The reason I launched the Micronesian Maritime Security Project in 2008 on my own was because of the "Higuchi Report", written by my mentor Professor Akio Watanabe. It was the first post-war, post-Cold War security policy for Japan.
In a single word, "Higuchi Report" was a multilateral security policy based on the Japan-US alliance. And there is no better place to proceed this than in Micronesia, in the Pacific.
I first met Professor Akio Watanabe through his book in the early 1990s. A left-leaning academic book that shouted "True independence for island nations! were sympathetic to my feelings, but my mind, which knew what was happening on the ground, ie Pacific Islands.
The existence of the US, Australia, France and NZ surrounding the Pacific island countries is important and cannot be ignored. It was around that time that I realized the importance of the relationship between the Pacific island countries and their former colonial powers.
When I first learned his name from a book, he was writing the Higuchi Report.
It was in the autumn of 1996 that I found out that he was a professor at Aoyama University, and I applied to the university.
I didn't know that the interviewer was Prof. Watanabe, that is, I went to the entrance exam without consulting him beforehand.The interviewer suddenly asked me in English "why Aoyama?" I answered "because Prof. Watanabe is here". The interviewer laughed and said, " I can' t reject you then."
Anyway, I was successfully admitted to the university, and after two years of evening courses for working people, I wrote a thesis on PEACESAT and the associated USPNet, which was the main ODA project of the first Island Leaders Meeting in 1997, from the perspective of international politics.
It was in 2008 that I read the Higuchi Report again. I first learned about the background and impacts of this policy in Akiyama Masahiro's book, "The US-Japan Strategic Dialogue Has Begun".
I was determined to position the maritime security project that had moved the presidents of the three Micronesian countries as Japan's multilateral security project, based on the Japan-US alliance. I declared to Professor Watanabe that I would take revenge for the "Higuchi Report".
