Tokyo story

Adam LeBor

● IT’S A STRANGE, almost paradoxical life, working as a journalist in a foreign country, as both Jake Adelstein and I can attest. While Adelstein was based in Tokyo in the 1990s I spent much of my journalistic career living in Budapest, covering central Europe and the Balkans. I moved temporarily to Berlin and Paris, but that shining city on the Danube kept pulling me back. I immersed myself in Hungarian culture and politics, shopped at the same supermarkets, drank in the same bars, ate in the same restaurants as the locals. I learnt the language, married a Hungarian and we raised our children there. I became a kind of semi-native by osmosis. Sometimes people thought I actually was a Magyar (until I started speaking Hungarian). Yet however much I…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023

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