Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

On tonight's program, what's the fate of once great imperial nations in the 21st century?

Later, as a new director takes over Tate Britain,

we look at its recently opened exhibition Artist and Empire

and about what the Tate Britain can do in a globalised world

where the idea of Britishness is under severe pressure.

But first, another country that once had an empire, Japan.

Now, until recently, Japan was probably the East Asian country that preoccupied us, not least its culture.

Sergei Leone stole from Kurosawa to make his spaghetti westerns.

Black from Japan became the colour of fashion.

Our music was carried by the Sonny Walkman. Murakami was read over sushi. Now of course

Japanese culture is still visible in the West, but eyes are now largely turned to China.

So what exactly is happening in Japanese culture today and soon we'll have that

conversation? But first, death by water, the newly translated novel by the Japanese Nobel

Prize winner, Kenzaburu Owe, a novelist much influenced by Western writers, but also

marinated in the history of Japan, not least the Second World War.

Owey wrote Hiroshima Notes in 65, but even in this new novel,

the father of his artistic alter ego, Gagito Choko, is drowned in a river during World War II.

Kogito remembers overhearing his father talking with a group of soldiers

about a suicide attack on the emperor. Death by water is about personal and national trauma. Cogito goes

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