Take a round trip from Tokyo to Hong Kong and you get a sense of where the balance of power in Asia is headed before you even reach your hotel. Contrast the 90-minute plus grind out to Tokyo’s Narita international, 60 kilometres from the city centre and several decades away from the present, with the 24-minute rail ride into the sleek, 24-hour Hong Kong International.
Protected by its isolationist tendency from the worst of the financial crisis, Japan nonetheless faces a more insidious, slow-acting threat: irrelevance. Investment banks have been moving their...
