Britain’s fateful decision to leave the EU has been cast as a bitter split between young and old. It’s an old tune: selfish baby boomers squatting on the future, at the expense of the millennials. But what if the real conflict were not between generations but rather between the city and the countryside?

Visiting Tokyo is like stepping off a subway station into a parallel universe of strange technologies, animated characters and perfectly wrapped pieces of fruit. Long before the iPhone existed, Japan led the world in smartphone technology and gaming. To this day, it remains a primordial soup of emerging consumer trends and digital innovations. One of my key contacts for trends in Tokyo is Serkan Toto. German by birth, he has been based in Japan since 2004 and runs a game industry consultancy called Kantan Games. I’m not the only one to enjoy talking to Serkan - he has been quoted everywhere from the New York Times to Techcrunch. In our conversation we talked about the future of mobile games, the curious persistence of flip phones in Japan, and why a Korean communications company decided to incubate the global messaging hit, LINE, in the country that asked the world to say Hello Kitty.

Despite being the founder of Mubi, an arthouse movie streaming platform, Efe Cakarel is not what you might call a conventional cinephile. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, got an MBA at Stanford and then worked at Goldman Sachs - before throwing it all in to dedicate himself to the world of film. In his office, situated in the heart of London’s Soho, and surrounded by old film posters, vinyl records and computer equipment - we talked about the influential behaviours of Asian consumers, the dynamism of emerging markets, the economics of online streaming, the paradox of infinite choice, and why the Middle East is so in love with Turkish drama.