I needed to leave China because my visa is only valid for 90 on each entry. So, I packed some reading and am visiting a good friend in Japan for a couple of days.

As I write this, I have only been here an hour or so, I’m sitting in a cafe waiting to meet my buddy when he finishes work. Just this short time, and the memories it prompts of my last visit some years ago (before my first visit to China), has already added some needed perspective on my time in China. And, for important political reasons, this is a good time to visit.

Japan provides something of a template for Asian economic and political development. The Meiji Restoration created the basis for a modern (in western terms, modernist) Asian society and this through education exchange and government advisors influenced Chinese policy in the late 19th and early 20th century. Japan’s victory over the Russian navy demonstrated to the Chinese that Asia need not play second military fiddle to the west.

Of course, this benign influence changed its character during Japan’s imperialist period, and Sino-Japanese political relations still struggle to overcome this history.

My visit runs in parallel with that of President Hu, visiting to, I hope, try and give political relations between the country some of the same warmth and vigour that is evident in the economic sphere.

Economic development in both countries has been characterised by state led development, with some industries selected as champions, moving to more market based policies. Both countries have been reluctant players on the world political stage. Both have recent histories with which they have not really come to terms. Both seen to have a rather ambivalent relationship with the USA, though with quite different histories.

In addition to these rather broad political and historical issues, I will get to observe Japanese middle class economy, identity and consumption, albeit rather casually. Still, even though these are two quite distinct civilisations, visiting Japan has already helped to render alien some of the things about China that I had come to take for granted.

Japan, for example, clearly has a capacity to plan and implement great projects in a way that China, despite a very impressive recent part, is still working to develop. Japan has, not unrelatedly, a huge human and physical capital stock that it deploys in industry, both large and small.

While it is clearly useful to be here and jolted from some of my acceptance of things in China, an acceptance that, of course, limits the capacity for thoughtful engagement, there are limits to how much I should take away from this visit (my books aside).

I should, to help with this issue of comparative perspective of culture and economy, visit Taiwan, where the economic and political circumstances are more like Japan than mainland China, but there is a shared civilisation.