There is a particular quality of Saturday morning light that I will never forget. It falls, in my memory, through the windows of a small apartment somewhere in France in the late 1980s — slightly golden, slightly grey, the way French light always is in the in-between seasons — and it illuminates a television screen on which something extraordinary is happening. A boy with wild black hair and an orange gi is fighting. Not just fighting: becoming. His hair is turning gold. His eyes are going green. The air around him crackles with an energy that a seven-year-old French child watching from a sofa cannot name but can feel, somewhere behind the sternum, as something close to transcendence. The show is Dragon Ball Z. The year is somewhere around 1990. And in that moment, without knowing it, a love affair between a French child and Japanese culture had already been burning for years — and would burn for the rest of his life.

I was two years old when my family settled in France in 1985. I grew up not merely as a French child but as a francophone child of the world, absorbing everything that the République had to offer — its language, its food, its philosophy, its cinema, its furious passion for debate — while simultaneously being inducted, via the television screen and the schoolyard, into one of the most astonishing cultural exports the modern world has ever produced: Japanese animation, Japanese storytelling, Japanese aesthetics. Je suis de Gauche. I believe in the dignity of the human person, in the solidarity of peoples, in the irreplaceable value of culture as a bulwark against barbarism. And I believe, with every fibre of my experience, that the relationship between France and Japan — two nations that the lazy geopolitical imagination might see as distant and unrelated — is one of the most fertile, most surprising, and most necessary alliances of our time.

This is not a dry diplomatic briefing. This is a love letter. A letter to two civilisations that taught me, simultaneously, how to eat well and how to fight with honour; how to cry at cartoons and how to build machines of extraordinary precision; how to debate with passion and how to bow with grace. It is also, necessarily, a political document — because in 2026, when demagogues and bullies and nationalist strongmen are once again testing the foundations of the international order, the friendship between France and Japan matters more than ever. Their work at the United Nations, at the G7, at every multilateral table where the future of humanity is being argued over, is not peripheral. It is essential.

At Zack Technology LLC, we think about the intersection of technology, world affairs, electronic music, and diplomacy. We also think, deeply and without apology, about mental health, emotional support, and music therapy — because we believe that culture is not a luxury appended to politics and economics, but the very substrate from which politics and economics draw their meaning. And no two cultures, in our experience, have done more to nourish the inner lives of people around the world than France and Japan.

To understand what Japanese animation meant to a generation of French children growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, you must first understand Club Dorothée. Broadcast on TF1 — France's main commercial television channel — Club Dorothée was not merely a television programme. It was a weekly ritual, a community, a shared universe that connected millions of French children across every class, every region, every background, in a common experience of wonder. And the engine of that wonder, week after week, was Japanese animation.

The lineup was staggering in retrospect. Dragon Ball and then Dragon Ball Z. Saint Seiya — known in France as Les Chevaliers du Zodiaque, one of the most beloved series ever broadcast on French television. Sailor Moon. Nicky Larson (the French adaptation of City Hunter). Ken le Survivant (Fist of the North Star). Captain Tsubasa — known to French children as Olive et Tom — which ignited a passion for football in a generation that would go on to win the World Cup in 1998. Goldorak, which had preceded Club Dorothée but set the template. These were not background entertainment. These were formative texts. They shaped how a generation of French people understood courage, loyalty, sacrifice, and the possibility of transformation.

What made Dragon Ball Z so emotionally devastating, and so enduringly beloved, was its understanding of stakes. These were not stories where the heroes were invincible. These were stories where the heroes bled, failed, died, trained for years in hyperbolic time chambers, and came back to face enemies who seemed genuinely insurmountable. The emotional architecture was operatic. And when the moment of transformation finally came — when Son Gohan, the quiet, studious, gentle son of Goku, was finally pushed past his breaking point by Cell; when the anguish of watching his friends suffer shattered the invisible ceiling on his power; when his hair spiked in two layers and his aura crackled with an energy that seemed to bend the laws of the universe — French children did not simply cheer. They wept. Because they understood, even at eight or nine or ten years old, what that moment meant: that sometimes, the quiet ones, the ones who would rather read than fight, are carrying something inside them that the world has not yet seen. Without giving away every detail of what follows, let it be said that what Gohan does in that moment is among the most cathartic acts of justice in the history of animated storytelling.

These moments were not merely entertainment. They were, for children who had perhaps experienced injustice in their own small lives — bullying, exclusion, the helplessness of being young in a world run by adults who did not always protect you — something close to emotional medicine. The Japanese understanding of gambatte — of perseverance, of giving everything you have and then finding more — spoke directly to the French Republican tradition of resistance, of la résistance, of the refusal to submit. Two cultures, separated by ten thousand kilometres, discovering in each other a mirror of their deepest values.

If Club Dorothée was the Saturday morning cathedral of Franco-Japanese cultural communion, then the Sony PlayStation was its private chapel — available any evening, any hour, demanding nothing but your imagination and your willingness to be utterly consumed. The PlayStation, launched in Japan in 1994 and reaching France in 1995, was not merely a games console. It was a portal. And what it offered, above all else, was immersion in worlds of Japanese creation that were unlike anything Western entertainment was producing at the time.

Metal Gear Solid, released in 1998, was the revelation that games could be cinema. Hideo Kojima's masterpiece — a stealth action game set in a secret nuclear weapons facility in Alaska — was simultaneously a geopolitical thriller, a philosophical treatise on the nature of nuclear deterrence, a meditation on genetic destiny and free will, and one of the most carefully crafted narrative experiences in any medium. Solid Snake, crawling through ventilation ducts, hiding beneath cardboard boxes, engaging in codec conversations with characters who quoted Dostoevsky and discussed the legacy of the Manhattan Project, was a character of genuine depth. The game's final act, in which the player is forced to confront questions about who they are and what they are fighting for, remains one of the most audacious things any storyteller in any medium has ever attempted.

But Metal Gear Solid was only the beginning. The PlayStation library was a curriculum in Japanese creative ambition. Final Fantasy VII, which explored grief, environmental destruction, and corporate evil with a seriousness that Hollywood had never managed. Tekken and its impossibly elegant fighting systems. Ridge Racer, which taught a generation of players the difference between oversteer and understeer. Resident Evil, which invented the grammar of survival horror. Silent Hill, which entered the vocabulary of psychological terror. Each of these games represented a form of artistic ambition — a Japanese insistence that popular entertainment could be, simultaneously, high art. It was an insistence that French culture, with its long tradition of taking popular forms seriously (from Molière to the Nouvelle Vague to electronic music), was perfectly positioned to appreciate.

The love of being a geek, a nerd, an otaku, an intello — this is another place where France and Japan find each other with a shock of recognition. In both cultures, there is a tradition of the intellectual as a social figure of respect rather than ridicule; of expertise as something to be admired rather than resented. The French normalien, steeped in philosophy and mathematics, is not entirely unlike the Japanese otaku, whose obsessive mastery of a chosen domain — whether anime, trains, computers, or medieval swordsmanship — is a form of disciplined passion that the broader culture, however ambivalently, ultimately respects. Both countries have produced extraordinary scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technologists, precisely because both cultures contain within themselves a deep vein of reverence for the life of the mind.

If you want to understand a civilisation, do not begin with its constitution or its military budget. Begin with what it eats, and how it eats it. By this measure, France and Japan stand apart from all other nations as civilisations that have elevated the preparation and consumption of food to the level of philosophical practice.

French gastronomy — la grande cuisine française — is one of humanity's great achievements. Its classical tradition, codified by Escoffier and transformed by the Nouvelle Cuisine movement of the 1970s, rests on a set of principles that would not be unfamiliar to a Japanese chef: the absolute primacy of ingredient quality, the discipline of technique, the respect for season, and the conviction that a meal is not merely fuel but a social ceremony whose proper conduct constitutes a form of civilised living. The French insistence on the déjeuner as an unhurried, two-hour ritual — even on weekdays, even in offices, even in the current age of the sad desk lunch — is a form of cultural resistance against the barbarism of efficiency-maximising capitalism. It says: human beings are not machines. They need beauty, flavour, and the company of others. Time spent at the table is not lost; it is, in the deepest sense, the point.

The cross-pollination of French and Japanese culinary traditions has produced some of the most extraordinary cooking of the past three decades. Chefs like Joël Robuchon — who spent years in Japan and whose Japanese influences transformed his approach to French cuisine — and Japanese chefs who trained in France and brought back techniques that they then refracted through Japanese aesthetics, have created a dialogue between two of the world's great gastronomic traditions that continues to astonish. In Paris today, you can eat kaiseki-influenced French tasting menus. In Tokyo, you can eat croissants that are technically superior to most of what you will find in Paris. This is not appropriation; it is the highest form of cultural respect — the willingness to learn from another tradition so deeply that you transform your own.

The Quai d'Orsay — France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, named for the Left Bank quai in Paris where its grand building stands — is one of the most consequential foreign policy institutions in the world. Its tradition of diplomacy stretches back centuries, to the Congress of Vienna and beyond, and it carries within it a particular conception of France's role in the world: not merely as a national interest to be maximised, but as the representative of a set of universal values — the Rights of Man, the sovereignty of international law, the indivisibility of human dignity — that France claims as its gift to humanity. This is a claim that can sometimes shade into arrogance. But at its best, it produces a diplomacy of genuine moral seriousness, willing to speak uncomfortable truths to powerful allies and to stand for principles even when it is costly to do so.

France's role at the United Nations, where it holds a permanent seat on the Security Council, has been consequential and sometimes controversial. Its refusal to support the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 — embodied in Dominique de Villepin's extraordinary speech to the Security Council on 14 February 2003, delivered in French, a linguistic choice that was itself a political statement — was a moment of genuine diplomatic courage. De Villepin warned, with a precision that history has entirely vindicated, of the catastrophic consequences that an invasion would produce. He was right. The United States was wrong. And France, alone among the major Western powers with a Security Council seat, said so publicly and without equivocation.

The Gaimushō — Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs — operates from a different tradition but with increasing moral weight. Japan's postwar constitution, specifically Article 9, which renounces war and the threat of force as instruments of national policy, has made Japan's engagement with international institutions a matter of existential necessity: a country that cannot project military power must instead project diplomatic and economic influence, and must invest deeply in the multilateral institutions through which that influence is exercised. Japan has been among the largest contributors to United Nations peacekeeping operations and development programmes, and its commitment to official development assistance — even during periods of domestic economic difficulty — reflects a genuine understanding that global stability is a public good that must be actively maintained.

At the G7, France and Japan have consistently been among the voices arguing for a rules-based international order against those — most notably the United States under Donald Trump, but also certain other actors — who would prefer a world organised around the naked exercise of power by the strong against the weak. The G7 is an imperfect institution, as all human institutions are. But it remains one of the few forums in which the world's major democracies can attempt to coordinate responses to global challenges — climate change, pandemic preparedness, nuclear non-proliferation, the regulation of artificial intelligence — that no nation can address alone. France and Japan, at every G7 summit, have pushed for ambition, for binding commitments, for the recognition that the short-term political cost of difficult decisions is always lower than the long-term civilisational cost of avoiding them.

France is, in a precise historical sense, the nation that invented human rights as a political programme. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the National Assembly in August 1789, was the first document in history to ground political rights not in the authority of a monarch, a church, or a tradition, but in the inherent dignity of every human being as such. This was a revolutionary idea — literally revolutionary — and it has never stopped being radical, because the implications of taking it seriously are never fully exhausted. France has not always lived up to its own declaration; its colonial history is a record of systematic violation of the very principles it proclaimed. But the declaration itself remains one of humanity's greatest intellectual achievements, and the French commitment to defending it — however imperfect, however selective — is a genuine contribution to the world.

Japan's relationship with human rights is shaped by a different, darker pedagogy. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 — acts of deliberate mass destruction directed against civilian populations, killing somewhere between 129,000 and 226,000 people instantly and condemning hundreds of thousands more to years of radiation-induced suffering — are the founding trauma of modern Japan's political consciousness. Japan said "二度と" — nidoto: never again. It said it in the form of a constitution that prohibited war. It said it in the form of three non-nuclear principles: not to possess, not to produce, and not to permit the introduction of nuclear weapons. It said it in the annual ceremonies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the Mayor of Hiroshima reads a peace declaration that is one of the most morally serious documents produced by any municipal government anywhere in the world. Japan's commitment to nuclear disarmament is not the position of a weak country unable to defend itself. It is the position of a country that knows, better than any other on earth, what nuclear weapons actually do to human beings.

Let us address a persistent and irritating misconception with the directness it deserves. There is a strain of Anglophone — and particularly American — commentary that regards the French military as a punchline, conjuring images of rapid surrender and Gallic shrug. This is a fantasy born of ignorance, nurtured by the specific circumstances of 1940 (which involved military failures but also extraordinary acts of individual and collective courage under occupation) and perpetuated by people who have never read French military history and have no particular interest in doing so. The reality is entirely different. And after the catastrophic terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015 — when coordinated jihadist attacks across Paris killed 130 people and injured over 400 others — France responded with a military and intelligence transformation that has made it one of the most formidable counter-terrorism forces on the planet.

The French Armed Forces — les Forces armées françaises — are the largest in the European Union and among the most capable in the world. France is one of only nine countries with a confirmed nuclear arsenal; it is one of only five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with a nuclear deterrent. Its conventional forces have conducted complex, sustained military operations in the Sahel, in the Middle East, in the Balkans, and across the Indo-Pacific, often in extraordinarily difficult conditions with very limited logistical support. The French Foreign Legion — la Légion Étrangère — is perhaps the world's most famous elite military formation, drawing its soldiers from every nation on earth and forging them, through one of the most demanding training regimens in existence, into a fighting force of legendary capability. The Groupement d'intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN), France's elite counter-terrorism unit, has conducted hostage rescue operations across the globe and is regarded by peer services worldwide as among the best in the world at what it does.

And then there is the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure — the DGSE, France's foreign intelligence service, sometimes called the French CIA but in significant ways more capable and more ruthless than that comparison implies. The DGSE operates globally, with a particular focus on terrorism, weapons proliferation, and threats to French interests and citizens abroad. Its human intelligence networks in the Middle East and Africa are among the most extensive maintained by any Western service. Its technical intelligence capabilities have grown substantially since 2015, supported by significant increases in intelligence funding authorised by successive governments in the aftermath of the November attacks. The DGSE does not publicise its successes, which is precisely the point.

Japan's military situation is more complex, constrained by the constitutional pacifism of Article 9 and by the unique strategic circumstances of a country that hosts a substantial American military presence and exists in a neighbourhood that includes North Korea's nuclear programme and China's increasingly assertive regional posture. The Japan Self-Defense Forces — Jieitai — are, despite the word "self-defense," a highly capable and well-equipped military organisation. Japan spends approximately one percent of its GDP on defence — a figure that sounds modest until you remember that Japan's GDP is the third largest in the world. The JSDF's technical sophistication, particularly in naval and air capabilities, places it among the world's elite forces.

And yes — the tradition of shinobi, the ninja, is not purely the stuff of legend. While the flamboyant portrayals in anime and Hollywood films bear little resemblance to historical reality, the actual historical ninja were practitioners of ninjutsu — a comprehensive system of unconventional warfare, intelligence gathering, infiltration, and survival that was genuinely employed by feudal Japanese military commanders. The Japanese special operations tradition, which draws in part on this heritage, has produced units of considerable capability. The Japan Special Forces Group, established in 2004, trains to standards comparable to Western special operations forces and has participated in international exercises that have consistently impressed allied observers. The spirit of the shinobi — adaptability, patience, the willingness to operate in the dark and to achieve objectives through means that conventional force cannot — is not dead. It has been modernised, institutionalised, and integrated into the capabilities of a 21st-century military.

Cinema is where France and Japan have perhaps made their most undeniable contributions to the human patrimony. And there is something deeply symbolic about the fact that the greatest film festival in the world takes place in France — in Cannes, on the Côte d'Azur, each May, when the Palme d'Or is awarded and the world pays attention — while Japan has produced, in anime and in live-action film both, a body of work that has fundamentally altered what cinema is understood to be capable of.

The Festival de Cannes, established in 1946 and held annually since, is not merely a glamorous industry event. It is the institution through which world cinema — non-Anglophone, non-Hollywood cinema — makes its claim to be taken seriously. Its competition has, over the decades, honoured films from Iran, South Korea, Romania, Senegal, Thailand, and dozens of other countries that would never have reached international audiences without the platform that Cannes provided. Japanese cinema has had an extraordinary presence in Cannes. Akira Kurosawa received an honorary Palme d'Or in 1994. Films by Kore-eda Hirokazu, Kawase Naomi, and others have competed in the main competition and won major prizes. The French commitment to cinema as an art form — maintained through the Centre National du Cinéma's funding mechanisms, through the rigorous protection of French-language screen quotas, through the simple fact that French audiences will go to see subtitled foreign films in ways that no other major film market will — has created an ecosystem in which Japanese cinema, and world cinema generally, can find an audience and a critical reception it would not find anywhere else.

And then there is the experience — impossible to fully describe to someone who has not had it — of watching a film in Japanese audio with French subtitles, or a French film with Japanese subtitles. It is not merely comprehension that this experience provides. It is something more uncanny: the sensation of two languages running in parallel, the spoken melody of one playing against the written meaning of the other, producing a kind of stereo understanding that monolingual viewing can never achieve. There is something almost musical about it — a harmony between sound and text, between one culture's way of speaking and another's way of writing, that produces actual physical sensation. Goosebumps. A shiver along the spine. The body's recognition that something extraordinary is happening.

Godzilla — Gojira — deserves particular attention. Born in 1954 from the collective trauma of a nation that had survived atomic bombing and was still processing the psychological and physical aftermath of that experience, Godzilla was never simply a monster movie. It was a nightmare given form: the fear of what nuclear technology could do to the natural world, the terror of destruction on a scale that human beings had no framework to comprehend, the specific Japanese anxiety about being the nation that had been targeted and that could, theoretically, be targeted again. In this reading, Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo is not adventure entertainment; it is the repressed terror of a civilisation working through its most catastrophic memory in the only way that art makes available: by turning it into a story you can watch from a safe distance. The franchise has produced scores of films, some profound and some merely entertaining, but the original remains a work of genuine horror and genuine political seriousness, as applicable to the nuclear anxieties of the 21st century as it was to those of 1954.

Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli require a paragraph of their own, though they deserve a book. Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle — these films have reached audiences worldwide and have been, for many non-Japanese viewers, including French viewers, their deepest introduction to Japanese aesthetics, Japanese mythology, Japanese attitudes toward nature, work, childhood, and the relationship between the human and the non-human world. Miyazaki's environmentalism, his pacifism, his deep suspicion of the modern industrial economy, his reverence for the natural world and for the mystery of childhood — these are values that find immediate resonance in a French intellectual tradition that has always maintained a romantic, Rousseauian strand against the dominance of technocratic rationalism. France was among the first countries outside Japan to recognise Ghibli's films as something more than animated children's entertainment, and French critics and audiences gave them a seriousness of reception that contributed to their international prestige.

If you need a single image to capture the meeting point of French engineering ambition and Japanese mechanical philosophy, you could do worse than this: a Nissan GT-R, engineered to within microns of its theoretical limits by the most obsessive quality-control culture on the planet, being driven flat-out through the night at the Circuit de la Sarthe during the 24 Hours of Le Mans — the oldest, most demanding, most consequential endurance motor race in the world, held every year near the French city of Le Mans since 1923. In this image, two engineering traditions, two national philosophies of precision and ambition, are playing in the same space. And the result is magnificent.

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is not merely a race. It is an argument — an argument about what human beings and their machines can endure, what engineering excellence looks like when tested to its absolute limit, what teamwork means when sustained over twenty-four consecutive hours of darkness and light and mechanical stress. The Circuit de la Sarthe, with its combination of permanent racing circuit and closed public roads, creates conditions of extraordinary variety and difficulty: slow chicanes, flat-out blasts along the legendary Mulsanne Straight (now interrupted by two chicanes but still the fastest stretch of public road used in racing), and the complex, high-speed Porsche curves where the difference between genius and catastrophe is measured in millimetres of steering input. Cars cover approximately 5,000 kilometres in twenty-four hours. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, for someone. The teams that win are the ones who have thought of everything — and then thought of everything again.

Japanese cars, and specifically JDM — Japanese Domestic Market — vehicles, represent a parallel tradition of mechanical philosophy whose influence on global automotive culture cannot be overstated. The JDM phenomenon is not merely about performance cars, though performance cars are at its heart. It is about a particular approach to engineering: the belief that a machine can be made to perform at a level far beyond what its modest external appearance might suggest, through obsessive attention to every component, every tolerance, every interaction between systems. This is the philosophy that produced the Honda Civic Type R, which looks like a family hatchback until you drive it; the Subaru Impreza WRX STI, which dominated rallying in the 1990s with a combination of sophisticated all-wheel-drive technology and extraordinary driver commitment; and above all, the Nissan GT-R — Godzilla, as it is universally known — which is perhaps the purest expression of the JDM philosophy in existence.

The GT-R's nickname is not accidental. Like Godzilla, it is something that appears from a distance to be manageable, familiar, merely large — and then, at close quarters, reveals itself as something operating on a different scale entirely. Its twin-turbocharged V6 engine, its sophisticated all-wheel-drive system with a rear-mounted transaxle for perfect weight distribution, its suspension and braking systems calibrated by engineers who apparently regard "good enough" as a personal insult, combine to produce a car that has, repeatedly, lapped circuits faster than cars costing three times as much. The GT-R is the engineering equivalent of the quiet student who, when the moment requires it, goes Super Saiyan.

The connection between France and motorsport runs deeper than Le Mans. The FIA — the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, the governing body of world motorsport — is headquartered in Paris. French manufacturers have been central to Formula 1, to the World Rally Championship, to the World Endurance Championship, since their inception. Renault has won multiple World Constructors' Championships. Alpine — Renault's sporting brand — competes at the front of the grid and has produced some of the most beautiful racing cars of the modern era. France takes motorsport seriously not merely as entertainment but as a demonstration of industrial capability: a proof of concept, executed at 200 miles per hour, in front of the world.

The French and Japanese traditions of scientific and technological excellence are among the least celebrated and most important facts about these two countries. Both nations have produced Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine in numbers that belie their populations relative to the English-speaking world. Both have space agencies of genuine capability: the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), which is responsible for the Ariane rocket family and has launched satellites for dozens of countries, and JAXA — the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — which has sent probes to asteroids, returned samples to Earth, and is an active partner in the International Space Station. Both nations believe, with a conviction that runs through their educational systems and their public culture, that the exploration of the universe is not a luxury but a necessity — not merely for scientific knowledge but for the expansion of the human spirit.

The geek, the nerd, the otaku, the intello — in both France and Japan, this figure has a social legitimacy that is often denied in Anglophone cultures. The French educational system, with its classes préparatoires and its grandes écoles, is essentially a machine for producing extremely well-educated technocrats; the reverence for intellectual achievement that it embodies is a cultural constant that has not changed substantially since the Enlightenment. Japan's educational culture — rigorous, demanding, sometimes brutally competitive — produces graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in numbers that are extraordinary relative to the country's population.

The love of computers, specifically, has deep roots in both cultures. France gave the world the Minitel — the world's first mass-market online information service, deployed in the early 1980s, a decade before the World Wide Web, and used by millions of French households and businesses for information retrieval, train bookings, and electronic messaging. It was a remarkable technological achievement, and the fact that it was also, eventually, superseded by the internet does not diminish the ambition and vision it represented. Japan's contributions to computing and consumer electronics — Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, NEC, Nintendo, Sega — shaped the hardware landscape of the digital revolution. Without Japanese manufacturing excellence, the personal computer revolution would have been considerably slower and considerably less elegant.

Both France and Japan are societies under enormous stress. France — battered by decades of economic anxiety, political polarisation, terrorist attacks, and the grinding social strains of a country whose promise of universal equality has not always matched its practice — has among the highest rates of antidepressant consumption in Europe. Japan — whose economic stagnation since the 1990s has produced a generation of young people navigating a labour market of radical insecurity, whose social pressures around conformity and performance can be crushingly intense, and whose rates of suicide have historically been among the highest in the developed world — is a society that knows, perhaps better than any other, the human cost of suppressed emotion and unaddressed psychological suffering.

And yet — or perhaps precisely because of this — both societies have developed extraordinarily rich cultures of beauty, of craft, of art, of food, of communal experience, that function as powerful counterweights to the pressures of modern life. The French tradition of the long lunch, of the café as a social institution, of the flaneur and the pleasure of walking the city without purpose, of wine and conversation and the particular pleasure of an argument well-conducted — these are not luxuries. They are technologies of psychological survival, refined over centuries by a people who have always known, at some level, that the life worth living requires more than efficiency.

Japan's equivalent traditions — the tea ceremony as a practice of mindfulness long before mindfulness became a Western wellness commodity; the onsen, the hot spring bath, as a communal ritual of relaxation and social bonding; the rigorous seasonal aesthetics of hanami, the cherry-blossom viewing, which arrests the entire country for two weeks each spring in a collective act of attention to beauty; the discipline of ikebana flower arrangement as a meditative practice; the whole tradition of mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness of impermanence that is embedded in Japanese aesthetics from the medieval period to the present — these are equally sophisticated responses to the human need for beauty, meaning, and psychological balance in the face of a world that provides none of these things automatically.

Anime, in this context, is not a trivial entertainment. It is one of the most effective systems of emotional education that the modern world has produced. The emotional range that anime addresses — from joy to grief to rage to hope to despair to the particular bittersweet feeling of something beautiful that cannot last — is broader than almost any other popular medium. The willingness of anime to take children's emotions seriously, to portray suffering and longing and the complexity of human relationships without flinching or sentimentalising, to offer protagonists who are damaged and frightened and uncertain and who nevertheless keep going — this is a form of emotional intelligence that has contributed to the mental health of millions of people worldwide, including millions of French people who grew up with these stories and found in them a mirror for experiences they had not yet been given language to describe.

At Zack Technology LLC, our commitment to mental health and emotional support is not peripheral to our work in technology and world affairs. It is central to it. We believe that the wellbeing of individuals — their capacity to feel, to connect, to imagine, to hope — is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Societies that suppress or ignore the emotional lives of their citizens pay an enormous price, in productivity, in social cohesion, in political health. Societies that take those emotional lives seriously — that invest in culture, in art, in music, in the institutions through which human beings make meaning together — are, in the long run, stronger, more resilient, and more capable of facing the challenges that the 21st century is placing before all of us.

The relationship between France and Japan is unusual among bilateral relationships in that the fascination runs genuinely both ways, with roughly equal intensity. French interest in Japan is well documented: the enormous success of Japanese culture in France — anime, manga, cuisine, fashion, electronics, film — has created one of the most sophisticated non-Japanese audiences for Japanese cultural production anywhere in the world. France has the largest manga readership outside Japan. French cosplay culture, concentrated around events like Japan Expo in Paris, draws hundreds of thousands of participants annually. The Japanese aesthetic — in architecture, in graphic design, in fashion, in interior design — has had a profound and acknowledged influence on French design culture, from the collections of the great couture houses to the shelves of Muji (which French consumers adopted with an enthusiasm bordering on reverence).

But the fascination is equally intense from the Japanese side. France — and more specifically Paris — occupies a place in the Japanese cultural imagination that is unique among non-Japanese cities. The phenomenon of "Paris Syndrome" — a genuine psychiatric condition in which Japanese tourists who have imagined Paris as a city of perfect romantic elegance are so overwhelmed by the reality (noisier, dirtier, more complicated and more magnificent) that they require medical attention — is extreme evidence of something real: that Japan has built, over decades of cultural consumption of French film, fashion, food, and philosophy, an image of France that is almost mythological in its intensity. The French language is studied by Japanese people who will never visit France and will never need French for any practical purpose, simply because the sound of it seems to them beautiful. French cuisine is celebrated in Japan with a reverence that sometimes exceeds what it receives in France itself.

There is, beneath this mutual fascination, a recognition of genuine kinship. Both France and Japan are societies that place extraordinary value on craftsmanship — on the idea that things worth doing are worth doing perfectly, and that the person who achieves mastery of a craft, whether a kitchen knife, a racing car, a piece of music, or a diplomatic argument, deserves deep respect. Both are societies in which tradition and innovation coexist in productive tension — where the weight of historical practice is taken seriously, but where the appetite for novelty and originality is also intense. Both are societies with a strong sense of national identity that is, at its best, inclusive rather than exclusive — that defines belonging not in terms of blood or origin but in terms of participation in a shared cultural project. France's republican universalism — the idea that anyone who embraces the values of the Republic belongs to it — and Japan's concept of yamato damashii, the Japanese spirit that can in principle be cultivated by anyone willing to make the effort, are different formulations of a similar idea: that what unites us is not where we come from but what we are trying to build together.

France and Japan are, in the deepest sense, two nations that know what it is to be tested by catastrophe and to survive it. France has known invasion, occupation, the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, two world wars, the Algerian War, decades of colonial violence, and more recently the particular horror of coordinated terrorist attacks on its civilian population. Japan has known the devastation of the Second World War, including the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities, the atomic bombings, the humiliation of defeat and occupation, and the subsequent extraordinary reconstruction — the economic miracle of the postwar decades — alongside the continuing challenge of building a stable identity in a difficult neighbourhood.

Both nations have also known the specific modern stresses of a globalised world that moves faster than either of their deliberately paced cultures is entirely comfortable with. The anxiety of economic insecurity, the disruption of traditional social structures, the challenge of integrating technological change into cultural frameworks built for slower times — these are pressures that both societies are navigating, imperfectly and with effort, in real time. And in navigating them, they find in each other a recognition: here is another society that refuses to give up; here is another people that understands that the answer to adversity is not withdrawal but engagement, not despair but discipline, not the abandonment of values under pressure but their more rigorous affirmation.

The word in Japanese is ganbatte — often translated as "do your best" or "hang in there," but carrying a weight and a warmth that those translations cannot quite capture. It is what you say to someone who is about to face something difficult. It is what Son Goku's friends would say to him before a battle. It is what the French might express as courage, or as ne lâche pas — don't let go. These are not slogans. They are survival strategies, refined over generations of people who faced impossible odds and found, somewhere in the depth of themselves, the resource to continue.

Je suis de Gauche. I believe in solidarity, in the public good, in the idea that a society is measured not by the wealth of its richest members but by the dignity and security it offers to its most vulnerable. I believe in the irreplaceable value of multilateral institutions — however imperfect — as the best available alternative to the law of the jungle. I believe in culture as a public good, in healthcare as a right, in the education of every child as an investment in the future that no sane society should refuse to make. And I believe, with the particular conviction of someone who has lived between cultures, who has been formed by the generous improbability of a French child falling in love with Japanese storytelling and Japanese aesthetics, that the meeting of different civilisations — when conducted with respect, with curiosity, with genuine openness to what the other might know that you do not — is among the most powerful forces for good that the world contains.

There is a widespread misconception — particularly in the Anglophone world — that France does not take work seriously. The evidence adduced is always the same: the 35-hour week (achieved by Jospin, as this publication noted in its recent tribute), the long lunch breaks, the generous vacation entitlements, the café culture, the apparent pleasure French people take in not working when the opportunity presents itself. This misses the point entirely. France's relationship with work is not characterised by laziness but by a particular, philosophically coherent insistence that work is a part of life and not the whole of it — that a person's worth is not determined by their productivity, that the hours not spent working are not wasted but are, in fact, the purpose for which the working hours are endured.

When French people work, they work with a seriousness and a commitment that this caricature entirely obscures. The French artisan — the cheesemaker, the baker, the winemaker, the chef — typically works hours that would appall a Wall Street analyst. The French engineer, the French researcher, the French designer: these are people whose dedication to their craft is total, whose standards for their own performance are exacting, and who would find the suggestion that they are not serious about their work deeply insulting. The 35-hour week did not make France less productive; the years of the Jospin government were among the most economically dynamic in the country's postwar history.

Japan's relationship with work is, if anything, even more intense — and, it must be said, comes with its own pathologies. The phenomenon of karōshi — death from overwork — is a genuine social crisis, reflecting a corporate culture in which the refusal to leave the office before one's superiors, even when there is no work to be done, is expected as a demonstration of loyalty and commitment. Japan has been slowly, painfully, and not entirely successfully trying to address this problem through government initiatives designed to limit working hours and encourage employees to take their full vacation entitlements. The work ethic that produced the economic miracle is real and admirable; the social costs it has imposed are also real and must be acknowledged.

What unites the French and Japanese approaches to work, beneath their surface differences, is a shared insistence on quality. The French artisan's refusal to accept a product that is merely adequate, the Japanese craftsperson's monozukuri — the art of making things, with a connotation of obsessive perfectionism that the English phrase cannot quite capture — are expressions of the same conviction: that if something is worth making, it is worth making properly, and that the standard to which it is held should be the highest achievable, not the minimum acceptable. This is, in its way, a moral position, and it is one that has produced the croissant, the Bugatti, the sushi knife, and the Shinkansen bullet train, all of which are — in their different registers — as close to perfect as human beings have yet managed.

Both France and Japan are nations that look up. Not merely in the metaphorical sense — though the French intellectual tradition of philosophical idealism, and the Japanese aesthetic tradition of reaching for that which transcends the immediate, both have an upward orientation — but literally: both countries have invested substantially in astronomy, in space exploration, and in the attempt to understand where we are in the universe and what else might be out there.

The Ariane rocket family — developed by the European Space Agency with France as the primary contributor and launched from Kourou in French Guiana — has been one of the most successful commercial launch vehicles in history, carrying satellites to orbit for dozens of countries and organisations over four decades. The Ariane programme is a demonstration that Europe — and France at its technological heart — can compete at the frontier of aerospace technology without dependence on the United States or anyone else. JAXA's asteroid sample return missions — Hayabusa in 2010 and Hayabusa2 in 2020 — are extraordinary achievements that required not merely technological capability but the patience to execute missions measured in years, at distances measured in hundreds of millions of kilometres, with error tolerances measured in centimetres. Both programmes reflect the particular combination of ambition and discipline that characterises both nations at their best.

The development of artificial intelligence presents both countries with challenges and opportunities that both are taking seriously. France's national AI strategy, developed under the guidance of the mathematician and economist Cédric Villani and adopted in 2018, is one of the most coherent governmental frameworks for AI policy produced by any country — combining ambition for technological development with clear-eyed attention to the social, economic, and ethical implications of that development. Japan's AI strategy, similarly, balances technological optimism with an awareness of the social disruption that automation can produce, and with a characteristic Japanese attention to the interface between technology and human values. Both countries are participants in the global conversation about how artificial intelligence should be governed — and both bring to that conversation a seriousness, and a willingness to consider long-term consequences, that is not always present in the Anglophone tech-industry discourse.

I began this essay with a memory of Saturday morning light. I want to end it with a conviction about the present and the future. The world in 2026 is a frightening place in certain respects — more politically polarised, more ecologically stressed, more infected by the various pathogens of authoritarianism, demagoguery, and nationalist cruelty than it was a decade ago. The bullies are louder. The defenders of the international order are under pressure. The institutions that were built, with such difficulty, after the catastrophes of the 20th century — the United Nations, the multilateral trading system, the human rights frameworks, the climate agreements — are under stress from those who find them inconvenient.

In this context, the alliance between France and Japan matters more than it might seem. Not merely as a bilateral relationship between two countries with aligned interests — though it is that. Not merely as a shared commitment to the rules-based international order — though it is that too. But as an example: as a demonstration that two civilisations separated by vast geographical distance and vast cultural difference can find in each other something deeply recognisable; that the values of dignity, craft, curiosity, solidarity, and the refusal to submit to injustice can be expressed in utterly different cultural forms and yet remain, at their core, the same values.

The child who watched Son Goku go Super Saiyan in a French apartment in 1990 has not forgotten what that felt like. He has not forgotten the lesson that was embedded in that image: that the moment when everything seems lost, when the enemy is too strong and the friends have fallen and the cause seems hopeless, is exactly the moment when the reserves that you did not know you had become available. It is the moment of transformation. It is the moment that everything that came before was preparing you for.

France and Japan know this moment. They have each faced it, in their different histories. They are each facing versions of it now. And they are doing so — in the halls of the United Nations, in the rooms where trade agreements are negotiated, in the laboratories where the next generation of clean energy technology is being developed, in the animation studios where the next generation of storytellers is learning how to make people feel things they have never felt before — together. With the particular solidarity of those who understand that the only answer to a bully is not submission, and the only answer to despair is not silence, but the continued, disciplined, joyful, sometimes furious refusal to give up.

Ganbatte. Ne lâche pas. The stars are watching. And they are patient.