Even in the late 1980s, the memory of that conflict remained strong among some people of an older generation. The sight of a once-defeated, non-Western Japan becoming an economic po...