Last night in bed I was thinking about Happy and Glorious. I realise it must seem odd for me to still be so fixated upon it, but this short film intrigues me even now. Part of the reason for that comes from the fact it was so unexpected: who would have thought we would ever see the queen ‘meeting’ James Bond and parachuting out of a helicopter with him? Isn’t she supposed to be above such populist things? It was out of the blue, broke our perceptions of royalty and was very, very cool. At one and the same time, it questioned our perceptions of royalty in a completely surprising way yet said something we all knew about British culture which is always left unsaid. How very British.

That got me thinking: where else might we see a similar breaking? Could anything else, any other combination, elicit the same reaction, the same degree of amazement and surprise? It occurred to me that Japan still has an emperor just as we have our queen; the interesting question is, would Japanese culture allow a similar type of play? Happy and Glorious said something about Britain’s relationship with it’s monarchy; could Japanese culture allow for a similar juxtaposition of reverence and irreverence, tradition and modernity? I don’t know much about Japanese culture, but the impression I get is that it wouldn’t – it is much too reverential and conservative. Then again, one might have said that of British culture before 2012. Thus Happy and Glorious opens up the possibility of such things happening elsewhere: if Bond can escort the queen to the olympics, surely anything else is possible and nothing is out of the question. But what if it is? what if the Japanese see their emperor – who, to them, is more like a god – as above such things? what does that say about their culture and ours; their relationship to monarchy and ours? These are the cultural implications of Happy and glorious which, believe it or not, still interest me. What would be fascinating is if we see a similar stunt in Tokyo in 2020.