Russia and the known unknowns

Plus: Japan's "smile coach," Big Tech's troubling hold on AI and more. [Bloomberg]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today but TGIF. So we have weekend tips for you — if you find yourself in London. If not, you’ll still get a distillation of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions from our columnists in Europe and Asia. Everyone’s a winner! [Sign up here](. Today’s Must-Reads - ChatGPT galvanized China. [India’s startups]( are caught in a time warp. - [Canary Wharf](can’t quit itself. - [Pakistan](needs to do what India did 30 years ago. - Big Tech’s troubling [stranglehold](on AI. Still Puzzling Over That Riddle in a Mystery in an Enigma Pundits have now spent nearly a week trying to puzzle through Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive two-day mutiny. History has been ransacked for parallels. Vladimir Putin started it off during his first TV appearance amid the turmoil. The Russian president raised the specter of the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the incompetent Nicholas II — an awkward mirror to hold up to himself, as Andreas Kluth and others have [pointed](out. I pulled together a piece about how Chinese social media put the Russian chaos in the same category as a [cataclysmic](8th century uprising against the Tang dynasty. Maybe not so apocalyptic, says Oleg Deripaska, the founder of Telegram, who [quipped](: “It’s ‘Not Storming Bastille’ Day’.” Lionel Laurent [wrote](, “As historical parallels go, this seems less like 1917 than 1905 — when a mutiny on the Potemkin warship was repressed and didn’t morph into a revolution.” Perhaps, Putin has been a Potemkin president all along — and even if he is deposed, the deep, if inefficient and ravenously corrupt, state over which he reigns as a deluded figurehead will persist, as Leonid Bershidsky [suggests](. Like all non-experts, I tend to believe the last carefully argued explanation I’ve read, hoping the expertise will rub off. (I tend to wade into conflict mostly over food. For instance, is [borscht](Russian or Ukrainian?) Historical references have the mystical weight of settled law so they are comforting. Reaching for lessons from the past, however, may lull us into believing we’ve seen this before. Alas, we really haven’t and so we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. From prison, opposition leader Alexey Navalny tweeted that he couldn’t believe the mutiny was actually taking place. He expected someone to yell, “[You got punk’d!](” Nope. Another opponent of Putin, Ilya Yashin, manages to hold on to optimism, even as he marked his 40th birthday on June 29 in a cell with “a cocaine drug lord, a major fraudster and an arms dealer.” Writing for the Latvia-based Russian- and English-language news site Meduza, [Yashin says](, “We have two options. We can either settle comfortably at this bottom, pity ourselves, and become resigned to the sad fate that awaits us. Or we can gather our strength, push off properly, and resurface.” He concludes, “I’m going to try to resurface. Are you?” Yashin began serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence last December. Is It Japanese or Japanist? I was just as incensed as [Gearoid Reidy]( when I read Western news accounts of the “smile coach” — what’s supposed to be the latest must-do trend in post-Covid Japan. If you take their word for it, people have forgotten how to smile because of the universal mask mandate and they need coaches to remind them how to do it. So Japanese. So kawaii (cute). IRL, it’s a well-marketed program provided by one company. As Gearoid explains: “According to one report, Kawano has trained some 4,000 people since beginning her business in 2017 — or about 0.003% of the population.” And that’s from before the pandemic, in a country that has always had a predilection for masks as a preventative against disease. It’s just the latest in the “weird Japan” class of stories that Western news organizations revert to without much thought. It’s a kind of contemporized orientalism that is permissible because each story perpetuates Japan’s supposed ultra-modern weirdness. The underlying thought: If it’s big in Japan, it may take over the way we do things, too. The trouble is, it’s not really Japanese. It’s Japanist — Japan perceived through a foreign lens. Smile coaches fall into the same category as the more colorful fetishization of Japanese culture. Don’t get me started on The Ivy Asia. It’s the hugely successful chain of restaurants that now has at least eight outlets in the UK. This one is a six minute walk from the office and, from the looks of it, is pure Japanist — the culture as exotic, sexualized, stereotypical decor: The Ivy Asia in The City of London Photographer: Howard Chua-Eoan I have no trouble with western-born chefs using Asian recipes and techniques to create good food. And to be fair, the Japanese aren’t above fetishizing Western culture too (e.g., pizza, which they do very well in Tokyo, in an almost obsessive way). All this isn’t xenophobia. Hatred isn’t at the heart of this. We need to be sensitive about cultures — even the ones we admire — being turned into cartoons. Telltale Charts “Though admittedly a less sexy topic than artificial intelligence, chemicals still deserve attention: They are often a reliable leading indicator of the global economy, owing to their upstream position in value chains and diverse end-use applications. The recent deluge of chemical company profit warnings is therefore concerning.” — Chris Bryant in [It Feels Like ‘Lehman II’ in This Crucial Industry]( “In China, the discussion is dominated by dismay with the expansion, for which there were such high hopes when Covid Zero ended late last year. Calls for more stimulus are proliferating. Even Chinese consumers are showing signs of fatigue … The currency, the yuan, is one of the worst performers in Asia this quarter, down about 5% against the dollar.” — Daniel Moss in [US Resilience Is a Problem Xi Wishes He Had]( Further Reading Europe needs an army of workers to curb its [tech reliance]( on China. — Lionel Laurent In [Myanmar](, the civilian resistance to the military dictatorship needs the same help that Ukraine’s received. — Ruth Pollard Nikolai Kondratieff, [Bolshevik economist](, victim of Stalin — and prophet of the next big commodities super-wave? — John Authers The [Saudis]( will miss Vladimir Putin if he goes. — Javier Blas I know this is about [Libor](, but it’ll be good for you. — Marcus Ashworth ICYMI The gravitational pull of the [Chinese economy]( has been measured by satellites tracking the lights of Southeast Asia. There’s [something]( about Bill… Gates. When wind turbines [break](, billions will fall. Poor Siemens Energy AG. Weekender: London Aperitif Back to life, with just one thing missing. Photographer: Howard Chua-Eoan What CBGB was to the world of New York City punk, P.Franco was to the London wine world. And so there was general mourning among oenophiles when the East London natural wine bar suddenly shut down in March. It was easy to miss the space beneath the half-torn billboard for the Great Wall Chinese supermarket that used to occupy the premises a decade before. But two weeks ago, it was unmistakably back to life thanks to the efforts of manager Will Gee, who has taken over ownership. It’s selling wine and serving up the delicious dishes P.Franco pioneered for tiny wine bars in this city. Gee hasn’t managed one thing, though: getting rights to the original name. The store is officially 107 Wine Bar & Shop (the number is its address on Lower Clapton Road). Still, as another Londoner once put it: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Extra Serving I played videographer at Lasdun, one of my favorite new restaurants in London — just to remind us all that AI can’t replace an excellent dining experience. Thank you, Ale Lampietti, for the incredible edit. Apologies for doing all the eating. Watch the video [here](. Drawdown You’ve made it to the end! Here is a cartoon for your troubles. ”Your screen time has increased by 54.8% this week. I now pronounce you man and WiFi.” Illustration: Howard Chua-Eoan Notes:  Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net is happy to receive feedback and to be fed. You can check out his food adventures on Instagram [@hchuaeoan](. [Sign up here]( and follow Bloomberg Opinion on [Instagram](, [TikTok](, [Twitter]( and [Facebook](. Follow Us You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Opinion Today newsletter. 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