The 21st Century: American Dreams? European Imagination? Asian Contempt?
© Terry Boardman September 1997 The recent death of Diana, Princess of Wales has led many in the media to claim that ‘a quiet revolution’ has been taking place in Britain, and that Diana was a symbol of this. We now have a chance to consider Britain’s identity, they say, where we want to go as a people in the 21st century, and they reflect on how we are becoming more ‘feminine’, ‘compassionate’, ‘emotional’, letting it ‘all hang out’; how we are more...
read more“Independence Day” – Who are the Aliens at the Millennium Threshold?
© Terry Boardman This article first appeared in the German magazine Info3 in October 1996 The Hollywood summer blockbuster movie “Independence Day” begins with a shot of the American flag and plaque left behind by the Apollo astronauts on the surface of the Moon (“we came in peace for all mankind”). They are soon covered by the vast shadow of an alien spaceship approaching Earth. The first person to monitor the approach of the aliens is an American of East Asian origin working at the SETI...
read moreWhat was Hong Kong Actually?
©Terry Boardman March 1997 This article first appeared in Info3 magazine 1997 “I sometimes imagine Britannia standing on the Peak and looking down with an emotion of great pride upon the great Babylon which her sons have built”. – Rev. James Legge, Sinologue, resident in Hong Kong from the 1840s till the 1870s. When the abducted youngster Hong Kong is returned to Mother China in June this year, we can expect that the media run by its abducting father Britain will indulge in a wave of self-congratulation at the...
read morePatten and Murdoch Quarrel – David and Goliath Again?
© Terry Boardman March 1998 This article first appeared in the German magazine Info3 in April 1998 Last year on May 29th at a sumptuous dinner in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, global media mogul Rupert Murdoch must have been feeling smug as he received from the hands of friend Henry Kissinger the Humanitarian of the Year award from the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York, a group that calls itself “the largest philanthropic organisation in the world”. But then Murdoch, as he said...
read moreMust The Great Game Be Replayed?
©Terry Boardman Nov. 1997 This article first appeared in the German magazine Info3 in January 1998 When I was a small boy, two board games were very popular in our family, indeed in families throughout the country: “Monopoly” and “Risk”. In “Monopoly” one sought to buy up famous London streets, build hotels on them and charge the highest rents to the other players; the richest became the winner. In “Risk” one tried from one’s own country plus a few scattered colonies to...
read moreThe Voice of Asia?
©Terry Boardman This article first appeared in the German magazine Info3 in September 1996 To paraphrase Karl Marx, a spectre is stalking the print rooms and media studios of the West today. It is the spectre of Genghis Khan, the ghost of the Yellow Peril: “the threat from the Far East”. Hardly a politician’s speech is complete without some reference to the dynamism of the Pacific Rim, and exhortations for greater national efforts to enable us to survive in ‘the competition with the dynamic economies...
read moreAsia and The West at the End of the 20th Century
by Terry Boardman The Crusade of the 13th Century Rudolf Steiner pointed out the great debt owed by western natural science to the spiritual stream of what he called ‘Arabism’, and which in fact is far broader than that of just the 7th century Arab conquerors of the Middle East; it includes the fruits of the much more sophisticated and long-developed cultures of the region – Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia. To a very large degree, western natural science is the product of this Middle Eastern culture – the offspring of the...
read moreIdeas of Freedom – Britain and Japan
a lecture given at the Asia-Pacific Conference of the Anthroposophical Society, Fujisanroku Yamanomura Conference Centre, Mt Fuji, Japan, November 2000 by Terry Boardman Structure Freedom and the English-speaking Individual: 1. The concept of freedom or liberty in the English-speaking world 2. Appropriate and inappropriate concepts for the 21st century Freedom and Folk Spirits - Britain & Japan: 3. 3 Temptations...
read moreBritain and Japan: Between Two Islands
©Terry Boardman May 1996 It is largely through their devotion to industrialism and competition that Britain and Japan have risen to world prominence. Japan’s rise began in the 1890s, just as England’s imperial sun started to set. Here we see evidence of a remarkable parallelism in the histories of these two countries. Until the year 1600, they had both been developing for a thousand years into united and disciplined nations. During the Tudor dynasty in England (1485-1603) and the Azuchi-Momoyama period in Japan (1568-1600),...
read moreTanabata – Conscience-weaving under Summer Stars
by Terry Boardman May 1998 The Tanabata (or “Loom”) Festival has grown greatly in popularity since the end of World War II. In 1996 the first All Japan Tanabata Summit was held in Sendai when representatives from 25 municipalities which hold Tanabata festivals got together to discuss the significance of the festival in Japanese history and its future development. One of the five traditional yearly sekku, and first celebrated at court in 691, the festival is based on an ancient legend which has acquired all...
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