[Feature: New Year's Dialogue] New Year's Dialogue: Toward a Juku That Fosters Global Citizens

Happy New Year. Today, we are joined by Mr. Glen S. Fukushima. From 1985 to 1990, during the bubble economy period, Mr. Fukushima was responsible for the formulation, coordination, and implementation of U.S. trade policy toward Japan and China at the Office of the United States Trade Representative. His book, "The Politics of Japan-U.S. Economic Friction," which summarizes those experiences, was awarded the 9th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize.

Afterward, he joined AT&T in the U.S. and held key positions such as Vice President of AT&T Japan, President and Representative Director of Arthur D. Little (Japan), Inc., President and Chairman of Cadence Design Systems, Japan, Co-President and Representative Director of NCR Japan, Ltd., Senior Vice President at Airbus headquarters, and President and CEO of Airbus Japan K.K.

During this time, in addition to serving as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, he has held various leadership roles in Japan-U.S. relations and cultural organizations, including Vice Chairman of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, U.S. Vice Chair of the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON), Vice President of the America-Japan Society, Councilor of the U.S.-Japan Council, and Trustee of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives. Since 2012, he has been a Special Keio University alumni.

More recently, in 2022, the "Fulbright-Glen S. Fukushima Fund" was established through a $1 million donation from Mr. Fukushima to the Fulbright Program, supporting Japan-U.S. Fulbright exchange activities. This donation to Fulbright is reportedly the largest ever made by a single American individual.

So, today we would like to welcome Mr. Fukushima back to the Mita Campus with a "Welcome Home" and talk with him. Mr. Fukushima grew up in the United States as a third-generation Japanese-American and studied at Stanford University. During that time, he came to Japan twice to study at Keio University. In 1969, he spent his summer vacation at Keio as a short-term exchange student, and two years later, he studied for two years as an exchange student under Professors Fuji Kamiya and Tadao Ishikawa. Could you start by telling us about your memories from that time?

Thank you for inviting me today. As you mentioned, I had two opportunities to come to Keio University when I was an undergraduate at Stanford University. The summer of 1969 was when I had completed my sophomore year at Stanford. At that time, 12 students from Stanford came to Keio every summer, and 12 students from Keio went to Stanford during spring break.

When I came to Japan in July '69, I stayed with a host family, the Hanadas, in Kamiosaki. The father of the Hanada family was an executive at a major company and had studied at UCLA and Harvard Business School before the war, so it was a very international household.

He had three sons, all of whom went to Keio. The two younger sons were still Keio students at the time, and one of them was Mitsuyo Hanada, who later became a professor at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) (currently Professor Emeritus). They welcomed me very warmly for two months, and it was a great experience.

How much Japanese could you speak at that time?

I had only officially studied Japanese for about a year after entering Stanford, so I could understand listening to some extent. My father worked for the U.S. Army, and I had opportunities to live on U.S. military bases in Japan. My education was entirely in English, but I had chances to hear Japanese through sports like sumo and baseball on television.

And now your Japanese is so perfect.

No, no. When I first came, I couldn't speak much Japanese. Because I had such a good experience at Keio in the summer of '69, I studied abroad at Keio again from '71 to '72. At that time, there was a one-year exchange program. When I was at Stanford, a person named Shinichi Kitajima was studying at Stanford from Keio. He later became an active diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and we became close friends.

The Stanford student who studied at Keio before me came to Keio after graduating, but since it was during the Vietnam War, he had to undergo a physical examination for the draft at Camp Zama. His host family at Keio was a doctor, and apparently, he was given medicine to raise his blood pressure and failed the physical (laughs). Because of that, I was told it would be better to study at Keio as an undergraduate while still having required courses left for graduation, so I studied at Keio from April '71 as a senior.

At that time, I mainly studied Japanese at the International Center. Just then, Professor Gerald Curtis of Columbia University was at Keio's Faculty of Law as a Guest Professor. He was teaching a seminar on Japan-U.S. relations for seniors along with Professor Kamiya. Since I could mostly understand spoken Japanese, I was allowed into that seminar as an auditing student, and that is where I was mentored by Professor Gerald Curtis and Professor Kamiya.

Additionally, since I was studying modern Chinese history and Chinese politics at Stanford, I was also allowed to audit a graduate seminar on Chinese politics, where Professor Tadao Ishikawa was the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Tatsuo Yamada was an assistant.

Also, Yasunori Sone was a graduate student at the time, and at his invitation, I went to the Tokyo Institute of Technology once a week to attend Professor Yonosuke Nagai's seminar on international relations. While basically studying Japanese, I was also able to study the content of international politics in the classes of Professors Kamiya, Ishikawa, and Nagai, making it a very fulfilling year.

Do you have any episodes or impressions that stand out from your time with Professor Kamiya and Professor Ishikawa?

In Professor Kamiya's seminar, we read quite a bit of material about the occupation period of Japan. As a result, I became interested in the occupation period. And I happened to run into two students who participated in that seminar much later. One was Hiroshi Takaku, who later worked in international personnel exchange at the Japan Center for International Exchange, focusing particularly on relations between Japan and Australia, for which he was decorated by the Australian government.

The other was a woman named Aguri Matsuda, who turned out to be the wife of Hugh Hara, a person I worked with at the U.S. Embassy in Japan as a press officer after I joined the Trade Representative's office in '85. In that way, I have had professional relationships with Mr. Takaku and Ms. Matsuda since entering the workforce.

Keio has produced many researchers who conduct research over a very wide range of the world, with regional studies being very active, starting with Mr. Ishikawa, as well as Mr. Kamiya and Mr. Yamada. That trend continues today, with many faculty members mainly at the Mita Campus and Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) conducting research as experts in various regional studies. And during times like the Ukraine crisis, they frequently provide commentary on television and in newspapers.

It is Keio's tradition and pride to take a bird's-eye view of the overall picture and contribute to policy recommendations and international cooperation, especially during turning points in international affairs.

Among Keio professors, I have relationships with people like Ken Jimbo, Yasushi Watanabe, and Ryosei Kokubun (Professor Emeritus), in addition to Toshihiro Nakayama, who passed away recently. I have had opportunities to discuss policy regarding Japan-U.S. relations and relations with China, and I think it is wonderful that so many excellent scholars are active at Keio.

I believe it has become Keio's strength that all these people connect with individuals like you, Mr. Fukushima, and contribute as global-level citizens.

Did you choose Keio at Stanford simply because there happened to be an exchange program?

That's right. Since the 1960s, there has been a one-year exchange program from Keio to Stanford and Stanford to Keio. I believe the first-year student was the economist Yoshihiro Tsurumi...

He is the economist who was active as a professor at the City University of New York.

I think the relationship between Stanford and Keio has been very good since the 1960s. So, when I heard there was an exchange program with Keio, I applied.

When I studied abroad for a year, I stayed in a boarding house about a 15-minute walk from Mita, through an introduction from Keio. It was a fairly large house belonging to the wife of a person in his 70s related to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, named Mrs. Katagiri, located at the bottom of Sendai-zaka, behind the Korean Embassy. I lived in a four-and-a-half-mat room and came to Keio every day to study, passing by the Australian Embassy from Ninohashi.

Fifty years have passed since then; are you glad you chose Keio? I'm sure you are well aware that there are many different universities in Japan now.

I am glad. In the late 1990s, I had the opportunity to work on the external evaluation committee for the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) with Takeo Shiina, Yuzaburo Mogi, and Yoshiharu Fukuhara, and I was also selected as a Special Keio University alumni. Personally, in addition to the professors I mentioned earlier, I have also given lectures at study groups for Jiro Tamura of the Faculty of Law.

Also, Shigeo Kashiwagi graduated from Keio around '73 and joined the Ministry of Finance, serving twice in Washington at the IMF; I met him just the other day. My personal associations with Keio graduates span over 50 years and are very precious.

After graduating from Stanford University, you went on to graduate school at Harvard and completed both Harvard Business School and Law School—you are a superman—but in the summer of 1979, you came to Japan again through the Japan Business Fellow Program and interned at Dentsu, didn't you?

From 1977 to '95, the Japan Society in New York and the International House of Japan in Tokyo operated a program called the Japan Business Fellow Program. The Japanese economy grew rapidly in the 70s, and in '79, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, my supervisor, Professor Ezra F. Vogel, published the book "Japan as Number One."

At that time, even at Harvard Business School, half of the cases in international business classes focused on two major themes: Japanese industrial policy and Japanese-style management, and there was an atmosphere of America learning from Japan. This program selected five American business school students to be placed in Japanese companies for a two-month internship during the summer between their first and second years to study Japan.

In the summer of '79, I applied for that program after finishing my first year at Harvard Business School. I came to Japan with five other students from American universities, and we were each assigned to a Japanese company. I didn't choose it; the International House of Japan decided to put me in Dentsu, and I spent two months there as a trainee.

Right around that time, a fairly large article about Dentsu appeared in "Fortune." That year, Dentsu had overtaken J. Walter Thompson and was attracting attention as the world's largest advertising agency in terms of sales. Reading this article, I expected that I would be going to such a large global company as a trainee. However, once I got in, I realized that 99% of Dentsu's business was domestic and it was by no means a global company.

What was impressive at this time was that among the Dentsu projects I participated in, there was one about Japan's demographics, predicting that aging would progress the fastest among G7 countries, and asking what products and services Japanese companies could provide to the 65-and-over age group.

It was already being predicted back then.

Yes. As of '79, they knew Japan would become such an aging society. There were almost no policies for it, but that project was very educational.

Afterward, you were active as a representative for the American side at the Office of the United States Trade Representative. You faced the semiconductor and automobile negotiations during the bubble era strictly as a member of the U.S. team. It was a situation where Japan's trade surplus became too large, and Japanese products were being destroyed in America; what was that experience like?

I had many interesting experiences. I wrote about it in my book "The Politics of Japan-U.S. Economic Friction," and that book actually has a connection to Keio as well.

After finishing my five years at the Trade Representative's office, I joined AT&T, and when I was posted to Japan in the summer of 1990, I was approached by Mitsuko Shimomura, a Keio graduate. She had become the editor-in-chief of "Asahi Journal" and asked if I would write a weekly serialized article about my experiences at the Trade Representative's office. In the end, I published over thirty weekly articles in "Asahi Journal." As a result, it was decided to compile them into a book, so I added a few chapters, held a roundtable discussion with Yukio Okamoto and Takashi Inoguchi, and thanks to Ms. Shimomura, it became a book and won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize.

It was a time of quite high tension in Japan-U.S. trade friction. As you mentioned, we held meetings of the Japan-U.S. Trade Committee about twice a year on semiconductors, supercomputers, beef, citrus fruits, telecommunications, and so on. About 30 items came up as Japan-U.S. cases, and there were many problems that had to be solved, making it a very busy job. Even when I was in the U.S., I worked from morning till night, and even when I came to Japan once a month, I consulted from morning till evening and met with U.S. Embassy officials and business people at night. After returning to my hotel room, I would communicate with Washington by phone, and I only got about four hours of sleep every day. I consulted around-the-clock, just like the Japanese negotiators.

At the time, there was no other Japanese-American who had experience contacting Japan as a high-ranking U.S. government official. In that sense, I received various interesting treatments and learned a lot.

At that time, did your connections—being Japanese-American and having studied at Keio and having many Japanese friends—prove useful?

The fact that I studied at Keio, and my experience studying at the University of Tokyo for a year in '82-'83, was very helpful. Also, I spent about eight years in graduate school at Harvard, and many international students came from Japan. Quite a few people studied at Harvard's graduate school as officials and later became politicians. People like Yasuhisa Shiozaki, Toshimitsu Motegi, Yoshimasa Hayashi, and Yoichi Miyazawa. The current governor of Kumamoto Prefecture, Ikuo Kabashima, was also studying at Harvard at the time. In that way, I was able to get to know people from various fields in Japan even at Harvard.

At Harvard, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to be an assistant to three prominent professors: Professor Ezra F. Vogel, Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, and the famous sociologist David Riesman, who wrote "The Lonely Crowd." Also, I ran a lecture series called the Japan Forum at the Japan Institute at Harvard and served as its director for five years from '75 to '80.

You served as the director of the Japan Forum as a graduate student?

Yes. For example, I invited Sadako Ogata from the UN headquarters in New York to give a speech, and I had people like Takakazu Kuriyama, who was working at the Japanese Embassy in Washington at the time and later became the Ambassador to the U.S. during the Clinton administration, give lectures as speakers. In this way, the eight years at Harvard were an opportunity to further strengthen my relationship with Japan.

When I was at the Trade Representative's office, my counterparts were mainly Japanese bureaucrats, but I also had associations with bureaucrats I had met at Keio, Todai, and Harvard, and in that sense, I felt I understood Japan better compared to other U.S. government officials.

An American who is an expert on Japan.

Let me give you one example. A delegation comes from America to conduct intergovernmental consultations between Japan and the U.S. for a week. At the end of the first day's negotiations in a conference room at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the leader of the Japanese delegation asks, "How should we explain this to the Japanese press corps?" We say that since negotiations are still ongoing, we have nothing prepared to say to the Japanese media at this stage, but the Japanese side says they must say something because the media is waiting outside. So we negotiate again and agree on what to convey to the media.

However, when I look at the morning paper the next day, it says something completely different from what was agreed upon. It is framed in a way that is advantageous to the Japanese side. Seeing that, my colleagues in the U.S. government take it very critically, saying, "We were betrayed. The Japanese officials lied again. They aren't keeping their promise."

However, because I knew that reporting methods for journalists differ between Japan and the U.S., I didn't necessarily interpret it as "the officials betrayed us." For example, in Japan, while the Japanese government may hold official press conferences after negotiations, there are also various other reporting methods such as informal talks and "night rounds," and they gather a lot of information on those occasions to write articles. Also, in the U.S., it is customary for the person who did the reporting to write the article with a byline, but in Japan's case, the person who wrote it isn't necessarily the person who did the reporting, and the person who writes the headline might not be the reporter either; an article goes through various stages before it is finished. So I thought that the officials hadn't necessarily lied.

That is ultimately very helpful for Japan.

Normally that would be the case, but some Japanese officials thought it was inconvenient to have someone who knows Japan well as a negotiating partner. That's why I was excluded from meetings several times. Those officials seemed to think that if I wasn't there, no one would know Japanese, so they could speak in Japanese and not be understood.

There was also this. In 1958, when I was working at a law office in Los Angeles and was approached for the job of Director for Japanese Affairs at the Trade Representative's office and accepted it, reporters from the Los Angeles bureaus of two major Japanese newspapers insisted on an interview. I gave them each an interview, but the articles that finally came out were by no means positive. I was treated as "This person has studied Japan, studied at both Keio and Todai, and can speak Japanese. He is a very dangerous person for Japan, a formidable opponent."

In contrast, the following year, a Japanese person named Masahiro Hayafuji, who graduated from Brown University, joined the then Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), becoming the first elite official at MITI who had not graduated from a Japanese university, and that report was welcomed from Washington. The tone was, "We heartily welcome that someone who graduated from an American university, can speak English, and understands America has joined the Japanese government." However, the fact that someone who knows Japan was joining the U.S. government was not welcomed by the Japanese government and was viewed with caution.

I see, so that happened. Afterward, you served as the head in Japan for technology-related companies such as AT&T, Arthur D. Little, and Cadence Design Systems, Japan. You have moved between companies quite a bit.

I studied science subjects until about my first or second year of college. After that, my specialties were always social sciences, law, and business, but I was very interested in advanced technology.

At the Trade Representative's office, I had opportunities to work on semiconductors, supercomputers, and telecommunications. So when I left the Trade Representative's office, I had offers from three companies: AT&T, Intel, and Motorola. At Intel, I received an offer directly from the legendary president at the time, Andy Grove. This was between the end of '89 and the beginning of '90, but at the time, semiconductor experts in Silicon Valley told me, "Major Japanese companies are competitive, so there's no future in going to a place like Intel" (laughs).

And five years later, they would take over the world (laughs).

What those people told me was, "In international business, large companies with assets and technology have the advantage. Small companies like Intel are risky." Partly because of that, I joined AT&T, which was a giant company and had Bell Labs, which had produced seven Nobel Prize winners.

However, by the time I left AT&T eight years later, Intel's stock price had skyrocketed 39 times. So if I had gone to Intel then, I would have made millions of dollars on stock alone and retired early (laughs). That experience taught me to listen to experts' talk very carefully.

And then, you served as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and engaged in numerous other initiatives to serve as a bridge between Japan and the U.S., expanding your network of relationships in both Japan and America, and now you live your daily life based in three locations: San Francisco, Japan, and Washington, D.C.

Something I particularly wanted to ask today is about the identity of being Japanese-American. Mr. Fukushima, you grew up in America as a third-generation Japanese-American. I think you were in the Asian-American community in a broad sense.

When you were small, I believe Japanese-Americans had the largest population among Asian-Americans and had a large community. However, since around 1965, immigration to America from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Southeast Asia including Vietnam has increased, and now the Japanese-American community is about the sixth largest among Asian-Americans. Based on your experience growing up in the Japanese-American community within the Asian-American community, your experience studying at Keio as a person of Japanese descent, and your experience working in America and Japan as a person of Japanese descent, what have been your thoughts from your position as a third-generation Japanese-American?

As you said, in the 1960s, Japanese-Americans had the largest population among Asian-Americans, but with the revision of the Immigration Act in 1965, the number of people immigrating to America from various Asian countries other than Japan increased significantly. It was mainly China, and then as a result of the Vietnam War, immigrants from Vietnam, and immigrants from South Korea increased. Recently, those of Indian descent have been increasing particularly. Now, among Asian-Americans, Chinese-Americans are the most numerous, and I believe Filipino-Americans are second. After that come Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese is sixth. Therefore, the relative population ratio of Japanese-Americans among Asian-Americans has become smaller.

Another thing is that 30 years ago, many Japanese-Americans participated in politics. At one time, from Hawaii, there were Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, and Representative Patsy Mink. On the U.S. mainland, there were Representatives Norman Mineta and Bob Matsui. At one time, five Japanese-Americans were working in Congress, but now that has decreased to three. In comparison, there are four Korean-Americans and four Indian-Americans in the House of Representatives. Therefore, whether considering population or political participation, the influence of Japanese-Americans has become relatively smaller.

When I was growing up in California, there wasn't much of a recognition of being "Asian-American." During the student movements at the end of the 60s when I was attending Stanford University—amidst the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's liberation movement, and the movements of Black or Hispanic students—the single category of "Asian-American" was created in the late 60s. Since people who immigrated from Asia had no political voice if they were fragmented by country, they thought of Asian-Americans as one group and created one category.

Meaning that lobbying activities wouldn't progress.

That's right. With that background, Chinese Americans and Korean Americans began to participate in politics, and recently, Indian Americans in particular have been actively participating in politics, increasing their influence in Washington. And as far as I can see, the relationships between immigrants to the U.S. from Asian countries other than Japan and their home countries all seem to be quite close. This is especially true for the relationship between Taiwanese Americans and Taiwan.

In comparison, the relationship between Japanese Americans and Japan is quite thin. Compared to third-generation Japanese Americans of my generation, I have a close relationship with Japan and can speak Japanese to some extent, but this is an exception.

At Gardena High School, which I attended for two years when I was in high school, nearly 25% of the graduates at the time were Japanese American. However, although Gardena has had a Japanese American community since before the war, I think probably less than 5% of those nearly 25% of Japanese Americans had ever been to Japan. Most were Japanese Americans who were born and raised in the U.S. and had no connection to Japan.

When I took a leave of absence from Keio High School in 1982 due to my father's job transfer and went to Los Altos High School in California, I met a Japanese American named Kevin Ikeda. He spoke only English and said he had no intention of speaking Japanese. He said that Japanese people don't see them as fellow Japanese. So he asked why he should have to speak Japanese. I think he was a third or fourth-generation Japanese American, but he said he would live in America as an American. I was shocked to hear him say that he just happened to have a Japanese-sounding name but was American.

This is because, as you mentioned earlier, while Koreans think of Korean Americans as fellows and Taiwanese people think the same way, I realized for the first time then that in Japan's case, there is a tendency to think of those who left as people who have separated themselves from their community.

For example, even in the figure skating at the Albertville Olympics a long time ago, when Midori Ito and Kristi Yamaguchi were competing for the top spot, I think very few Japanese people supported Kristi Yamaguchi as a fellow Japanese. So I really felt that Japanese people are actually cold. In other words, I felt there was a strong consciousness that only those within their own "seken" (social circle) in the island nation are fellows, and those who are not are not fellows. They draw a border between their own seken and others, and I have always thought this is a great loss for Japan.

Mr. Fukushima, I believe you previously mentioned that there are four patterns of Japanese Americans.

From my experience, there are at least four types of Japanese Americans.

First, at U.S. military bases in Japan, there were quite a few people whose fathers were Japanese Americans working for the U.S. military and whose mothers were of Japanese descent or Japanese. Even if those people learned English at school, their living environment was Japan, so they could speak Japanese to some extent. They were somewhat familiar with Japan. Many of the Japanese Americans I associated with when I was young were like that.

However, like the majority at Gardena High School in Los Angeles, there are Japanese Americans who have never been to Japan, have no contact with Japan, and cannot speak Japanese. People like Kevin Ikeda, who have an identity as Americans, are the second type.

Third, when I went to Stanford University, I first began associating with Japanese Americans from Hawaii. At that time, there were quite a few Japanese Americans in the undergraduate program at Stanford who had graduated from prestigious private high schools in Hawaii like Iolani or Punahou. Their identity is quite close to Japan. They have watched Japanese TV programs since they were small, and live with grandfathers or grandmothers from Japan. They use the Hawaiian word "kotonk" (empty head) for Japanese Americans from the mainland. This is a derogatory term for mainland Japanese Americans.

They are a different social circle, aren't they?

That's right. It ridicules the fact that they have become too Caucasian. In Hawaii, there are quite a few people with the consciousness that "we are maintaining Japanese culture and traditions."

The fourth type are Japanese Americans who grew up on the East Coast, like Francis Fukuyama and Kenneth Oye, whom I associated with when I went to Harvard. They have almost no association with other Japanese Americans. They primarily associate with Caucasians, especially Jewish Americans. They have no connection to the Japanese American community or Japan. So I think there are at least four types of Japanese Americans.

In this way, it is very difficult to generalize about Japanese Americans. In particular, how they think about Japan really differs from individual to individual. Among Japanese Americans, there are those who have no interest in Japan at all, or even those who dislike Japan. On the opposite end, there are those who say they love Japan. I want everyone in Japan to understand that there is diversity.

Mr. Fukushima, do you feel that you are currently accepted as a fellow by the Japanese community living in Japan?

I think that depends on the person. There are those who think of me as completely American, and those who think that although I am American, I can speak Japanese and understand Japan to some extent. It depends on the definition of "fellow," but about 50% to 60% of Japanese people actively accept me, while 10% to 20% show some resistance or caution—I don't know the real reason, but it's a fact that some people keep their distance.

Even in Japanese newspapers, for example, when a Japanese-born person who moved overseas wins a Nobel Prize, they use the term "brain drain" and don't view it positively. They also immediately use the term "All Japan," and I still sometimes feel this conflict between the two social circles: the desire to think in terms of Japan as a unit before connecting with the world.

I believe that as Keio University becomes more internationalized in the future, it is very important to consider how to connect with people around the world and with the Japanese American community.

As I mentioned earlier, the relationship between Japanese Americans and Japan is quite different from the relationship between immigrants from other parts of Asia and their home countries. I think there are two reasons for this.

One is that from the Japanese American perspective, about 120,000 people were forcibly interned during World War II. Therefore, I have third-generation friends who were told by their second-generation parents that associating with Japan would be of no use in the future. I think there were quite a few second-generation Japanese Americans who saw that living as an American was the wisest thing and that it was better not to have a relationship with Japan.

I have three cousins in the Sacramento area. They all married Caucasians, have never been to Japan, and have no interest in Japan at all. So among Japanese Americans, at least up to the third generation, there were quite a few people who didn't want much of a relationship with Japan.

The other reason is that on the Japanese side, since the Meiji Restoration, priority has been given to associating with America and Europe rather than Asia. And there is a strong sense that associating with the West means associating with white men.

After returning to the U.S., I became the Stanford University chair of the Keio-Stanford Program. In past documents, there was a letter from the representative of the Institute of International Relations (IIR) at Keio, which said, "Every year 12 students come from Stanford to Keio in the summer, but recently there are too many Japanese Americans. We do not see Japanese Americans as real Americans. So please send blonde Caucasians, real Americans."

Also, at that time, Japan was enthusiastic about English education, and there were many part-time jobs for English teachers. However, since the perception at the time was that white, blonde people were real Americans, schools sometimes wouldn't hire Japanese Americans, which became a topic of discussion among Japanese Americans for a while. It was likely a mistaken sense that a white person with blonde hair and blue eyes must speak proper English, even if they were less educated than a Japanese American who was highly educated, graduated from a prestigious American university, and had high SAT English scores.

A month after I joined the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, at a party at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, a high-ranking Japanese government official told me, "You are the most unsuitable person as a representative for the American side. The reason is that Japanese people do not think of you as an American." When he said that, all the Americans around me were shocked.

Mr. Fukushima, you published a book titled "In 2001, Japan Will Surely Revive." Twenty-three years have passed since its publication; what are your thoughts now?

When I wrote the book in 1999, I expected that Japan would recover economically. Looking back over these past twenty-odd years, it hasn't revived as much as I had hoped.

One reason for that, from my perspective, is the inward-looking tendency in Japan. In 1997, there were more than 47,000 students from Japan studying in the U.S., and at that time, Japan had more students studying at American universities for at least one year than any other country. That dropped to 8th place in 2012, and now it is 11th. Currently, there are fewer than 12,000 Japanese students studying in the U.S. China has about 350,000. India, Taiwan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam also have many. Recently, Japan was overtaken by Nigeria. South Korea's population is less than half of Japan's, but the number of its students studying in the U.S. is more than three times as many.

In a sense, Japan is very comfortable. Previously, I had a meal at an Italian restaurant in London with a Japanese friend who works at a bank. He invited three high-ranking Japanese government officials from the Japanese Embassy to have dinner with us. At that time, when I mentioned that "the number of Japanese students studying abroad has plummeted, which might not be good for Japan's future," one person said, "We have built a perfect society in Japan. Japan is safe and secure. Trains run on time. It's clean. Tokyo has more Michelin three-star restaurants than any other city. It's very comfortable. Going abroad is dangerous, dirty, and there are diseases. You have to speak a foreign language. There is racial prejudice. So there is no reason for Japanese youth to go abroad."

I think they are thinking on the premise that Japan's population is nearly 100 million and they can get by within that market alone. There are countries like South Korea, Sweden, and the Netherlands that have no choice but to compete in the global market considering their domestic population size. Perhaps only Japan and Germany still barely operate on the premise that they can get by with just their own domestic markets.

But even that is difficult as globalization progresses. Things cannot be resolved within one's own market alone. Semiconductors and food all come from outside, and things also go out from Japan. From the perspective of the world market, we have to operate globally.

So you believe the main cause of Japan's shrinking is indeed inward-looking thinking, and one aspect of that is education. I believe you donated 1 million dollars to establish the "Fulbright-Glen S. Fukushima Fund" from that standpoint.

I am indeed concerned that the number of students studying abroad from Japan has plummeted so drastically. Drew Faust, the president of Harvard, said this when she visited Japan in 2010: "Looking at the top 10 countries of origin for students studying at Harvard, nine countries had more students in 2009 than in 1999. Only one country had fewer, and that was Japan." She said the number and presence of Japanese students have declined significantly.

In 1982–83, after graduating from Harvard University, I had the opportunity to study at the University of Tokyo for a year on a Fulbright scholarship. The Fulbright scholarship celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2022 and has supported students and researchers from the U.S. to Japan and from Japan to the U.S. since the war, and six of them have won Nobel Prizes. By donating to that fund, although the scale is small and can only support a few people, I hope to be able to support students studying abroad.

Even if you say it's small, it's the largest scale within the Fulbright program. I think it's truly wonderful.

Finally, I would like to ask about your expectations for Keio University and the direction of internationalization that Keio University should take. If education is one important factor in the "lost 20 or 30 years" of the Japanese economy, I also reflect on the fact that there might have been more that Keio University could have done. What are your thoughts on the path to internationalization that Keio University should take?

That is a very large theme. I am not an expert in pedagogy, but Keio was my first experience studying abroad and I have many friends from Keio, so personally, I have high expectations for Keio. Of course, as a research institution, I expect it to cultivate excellent researchers and for the results of those researchers to be at the global cutting edge.

From the perspective of American universities, I believe that a university is basically an institution that cultivates leaders. Stanford and Harvard, in particular, want people who can become future leaders and who have that potential to come and be cultivated.

Therefore, I hope that Japan, and Keio in particular, will become a university that cultivates students who can contribute to and lead society in the future, even more than before. To that end, internationalization and globalization are very large challenges. Not only in education, but also in business, politics, and technology—no matter which field you look at, cooperative relationships and collaborative work with other countries are extremely important.

Basically, I don't think Japan can survive alone. As is true for any country, I hope Keio University will cultivate people who can take leadership, including in international coordination and cooperation.

In the case of Keio University, it's not just the university; we have everything from elementary school to graduate school. Encompassing that large Keio University, there is a phrase in The Mission of Keio University by Yukichi Fukuzawa: "to be a constant source of honorable character and a paragon of intellect and morals for the entire nation." A "paragon" or "leader" in a direct translation. So, as you just said, while enhancing research, it is an important purpose of Keio University to cultivate leaders who have the spirit to contribute to creating a good society.

As you just mentioned, in order to live in a global society, internationalization and direct contact with the world are more important than anything else. Probably all Japanese people say so, but for the past 20 or 30 years, they thought they could get by without advancing it much in their own circles. There is the phrase "not in my back yard" in English; I feel there is a way of thinking that "I won't do it here, but everyone else should."

In terms of timing, do you feel that Japan should finally get serious about promoting internationalization? I sometimes think that educational institutions might be the ones that say internationalization is important and need it most, yet are struggling to achieve it.

I think it's a fact that more people believe we must change fundamentally. However, I returned to the U.S. from Japan 10 years ago. From my experience working in Japan for 22 years from 1990 to 2012, Japanese society places great importance on stability, continuity, predictability, and precedent. That's fine in its own way, but America is the exact opposite and tends to disregard those things, and I think both are extremes. I prefer something more in the middle.

I heard that Mr. Yanai of Uniqlo started a program a few years ago to provide full scholarships for high school students who have been accepted to universities in the U.S. and the U.K. Also, I hear that from this year, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation is running a similar program providing full scholarships for Japanese high school students accepted to a limited number of universities in the U.S. and the U.K. I feel that parents who are not necessarily satisfied with Japanese universities and are prepared to send their children to so-called selective universities in the U.S. or the U.K. are gradually emerging. In that sense, if Japanese universities do not internationalize in earnest, I think excellent Japanese high school students will leave through such programs.

President Ito, you have experience studying in the U.S. during high school. You also experienced a very high-level graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley. I hope you will utilize such study abroad experiences to lead Keio's future globalization.

Thank you. You said that both America and Japan are extreme. The more an American knows about Japan, the more they say that the middle ground between the two poles is best. You are one of them. I think people who know various countries think carefully about where to land the good points of each country's methods.

Also, like yourself, excellent Japanese Americans such as Professor Emeritus Dan Okimoto of Stanford University speak very accurate and beautiful English. In contrast to those who speak American-style English that looks cool and energetic at first glance, there are many Japanese Americans who speak accurate English in a logical and orderly manner. In that sense, I have recently felt especially that there is much for us to learn from that "just right" middle ground.

There are not many people who have contributed as much as you have to bridging America and Japan. It is very gratifying to have someone like you guide us on how far Japan and Keio University should go, and I hope to continue learning from you in various ways.

I have high expectations as well, so please do your best. Actually, my wife Sakie is not a graduate of Keio, but she served as an external evaluation committee member. As someone who has been indebted to Keio University, I would like to be of help.

For Keio University, I believe that cultivating global citizens will be the most important goal from now on. Various challenges in Japan are becoming apparent. While the number of children is decreasing due to the declining birthrate, people aged 60 and over account for nearly one-third of the population. If the proportion of elderly people in the population continues to increase like this, policies will inevitably center on those people.

I'm not saying that's wrong, but as someone in charge of an educational institution, I feel the responsibility for the future of young people first and foremost. How can we increase the number of young people in Japan? Should we increase them by having people come from around the world? How can young people feel that it was good to be active in this country and the world for the next 20, 30, or 50 years, and how can we create such a country and planet? That is our important task. I believe we must think about this in a situation where there is no time to lose.

The number of problems that must be solved on a global level, such as environmental issues, is increasing. Considering that we must participate in those efforts, global citizenship becomes very important.

There are also problems unique to Japan. For example, the salaries of workers are not rising. While it is easy to live here, everyone is enduring a lot. We must solve the situation where there are also significant numbers of people in poverty.

Positioning Japan within the world, strengthening Japan as a sovereign state, and having that Japan contribute to the development of the world. We must create Keio University as an educational institution where each individual can become a person who can be active as a global citizen, whether they stay in Japan, live anywhere in the world, or marry someone other than a Japanese person.

Since I was appointed President, I have felt this as a responsibility. While discussing these things with my colleagues at Keio University, it might already be too late to just do what we can one by one, so I want to take on a major challenge.

Thank you very much for today.