Excerpt: Flying Visits by Clive James
Flying Visits Clive James Postcard from Japan: 1 An Exchange of Views By courtesy of a British Airways Boeing 707 I was crossing in a few hours the same distance that cost Marco Polo years of his life, but the speed of modern travel has its penalties. Among these had been the in-flight movie, which I dimly remember was about bears playing baseball. From the air Siberia looks like cold nothing. The Sea of Japan looks like wet nothing. But Japan itself, at your first glimpse of it, looks like something. Even geographically it’s a busy place. Immediately you are impressed by the wealth of detail – an impression that will never leave you for as long as you are there. Only a tenth of the land is useful for anything. The remaining nine-tenths, when you look down on it, is a kind of corduroy velvet: country so precipitously convoluted that the rivers flowing through it look like the silver trails of inebriated slugs. The useful tenth is inhabited, cultivated and indus...