Five years have passed, since we Japanese faced the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 in 2011. To overcome a series of difficulties the Japanese society has been experienced, a lot of political measures have been taken since then. And, of course, some of them have been succeeding to help local victims to get back to their normalcy.

However, from my viewpoint, the following two significant elements still fail to draw public attention:

Final disposition of tritiated water drained off by the TEPCO’s First Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima urgently needs technological giant leap. The GOJ obviously fails to accomplish it. Instead of doing so, the Japanese political leadership and TEPCO have been trying to hide the reality from the public, and prioritize diversionary tactics such as establishing a strategic meeting by experts for new energy in Fukushima. As if nothing had happened. We should not count on both political and economic powers at this level. What we need is the authority which is capable of understanding what to do and override these common powers to get a significant breakthrough. To this direction, we have to further work on. Without succeeding final disposition of the tritiated water, Japan just loses credibility in the global community. It’s nation’s credibility that matters.

Beyond that, we should concentrate on boosting local economy in the TOHOKU region by helping the local enterprises and entrepreneurs to expand their business. Only by doing so, we can stabilize both the local economy and society, and give particularly young generations hope and future. Instead of a numerous amount of governmental subsidies, what we promote is fostering local business and entrepreneurship aiming at brilliant innovations for the better world. In this mean, we need to build up transregional innovation ecosystem, which successfully leads them to breakthrough even in a global scale. Based on my global experiences, I personally try to connect them to global scheme such as World SME Forum established by B20, which will promise ambitious local business leaders and entrepreneurs to get both prestige and profit on the globe.

In short, we have to immediately stop to pretend, as if nothing had happened since March 11, 2011. It’s to look the question in the face and innovations that matter. Unless we’ll ungently pay appropriate attention to this, we Japanese will reach a disastrous of our own civilization. Don’t miss the last opportunity.