TOKYO: Eager to admire colorful foliage, eat sushi and go shopping, droves of tourists from abroad began arriving in Japan on Tuesday, with the end of pandemic-fighting border restrictions that had been in place for more than two years. “We got the news that we can finally come. We are really, really happy,” said Nadine Lackmann, a German who was among the crowd of tourists arriving at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Travelers like Lackmann are expected to deliver a sorely needed 5 trillion yen ($35 billion) boost to the world’s third-largest economy. And the flood of visitors is expected to keep growing. A daily limit of 50,000 arrivals is gone. Airlines have added flights in response to the full re-opening of borders. Visa-free travel is back for short-term business visits and tourism from more than 60 countries. David Beall, a photographer based in Los Angeles who’s been to Japan 12 times, has already booked a flight, planning to go to Fukui, Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. The last time he was in Japan was in October 2019. But it’s everyday things the American is looking forward to, like eating Japan’s popular pork cutlet dish, tonkatsu. “As cliched as it sounds, just being back in Japan after all this time is what I am most looking forward to. That of course includes hopefully meeting new people, eating the food that I’ve missed like good tonkatsu, being in nature at that time of the year, riding the trains,” he said. As a tip for others planning trips, he recommends getting a Japan Rail Pass and a Suica or some other pre-paid card that allows cashless payments for easy travel. About 32 million tourists visited Japan in 2019, before COVID-19. Their return is welcome for good reason. Many will have more spending power because the Japanese yen has declined in recent months in value compared to the US dollar, the euro and other currencies. The only protocols left for entry are that you must be fully vaccinated with one booster or have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of departure. Virtually all visitors from the US, the rest of Asia, Europe and South America who fulfill those requirements won’t have to quarantine. In August, during the most recent coronavirus surge in Japan, nationwide daily new infections topped 200,000. By now, both case numbers and deaths have dwindled. Last week, daily deaths averaged eight people nationwide. The government has provided free COVID-19 vaccines, especially encouraging the elderly and the medically vulnerable to get inoculated. Visitors may have to adjust to face masks, worn by most Japanese just about everywhere outside their own homes. Many stores and restaurants require customers to wear masks and sanitize their hands. Some establishments still close early, or have shuttered completely. But bookings from abroad with Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways Co., or ANA, have already jumped five-fold compared to last week, while bookings of flights out of Japan have doubled. Air Canada said bookings for Canadian travel to Japan jumped 51 percent this month compared to September, while the number of travelers from Japan to Canada grew 16 percent over the same period. The Japanese economy can use the influx of tourist spending. Fitch Ratings forecasts that Japan’s economy will grow at a 1.7 percent annual pace this year and by 1.3 percent in 2023, supported by easy credit, a recovery for service industries and a gradual fix for supply-chain problems, which will boost manufacturing and exports. Japan had basically shut its borders to tourists, but started allowing packaged tours in June. Many people opted to wait for open-ended individual travel before booking their tickets. With declining nervousness about the risks of infections, Japanese also are traveling more — encouraged by discounts offered by airlines, bullet trains, “onsen” hot springs resorts and hotels to jumpstart the ailing travel industry. Although Japan offers various attractions from the ski slopes of northern Hokkaido to the semi-tropical beaches of the Okinawa islands in the south, experts say these months are the best for enjoying what Japan has to offer. The mountains are vibrant with brilliant autumn foliage; the weather is moderate, not freezing, sweltering or humid; seafood, grapes, chestnuts and other culinary delights are fresh and plentiful. “Now we are all ready to welcome people from abroad,” said Shuso Imada, general manager at the Japan Sake and Shochu Information Center. His job is to promote sake rice wine and shochu liquor made from barley, potatoes or other vegetables, domestically and abroad. “Autumn is the best season to enjoy Japanese food with sake and shochu,” he said. That’s why Javier Perez Toledo waited more than a year for his honeymoon. “We are really passionate about the country,” he said, arriving from Spain. “We are so happy that we could come.”

KARACHI: Pakistan’s foreign minister on Saturday said the US ambassador to the country had been summoned after President Joe Biden said in a speech that Pakistan is “maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world” as it has “nuclear weapons without any cohesion.” The minister, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said he was surprised by Biden’s comments and a misunderstanding was created by a lack of engagement. Bhutto-Zardari said he didn’t think the decision to summon the US Ambassador will negatively affect relations with the United States. Biden made the remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reception on Thursday.

JAKARTA: From tropical beaches to vibrant cultures, Indonesia’s Bali is known as one of the world’s most popular destinations for vacation — an experience some of the local operators are trying to enhance with the presence of animals exotic to the island’s fauna: camels. On Kelan beach, located near Ngurah Rai International Airport, three camels called Bintang, Yulia, and Munaroh have been giving tourists rides by the beach, where sunset views and a glimpse of the fishermen’s lives become part of the experience. “Tourists will see the fishermen’s fishing boats, how these people living on the shores earn their livelihoods through fishing,” Dewa Gde Yudistira, a veterinarian and co-owner of Bali Camel Adventure, told Arab News. Yudistira, who started his camel rides in 2017, said tourists will also get to see the 122-meter-tall Garuda Wisnu Kencana statue from afar, or airplanes leaving or reaching the airport, as they ride on the camels. “The sunset here is also one of the main attractions because there’s nothing like it,” Yudistira said. “It’s been gaining traction lately.” Though the species is uncommon throughout the archipelago nation and, if at all, only seen at zoos, the animals’ upkeep is “not that difficult,” according to Yudistira. The camels, brought in from Australia, eat mainly grass and are sometimes treated to carrots, bananas and sweet potatoes. The beachside camel rides have attracted visitors from all over Bali, Indonesian tourists from other parts of the country, and foreign visitors. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Yudistira’s guests included tourists from Japan, Australia, China, and South Korea. After two years of closures, the business and the whole hospitality sector in Bali are getting back on track. More than 617,000 international visitors have entered Indonesia through Ngurah Rai as of July 2022, according to Ministry of Tourism data, compared with just 35 foreign tourists during the same period last year.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is planning to increase the number of its flood telemetry stations on rivers and waterways nearly 10 times for precise forecasts and early warning to protect regions vulnerable to flooding, a senior official told Arab News. The plan comes after monsoon floods battered the country for months, killing at least 1,700 people and wiping out its infrastructure.

The destruction induced by flooding has directly affected over 33 million people, about 15 percent of the country’s population. As flooding, worsened by climate change, is likely to intensify in the future, a new response plan by the Federal Flood Commission aims to allocate about $69 million to purchase early warning systems from the international market. “We have made a first-ever national master plan on flood telemetry, and it is composed of 679 stations,” Ahmed Kamal, the commission’s chairman, told Arab News.

“These stations are going to be placed on even the smallest of rivers and streams.” Currently, the country has only about 70 such automated stations. Kamal said the country’s Balochistan province — worst hit by the recent floods — as well as parts of Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, which also suffered huge damages and casualties, were “devoid of the flood telemetry system.” The flood protection strategy has been in the works for the past few years, but Pakistan had not been able to secure funds for its implementation. “By the time we were discussing this situation, the 2022 floods arrived,” Kamal said.

“Afterwards, I think there was a much greater realization that perhaps we have not done justice with this very important sector.” The UN last week revised its flash appeal fivefold, from $160 million to $816 million, to reflect the magnitude of the disaster. The flood commission will submit the new protection plan to the federal government by the end of the month.

Sites for many of the telemetry stations have already been identified and foreign donors, including the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, are likely to support the project. “We are very much hopeful that this time it is going to be approved and funding shall be made available,” Kamal said.

“The most important points we must address can be implemented in one year’s time.”

LONDON: From a military perspective, the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, an attempt to disrupt British trade and influence in North Africa and India, was a complete failure. For the world’s understanding of 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian history, however, it would prove to be an accidental triumph.

An army of 50,000 men under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Alexandria on July 2, 1798, and over the next three years there were a series of victories, and the occasional defeat, for the French troops in Egypt and Syria.

But after the British navy sank Napoleon’s fleet in Aboukir Bay at the Battle of the Nile on July 25, 1799, the dwindling, disease-ravaged French army, harried by Ottoman and British forces, found itself trapped in a hostile, alien land. With no way out, and no chance of reinforcement, the end was inevitable.

Napoleon knew this, and on the night of Aug. 22, 1799, he abandoned his troops and slipped back to Paris and his ultimate destiny — in 1804, he would be crowned emperor of France.

The remains of his army in Egypt clung on, even after Napoleon’s successor as commander was assassinated, until it finally surrendered to the British at Alexandria on Sept. 2, 1801.

As part of the expedition, Napoleon had ordered the wholesale looting of antiquities to be taken back to France. But, after the French surrender, most of these fell into the hands of the British. Among the spoils shipped back to the British Museum was a block of polished stone engraved with writing in three different languages — ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Discovered in July 1799 by a French army engineer who had been strengthening the defenses of a captured 15th-century Ottoman fort near Rosetta on the west bank of the Nile, the object became known as the Rosetta Stone.

It would prove to be the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Although many European scholars were fluent in ancient Greek, it would be more than two decades before they were able to crack the Rosetta code. When they did, it was a landmark moment in Egyptology, which the British Museum is celebrating this month with a major new exhibition that brings together a collection of more than 240 objects, including the Rosetta Stone.

The exhibition, “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” coincides with the 200th anniversary of the final breakthrough by French philologist and orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822.

“Deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone unlocked 3,000 years of Egyptian history,” Ilona Regulski, curator of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum, told Arab News.

“Until then, nobody knew how far back the ancient Egyptian civilization went, or how long it lasted. But after his breakthrough, Champollion was able to translate the names of kings and establish a royal chronology which went back much farther in time than anyone had previously realized. 

“Very soon, there also came the understanding that this was a complex civilization that had relationships with its neighbors, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, and step by step we came to understand the society better.

“From the Greek historians, who reported some practices that they saw, we knew that the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. But we didn’t really understand how these people lived and experienced their world.”

Cracking the Rosetta code was a complex business that tested the minds of European academics. Although the stone featured three translations of the same decree, they were not alike word for word.

“Champollion and others started by looking at the Greek text and identifying words that appeared often, for example, the word for temple, or the title basileus (a term for monarch),” said Regulski. “They looked at the demotic text to see if there was a cluster of signs that appeared more or less in the same place.”

It was a reasonable start, but a process frustrated by the fact, not initially appreciated, that neither ancient Egyptian nor demotic were alphabet-based scripts, and that any one word could be spelled in many different ways in the same document.

Eventually, a sign list, a kind of ancient Egyptian dictionary, was created, “but it was not enough to understand the entire text, or to use it to read other inscribed objects,” said Regulski.

It was Champollion who finally figured out that hieroglyphics was a hybrid system.

“There are alphabetic signs, but also single signs that represent two or three letters, or even entire words,” said Regulski. “And some are silent signs, what we call ‘determinatives’ in Egyptology. You don’t read them in any way, but they indicate the meaning of the preceding word, telling you whether it’s a verb or a noun.”

Basically, hieroglyphics “appears to be a very simple, symbol-based language, but it’s much more complicated than that, and much more complex than an alphabetic script, and that took a long time to figure out.”

The script on the Rosetta Stone turned out to be a decree written in 196 B.C. by priests at Memphis, recognizing the authority of the Ptolemaic pharaoh Ptolemy V. It would have been written originally on papyrus, with copies distributed around the kingdom so the text could be engraved on stone slabs, or “stelae,” for display in temples throughout Egypt.

Over the following decades, nine other partial copies of the decree would be discovered at sites across Egypt. But the Rosetta Stone is the most complete and, without it, for example “the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun,” excavated by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, “would have looked very different,” said Regulski.

“It would have been difficult for Carter to identify the king, which is quite crucial, and his place in the context of the chronology of the 18th dynasty. We would just have a beautiful tomb with beautiful things.”

By the standards of ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone is not that ancient. “For us as Egyptologists,” said Regulski, “the stone, from about 200 B.C., comes very late in the story of hieroglyphics, a writing system that first came into use in about 3250 B.C.”

And in 200 B.C., hieroglyphics were already on the way out.

“The first really important change in Egypt was the use of Greek as the administrative language,” said Regulski.

“When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C., people were already speaking Greek; the language was already circulating from the eighth century onwards, because of trade and because there were lots of Greek mercenaries who fought in the Egyptian army and settled in the country.

“But from Alexander the Great onward, and especially in the Ptolemaic periods, Greek became the language of administration and slowly pushed Egyptian out.”

Regardless of the historical context of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and its seizure by the British, “for the field of Egyptology, and for Egypt, it is definitely something to celebrate,” said Regulski.

“Today, there are many Egyptologists in the world, including our colleagues in Egypt, and we all work together, a huge community trying to refine our knowledge of ancient Egypt, which all came out of this one venture.”

Regulski, who spent two years working alongside Egyptian colleagues at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, could not be drawn on the vexed subject of whether the Rosetta Stone should be returned to its country of origin.

More than 100,000 artifacts from Egypt’s rich past will be housed in the Grand Egyptian Museum, currently nearing completion at a site west of Cairo, close to the Giza pyramids.

Among them will be the 5,400 treasures entombed with Tutankhamun more than 3,300 years ago, including his iconic death mask, which, after decades of touring the world, will finally come to rest where they belong.

However, the Rosetta Stone, the key to understanding it all, will remain in Britain.

The British general who accompanied the stone back to Britain in 1801 after it was taken from the French, chose to see it and 20 other pieces not as loot, but as “a proud trophy of the arms of Britain — not plundered from defenseless inhabitants, but honorably acquired by the fortune of war.”

The British Museum exhibition will feature the French capitulation document, on loan from the UK’s National Archives and displayed for the first time. This, said a spokesperson for the British Museum, is “the legal agreement which included the transfer of the Rosetta Stone to Britain ... as a diplomatic gift ... signed by all parties; representatives of the Egyptian, French and British governments.”

Today, an Egyptian government might justifiably take issue with the description of an officer of the Ottoman army as a rightful custodian of Egyptian heritage. 

Certainly, at the time, no thought was given to whether the Rosetta Stone and other antiquities ought to remain in Egypt, a question that is becoming ever more acute today, in an era when pressure is mounting on Western institutions such as the British Museum to return the spoils of imperial wars and adventures.

“The only thing I would say is that having worked closely with Egyptian curators at the museum, it’s not a priority for many of them,” said Regulski. “I find it a bit sad that our relationship is framed in this way, about giving back objects or not, because our relationship with our Egyptian colleagues is about so much more than which individual objects went to this place, or that.

“It’s about celebrating ancient Egypt, and there is still so much to do in Egypt, so much to learn, to research and collaborate on, and that is the positive thing to focus on.”

The public fascination with ancient Egypt owes its origins to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the single most visited object in the British Museum, and “to a culture that left behind such a well-preserved, monumental testament to its existence that also has such a powerful visual appeal, which you don’t have in some other ancient cultures.

“I think the general visitor to a museum is drawn to this highly visual, artistic culture, including the writing system itself. If you compare it with cuneiform, for example, you’re going to be drawn more to hieroglyphics, because it’s so beautiful, so visually appealing. I think that’s what hooks people and encourages them to learn more about the culture.”

Certainly, the British Museum expects the exhibition, which will chart the journey to decipher hieroglyphs, from initial efforts by medieval Arab travelers and Renaissance scholars, through to Champollion’s triumph in 1822, to be one of its most popular to date. 

‘Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,’ is at the British Museum from Oct. 13, 2022 to Feb. 19, 2023.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan wants to strengthen and “add value” to its defense ties with Saudi Arabia during next month’s visit of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its defense minister said.

Khawaja Muhammad Asif said Pakistan “immensely” valued its relationship with the Kingdom, and described the forthcoming trip as “very important.”

“His royal highness’s visit will strengthen this relationship further and will add value to this relationship, in both the field of defense and in the field of investment,” he said at this year’s Arab News Pakistan Annual Workshop in Islamabad.

“It has a pivotal role in our foreign policy. They are our brothers and they have helped us in very difficult times over the decades.”

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rana Sanaullah, said in September that his government was “waiting with love and affection for the day.”

It will be the crown prince’s second official trip to Pakistan. During the first in 2019, the two countries signed investment deals worth $21 billion, including for an oil refinery and agriculture projects.

The Arab News workshop audience included editors, reporters and management from Pakistan, Asia and Riyadh.