My previous two Blake blog posts have been about Japan. In terms of writing about what I know it was that or rowing, so I imagine no one is complaining, and due to a chronic lack of creativity, I’m going to do the same again this time.

This week, I procrastinated to The Unbelievable Truth. If you haven’t heard of this, it is a radio show hosted by David Mitchell. If you need a more detailed reason to be interested (doubtful – it is hosted by David Mitchell!), it is a BBC Radio 4 panel game where each contestant reads a passage of made-up facts about a particular topic, and attempts to conceal five true facts within the drivel. Points are on offer for each truth that slips by uncontested, and the other panellists can win or lose points with their challenges.

On this week’s episode (available online still at the time of writing), one of the topics was, surprise surprise, Japan. Remarkably, not a single truth was picked up. As Mitchell commented, “not a good sign of our cultural empathy”, so in a bid to keep the Blake blog readership’s cultural empathy higher than Radio 4’s, here are the five truths, and the truths behind the truths. I spotted 4 out of 5, and would question their ‘unbelievability’, except a) my degree probably counts as cheating and b) the one I didn’t get was reasonably hard to believe!

1. Japan is in fact an archipelago of 6,852 islands

This one is relatively boring, as most of the islands are sufficiently tiny that it is a similar level of pedantry to saying Britain is made up of over a thousand. Then again, Japan identifies very strongly as an island nation, more so than Britain in this day and age, and is very proud of its archipelago. Some of these tiny islands could start a war* – the latest instalment in the volatile territorial disputes between China and Japan over islands that are barely more than rocks (the possibility of oil reserves notwithstanding) has seen Japan introduce its territorial claims to the school syllabus, while one toy shop owner in Hong Kong has taken the quainter approach of putting slogans about China’s claim to the islands on toy guns.

(*This won’t happen any time soon, if at all – the hyperactive media coverage of the whole thing is regularly even worse in the cultural empathy stakes)

2. Clean toilets are lucky

Really? In a country that has invented heated toilet seats and built-in control panels that regulate temperature, discretion-providing sound options, height adjustments and jet-sprays (not kidding – and pressing the wrong button can be alarming), can cleanliness really be a bonus?

It turns out this was a bit of craze started by some enterprising fortune-tellers in 2007, who published books like ‘Cleaning the toilet to attract luck’. Superstitions, many with religious origins, can seem unbelievably prevalent in Japan today, but I think they are adhered to with a remarkable balance of sincerity (because they are traditions, often communal, and enjoyable* if you suspend your cynicism) and pragmatism (because taking something seriously in the moment is often kept separate from any real expectation that life will fundamentally alter because of a superstition or tradition). I’ve always found it rather admirable.

(*I’m not sure how far this theory extends to cleaning your toilet, to be fair)

3. It is ‘illegal’ to be overweight

The Japanese lifestyle has been famously healthy for decades, with consistently some of the highest life-expectancy rates in the world. It is far from surprising that the government plays a hand, with laws targeting health gaols that are motivated partly by the need to keep healthcare provision costs down. Initiatives often have a social feel to them – below is some footage of workers fulfilling their quota of pre-shift exercise (with helpful English commentary!)

The law here is less directly punitive that it sounds, but still fairly troubling. If your waist measurement passes a certain point you are required to consult with a doctor, you may be given incentives like gym memberships, and if you fail to get yourself back within the boundaries it will be your employer who pays fines. That last point may be faintly sinister if it encourages employers to intimidate their employees into getting thinner. The whole notion also seems to miss the point. Five minutes in a Japanese city is enough to bombard you with far more evidence of a body-image obsession than you’re ever likely to want. The more out-there bits of Japanese pop culture that register on Western radar tend to grow out of movements to reject conformity, but they don’t escape the pressures of image. Encourage healthiness? Sure. Create extra pressure to conform? Definitely not necessary.

4. 98% of all adoptions are of adults

This one is the only truth I’ve actually studied in any detail. Japan has a ludicrously high adoption rate, and sadly it is largely down to wanting men to run the family business. The days of formally arranged marriages are largely gone, but if you are the daughter of a son-less family, you are likely to be under fairly intense pressure to find an eligible young man with good business credentials. Once you’ve married him, he can take on your family name and be formally adopted into the family, with the idea that one day he will inherit the business in the family’s name. In this instance, retaining your family name as a married woman is hardly a triumph for enlightened liberalism. Job prospects for women are improving slowly, but family structures are collapsing faster, and the obvious bias towards men suggested by a trend like this makes question how substantial improvements for women really are.

An interesting sub-phenomenon of Japan’s odd adoption trends concerned tax. Splitting inheritance among multiple heirs reduces inheritance tax rates, so families would effectively employ people who they’d adopt and name as heirs. For a fee, they would receive their inheritance and pass it on untaxed. The government was forced to place a cap on the number of adopted children that could be named as heirs per family.

5. Robots pay union dues

This is the one that stumped me, a perfect storm of cultural preconceptions – ‘Japan is ultra-modern and full of robots’ meshing beautifully with ‘Japanese bureaucracy can be a little hard to fathom’ (this phrasing is straining my ability to be diplomatic – it can an often be a nonsensical nightmare). I rejected the notion that it could be true, simply because it ticked my prejudicial boxes too perfectly.

The details are entertainingly logical. As Japanese firms began hiring fewer workers thanks to incorporating robots into production, unions began losing money with fewer workers to unionise. So now firms have to pay the unions fees for every robot they ‘employ’ to compensate this loss of income. Given it isn’t feasible to provide long-term compensation to all past and future workers who lose their jobs to robots, I find the sheer cheek of the unions to get compensation for themselves quite brilliant. Might as well get something out of it – the robots are here to stay:

On 12th January at 8:30pm I, like 8.8 million other viewers huddled round TVs and computer screens, tuned in to the last episode of Sherlock Series Three with palpable excitement. The no-nonsense detective, whose favourite drug is crime-solving (when not a seven percent solution), lit up our screens and after ninety minutes of false steps, negotiations and the grand tour of mind palaces, we said goodbye to BBC’s stunning adaptation for another few months or so (rumours go that Christmas 2014 will mark its return, but who knows with Sherl…).

Modernised retellings and adaptations have stormed every medium of entertainment. She’s the Man brings Twelfth Night hurtling into a 21st century American High School. The song Roméo kiffe Juliette by Grand Corps Malade makes religion the obstacle for the infamous star-crossed lovers. And then novels can inspire more novels, such as Gregory Maguire’s Wicked being L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as told by Elphaba’s perspective, which was subsequently adapted by Stephen Schwartz  and Winnie Holzman into a family-friendly musical currently residing at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London. In fact, in 2012 you could go to the London Palladium at 2:30pm on a Wednesday or Saturday to watch the classic story of Dorothy getting whisked away to the magical land of Oz, grab a bite to eat afterwards, and then take two stops on the Victoria line to see “the untold story of the witches of Oz” at 7:30pm. An overdose of green, yes, but you couldn’t say that you were only give a whistle-stop tour of Emerald City. I also had a go at changing texts in my AS English coursework; re-casting Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse as a protégé of Cilla Black and having Harriet Smith take the hot seat in Blind Date. There is an endless stream of inspiration that can be gotten from words on a page, from a faithful adaptation to and “inspired by the works of…” spiel. 

So what’s so appealing about them? As well as the opportunity for avid fans to feel smug as they pick up on allusions and references to the original works (It’s a “three-patch problem” nowadays, Watson…), different settings can offer an alternative or more accessible way to understanding the story. Give a child (or indeed an uninterested student/adult/self-professed Shakespeare-hater) Hamlet, and the book will probably end up as a doorstop. Watch the 89 minute African vista-ridden The Lion King with them, and they’ve pretty much got the plot sorted, as well as learning a bit of Zulu along the way (after all, “Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba” (Here comes a lion, Father) is a necessary phrase to learn). In fact, through retellings such as this, you may know more about Shakespeare’s works than you think (though probably not for English students. English students probably know how much they know about Shakespeare). At least, it breaks down the complexities of the playwright’s iambic pentameter. 

Adaptations also show just how versatile the original “classics” are. Nestled under the prose, the metaphors and social/cultural/historical context of whatever setting the author has chosen is a story that can be related to by anyone. They offer plot lines that can be delved into and characters that can be explored on so many different levels.  They  are classics that have been stripped of what may be off-putting for some (language, social attitudes, etc.) before being embellished with contemporary equivalents, and their popularity is then determined by the effectiveness of these changes, how faithful (or unfaithful) the creators decide to be, and then what they are like as a standalone work.

With a brief as broad as this, that’s enough to get anyone’s creative juices flowing…

The Game is Afoot!


Lian Wilkinson

Sometimes rather annoyingly, studying an arts subject sometimes requires an awful lot of justification. This is primarily because in a time when there are fewer jobs available, everyone apparently needs to make a direct line for them. So whilst telling your friends and relatives that you study law, medicine, or golf course management allows them to see you quickly replacing your mortarboard with a pay cheque after a short post-graduation jaunt in South-East Asia, talking about your arts subject leaves them fearing you living at home, at 30, jobless. 

To a small extent they have a point; arts graduates do have slightly lower rates of employment, and most (ir)reputable banking firms, for example, would much rather hear ideas on Keynesian economics rather than my ideas on Goethe's Faust, even if the banking firm in question is the Deutsche one. Because of this, I have been guilty of bemoaning my own situation several times, exasperatedly demanding the people around me to tell me “what on earth” I’m going to do with MY degree. However, as part of my compulsory year abroad trip of self-discovery (often undertaken in the warmth and comfort of Viennese coffee houses, if you’re interested) I think this is wrong. Instead I should be lauding the benefits the arts bring, and hopefully changing the hearts and minds of a few relatives and employers who think arts students en général lack employability. 

Now, one thing every arts subject teaches you to do is to construct an argument, so I realize here I’ll need some academic backup. Luckily, I have Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Manfred Spitzer (the phrase ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’ in Germany applies primarily to academic titles), professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Ulm. I was lucky enough to meet Prof. Dr. Dr. Spitzer when he came to a meeting of the heads of apprenticeships’ schemes of some of Austria’s largest companies to explain to them why it was worth their while to send their apprentices on theatre courses. Austria, like Germany, has a very successful apprenticeship culture that is often commended by the British press and politicians alike. So to put this meeting in a clearer light: here was a many-titled man, explaining to people with highly successful apprenticeship programmes that exist entirely to prepare young people for work, that they could do nothing better than make their apprentices engage with the arts. 

I’m sure that a few very obvious reasons spring to mind why theatre might be useful to apprentices: confidence, public speaking, etc. But Prof. Spitzer was not suggesting anything quite so obvious as this. Instead, arguing with the kind of dogmatic assuredness that only a middle-aged man with an excessive endowment of academic titles can, he offered both theatre and the arts in general as the best way to combat digital dementia (see here for something a little alarming) and turn young people into well-rounded individuals capable of doing any job well. To summarise his argument embarrassingly quickly, performing Shakespeare will improve the motor skills and coordination of the apprentices, and reading and understanding a complicated text will create far stronger and lasting connections between synapses in the brain, whilst requiring them to improve their concentration on certain tasks. Repeat the process by having the apprentices read multiple books, perform multiple plays and thereby encounter many different views and arguments, and they’ll be able to concentrate for longer, find solutions to problems faster, be more adaptable, and even google better! They’ll also most likely suffer from mental degeneration much later on in life. In Internet speak, that’s much win. 

I also have some anecdotal evidence to back up what the Herr Professor Doktor was saying. In November last year I travelled to a small Romanian town on the border of Romania, where the Wiener Kindertheater has started a project to help the local children. Sighetu is a beautiful little place, but it lies in a rural region of one of the poorest countries in Europe, and as such the children there have few opportunities. Crashing through the language barrier with a cunning mixture of loud English, wild hand gestures and hotly debated English-Romanian translations, I managed to find out what the children there did: nothing. They went to school, they went home, and they watched television. It struck me as being terribly sad. And then I saw the effect that the theatre was having. The kids were always extremely excited to come, play warm-up games, perform and try to speak English. As they were performing L’invalid imaginaire by Moliere (in Romanian of course), plenty of them also asked questions about their characters motivations and reactions to others, which was particularly impressive given that at the start of the project some of them were incapable of reading! It didn’t matter that some of the questions were somewhat simplistic, but rather that they were engaged in and excited by classic literature, and finding inspiration in the arts. 

Clearly, a person who has had the benefits of studying an arts subject should not immediately be thought of as having fewer job prospects and therefore less of a chance. And if you’ve managed to spend your university years arguing that, for example, a Marxist reading is the only suitable way to interpret everything from Orwell’s 1984 to How I Met Your Mother, then you’re probably a very adaptable person who will learn quickly on the job. So the next time somebody asks me what I’m going to do with my degree, I’ll look up from my PGCE application, smile and tell them I can do anything. 


Alex Matthews