Posters on the London Underground are advertising six-day city breaks to Tokyo. Including flights and hotels, these cost less than 150,000 yen: affordable for millions of Britons. Many are going: the number of British tourists visiting Japan hit a record high in 2005.

When I wrote my first column for this newspaper, in July, I too was about to visit Japan, returning for a 10-week research trip after 15 months in Britain. I wondered then whether the country's sights and customs would have grown unfamiliar in my absence. Instead, I felt as if I had never been away. I drank in my favorite bars, visited known landmarks and spent time with old friends. Japan, no less than England, felt like home. While there, I kept in touch with British friends and family by e-mail; back in Britain, I use the same means to contact friends in Japan. And it makes little difference that I am typing this article at a computer in London, since I will submit it by electronic mail for publication in Tokyo.

But I am aware of being a beneficiary of a situation which is new and may not last. After the first world war, British economist John Maynard Keynes looked back on what then seemed like halcyon days to Europe's educated classes: the years up to 1914, characterized, at least on that continent, by relative peace and stability, by growing prosperity and rising living standards.

"The inhabitant of London could order by telephone the various products of the whole earth; he could adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world. He could secure cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country and climate, and could proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs. He regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable."

Those passages were written soon after World War I had shattered such assumptions. The Depression, another war, and the division of the world into capitalist and communist camps, long precluded this kind of global interchange, which is best served by a single, international economic system, and by peace among nations.

We still live in a dangerously divided world. Yet, since the collapse of communism in Europe and the embrace of capitalist values by such nominally communist states as China and Vietnam, globalization has proceeded apace. Keynes' Edwardian speculator would have been astonished to think that his great grandchildren could travel from London to Tokyo in 12 hours. It is as feasible now for a Londoner to take a short holiday in Japan as it was, 50 years ago, to visit France.

To an extent, too, modern globalization seems indifferent to politics. British supermarkets sell herbs grown in Israel alongside herbs from the West Bank. The unstable Muslim world is another area attracting record numbers of British tourists; they are spending long weekends in Marrakech, or buying holiday homes on the coast of Turkey, indifferent to events in Kabul or Baghdad.

Will this last? The political disputes which divide the world may be resolved with time. But globalization requires wealth, and a surplus of natural resources -- oil for aircraft, electricity for computers. That Western foreign policy has offended the people who supply most of our energy resources is a short-term problem. The long-term problem is that those resources will run out.

"Aberrant, scandalous and avoidable." The globalization of the early 20th century died for reasons that were avoidable, since they were political: the first world war, the Russian Revolution, and the Depression, were consequences of choices made by individuals, governments and institutions. But the globalization of the 21st century may end for reasons that are unavoidable: the depletion of natural resources, the need to restrict the movement of goods and people for the sake of the environment.

The Japan Times Weekly: Nov. 25, 2006
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