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The Monocle Daily
Russia’s plans to increase its propaganda budget, Vance meets Netanyahu and the EU’s first anti-far-right European Council
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 22 October 2025 on Monocle Radio.
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Might the non occurrence of the US Russia summit work out OK for Ukraine? The US attempts to maintain pressure on Israel, but which has the upper hand? And might social media platforms have overestimated enthusiasm for unending AI slop and human lunacy? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now.
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FOREIGN.
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Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests, Elizabeth Broh and Stephen DL will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll meet an array of artisans attempting to keep it old school in a digital world. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily.
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FOREIGN.
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This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Elizabeth Bros, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, author of the upcoming title Undersea War, among other titles, and Stephen DL, Russia analyst and regular Monocle Radio contributor. Hello to you both.
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C
Good evening.
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B
Stephen, you have recently been visiting sites of ancient disaster.
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C
I have. My wife and I last week went back to 79 AD to visit Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Archaeological Museum of Naples. I mean, just incredible. You know, one has read about it and heard about it, but I've never actually seen it before. And I got a complete fixation with Mount Vesuvius, particularly when I was on the south side of the Bay of Naples. It just, it's there and it's, it's incredible.
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It is a stunning natural environment. The, the, the Bay of Naples and Pompeii. Yeah, it is one of those places, however many times you've seen the pictures and everybody's seen the pictures to, to go there. Yeah. It's always absolutely extraordinary. Have you always had the stereotypical male of a certain age's fixation on the Roman Empire or is this, this a new thing you're trying?
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C
Well, it's not entirely new. I remember as a small boy, I was fascinated by Romans. We did Romans at primary primary school, actually. Yeah. So it was nice to come back.
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To it, but it's rising above the temptation to suggest, Stephen, that you were taught by Romans.
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But what I found fascinating, what we found fascinating was the fact that, as I said to a number of people, if only the Romans had come up with electricity, then they'd have been away and who knows where we'd be now? It probably actually all destroyed the planet well and truly by now. But Then you follow them with the appropriately named Dark Ages and suddenly it all had to start again sort of 1800 years later, not just by discovering Pompeii and Herculaneum, but actually by discovering civilisation again. Incredible.
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Elizabeth, pertinent to what we will shortly be discussing, you have recently been in Sweden talking about defence related matters and there is a Swedish defence related matter which leads us quite nicely into Ukraine, which we are getting to shortly.
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There is indeed. So I was talking about increasing defence budgets and the startup community with their brilliant ideas, first of all, how they can develop brilliant ideas for tomorrow's weaponry and how that can be funded through VCs here in Europe because we don't have the American style VC community. But considering where things are at the moment and are likely to be in the future, we need something like that here. So that's what I was talking about. And then today came the announcement that Ukraine plans to buy 150 Gripen E aircraft, which is the latest version of Gripen and it's a futuristic aircraft and perfectly suited to Ukraine's needs. A massive, massive, massive deal and it.
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Was signed today, built by that great Swedish startup, Saab.
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Indeed. And Saab as it turns out, even has its own new VC arm, a small one, but nevertheless it does have a VC arm because it realizes it needs to tap into these new inventions and ideas by startup entrepreneurs. But I was also last week, Andrew, I was in the United States and I returned on Saturday flying from the Midwest via Washington D.C. and because I had to transfer between the two airports, I went into the, into Washington and did some errands and looked after my house. And so I had the privilege of seeing the no Kings protest in a mid sized town in the Midwest and then in Washington D.C. and what was fascinating and quite heartening about it was that everybody was incredibly peaceful.
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Well, we will start in Ukraine, which was once again last night on the receiving end of a barrage of Russian rocketry in Kyiv and Kharkiv. At least seven people were killed, including two children and at least 27 injured. This salvo may or may not have had something to do with the apparent collapse of barely even half baked plans for some sort of summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest. Beyond that, its strategic logic seems no more or less comprehensible than usual. Stephen, I think we've long since passed the point at which Russia just sort of does this for want of any better ideas. It has become kind of force of habit. But is there any prospect that A slight uptick last night had something to do with Putin's either happiness or displeasure at this summit not happening.
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I think probably not. I think these things are planned in advance. And in fact, it may have been because Putin thought he was gonna be meeting Trump next week. He would have done this to say, well, look, you see, this is what we're gonna keep doing unless you and I can come up with the deal. So I don't think it was a knee jerk reaction to the announcement that the talks weren't gonna take place in Budapest, but it just underlines again. And then coming back, Elizabeth's already made. I mean, Ukraine buying these Swedish fighter jets is a fantastic move. It's unfortunate they're not being given them, but Sweden is the third largest arms exporter in the world, so they have to make some money, too. But I think that this is really a signal that what comes to me most of all out of this is that we know now that that in the west that we cannot rely on Trump coming up with any weaponry or any real help for Ukraine. Maybe tomorrow he will, but then maybe the next day he won't. So he's so unreliable that the Europeans really do have to step up and provide weaponry, provide money. There's so much talk about the frozen Russian assets of 2, depending on where you read it, 200 billion or $300 billion worth of which could go to help rebuild Ukraine. That should be done, I think. There's no doubt about that. But it's been talked about almost since the start of the war, and that's three and a half years ago. So there is no end in sight. That's the very sad thing, Elizabeth.
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Is it clear why the summit didn't happen? That, of course, is to presuppose that it was ever going to. But President Trump has claimed it was because Russia would not commit to stop their advances on current frontlines. And this is possibly one of those points at which we have to consider that just because Donald Trump says something doesn't mean it isn't true.
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There is that possibility. And I think for him, he wants breakthroughs, Right? And there have been conversations in the past, including quite recently, for example, in Alaska, where he seems to have assumed that he got somewhere with Putin and then Putin went back to Russia and did more of the same. So he wants success. And if traveling to Budapest doesn't result in something that he can then hold up for the television cameras, then what is the point of going? That's the sort of diplomacy that Norway specializes in. The Vatican Those sorts of countries and diplomatic services that put in the hard work of going through every single detail and then hopefully hammering out the deal. That's not how he operates. He wants something to show after a meeting like that and he seems to have realized wasn't going to happen.
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Would that be actually, though, Stephen, necessarily a terrible idea. That is the frozen conflict dynamic. And President Zelensky has said today that it struck him as a good compromise, possibly because he realizes that that would buy his forces time to rearm, regroup and at this point just actually rest. But there has been a lot of talk that this is what a settlement could look like. It is. We were discussing this earlier this week on the show. It's your West East Germany scenario. You the bit you've got, the Russians get to hang on to the rest of it for as long as the people there will put up with it, which historically is not really all that long.
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No, it's not. But I can't see Putin buying this at all. And indeed what the talks that took place between J.D. vance and Sergei Lavrov seem to have come to that conclusion. Reading between the lines, I was at in fact two Russia related events yesterday in London and a takeaway was very much the idea that Russia has been looking for its great idea since the breakup of the Soviet Union. And Putin in particular has been pushing this and he's found the great idea and that is war. And he has got his people now into such a situation of thinking that rather like in Soviet times, perhaps even more than in Soviet times, the west is against us. A lot of the world is against us. We've got lots of friends though mine, we've got China, we've got India, we've got countries in the southern hemisphere, but I'm not including Australia, just in case you're wondering. But he sees, you know, he's driven his propaganda machine to say there's, you know, the west is against us. And for now, Russians are prepared to tighten their belts and say, well, you know, the world hates us and it's all very unfair. And so therefore, you know, we'll pay more for our eggs and we'll queue for our petrol because Ukrainian attacks, Russian oil refining facilities have been very successful in the last few months, destroying up to 40% of them. And there have been serious petrol shortages across Russia, not in Moscow, but elsewhere. So this national idea that really struck a bell when I heard this idea that war is the new national idea, it fits. And that's why Putin, unless he's really backed into A corner. Unless there's some way that sanctions from the west completely stopping buying Russian oil and gas, for example, which is just. I can't see happening if that doesn't happen. He doesn't have a normal economy. His economy can keep going and keep, you know, it's already on a war footing, and they can keep this going for a long time to come. And Russians seem to be acceptable accepting the fact that, well, you know, war is. That's the new norm.
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Sorry to interrupt you, Andrew, but there's also the problem of what to do once you've started a war, right? So it's easy to keep going because when that war ends through some sort of peace negotiations and an agreement, there will be accountability for the people who have led the nation into that war. So it's better to keep going, to postpone that day of reckoning and accountability.
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And also, he doesn't want 700,000 brutalized, angry young men coming back, finding that the money that they've been earning at the front is no longer there. There are no jobs. A lot of people already are talking about, you know, the spread of criminality and violence throughout Russia will be horrendous. It's bad enough already there's been at least 1,000 women killed by soldiers returning from the front. And Russia in 2016, up until then, not for many years, but it had had a law against domestic violence, and they did away. So women are not protected in Russia.
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Well, to Jerusalem now, which is the exact journey recently undertaken by US Vice President J.D. vance, the obvious point of which being to assert America's ongoing commitment to the ceasefire recently brokered by US President Donald Trump and even more recently breached by both Israel and Hamas. Vance, who professed belief that the ceasefire is, quote, in a very good place and that he is, quote, optimistic, is also assumed to have been dispatched with instructions to apply the diplomatic headlock to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dissuade him from scuppering Trump, shot at next year's Nobel Peace Prize, etc. Elizabeth, first of all, to the violence over the weekend, is that necessarily massively ominous? It's not unheard of in the immediate aftermath of ceasefires for a few things to continue to occur. This is not necessarily the end of everything, is it?
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It's not. And in fact, with almost every ceasefire, you have small skirmishes after that ceasefire has been signed because our units are maybe disgruntled or they haven't received precise instructions, or they don't know where the actual line is that they are not allowed to cross. And it was interesting to see, though, Andrew, when Israel resumed bombardment after saying that Hamas had broken the ceasefire, that Trump then said, oh, it was some gangs within Hamas or disgruntled units. I can't remember what it was he said. But he minimized the violation that Israel was responding to, which suggests to me that he's keen for this ceasefire to hold. And he is, as you said, not going to support a massive Israeli response. In fact, he will put pressure, as he's doing now through JD Vance, putting pressure on Israel to restrain itself.
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Stephen among the other things Vance has said, he was asked about Hamas disarming, which they seem so far disinclined to do. And he said if they don't, he echoed Trump's promises that they would be, quote, obliterated. He also talked about an international security force going into Gaza. What he didn't explain in either instance was the fairly fundamental, fundamental issue of who is going to do either of those things.
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Well, the Americans, I mean, I can't see, you know, the Europeans are being very cagey about sending troops into Ukraine, even to keep a peace where a peace to be established. And I cannot see, unless they really want to bend over backwards to make Trump happy, I can't see why the Europeans would send forces into the Middle East.
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Surely there's not an imaginable scenario in which Trump sends US Forces to Gaza.
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Well, only in the, you know, in the shape of future planners for real estate and the playground he's going to create then.
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But the candidates, I think, are Indonesia and Pakistan. And they just need some sort of guarantees and rules of engagement, so guarantees that, you know, somebody will back them up if it becomes a full blown war or full blown, full blown conflict. But it is interesting to see that Pakistan and Indonesia, which are obviously major powers in the, geopolitically speaking, with major armed forces, and are obviously also Muslim countries, but not Middle Eastern one, that they are willing to take on this role. But as always, you need rules of engagement. What exactly is it that they are supposed to do there? Under what conditions are they supposed to.
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Because we saw a UN force sent to Lebanon with one of its mandates being to disarm Hezbollah, which they proved thoroughly unable or unwilling to do.
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Indeed. And this would be unlike any peacekeeping mission that we have seen so far by the United Nations. So it would be something different. But what would the difference be? What are these troops that are going to be walking, if it happens, going to be walking on the ground out? What is their actual mandate? What Are they allowed to do? What are they not allowed to do? These are major details, not details, major issues that Indonesia and Pakistan have to know and understand and learn from somebody before they commit troops to this potential mission.
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Stephen, I know this is all just vastly, vastly, vastly easier said than done, but are we already at the point of perhaps regretting that part of the ceasefire was not the dispatch of some sort of such a force, assuming anybody could be willing found, willing to contribute to one? Because is it not looking somewhat like the immediate effect of this ceasefire might just have been to hand control of Gaza right back to Hamas?
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Well, I'm sure it will be, actually. I mean, I saw a very interesting short film a couple of days ago about young Palestinian children, I mean, like 10 years old, being arrested by Israeli soldiers. And it really seemed to me to underline the point that, you know, Hamas is the hydra, cut off one head and two grown its place, because they may have killed many of them now, but with what the Israelis have done to Gaza and the complete destruction, all this talk recently about people going back to their homes, question mark. Because there's nothing left. And, you know, this is. This is not going to go away overnight. You know, Trump's talk about an eternal peace is complete nonsense because there is so much anger and resentment that there will be. And, you know, children who've seen their parents killed, who, you know, have seen so much bloodshed at their young and tender age, that's only going to push them one way. So, you know, I think, you know, as Elizabeth says, you know, Indonesian, Pakistanis might be saying, well, we'd be prepared to send troops, but that they would want very firm guarantees that there was some backup. And if that doesn't come from the Americans, then I can't see that happening.
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Just finally on this one, Elizabeth, we were talking earlier about Putin being basically all in on his current course, that he doesn't see any option other than just continuing to wage war, because if he doesn't, then one way or another, he's finished. That comparison. Or that suggestion has certainly been made about Benjamin Netanyahu as well, because obviously, if this war stops, he is suddenly fought to confront the quite significant political difficulties he had before it started. Is there a concern that it is now, from where we are now, in Netanyahu's interests, to try and screw this ceasefire up in the hope that the Americans will lose interest and leave him to it?
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I. Yes, I think what the Israeli government had assumed was that this US Administration would wholeheartedly back the Israeli government, no matter what. And it seemed like that, but then. So that's if you assess Trump from an ideological perspective, but he's not an ideological man. He is obviously a transactional man. And what he wants is, as we all know, to be seen as having brokered peace. And he wants also good relations with other countries in the region. So he may be ideologically predisposed to support of this Israeli government, but that's not his main consideration. And that's what I think has complicated Netanyahu's equation when thinking about this war. And that's what makes it also, I think, incredibly difficult for the rest of us to understand what his next move may be, because we would have assumed that he would continue just as he has until now. But what role does Donald Trump play in his thinking now that Trump has shown that ideology is not the only consideration in his mind? So the Middle east was difficult to understand before this, and now it's even more difficult.
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Well, to Brussels now, where tomorrow European leaders will convene for the latest get together of the European Council. Among the things you would expect and or hope they would discuss, a newish item has been added to the formal agenda. The populist far right, for which large and growing numbers of Europeans insist on voting, often on the basis that institutions like the European Council are sinister cabals of malevolent liberal globalists plotting to destroy all they hold dear. It is very far from impossible that more than a handful of politicians elected on such a basis will shortly comprise a decent chunk of the European Council itself. This is a tricky one, Stephen. And what I bleakly wonder is whether it is a solvable problem short of one fairly drastic option. And at this point I am reminded of the interview we did a while ago with Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece. And I did ask him if what his government had been able to accomplish was perhaps some sort of exportable antidote to populism. At which he allowed himself the merest glimmer of a smile and said, well, well, here I had the advantage that the populists had governed. Is that really the only solution to it? That is just basically throw your hands up in resignation and just say, all right, you bozos, try and run a continent and see how you get on.
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C
What will fascinate me tomorrow at this meeting is how Europeans can come together to try and solve this. It looks to me as yes, in just about every European country now there is what I would call a problem. It's preferred to be neutral, an issue of the rise of the far right. And you know, we think back 100 years and think have we learned nothing from history? But I can't see how there can, you know, European countries get together in the European Council, in the European Union, even to a certain extent in NATO and find it very difficult often to come to a conclusion that they all agree with. And you know, they're talking about housing problem. Ah, if we can sort out a housing problem, provide more cheap housing for our people, that will take something, almost pull the rug out from under the far right. But that's a question for individual countries and I can't see how Europe wide this can be solved in a hurry. So going back to your question, I think there is going to be something of a, well, there's not a lot we can do about it as a European group, which is very worrying.
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B
But what Stephen's suggesting there, Elizabeth, is it's an understandable enough response, but this still looks amounts to attempting to combat the fundamentally illogical with the logical. There's this idea that, look, if we can, if we can just fix these actual real world problems, housing, immigration, whatever it is, then everybody will go, oh, that's all I wanted fixed. I'm happy now. I will now return to voting for the relatively sane. I'm not confident that's going to work. I think we are at a point which there is a large number of people who just kind of enjoy being angry. They like the drama, they do.
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And the realization I think has also set in that populists often they don't play fair, they don't have to, they use so called alternative facts. And so even if you fix housing, they are not going to say, all right, thank you for credit where June, thank you for doing that. That's what we wanted to get done. And now we'll move on to the next issue that we are angry about. So they'll continue exaggerating any state of affairs. They'll continue to probably in some cases make up issues where there are none. And we have seen in the United States where this sort of trip into an alternative reality can then result.
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In.
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A new parallel reality where really facts no longer matter. And that is incredibly frightening. I think what traditional parties or mainstream parties need are compelling public speakers who can speak in the manner of, I don't know, Obama, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King, those sort of people and, and get people excited about mainstream politics.
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Is there anybody that it strikes you has been able to do that? I mean obviously what Elizabeth there is describing is the. I don't think People necessarily dream of thinking of a candidate who comprises all the virtues of Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama. I can't even begin to imagine who that person might be and I'm frankly not sure I'd want to meet them. But has anybody got anywhere near that?
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No one I can think of. I mean certainly if we just take Britain as an example, these are qualities that our current Prime Minister Keir Starmer does not have. He does not. He may be a terribly nice chap and I think he is sincere, but he doesn't have charisma. And charisma is really what's needed here. I think though also there's a, in the background of all this as well, I'm still convinced that there is Covid. Not that we're suffering from COVID but that that period when the whole world was in this extraordinary situation for over a year created an awful lot of anger. You know, people who were living at top of blocks of flats and weren't allowed to go out of their. Of their flat, you know, with three small children running around and driving them crazy and, and there was so much anger I think created and they didn't know against whom. You know, you could blame your own government to a certain extent, but that I think was a real problem. And five years on I don't think we've really come to terms with it yet. And I think the anger is still there and that is partly what is fuelling the far right.
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Well, relatedly, faint hope that the disastrous social media experiment may have begun limping towards a conclusion. Recent surveys by boffins in both the UK and Germany of the social media habits of younger folk have discovered that while Generation Z do still spend shocking amounts of time gawping into their phones over two hours of an average day, the numbers are either stagnating or declining. It is posited, maybe hoped, that people have wearied of social media feeds increasingly comprised of AI generated garbage interspersed with paranoid outbursts by the angry and insane. Elizabeth, Dare we hope that we have thought better of this idea of just lets just issue every seething moron with a megaphone. What could possibly go wrong?
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What could possibly go wrong? And we dare hope, based on my unscientific survey of people traveling on the tube, I have in recent weeks and months seen more books than I have in the previous decade. So I am hopeful and I'll just tell you.
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B
Are you catching the tube though? Through a very fancy and high polluting part of London.
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I start out in Clapham. Is that Fancy.
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It's relatively fancy only if you call.
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It, pronounce it clarm.
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But I went to the hairdresser today and she told me about her niece who is six years old and wants to become an influencer. And the hairdresser told me that she had said to her niece, have you considered the career trajectory of influencers? Have you heard of influencers who go on from being young women to being middle aged women still doing beauty influencing? It doesn't exist. So this hairdresser who is herself young, had realized that there is a limit to the benefits you can get from being online.
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B
See, Stephen. When I was six years old, I had robustly realistic dreams like batting number four for Australia and being a fighter pilot.
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C
And there was I looking at the Romans and thinking, gosh, that's a fascinating period of history. I'll take another form, form of moving around London. I mean, I always read a book on the tube. That's just because I love reading.
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I must have seen you several times.
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Yes, the mystery solved.
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C
But I think, but what, what, why I'm rather skeptical about this is, is actually when you're walking along the street and it drives me crazy that particularly you know, someone you see walking towards you, they're looking at their phone and you see this all the time. And it's, it's actually, it's not just young people, you see that an awful lot. I have been known occasionally if I'm hurrying and particularly if I'm about to get on the tube and I need to send a quick message to do that. But generally I keep my phone in my pocket. Another good reason in London is that you've got a very good chance of having it stolen if you've got it in your hand, which is a real problem at the moment. But I'm very skeptical of these sort of surveys that say, oh, you know, the youngsters are cutting down. I don't think they are. I think one, one very positive thing that's being talked about this week actually in the UK is more and more schools saying at the start of the day, you hand your phone over, you get it at the end of the day, you don't have it during the day. That I think is positive and I think long overdue.
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B
Genuinely astonishing to me that it was actually ever allowed. But if we boil this conversation down to not possibly spurious surveys, but your own views for which you are as yourselves exclusively responsible. Elizabeth, I will ask you first, where social media is concerned, would you say it has, has been a net positive or negative if given the choice to just yank the plug out from all of it, would you pull that plug?
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A
Yes, I would. Because it's not social, it's media, but it makes us antisocial. And that is, I think, the big regret with Facebook, which was the original giant. Right. I mean, it was going to be. Allow you to connect some of us.
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B
Remember MySpace, Elizabeth?
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A
Yes, but. But it was going to allow you to reconnect with your friends from primary school, that sort of thing. Yes, but it has created so much harm that balances out, far balanced out.
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B
Which is an amazing sales pitch when you think about it. You can get back in touch with people you haven't spoken to for 30 years. Maybe there were reasons why I haven't. Stephen, what about you? Would you yank the plug on the whole enterprise?
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C
I agree totally with Elizabeth on this. And I will add also another thing that really, really angers me about social media is that be it visual in terms of images or be it writing, everyone now seems to think that they're a journalist and that they can write and that we're interested in their opinion. And having spent much of my life as a journalist, I. There was a. I can't remember his name, which is awful. There's one of the presenters of the Today program, Radio 4 some years ago who was asked, John Humphries, he was asked if he would become the Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University. And he said, well, I'll do it only on one condition, that I'm allowed in the first week to shut down the department of journalism. Because he said, and I would agree with him, you feel it inside, whether you're a journalist, yes, you can learn to write better and so on, but you're either a journalist or you're not. And far too many people out there now think they're journalists when they are certainly not.
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B
Stephen Diol and Elizabeth Braugh, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, heritage crafts. Traditional skills like hand weaving, blacksmithing, pottery and wood carving, often held up as living threads of cultural identity passed down through generations. But there is nevertheless a chorus of concern that these time honoured traditions are dying out. As mass production and digital technologies continue to dominate. Fewer people are taking up those tools. So where does that leave the future of these crafts? Monocle contributor Maisie Ringer hears from today's artisans and makers to find out how they see the road ahead and why these traditions still resonate. Note.
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E
According to Heritage Crafts 2025 Red List, 72 traditional crafts in the UK are now critically endangered, each at Serious risk of disappearing within a generation. But what exactly is a traditional heritage craft? Their time honored skills passed down through generations, often tied to local materials, tools and cultural identity. From basketry to wood carving, metalwork to textile dyeing, these crafts are still practiced by artisans today, often using methods unchanged for centuries. In the uk, we hear a lot about the threat to these crafts, but I wanted to explore whether this decline is part of a global pattern and what makers themselves feel about the future of their art forms. My journey began on a rainy day at Charleston in the southeast of England. England, where artisan Dominic Perrette was teaching a workshop on weaving willow plant supports. Dominic is a basket maker and educator who specialises in traditional frame baskets crafted from sweet chestnut and white willow materials native to the Sussex countryside. I asked him how he first came to the craft, but Dominic pushes back on the word heritage. He says it doesn't quite reflect the nature of his connection to his work. Work.
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I don't like the word heritage, you know, kind of. I do this because I enjoy doing what I do and it's a sustainable craft and it's linked to the environment. I'm very passionate about the environment. That's kind of my. My sort of little thing is that I'm sort of working with sustainable material. I can create things that people like and can use. They're functional. The heritage thing, it is important because, you know, if you lose these skills, then you lose that kind of constant connection with the land and the functionality of all these things. But that's kind of an accidental part for me.
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E
For Dominic, the heart of his practice lies in teaching passing on the knowledge, rhythm and satisfaction of making something by hand.
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F
I'm really passionate about passing these skills on and it's really important to get young people involved, so. And actually, in the last few years, more and more younger adults are becoming makers, which is great, great. That's really encouraging. It's difficult to get people to commit and become a maker because, you know, there's not a great deal of money in a lot of these crafts and it is increasingly more younger people, which is great. I hate social media, but I think that is one of the great things about it. It has put people like myself, who might be in a shed tinkering away with bits of wood that actually you can be. People can see what you do and go, oh, I quite. I'm interested in that and wouldn't mind learning about that.
- [36:22]
E
We shift now to Istanbul, home to the centuries old tradition of Tezip, the art of illumination. Nagahan Seymour originally studied as an engineer. It was only at university, after doing a course on making gold, that she decided to try Tezip, enrolling on a government course and soon finding herself immersed in this highly technical visual craft.
- [36:45]
D
Taysip word is coming from Zahep. It's an Arabic term which means gold. Ornamenting with gold, the origin of the tasteb we can chase up till like 8th, 9th centuries. In old days, it has always been used for decorating and still actually as well, Quran and important books.
- [37:03]
E
The art form itself is a continuous graph pattern of motifs from the ground to the sky, combining florals and stylized animal motifs all embossed in swirling golden illumination. Like Dominic, Nagahan teaches her craft in person, but she also teaches online. Her classes now reach students in more than 50 countries. She believes the revival of interest in these crafts is more than just nostalgia. It's a response to the modern world.
- [37:30]
D
I think when I started this art, people didn't know that much. Even when I was living in Istanbul and seeing my friends in Istanbul, I was like, oh, I started to learn testable, like what's tested? You know, they actually did the. Although it is part of our culture really there. But now, I don't know, maybe with the help of the Internet, you know, the social media, people have more information about it. I think generally the heritage crafts gets more interest nowadays. I feel like, I think life is in a very quick pace right now and sometimes we feel like we need to slow down.
- [38:04]
E
The growing appreciation for these crafts became even more apparent during a visit to Japan House, the Japanese cultural center in London.
- [38:16]
G
Good evening everyone and welcome. My name is Simon Wright. I am the director of programming here at Japan House London.
- [38:24]
E
In a packed out demonstration room, I watched artisans recreate the craft of Sendai Tansu. Ornate wooden chests historically used to store samurai swords. Originating from Miyagi prefecture, these chests are a marriage of woodworking, lacquering and intricate metalwork. I spoke with Simon Wright, director of programming at Japan House, about how Japan has preserved its extraordinary craft heritage.
- [38:49]
G
So an important aspect of programming at Japan House is giving visibility to those in Japan who may not have visibility otherwise. What is important, especially to me, is the promotion of local communities. It's a way of life for people. Yes, it's what puts food on the table. So if it is something like Sendai Tansu, these chests, they happen to be a craft which is becoming less popular and they're having to find ways to adapt to contemporary society.
- [39:27]
E
And we were talking about, you were saying there that it becoming less Popular. But as we were talking about, about before we came in here, when you do put these things on, the room is packed out, so there is still an interest in the tradition itself.
- [39:40]
G
It's attractive. A lot of these. These craft pieces are beautiful. There's a fascination, I think, with handcraft, especially in this digital age. More and more people are wanting something analog as an antidote, maybe to the technology that surrounds us. Yes, we do have a full house every time. Our demographic is quite young. My hunch is that this is also a generation very familiar with Japan, probably very familiar through introductions of manga and anime and very aware of Japan, but not having been able to have access to other aspects of Japan. And so therefore, those aspects that we're able to present at Japan House, I think, feed into this desire for authenticity. Something from Japan that people don't necessarily know about, but they know has a connection with what they like themselves.
- [40:40]
E
What seems clear from the willow groves of Sussex to the glowing gold work of Istanbul and the woodworking traditions of Japan, is that these crafts, although perhaps not practiced quite as widely today, are far from obsolete. They're alive, evolving, and perhaps most importantly, resonating with younger generations. Whether it's driven by a desire for sustainability, a need to slow down and reconnect, or a yearning for a more authentic cultural identity, there's a sense that these techniques are being rediscovered and reclaimed. For Monocle Radio, I'm Maisie Ringer.
- [41:23]
B
That was Maisie Ringer with that report. And that is all for this edition of the Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Elizabeth Braw and Stephen DL. Today's show was produced by Monica Lillis and researched by Joanna Moser, our sound engineer with Steph Chungu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
- [41:48]
C
Sam.