The Essay

Joanna Robertson is a journalist and mother who has lived in five foreign countries, where she has observed that local shopping habits tell you a lot about the place. In these Essays, she argues that when people go shopping, they don't just purchase goods, they also buy into something else. Joanna Robertson takes us shopping and explores these ulterior motives and what they reveal about the residents of five cities: Rome, New York, Berlin, Tirana and Joanna's current home, Paris. In Tirana, after the fall of Communism, people dream of buying luxuries and achieving the kind of wealth they've seen on Italian TV. They buy and sell what they can, and are inventive about ways to make money, particularly in the main square. Someone takes their bathroom scales and charges customers ten lek a go to weigh themselves. Whole families come and see it as a treat. But when virtually the entire nation tries to finance its dreams of wealth through pyramid schemes, the dreams turn into nightmares. In the town of Gramsh, virtually all that remains for sale - are guns. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.

Christopher Harding asks if mental illness in Japan may actually be a sign of a rejection of a narrowly conceived modernity? From the neurasthenia of the great novelist Natsume Soseki to the "hikikomori" or acute social withdrawal of the 1990s, he questions whether these conditions may actually be a rational response to a tightly governed society: "their deep disorientation may be the result of living in a rapidly changing society and possessing an almost pathological degree of clear-sightedness." This is the final episode in a series of essays in which he explores the doubts and misgivings which have beset the rapid modernisation of mainstream life in Japan.Producer: Sheila Cook

Christopher Harding tells the story of a famous crime, the robbery of hundreds of millions of yen in 1968 - which also serves as a metaphor for the theft of postwar promises of liberty and openness in 1960s Japan. The country's "radical moment" was purloined in the interests of rapid economic growth and embrace of an American alliance.Producer: Sheila Cook

Christopher Harding examines how Buddhism was reimagined in early 20th-century Japan in the service of militarism and nationalism. At risk of terminal decline and blamed for an economic and imaginative stranglehold on the population, its standing was transformed by the former Buddhist priest turned philosopher, Inoue Enryo, who turned "philosophical somersaults to find a basis in Buddhism for war".Producer: Sheila Cook

Delving further into the darker sides of Japan's recent history, Christopher Harding explores two starkly contrasting models of ‘family’ in turn-of-the-century Japan. One was a neo-Victorian idyll, epitomised by the emperor serving as the benevolent head of a national family; the other was symbolised by a woman who joined a group of anarchists plotting to assassinate the emperor and by feminists who opposed "the heavy investment of powerful people in this familial ideal."Producer: Sheila Cook

Christopher Harding begins his exploration of some of the darker sides of Japan's recent history by reflecting on popular doubts and misgivings about mainstream modern life through the story of a building: Deer Cry Hall. The rise and fall of this single, iconic piece of late 19th-century architecture represented Japanese concerns about foreignness and fakery in the new world their modernising leaders were creating. Producer: Sheila Cook

Radio 3 presenter Kate Molleson celebrates a composer whose music is particularly important to her: the Frenchwoman Eliane Radigue, whose calm and long-form sense of perspective Kate finds inspirational.

Radio 3 presenter Andrew McGregor reflects on the powerful Lamentations of English composer Thomas Tallis and their special place in his life.

Radio 3 presenter Kathryn Tickell celebrates a composer whose music is particularly important to her: the Australian-American folksong fanatic Percy Grainger.

Radio 3 presenter Tom McKinney celebrates the birdsong-inspired music of the 20th-century French composer Olivier Messiaen and its special place in his life.