VIEW 1 Hokusai's great wave

1. Hokusai's great wave

If you browse the souvenir shops at Tokyo’s Narita airport you will find yourself surrounded by images of the “Great Wave off Kanagawa” on T-shirts coasters, mugs, fans and jigsaw puzzles. This image is a global icon (you will also find it on tea towels in the British Museum), a universally recognised symbol of Japan. What is less well known is that it is actually an image of Mount Fuji. Look closer and you will see Mount Fuji’s conical tip poking up above the horizon in the background. It forms part of a series of prints by Katsushika Hokusai in 1830 called “36 views of Mount Fuji”. Each image in this series shows a snapshot of daily Japanese life in the foreground with the mountain somewhere in the background.

1. Hokusai's great wave

Different perspectives, same object
Fuji-San, to give it its proper honorific title, is not just the tallest mountain in Japan but also a sacred site. In the Shinto religion it symbolises Japan’s cultural and spiritual soul. Hokusai, in his series of prints, is saying that to properly comprehend its mystic significance it must be approached obliquely. It must be viewed from all angles. So the 36 different views of daily life are all different perspectives of the same thing. The spiritual soul of Japan as symbolised by the holy mountain shown through 36 different lenses.

1. Hokusai's great wave

Three plates meet
And so to cyber risk. The active volcano of Mount Fuji sits at the intersection point of three tectonic plates. The Eurasian Plate, the North American Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate which form a triple junction at this spot. We can read across from geological risk to the cyber realm. Cyber risk also sits at the nexus of three ‘plates’: the three different disciplines of information technology, security and insurance. Each of these three subjects has its own conceptual framework, its unique acronyms and specialist expertise. To truly understand cyber risk, we must slowly circle through each zone of this triad, gaining a 360-degree view of the half-glimpsed entity at the centre. The three zones are marked by a symbol^* in the top right-hand corner to help the reader navigate this triune journey; each picture a fragmentary shard in a multifaceted whole.

Hokusai portrayed Japan as a series of 36 prints. We offer our view of cyber risk as a set of 35 views, one less than 36, in due deference to the master.

^*S for security, I for cyber insurance and C for cyber and information technology