10th Anniversary and More.
Yesterday, I proudly celebrated the 10th anniversary of my think tank, “Institute for International Strategy and Information Analysis, Inc. (IISIA)”, with my closest clients and staffs in Tokyo. More than 80 guests got together and kindly listened to the speech I delivered in terms of our past and future.
In April 2007, two years after I had jumped out of the diplomatic career, I got started with my entrepreneurship as CEO of my own think tank. The first headquarter was located in not the city center of Tokyo but the suburb called “Kunitachi”, where I live. Only with 4 colleagues, whom I succeeded to hire with tremendous difficulties, I built up my first company.
In this very early stage, I simply knew nothing about how to run a company “appropriately”. It’s rather my honest feeling that motivated me to establish the company: While having served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I gradually got to know who controlled the global community. Besides that, I could never understand why other ordinary Japanese couldn’t pay attention to that and simply believed that today is just an extension of yesterday, and that tomorrow will be another extension of today. Somehow, I strongly felt the world order would be changed dramatically by the period between 2018 and 2020. Of course, I couldn’t explain why, however, I began to try to find out an “appropriate “ narrative of what I had felt.
In the very early stage, neither I nor my staffs exactly understood what products we delivered to customers and clients. Instead, I kept on writing reports and tried hard to express what I felt while facing realities in the global community.
As one of Japanese “micro-multi”, i.e., a tiny company with a series of stakeholders (not only clients) in the whole world, my company made tremendous efforts to survive for the past 10 years. For me, the short history of the “IISIA” is a copy of my own “Bildingsroman”, which thoroughly recorded how I’ve been growing up as a young business leader. In the course of time, I’ve become conscious of what I was born to do in my second professional stage.
A simple phrase my closest friend living in Kobe I heard in around 2003, entirely changed my life and made me aware of my destiny: “By 2020, the world order will be changed completely. Japan could lead the global community after that. If she would fail to do so, she would rather collapse and be disgraced.” Since then, my think tank and I have been working only on this issue, “Pax Japonica”, either consciously or unconsciously. Towards the moment of truth, what should the Japanese as the nation living on the selected soil initiate for the sake of the entire global community? That’s exactly what the IISIA was born to continuously ask itself and to seek the final solution. Based on the advanced research of “information literacy” in the age of total digitalization, we, the members of IISIA dedicate ourselves for the better world.
