"I'll have the agreement drafted by Monday, then fax it over," Kazuyuki Nakamura was saying to a client over the phone last week in northwest London. "It's not your property? So who is the landlord? Well, he can appoint you to collect (rents) on his behalf. Otherwise we can, but then that will cost you; we'd have to charge. And as far as the Inland Revenue is concerned, anyone who resides in the U.K. and collects rent will be liable to pay tax at the source."

In British English, Nakamura is an estate agent. If he were operating in America, he would be a real estate agent. In Japan, a "fudo-san." He founded his company, Tokyo Agency, in the early 1980s, when corporate Japan began relocating staffers in large numbers to the British Isles in general, and London in particular.

At one point in the early 1990s, there were around 60,000 Japanese living in the English capital alone, with several Japanese-language publications servicing the community, and even a large supermarket run by the now defunct Japanese family business Yaohan. Today, even the store once operated by Sogo in Piccadilly stands empty, yet another influential sign of recessive forces half the world away.