I left Japan behind in January, 1959 for the United States with an aim in mind to "rediscover Japan." But, I found myself in a strange position of rediscovering the United States, or the Western modernity itself and as a result, and was forced to prolong my stay there much longer than expected. In the end, I ended up spending more than quarter of a century overseas. Upon return home in 1983, as the wave of "informatization" and economic globalization washed the Japanese shores, I organized a world affairs research center using the newest internet technology with an aim to producing the vision of Japan's new role in the international community irrevocably committed to material globalization.
Since then, for over a decade, I have single-mindedly pursued this goal, and today, taking advantage of this opportunity of addressing the memorable 2001 luncheon of the Naniwa High School's annual alumni meeting in Tokyo, I decided to reflect back on the decades of my past life and touch upon what I believe will be the most important issues confronting Japan in the first decade of the 21st century.

(1) What I experienced in the United States during my stay there of more than a quarter of a century

Throughout the entire stay in the United States, where I tried to live experiencing the nature andcharacteristics of the individualistic Anglo-Saxon capitalist society. For this purpose, I made it a point to change my occupation every three years or so in order to expose myself to the diverse phases of life in the American society. Even if personally experiencing the cruelties of the economic Darwinism in a predominantly white society in this process, I was still able to become aware that I was living in a society which was fundamentally an open to everyone and capable of "cleansing" itself of the mistakes made in the past.

For instance, during the 1960s and the early 1970s, the downtown Detroit contained a vast desert of dilapidated city blocks. The picture shown here is that of a typical taxi cab equipped with 1-inch thick bulletproof plastic shield separating the driver from the passenger seat, and I could only pay him through a small hole which could also be shut tight if need be by the driver. The visitors to today's prosperous Detroit, having overcome the dramatic past economic dislocation, finds it hard to imagine that life was once like this in the heart of the city.

On the other hand, I was also aware of the fact that the indigenous people of North America, who came to be mistakenly called "Indians," moved to the New Continent in the remote past from Eurasia to the New World across the Bering Land Bridge, and walked all the way down to the southern tip of today's Chili, and the so-called Eskimo people moved to Alaska much later during the several thousand years before the Christian Era overlapping Japan's prehistoric Jyomon Period. Though lacking hard archaeological evidence, it is generally assumed that the Eskimo people also moved into the northern sections of the Japanese archipelago during the same period along with other ethnic groups and helped develope the Jyomon culture of northern Japan thanks to the availability of rich salmonid and marine mammal resources. My life in Alaska began with personal association with the Eskimo people in rural Alaska and continued until my return to Japan in 1983.

(2) The Establishment of the Virtual Foundation Japan and our Projects in the Eastern Edge of Eurasia

I came back to Japan in 1983, and after several years of trials and errors, I managed in 1997 to establish a Japanese NGO called the Virtual Foundation Japan (VFJ) responding to the call from the Virtual Foundation USA, which had been operating in the Eastern Europe as an environment-oriented American NGO. VFJ's main objective however was to provide various support services to the development of the isolated rural villages on the eastern edge of the Eurasian Continent. The primary target zone stretched from the Himalayan Foothills on the East Asian side all the way north up to the Russian Far East as shown in the maps here.

In these areas of East Asia, there still live today the descendants of the people who brought their respective cultures and divergent ways of life to the Japanese archipelago during the thousands of years before the Christian Era throughout the latter Jyomon and Yayoi periods. We can easily find a number of common cultural roots between our way of life in today's Japan with those still remaining in these areas of East Asia. One of VFJ's long-term objective is to work with the Japan National Ethnological Museum to construct an internet site which will function not only as the contemporary extension of the museum depicting the Japanese people's East Asian roots, but also provide a meeting place whereby we can interact with the peoples of these areas across East Asia and beyond.

My study of the Eskimo culture in Alaska inevitably took me across the Bering Sea to the Chukoto Peninsula and through Kamchatka, and all the way to the eastern edge of the Eurasian Continent from which area
Eskimos moved eastward in the obscure past. As my research interest moved westward, it also narrowed its

focus on the closing millennia of the Jyomon period, particularly the last B.C. millennium and the first few centuries A.D. into the Yayoi period, during which time a variety of tribes, fundamentally Tungusic in linguistic and cultural orientations, are thought to have left their Eurasian homeland in repeated small waves to migrate to the northeastern Japan. In the early part of the 1980s, I was already feeling the need to come back to Japan so as to familialize myself with the existing conditions of this part of the Eurasian Continent as it had become possible to conduct private field studies in the post-Soviet Russia.

We are planning to assist the isolated villages with divergent ethnic population mixes scattered in the Maritime and Khavarovsk Provinces acquire their own communication access to the outside world so that they can begin planning their own sustainable local economic development starting with ecotourism. One such on-going project is in the Samarga river valley in the northernmost section of the Maritime Province involving a small village of Agzu with a predominant Udehe population located midstream surrounded by beautiful virgin forests. The stream abounds with fish of salmonid species, and the village commune is planning to develop a well-planned ecotourism project, first with the Japanese consumers as the target market.

The Udehe people are said to be the descendants of the Tungusic tribes who once build the northern Chinese empire of Jin incorporating the entire Yellow River basin in early 12 century. During the 1990s, it has become increasingly known that the horse-rearing dry farming culture of northern Japan, which gave rise to the horse-riding Samurai culture of the eastern frontier land in the 10th century can also be traced back to the cultural heritage of these Tungusic tribes.

(3) We Need to Make a Fundamental Reexamination of the Historical and Cultural Heritage of Japan in order to articulate what Japan can possibly contribute to East Asia as we cross thethreshold of the new century 　(The following charts were developed by the students of Prof. Ota's seminar at Chiba University of Commerce)

The Pacific-Rim migration of the Altaic speakers, to which the Tungusic speakers belong, left a clearly recognizable imprint on the Japanese language as well, particularly its grammar. The Altaic-speaking proto-Japanese then accepted the rice culture that came from the subcortical south and quickly spread in the southwestern Japan during the early Christian centuries, incorporating in this process much of the southern linguistic features into Japanese, particularly in pronunciation, to ultimately produce a unique hybrid language unique to Japan, significantly influencing the process of the rise of the Samurai culture which lasted for more than a millennium. Our quest for the true historical identity of the Japanese feudal culture must therefore begin with a thorough examination of this hybridization process under new analytical light.

Its most unique feature lies, in my opinion, in the successful fusion of the horse-riding dry-farming culture of northeastern Japan with the highly productive wet-paddy rice-growing culture of southwestern Japan in the first several Chirstian centuries. The former provided the solid institutional framework of rule of Samurai domains while the latter an expanding economic basis for the Samurai-dominated feudal society in Japan. We must also pay a special attention to an interesting social feature peculiar to this cultural fusion, i.e., the Japanese feudal system did not produce an institutionalized slavery class called serfs nor absentee landlordism as commonly observed in the Western history.

(4) The Real Key is Hidden in the Cultural Heritage of Japan's Distant Past

It is well known that the oligarchical ruling structure and the insularity peculiar to the Japanese corporate management system of the pre-World War II period remained essentially intact even after the end of the World War II, even though the occupation-imposed reforms restructured it into a more democratic system of loosely organized and more competitive corporate groupings patterned after the Han domains (the land of the lord) of the Samurai society. The corporate employees in the postwar Japan were like the Hanshi, the vassals belonging to the Han domains (Kigyo or corporations) in respective business domains (Gyokai), and as such, the employees pledged absolute loyalty to their corporate "lords." But, the world-famous Japanese business management model of the 1970s and 1980s ceased to have relevance during the stormy era of economic globalization and information revolution of the 1990s. The real issue at the beginning of the 21st century is whether the Japanese economy can ever come up with a new strategic model to regain its former competitive edge in the ever more competitive international market place.

Therefore, what Japan is really in need are, in my opinion, (1) a bold restructuring of the existing system of Han-type business groupings which are seemingly incapable of overcoming their above-mentioned shortcomings, i.e., scrapping, as it were, the closed system of Tokugawa capitalism dominated by the pervasive "Iemoto" organizational principle, and (2) a decisive shift from the collectivist culture of the Tokugawa period to a new model reflecting the much earlier Kamakura-period experience, in which there indeed was an emergent form of a vigorous individualist culture indigenous to Japan which continued to exist in Japan until the dominance of the Tokugawa Shogunate system was conclusively established in the mid 17th century.

To begin with, there are two known Asian models of individualistic society, i.e., the life style of the overseas (or globalized) Chinese for one, and Japan's early Samurai society of the Kamakura period. As to which of these two may become the dominant role model in the Asia-Pacific region of the 21st century is yet to be determined in the first decade or two of this century. I for one remain convinced that both of them are destined to reemerge like Phoenix as the role model of East Asia's own individualism needed for this region to survive in the process of onslaught of the information revolution and the unfettered economic globalization.