Having lived in Japan for 45 years, 70-year-old British journalist Henry Scott Stokes has seen Japan go through more changes than virtually any other foreign resident has.
And as Tokyo bureau chief for some of the world's biggest newspapers and a friend of prolific writer Yukio Mishima (about whom Stokes wrote an acclaimed biography), he also recorded these changes as part of his work.
But his simple statement to newcomers to Japan remains the same. "Japan is an island country. It has evolved in certain ways, has a very unique culture, and how it came to be like that is a fact of geography."