These notes may be brief this week. I’m in a hearing Monday to Thursday, and daughter’s (initially remote) school is restarting tomorrow. So I’ll focus on SIROTI, with other things when I can.

Short thought: I’m pondering (for a client) what the word “enactment” means in a UK statute. On the face of it, it’s straightforward: it means something enacted as written statute, whether in primary or secondary legislation. But does “enactment” (the reference here is s43L(2) of the Employment Rights Act 1996, saying that a “reward payable by or under any enactment” doesn’t count as “personal gain” for the purposes of working out whether whistleblowing is protected or not), mean solely domestic legislation? Or would – say – a whistleblowing payout by a foreign regulator under its domestic statutes be covered? I incline towards thinking it does, primarily because I can’t think of a reason why “any” shouldn’t mean just that. But I’m happy to be contradicted.

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Someone is right on the internet: I first got interested in Japan in my early teens. (It was samurai and ninja that did it, of course. I was 13, after all.) But the delight in the country blossomed like a tree in cherry season, and my first degree was in Japanese. (I’d also done a school history project on the rise and near-extinction of Christianity in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries. And this in the pre-Internet times. I can’t recall how I found the sources.)

For various stupid reasons I haven’t been back there for 20 years, so reading Craig Mod’s dispatches, often tracing his walks through Japan, is a vicarious delight.

Like anyone else worth reading online, he takes me to sites (as well as sights) I might not otherwise have found. Like this entrancing, magical and scholarly (in the best sense) New York Times piece on Hokusai. Seriously: no description by me can do it justice. Go and revel in it.

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