21st November

Father Frances Xavier came back from two years in Japan today in 1551. He was the first Westerner to live among the Japanese and said of them '... no finer people will be found.'

That's because he wasn't building the Burma-Thailand Railway.

In other news ...
Today in 1906 a man died in Glasgow when 300,000 gallons of whisky burst out of vats. He had to get out three times to go to the loo.

What do you mean, you've heard it before? It was pretty new in 1906.

24th September

Today in 1877 a rebellion of Japan's samurai was put down by the government. You've probably seen the story filmed as The Last samurai with Tom Cruise. It's not bad historically, except that the country offering military advice to the Japanese government was Germany, not America. The idea was that the samurai were an armour-wearing anachronism, whose code of Bushido ( the way of the warrior) was hopelessly out of date. Why was it then that Bushido was still there in the 1940s which explains the appalling brutality meted out by the Japanese to British, Australian and Dutch prisoners of war? And why has Japan's 'enlightened' government never apologized for that?

In other news ...
Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor, came out with one of his great bon mots today in 1862. 'The great questions of the age,' he said, 'are not settled by speeches and majority votes, but by iron and blood.'

Right on, Otto. The result? Germany 0; Rest of the world 2.