When I started my career in the late 1990s, my employer encouraged us to adopt a global mindset to cope with Japan’s recession, the so-called “lost decade.” By 2000, the words “global” or “globalization” were used as keywords—and sometimes as buzzwords—for surviving the upcoming millennium, followed by the dot-com bubble. My coworkers and I were pressured to raise TOEIC scores, learn SWOT analysis, MECE, and other terms of logical thinking, abandon the obsolete Japanese work style, and get accustomed to the global—in many cases, American—way of thinking.

In 2006, those ideas were changed. Seeing the Livedoor scandals and the accompanying downfall of dot-com millionaires, Japanese people realized that the American way did not work. Instead, they began taking a second look at their own country and reviewing its good things. The company I worked for focused on the products for domestic customers rather than overseas ones, with “the Japan quality” as its corporate philosophy.

Starting in the 2010s, people’s inward-oriented views were changing globally again. Japanese enterprises were going overseas not only to the United States at that time but also to the Third World, including India, China, Russia, Brazil, and Southeast Asia and Africa. I had more and more opportunities to get involved in the services offered to such customers, going to those countries to meet their needs and demands.

The first half of the 2010s was the year of transportation. Low-cost carriers helped people fly abroad at low airfares. Everywhere you can see people traveling to and from all over the world regularly.

Yet you see that people’s favor of the global-oriented mind or the local-oriented one swings from side to side every five or six years. That being the case, such a globalized world will come to an end shortly. The event that happened this week in the United Kingdom was the most symbolic. The referendum determined that the UK would leave the European Union, which it had joined in 1973. Other European countries like France, Italy, and Spain have begun the preparation of a referendum on whether they should leave or remain in the EU, as some people are tired of the enormous number of immigrants from the Middle East and accompanying terrorist attacks occurring inside Europe. 

Likewise, in the United States, Donald Trump, saying that a wall should be built on the border to shut out Mexicans and Muslims, has the enthusiastic support of the conservative and relatively poor American population. Even Hillary Clinton, one of Trump’s rivals, says she is against the US joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In Japan, some nationalistic extremists carrying patriotic flags with them are making hate speech on the street, saying that the people from neighboring countries should get out of Japan and go back to their own country.

I think that now is the turning point of the era, and there will be no more “globalized world” from now on. People of each country will pay attention only to their own country. A dispute or, in some cases, an armed clash may break out between countries. Such an era will last five or six years, at least during Trump’s or Clinton’s presidential term. What we can do right now might be to look at the World and have as many options as possible to cope with future fluctuations in circumstances.