My son and I attended the first night of the third run of My Neighbour Totoro in London earlier this year. We were the guests of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who were the producers of the show in partnership with Joe Hisaishi. It may seem odd that the Royal Shakespeare Company was involved, but actually they have produced several musicals for children such as Matilda and Wendy & Peter Pan.

Looking around the audience, most of the people present were adults – only a few had brought children with them. I had watched many of the Studio Ghibli movies with my son when he was younger. He is now 23 but still found the show magical. He was disappointed, however, that the theatre shop had already sold out of souvenir T-shirts.

An older man sitting next to me said that he was fascinated by  how the pace of the musical was so much slower than Western musicals. The plot was less important than the emotions and the ideas being expressed – and they were expressed visually more than they were through words.

We are beginning to worry, in the land of Shakespeare, that we are losing our literary culture and moving to a visual one. Young people are not reading books or newspapers and instead watch short videos on social media. The attention span of people of all ages has shortened.

At the same time, there seems to be a reaction against digital. As well as the revival of cassette tapes and records, it seems younger generations do not want to be reliant on streaming services for films, so are buying DVDs. They like the tangibility of a boxed set.

Despite the decline in the reading of books, Japanese novels have become very popular in the UK, particularly ‘cozy fiction’, or crime, with attractive covers that look good on a shelf.

I worry what these shorter attention spans and shift from literary to visual means for my Japanese cultural training. Twenty years ago, a six hour face to face seminar was my best selling course. Now I am being asked give a course in 1.5 hours, online or face to face, or as an e-learning video. Anime based e-learning, although common in Japan, is still seen as childish in the UK, however.

Perhaps I also need to add something tangible to my training too – a T-shirt or a book?