The head of a US venture fund calls to say he will be in Japan next month for the first time in years. He needs to get a grip on the place, and fast. As an American investor, he cannot look at China right now and may never again. Tokyo, he reckons, is on course to become the “second city of the western world”.
Both he, and others who have made similar predictions in recent weeks, have alighted on a seductive idea. It becomes more so with each fresh embitterment of US-China semiconductor diplomacy, and with decisions — such as that of US VC fund Sequoia Capital to split off its China business — that seem to signal a clear break with the world we thought we knew. Tokyo, meanwhile, looks unconvinced.
Still, the argument nags. The geopolitical and financial hefts that were once respectively concentrated in London and West Berlin in the previous century’s cold war will in the “second city” thesis naturally combine in explicitly US-friendly Tokyo as we hunker down for a new one. Tokyo’s quest to become a global financial hub, meanwhile, will succeed by default as Japan’s “not China” credentials offer solidity in all this flux.