Kazuo Ishiguro, who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in the London Review of Books in 1985: 'The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a curious desperation to deny it? No doubt, they sense that to look at Japanese culture too closely would threaten a long-cherished complacency about their own.'