One of the reasons I’m so fond of plane travel is the way it frees you from the usual daily distractions that prevent deep thought. My mind makes peculiar leaps when airborne, which might be why, on a recent flight to Athens, I found myself drawing a line between the collapse of teenage jewellery outlet Clare’s Accessories and a mid-90s cultural history-cum-memoir called Lost Japan.

The retailer’s recent descent into administration has prompted a wave of nostalgic recollections from my generation about getting our ears pierced back in the day. Everyone remembers it – it was a rite of passage.

Unfortunately neither myself nor my peers shop at Clare’s anymore, because we aren’t teenagers. We’re unhappy about its demise, but let’s face it, we’ve done bugger all to preserve this high street institution, other than spending a fiver on a piercing thirty years ago.

Meanwhile, our nostalgic recollections are, to younger consumers, proof that Clare’s, like The Body Shop, and their parents, belongs in the category marked ‘irrelevant dinosaur’.

I opened Lost Japan expecting a similar nostalgia trip, having visited the country twice in the past decade and taken great pleasure in immersing myself in its many cultural idiosyncrasies.

Regrettably (and I should really have guessed this from the title), the book tells the story of a middle-aged, affluent American gentleman with a taste for fine art, who settled in Japan in the 1970s and has been objecting to the country’s direction of travel ever since. He spends 200 pages lamenting the erosion of Japanese traditions in every walk of life, and lambasting the population at large for turning its back on the past.

It’s the most irritating book I’ve read in at least eight years – since a purported paean to slow travel was pressed into my hands, which turned out to be an annoying man wandering around the English countryside and congratulating himself for it.

What makes the Lost Japan author’s lament harder to swallow is that he isn’t Japanese. He’s an outsider who chose to embrace the traditions of another culture – perfectly fine in itself – but then decided he was qualified to pass judgment on which practices should endure, and which should fade.

In his telling, Japan has a patriotic duty to live like he does. He purchases unwanted calligraphy and forgotten texts, he rethatches his roof the good old-fashioned way, he fills his house with antiques from the fading Shogunate era. And he’s utterly furious at the rest of the country for failing to follow suit.

I am sad about the likely passing of Clare’s Accessories, and still more dispirited about the decline of the Great British high street. But were I to traipse around the country purchasing as much teenage jewellery as my finances would allow – masquerading as a sort of high street Don Quixote – there could be no hope of averting the inevitable.

To claim a lesson in all of this – and it’s a stretch, I grant you – it’s that we should enjoy cultural traditions, practices and institutions for as long as they endure, and even beyond if it suits us and is remotely viable (just look to the Amish for inspiration). And yes, lament their decline as they are replaced by new ones. But let’s not get on our high horse and pass blanket judgement on the rest of society. Things change, the world moves on, and life is too short for tilting at windmills – or filling your house with unwanted earrings.

Photo by Kate Branch on Unsplash