Philip Patrick

The San-ikukai hospital in Tokyo’s Sumida ward is much like any other in the Japanese capital, save for one special feature. It has had, since March of last year, a small room on the first floor with a cradle (and nothing else), where mothers can anonymously deposit their babies, never to see them again. The hospital accepts babies up to four weeks old. They are then cared for until foster families or infant homes can be found. In July, the hospital announced it had just received its twentieth baby, most of whom had been left within 24 hours of birth. The scheme is the first in the capital but not the first in Japan.

One of the joys of living in Japan is the lack of wokeness. It is not that it doesn’t exist - there is a Tokyo Pride, the odd Gaza protest, and gender equality is increasingly discussed - it’s simply that the concept doesn’t quite translate. Like the strikes that only take place at the weekend so as not to inconvenience customers, woke protesters here are tiny in number, generally polite and devoid of the threatening aggressiveness of the West. And diversity isn’t really a thing. Maybe that’s another reason tourist numbers have exploded.

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone. This time there was no phone call, it’s all gone, a similar amount of cash but far more worryingly, my entire suite of credit and ID cards.

The Rolling Stones’ resilience is hard to get one’s head around. In a world of fleeting cultural phenomena, they just keep going… and going… and going. Earlier this month, under the pseudonym ‘The Cockroaches’, the band released 1,000 copies of a vinyl-only single (their 124th in their 65th year of rocking) ahead of a new studio album which will come out this summer. The combined age of the three surviving principals Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is 242. The band are so venerable that even jokes about their age are getting old: their ‘Steel Wheels’ tour was dubbed ‘Steel Wheelchairs’ back in… 1989.  Full disclosure: I’m hardly a Rolling Stones fan.

Ever fancied an extra family member or new best friend supplied on demand and available for as long as required? Ever dreamt you could summon up a surrogate to explain yourself out of an awkward romantic entanglement, or a presentable spouse to secure an employment opportunity (like Alan Partridge’s rented wife in the ‘Hamilton Water Breaks’ episode)? All of this, and more, is readily available in Japan, for a fee, courtesy of the ‘companionship agencies’. This decidedly odd business is the subject of the film Rental Family currently on release across the UK.

The Japanese are fascinated by the scandal concerning the aristocrat formerly known as Prince Andrew. The main themes resonate powerfully. The concepts of duty, shame and being a burden to one’s family are deeply woven into Japanese culture and so embedded in the language that it is hard to express yourself without touching on them. There are at least four expressions for ‘black sheep of the family’ in Japanese and one of the very first kanji I learned was for the word ‘muru-hachibu’ (eight against one) which means ‘sent to Coventry’ (shouldn’t that be Norfolk now?).   There might also be a sense of ‘there but for the grace of god’ relief for the Japanese in watching a fellow constitutional monarchy floundering.