Yokohama mums against radiation

Late last week, the Japanese government lifted a ban on shipments of beef from Fukushima, Iwate and Tochigi Prefectures, bringing minor relief to farmers whose livelihoods had been threatened by the discovery in late July that over 4,000 kilograms of cesium-contaminated beef had hit the shelves at Aeon, one of Japan’s biggest supermarkets. Not that the pressure has been entirely lifted, of course. Amongst everyday folk as much as the farmers themselves, confusion is rife.

Unsurprisingly, few can tell a becquerel from a sievert, and plenty feel that this lack of knowledge has allowed the government and nuclear industry to patronise and mislead them. Couple that with the perception that the country’s leaders have no real idea themselves (Japan just lost its sixth prime minister in five years in a mess of backstabbing and ineptitude), and the current sense of mistrust is wholly justifiable.

Get the answer in Delayed Gratification

The answer to this question isn’t easily come by, of course, but I’ve given it a decent bash in the latest edition of Delayed Gratification, a very new and very handsome quarterly that proudly boasts being “last to the news”. As you’d expect from a project with such a future-minded manifesto, they don’t have much by way of an online presence, and there’s certainly no OS app in the offing. However, I’d urge anyone in the UK to pick up a copy. DG, as it’s known to its friends and admirers, is a gorgeous and lovingly-put-together journal. And besides, delayed gratification is often the very best kind.

Yoko Ono. Y'know, John Ono's wife

This was the first interview I ever did with someone of note, and even though it was a phoner, I was terrified. Yoko Ono has something of a reputation as a ‘difficult artist’, and I was well aware that she’d probably spent most of her life being asked about her former husband than her own art – getting the balance right was extremely important to me.

She turned out to be a delight, of course. I remember describing the experience afterwards as not dissimilar to chatting with a high level Japanese student of English, only one who kept throwing disarming comments into the conversation. At one point after the interview was over, she asked me why I was in Japan. I told her I was married to a Japanese woman, to which she replied, “Oh, that’s sweet! My husband was from England, too…”

Angry Bob, not so angry after all

This was one of the first interviews I did working for Time Out. Jeremy Lawrence, the editor of Time Out Dubai at the time, popped his head up over the computer screen and asked nonchalantly if I fancied interviewing Bob Geldof in, oooh, an hour? Cue 50 minutes of frenzied research on African policy, all of which led to nothing at all when it turned out he just fancied talking about his time as a music journalist.

I remember him being a bit curmudgeonly, but generally fairly gentle with me, perhaps sensing how green I was. I also recall that he left the conversation mid-sentence, pretty much hanging up the phone without even rounding off what he was saying. He was talking about Bono’s music taste at the time, though, so I didn’t feel I missed out on much.

Tokyo - Strange facts and useless lists

How many Tokyoites can you squeeze into a Mini Cooper? How many times has Godzilla attacked Tokyo? Why was Paul McCartney banned from having bananas?

All the questions you never had about Japan’s great capital, answered here before you’d ever thought of them…