On the occasion of my 60th birthday. Two points of astonishment.

 ■ On the occasion of my 60th birthday. Two points of astonishment.

I am simply shocked. My 60th birthday is here.

I was immature all this time, and considered myself to be a rookie, yet here I am, suddenly a senior, an old man, and somehow missed the middle part.

At the same time, I was confronted with an incident that made me question just how such a thing could happen in my life.

Here came these two surprises. Just what happened?

It's a super personal introspection. I'm writing this down as a note to myself.

They say that we will soon live to 100 as commonplace, and will go through three major phases in a lifetime.

If we assume it was two phases thus far, the major turning point between the first and second half was marriage and children around my 30s.

The first half was a growth period, while the latter half was living with my family.

The children have grown into adulthood and found their own careers, and both got married this past year.

If we shift into a three-phase cycle, who should play the leading role in that?

If we shift this thinking from "who" to "what," then it'd be safe to say I have four discrete stages at 20-year intervals.

1) First phase in the 60s-70s; 2) Second phase in the 80s-90s; 3) Third phase in the 00s-10s; 4) Fourth phase in the 2020s.

1) The first was goofing off; 2) The second was with the government; 3) The third was doing projects as a pseudo-academic.

4) What should the fourth phase be, then?

1) I built up Shonen Knife towards the end of phase 1.

2) I was at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in phase 2.

3) With phase 3, we created iU and CiP.

That's the extent of my output.

4) So what to do in phase 4?

1) As someone who had been TV-loving kid, I set managing the rules of the information society as the locus for my workplace.

2) I worked as a government official tackling the advanced information society of new media.

3) I was an academic for the burgeoning age of digital, IT-driven society.

4) At the forefront of AI, I founded iU and CiP out of the idea of a "super-leisure society."

I was never exposed to war.

I felt a sense of inferiority compared to those that had.

However, I had to confront COVID-19, a "war" in its own right.

We are still in the midst of the battle, but I'd like to see what the future after that brings.

Over the course of this war, I have seen how Japan truly fell down in digital during the second and third phases.

Despite the fact that we had been at war in the digital space for thirty years, we lacked a wartime awareness.

Our generation questioned the one before it to take responsibility for the previous world war, and we are now the generation that has lived through the "Digital Thirty Years' War," and are in turn being asked to take responsibility for that defeat.

While I'm taking my own actions towards those who came before and using the "shut up, old man" card, I have to think about how to take responsibility for my own part in this.

I aim to grow iU and CiP as sites for digital into something mature and ready.

So what should I set my sights on next?

I'd better think about it before my 60th birthday.

Is what I was I thinking, but once COVID-19 hit, the environment and prospects have been more like a roulette wheel.

It seems we'll have DX and my vision of a super-leisure society much sooner than I expected.

I'm simply stunned.

I needed to set about making sense of this shock.

Yet as I did, something even more shocking occurred.

2) It was quite turbulent times at the government office where I spent my second phase.

The two head people reported about on a daily basis had been sworn friends from the same period, and I was intimate with all of the junior staff below them.

Who would have thought they would shock the world in that way?

I really suffered, feeling it personally.

My second phase as a government official corresponds to when the scope of media policy increased.

Until then, the only companies that had relationships with government offices were the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation and a monopoly called KDD, and NHK, so only commercial broadcasting technology and accounting capacities.

It was a very small administration within an even narrower field.

Liberalization, deregulation, and digitalization were in that sense movements to increase the scope of the administration itself.

How do we increase the number of new IT entrants? How to give business opportunities to content companies other than broadcasters?

My job was doing sales to increase our clientele.

I went to and fro.

In terms of creating a culture where the public and private sectors could connect, I am not entirely detached from the current issue, and I have my part in the responsibility.

My senior colleagues did their best.

They tried too hard, got into a conflict with NTT, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and the Ministry of Finance, and were dismantled under the Hashimoto program.

Feeling responsible, I stepped down, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications was established.

My peers and junior colleagues worked hard, too.

The reputation has improved, and good infrastructure has been created. 　

But perhaps we tried too hard.

Those efforts went outside of the established rules and were subject to opprobrium.

And that criticism went beyond the administration and methods itself, but that the organizations and people within them were themselves to blame.

It's painful to hear.

As a consequence of 2) above, the government office was dismantled and reorganized. Alongside rebuke for our failure at digitization, it's subject to censure yet again, which is shocking.

All I can do is be shocked. I keep thinking about it instinctively.

That's where I am on the occasion of my 60th birthday.