What would most strike a foreign visitor returning to Japan after a gap of several years? Most likely it would be the gloom surrounding the future of Japan, and at street level, finding how many people from a distance look Western -- because their hair is dyed brown, blond or every other color you can name.

Both phenomena are bound up with what, at the end of the 20th century, has come to be called globalization. Japan is clearly not at one with this phenomenon, and the gloom has much to do with this because it seems that Japan is being bypassed by the new global forces.

At the economic level, the impact of globalization is most evident in Japan's financial "Big Bang." Here the threat comes from what could be called the "Ripplewood Effect" (the ripple from Wall Street's Big Bang some 20 years ago, finally reaching Japan's shores like a tsunami in the form of Ripplewood Holdings). In fact, the local press and the Financial Supervisory Agency have made Ripplewood's proposed purchase of the LTCB look like a tsunami in order to frighten the life out of the domestic banking industry. Here the thinking is that, historically, Japanese companies have responded best to shocks -- a bit like the British, who only get going when their backs are up against the wall. Britain's own Big Bang in the mid-1980s came when the British economy had been pushed to the wall and then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher released the creative energy of the nation and the whole economy recovered.