Don’t repeat “Too Late and Too Little” Again.

After having an extremely successful business meeting in Haikou/Hainan Island, I got back to Japan and am staying in Fukuoka right now. Back to “normalcy” here in Japan. Yesterday, I had meetings with senior bankers of one of the leading local banks here.

What I wanted to discuss with the guys there was how to move forward in B20 process. As I sometimes mentioned beforehand online, it’s really hard for met here in Japan to get a breakthrough in terms of understanding how significant B20 is towards our future. Since every single government official in charge is rather concentrating on G7 summit in Ise/Shima in 2016, it’s hardly possible to draw GOJ’s attention to the B20 process as a whole. Only few senior government officials show their interest in this matter and willingness to get involved, however, only in a temporary manner. Nevertheless, I’ve been trying hard to make them understand what the reality is in the global community.

This is exactly why I visit here in Fukuoka: The “leader of the leadership” in Fukuoka’s financial world is a former senior government official in charge of international finance and well known as a “legend” in the Japanese Ministry of Finance. To get rid of the above shown current difficulties vis-à-vis the Japanese bureaucracy, I wanted to ask him to advise me how to move forward.

The “legend” kindly advised me as follows: “First of all, you need a “concept” everybody can easily understand. As far as I find out in B20’s paper in terms of SME, it obviously lacks for such a concept as, particularly, Japanese government officials understand. Just focus and try to make a concept, with which you can penetrate in the B20 process. Only by doing so, other leading participants of the process from western countries regard your work as indispensable contribution to the whole process. Secondly, don’t rely on individual government officials. Since they are to leave their each positions every two or three years, relying on them lead to discontinuity. That affects, of course, your effort negatively, when you’ll be working on B20 process. Always try to be independent of GOJ and rely only on yourself as a Japanese actor in the global community. “

That was a Copernican revolution for me, since I’ve been always thinking of how to involve GOJ to B20 process. NO, from now on, I should stick to work on the process itself and make as much substantial contribution as possible regardless of GOJ’s assistance. Otherwise, I would be involved in typical mistakes GOJ used to make: “Too late and too little”. In this regard, Fukuoka was, at least for me, worthy of visiting, although you never know such a “legend” always welcomes there those Japanese intellectual successors who are about to initiate the global community.