The Blackberry Walk

I don't mean to sound too doomer, for I'm well aware that many people and countries love England. But throughout the world there is a pattern - a kind of conspiracy - to denigrate and insult the English, and claim that many of her greatest inventions and cultural products are not in fact hers. There is, in many quarters, a kind of embarrassment at the mere association with Englishness: the Americans will never call themselves 'English-American' even though the majority of them are; the Europeans see the English as the butt of all jokes (although that partly arises from envy); and the third world have been hypnotised into calling us horrid, domineering colonialists, even though without the English these countries would have no institutions, infrastructure, and in some cases, civilisation to speak of! There is one country however, who earnestly love the English: and that country is Japan. To best illustrate Japan's love for England, let me tell a short story from my recent travels. Before we set off to Japan, one of my travelling companions had heard about a maid cafe with traditional English-style maids in Ikebukuro. We booked a reservation, yet in reply we were asked if we could move our reservation a day earlier, because one of the maids was learning English and wanted to practice on us. They also added that they were looking forward to seeing us very much. We agreed, and visited the cafe on the revised date. Walking inside, it seemed as if a charity shop had been raided of all their porcelain nick-nacks; the ceilings were adorned with improperly-fit coving - for who in Japan knows how to install coving; and for cutlery, a real novelty in Japan, we received a butter knife and a humongous serving fork. And it was so incredibly charming! I'm sure a Japanese visitor who saw a Japanese-style restaurant in Britain, done up with Japanese decor, would have exactly the same feeling: that of awe and of love. Britain, to Japan, is a distant land, where such ornaments are novel; so to attempt to implement traditional British silverware and porcelain in spite of not knowing much about what it is for or how to use it, is emblematic of a raw love. It never comes across as attempting to clothe oneself in the raiments of power, as Chinese Anglophilia so often does. The Japanese Anglophilia is earnest and agapic. To return to the story's strange finale, as we were wrapping up our meal, the maid requested we wait a moment more. After a short wait, our maid brought out an A3, wooden-framed picture of one of the cafe's maids, dressed in maid garb, outside a British castle. We also received a volume of manga (Maid-san wa Taberu dake), which she was awfully surprised we'd all already read. Here's another story from the trip. On the Shinkansen, my friends and I were all split up owing to a lack of seating for large luggage. My neighbours on the train - who I had a long conversation with in Japanese (I'm not trying to show off.. alright, maybe a bit) - had just returned from a holiday in England. They said where they had gone, but I couldn't make head or tail of what they were saying. Owing to accents and such, I kept guessing well-known English cities and locations, but none hit the mark. In desperation, I opened the map on my phone, and had them locate the town in question; it was the town of Bideford in north Devon, a town I had never heard of. The vast majority of tourists who visit Britain see London, and afterwards maybe Edinburgh or York. Very few make their way to the countryside. And the countryside is very much the soul of a place; some of my favourite, most wondrous, moments in Japan were in the countryside, where the soul of the nation is less hidden. The two elderly ladies I was talking to told me how much they enjoyed English pubs, how they enjoyed the ale, and how much they liked charity shops! I was taken aback at how what they saw and found in England aligns so perfectly with what I love in England. There is much to be said about Anglo-Japanese similarities, the famed Shiba-Corgi Axis, and perhaps that'll be the topic of a future article. But a tourist's love for the British countryside, the love for the raw, honest England, is almost uniquely Japanese. Japanese doesn't have a mass of foreign restaurants, but a surprisingly common one was English pubs. Restaurant-bars named "Ale House" were everywhere, most likely a chain, and my favourite one, named "Morris' Lamb Chop". Again, like with the maid cafe in Ikebukuro, there's a sense of deep love for the English. "Morris' Lamb Chop" isn't the name, nor remotely similar to the name, of any public house I've ever seen; but there's an uncanniness to the name, which makes it feel as if it's the name someone would give who's read a lot about pubs but never visited one. Japan is the only place I've ever been, other than of course England, but even then it depends where you are, that truly loves England. Love is complex. As Chesterton argues in his essay Flag of the World, love is a kind of patriotism for something, and that patriotism can't be a love for any specific quality, but rather for that thing in of itself. Chesterton sums up the thought in the following aphorism, "Men did not love Rome because she was great; Rome was great because men loved her." For if you love Britain for her colonies and power, or your wife for her current good looks, you'll in time fall out of love. No longer does Britain have colonies nor the same power, and one day your wife will be wrinkled and grey. Love like patriotism must be for no particular reason other its simple being. As I eluded to before, the Chinese today build mansions in the Victorian style which would put the Victorians to shame; but, these palaces are used to symbolise and magnify the power of these CCP officials. They don't love England at all, for they love her merely for the power the Victorians once projected. Whilst I'm not too familiar with the history, perhaps the same could be argued in the Meiji era, when Japan was incorporating into their culture all things Western, including the British curry, the British sailor uniform, and the British suit (the Japanese for suit is sabiro, derived from London's Saville Row). And maybe in that era, Japan latched on to Englishness for their power and grandeur. But even if that was once the case, walking around Japan it doesn't seem like that anymore. Japan truly loves England, for they are the last lovers of Albion.