I have just returned from a fact-finding trip to Japan. This puts me in a good position to provide a business traveller’s guide to the inscrutable inhabitants of a remote, wave-racked archipelago.

I am talking about the British, of course. Nothing opens one’s eyes quite so forcefully to the peculiarities of one’s own culture as exposure to someone else’s. As I navigated the chaos and squalor of Heathrow airport, I imagined a first-time Japanese business visitor in the same situation wondering to himself: “What’s with these people?”