I SHOULD EXPLAIN. I was one of those who did well out of the war. At the age of seventeen, I was given eighteen months to learn Japanese at the expense of the War Office. At seventeen, one is still linguistically flexible, so I became quite fluent, only slightly less so than those who started learning the language at age nought. My knowledge of that language became the basis of my whole career. In total, I have probably spent ten or eleven years in Japan, mostly doing research.

And in my years in Japan I have acquired enough of a sense that Japan is my second home to get as hot under the collar about the stupid things its government does, as I do when I read a particularly devious speech by David Cameron.

But, it is not the occasionally odd accenting of my speech which sets me apart from natives. It is my Caucasian face. Plus the fact that the English culture, values, weltanschaung in which I spent those first seventeen years was different from those in which my friends were brought up. Even with many of my closest Japanese friends, the consciousness that we are of different tribes is there somewhere below the surface. So ‘near’-native.

How near I leave to the reader to judge. I arrived in Japan on 1 June 2014 for an indefinite stay, and kept a ‘for publication’ diary, noting particularly things (like the wife/chauffeur syndrome I mention on the first day) that a non-Japanese reader would not, as I normally do, take for granted. Here is that diary for the first ten days.

1 June Arrived at Narita and took the bus to the Keio Plaza Hotel where my friend Prof. N was waiting to take me to the mansuri manshon (monthly mansion) that he had sussed out for me. I hadn't been in that hotel for about thirty years when I was put up in its luxury for a conference. There on the 40th floor I learned at first hand of the efficiency with which the Japanese build for earthquakes. We just swayed; suitcases slid back and forth on the floor as they did in the Bay of Biscay on my first cargo-boat trip to Japan in 1950.