I recently read Dr.Kazuhiko Nishi's "Record of Regrets."

 ■I recently read Dr.Kazuhiko Nishi's "Record of Regrets."

Record of Regrets is written by Dr.Kazuhiko Nishi.

What would Mr. Nishi have to regret?

An unprecedented and rambunctious person who was Bill Gates' right-hand man, competing with him and succeeding at growing ASCII, a company with a punk mentality, although it later sunk, but he still was undeterred.

At least, that was my original thought, but it seems to be a serious look on the latter half of his life with a good dose of reflection.

He had a lot of turbulent times.

I have many people to whom I am indebted.

The person who created an opportunity for me to leave the government and go to MIT was Dr.Kazuhiko Nishi, after all, and it was Dr.Jun Murai who invited me to a project to create a graduate school in Japan, and Mr.Masayoshi Son supported me in launching a movement to digitize education.

And one such person is in the midst of serious reflections in this book.

I tried reading it in the context of my own career.

He is a true digital entrepreneur and tech nerd through and through. Ideas seem to just bubble forth aplenty.

He enters a pub, and orders items willy-nilly all across the menu, then takes out a red felt-tip pen and starts scrawling on the paper sleeve for the chopsticks, jotting notes about next-generation communications devices or acoustics systems, and pushes it over asking, "Well, what do ya think?"

So that must have been the framework out of which the "10 dollar PC" idea came about.

The fact that he garnered the support of Mr.Nori Oga, former president of Sony; Mr.Sohei Nakayama, special advisor to the Industrial Bank of Japan, and Mr.Shinji Fukukawa, vice minister of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry is a testament to his appeal as a business manager.

Yet the vexing trials and tribulations around financing, internal rebellions, restructuring, and betrayal that appear in the book would be fit to make a melancholy film.

He is mischievous, short-tempered, and focused on minutiae despite working at a macro scale.

That intriguing appeal may not fully come across in this 450-page autobiography, but give it a read all the same. It's quite interesting, I can tell you.

I had some involvement with the latter stories involving Isao Okawa of CSK/Sega, so I'll jot down some comments on that.

I first met Dr. Nishi at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

I was dispatched by the government as a "spy," and received a phone call from the White House.

Dr. Nishi, who had been discussing digital policy with the Clinton administration, said he would find someone to bridge the government and private sector, and got on a Concord jet then and there and arrived.

I think it was around 1995. It was a fun time.

But according to the book, ASCII fell on hard times and faced a looming deficit of 14.6B JPY.

Weekly ASCII, which was first published in May, featured me and Jun Murai, but the magazine failed miserably.

Dr. Nishi approached me and said, "Why not quit the government and handle the games division at ASCII?"

We were right in the midst of an agency reorganization, so it was neither the time nor place.

At the end of 1997, when the Ministry of Posts and Communications merged with the Ministry of Home Affairs and the General Affairs Agency to become the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the internal reorganization was finalized, I began thinking about how to handle my responsibilities.

Around the same time, Dr. Nishi asked Mr. Okawa to invest, and he agreed in December.

Dr. Nishi was demoted as president of ASCII and became a non-executive director, acting as Okawa's secretary.

In 1998, Dr. Nishi mediated negotiations between Dr. Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, and Mr. Okawa, to discuss a plan to establish a media and children's research institute dubbed the MIT Okawa Center.

Mr. Okawa immediately agreed to MIT's proposal and paid them 1B JPY on the spot.

On the condition of that investment, one visiting professor from Japan would be invited.

So Dr. Nishi approached me and said, "Instead of ASCII, why not become a guest professor at MIT?"

I think he was worried he might be sent instead.

Building a lab at MIT? I was definitely game.

We met at a wine shop in Nishiazabu to present ourselves, so to speak. And I passed the test.

There's no one who is usually able to go toe-to-toe with Okawa and drink that much, they told me afterwards.

I went to MIT, became a special advisor to Sega, and was involved in the development of the Dreamcast.

It was the first game console to be equipped with a telecommunications function.

That epoch-making decision was perhaps ahead of its time.

It may have been one of the factors behind the delay in e-sports in Japan.

In March of 2001, after a battle with cancer, Mr. Okawa donated 85 billion yen to Sega and gracefully passed away penniless.

The Okawa Center was not ready in time.

In July, Dr. Nishi proposed to MIT a concept that would become the basis for the "100-dollar PC," and laid the foundations for the Okawa Center.

Apparently, his "Japan Advanced University" initiative was sundered by the global economic crisis.

Yet he was indomitable. He wrote, "I want to make it a success and gain the approval of Mr. Okawa!"

I had some doubts about Japanese universities when I saw MIT's industry-academia collaboration, so I went ahead and created iU first.

I hope it will be useful in its way in achieving Dr. Nishi's university plan.