The world’s second biggest economy is still Japan, yet for all its apparent modernity and embrace of the latest technologies, when it comes to politics the nation remains entangled in a twilight world of ghosts gone by.
Its most recent example is reminiscent of a former age, centering as it does on the late Emperor Hirohito and his disastrous foreign wars; court intrigue and a faded diary; two old loyalists of the imperial past (one now dead); and instead of a fascist assassin wielding a samurai sword, a suspected right-wing nationalist hurling a petrol bomb.
