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If nothing else, this pandemic has over the past few months taught us how vulnerable we all are and given us some inkling of the sort of steps that are necessary to reduce that vulnerability. Our friends in Japan perhaps needed less reminding of that, given the prevalence since time immemorial there of natural disasters.

As a boy I was always more interested in subjects like history and geography than in science, but for some reason I have always remembered watching Professor Eric Laithwaite of Imperial College giving a lecture about magnetic levitation, a topic which seemed to the youthful me to be akin watching magic.

In a week when pleasure at the prospect of returning to something closer to normal life has been balanced by concern about crowded beaches and a stubborn British resistance to learning from Japan by wearing masks, I have found myself thinking about comedians, political talk shows and men with moustaches.

The news, from this week’s webinar, that in 1964 the country received only 353,000 visitors was striking enough, especially given that that was the year when the Olympic Games were last held in Tokyo.

If recent events have taught us anything, it is that in these British Isles we are rather nicer to our famous past writers than we are to the historical figures whose statues have been ending up toppled or vandalised.

In cricket, that English national sport which arrived in Meiji Japan a good decade before baseball but sadly was superseded, there is a saying called “the commentator’s curse”.

There can be no doubt that the pandemic and associated lockdown has at times been a test for our imaginations, although the idea of taking a nearly 60-mile drive to test your eyesight did rather take the imaginative biscuit this week.

China’s rising role in the world and America’s decline is one of those seemingly accelerated forces. Another is the changing nature of work, towards remote working and management-by-video-conference.

One enjoyable memory from my time when posted to Tokyo is of a weekend visit in what I think must have been 1985 to Ito-shi, out on the Izu peninsula, for the Anjin Festival.

Whenever I visit a city abroad, whether for work or for pleasure, I look out for smaller, less well-known museums and galleries to drop into. I think this habit began 40 years ago.