Journalist and broadcaster Michael Fitzpatrick has run with all the big game of journalism while inhabiting more countries than is absolutely necessary. TOKYO — Nothing triggers the bog-walloping Fenian in me quite like a visit to the British Embassy. This one, with its fine Georgian-revival facade, looked on my last visit a decade ago like a lost Cotswold manor-house brought to life in Tokyo.
But what was it that I found so unsettling? Perhaps the stately setting? Or its gilt-framed displays of a preternaturally regal, late queen?
Her gaze following me about the room as I moved among the fine art and mahogany, like those creepy Sacred Heart of Jesus portraits I grew up with. Me, a lad reared in an Irish republican home where the Queen’s annual Christmas messages were as welcome as a poltergeist. To the more clubbable, the embassy’s English country house manner would have seemed merely civilized; a demonstration that Merrie England had acquired over generations the ability to arrange the upholstery without the aid of an AI shepherd.
The decor was a projection of centuries of British self-assuredness and ease, distilling, as adroitly as the form allows, the essence of (an ebbing) sovereign power. The fine art, damask and agreeable lighting gave no hint that Britain’s technological might has long migrated elsewhere. That such hegemony now lies with American platforms and Asian supply chains.
But the genius of spaces like these is that you can start to believe in a type of fanciful continuity of the imperishable. It inveigles you into sharing a fantasy. This one being that if these old arrangements had survived war, decolonization, Tamagotchis and the mobile phone, perhaps it might survive the latest digital convulsions, too.
Here was a refuge, some autonomy even, from the technological superpowers that increasingly own us. Proof that small jurisdictions of taste, privacy and human-scale abound. Of course, like any contemporary state, the British must put on a show of modernity.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
