COVER STORY • Future Design – Thinking About Our Legacy to the Next Generation • 1

Beginning of Future
DesignBy Tatsuyoshi Saijo

Introduction: Discovery of Iroquois Indians
In March 2012 I was invited by John Stranlund, a professor at the
Department of Resource Economics at the University of
Massachusetts and a former student of mine at UC Santa Barbara, togive a report on my research paper resolving the Prisoner’s
Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a situation in which two players
could produce good results if they cooperate with each other but
cannot do so easily, since one player will get even better results by
not cooperating even if the other player does. Although the dilemma
is named after prisoners, the original issue was that the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union had both come to possess nuclear
weapons, making it possible for both sides to deliver a catastrophic
blow to its opponent by a preemptive attack (= not cooperating).
However, nuclear war did not break out between the two. I had
designed an approval mechanism as a new framework to explain thisand demonstrated its great effectiveness through an experimentusing subjects.
After giving the report, I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in
Amherst with John, his wife Laura, and seminar participants, where
our conversation revolved around the fact that while social dilemmas
such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma were issues for the current
generation, climate change and massive public debt were issues for
future generations. When the current generation emits greenhousegases, its impact will fall on future generations, not the current one.
Likewise, massive government debt means that the current
generation uses resources now that are to be used by future
generations in order to enjoy a better life now.
Issues like climate change are difficult to resolve because thefuture generations, who are parties to the issue, do not exist yet.
Thus, I proposed a mechanism in which an imaginary future
generation, which I named the “Ministry of the Future”, is selectedfrom the current generation and the two generations negotiate witheach other. In fact, this proposal would eventually lead to the firstpractical future design in the township of Yahaba, which I will explain
later. In response, Laura began explaining that there had been people
in America who had actually used such a mechanism – the Iroquois
Indians. According to Laura, when the Iroquois face an issue thatconcerns the future, they decide what to do now from theperspective of the seventh future generation. I had casually proposed
an imaginary future generation and a Ministry of the Future; I wasshocked by the fact that there had been people who had designed
4 Japan SPOTLIGHT • March / April 2019

Author Tatsuyoshi Saijo

and actually used such a social mechanism.
That night, back in the hotel where I was staying, I began looking
into the Iroquois Indians on the Internet. “Iroquois” is not the nameof a single tribe. In the 17th century, five tribes in the Great Lakes
region formed a league later known as the Iroquois Confederacy.
Another tribe joined it in the first half of the 18th century, making it afederation of six nations. The Great Binding Law is the equivalent of aconstitution that holds the confederacy together. And the law
proclaimed, “Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people andhave always in view not only the present but also the coming
generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface ofthe ground – the unborn of the future Nation.” Their constitution
explicitly required consideration for future generations in order tomaintain a confederacy that consisted of different tribes.

Launching the Seventh-Generation Study GroupFor a long time, as a researcher in economics, I had worked toconstruct theoretical models and design social mechanisms using
the maximization of personal benefits as the basic axiom. However, I
was also aware that the Payoff Maximization Axiom was not the only
feature of human beings, since I had been conducting experiments
simultaneously using subjects. According to neuroscientist Robert
M. Sapolsky in “Super Humanity” (Scientific American, Vol. 307,
Issue 3, 2012), human beings have three characteristics: impulsivity,
relativity, and sociability. Let me explain them, perhaps a little
differently than Sapolsky.
Impulsivity means more or less immediately consuming
something that is in front of you. The meaning could be stretched alittle to call it myopia. Relativity means reacting to change. When it
suddenly becomes dark, you must react in a way that enhances yourchances of survival. In other words, you react not to the absolutelevel of brightness but to the relative change in it. This more or lessmeans looking for a state that maximizes a function, i.e., a state
whose derivative becomes zero. This is the Optimization Principle; itis the equivalent of the Maximization Axiom in economics.
Now let’s look at sociability. Although human beings were no
better than other animals anatomically, they reached the top of thefood chain by cooperating with each other. But I would like to add afourth: optimism. Where the future is concerned, Tali Sharot explains
optimism in “The Optimism Bias” (Current Biology, Vol. 21, Issue
23, 2011). Human beings tend to be overly optimistic about thehttps://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

COVER STORY 1

future.
In this manner, I had despaired that human beings did not havethe ability to resolve long-term issues such as climate change anddebt accumulation. That is why I found the Iroquois so moving; they
had prescribed a social mechanism to become people of the future toconsider what to do now in their constitution and used it. I spentquite a lot of time on the Internet that night researching the Iroquois
but could not find enough to satisfy myself.
At the time, I belonged to the Osaka University Center for
Environmental Innovation Design for Sustainability (CEIDS), where I
ran a monthly research meeting with young engineering researchers.
When I returned from my trip and talked about the Iroquois, theparticipants also found the story moving and named the group “TheSeventh-Generation Study Group”. As for the Iroquois themselves,
we found that they had had a significant impact on the designing of
the American political system. The 13 British colonies in America
took in many ideas from the Iroquois including “confederacy” inorder to seek independence from the United Kingdom and constructa political system that was different from those of Europe at the time,
though we also learned that that the concept of “seven generations”
was not adopted by the US Constitution. Furthermore, it appears that
the Iroquois also had a major influence on European Enlightenment
thinkers, who invited Iroquois to give speeches to show that ademocratic system that was more advanced than those in Europe
had already emerged on the other side of the Atlantic – gaiatsu(external pressure), if you will.
It was Michinori Uwasu who began pointing out in this study
group that the market had a problem. A well-known “market failure”
is that the market does not function well when there is uncertainty
about the future. Uwasu introduced the point that the market does
not function because future generations cannot participate in it, aperspective that differed from those of the past. Researchers
followed this with the presentation of studies in their respective
fields on the changes that would occur when the “seventh
generation” idea was adopted.

of future generations had begun. Taking the lead in this initiative
were Uwasu and Masahiko Ozaki. This process in turn made usaware that what we were seeking was not merely to establish any
specific institution in this society of ours but to design systems thatare resilient and structurally stable in the face of change. Thus, wechanged the name again, to Future Design (FD). We lacked researchfunds at the time, so we created an imaginary future generation
during classes and observed what happened. Taking the lead in thiswere Keishiro Hara, Uwasu, and Masashi Kuroda. Shinsuke
Yamanaka, the deputy director of the CEIDS, who is now a Nuclear
Regulation Authority commissioner, took note of our research andencouraged us to publish a declaration of FD as a new field withpotential despite the simplicity of the concept.
I transferred to Kochi University of Technology (KUT) in 2013 but
continued to participate in the monthly meetings at Osaka University
and began work on a book. All the prospective authors met on the
KUT Kami Campus in November 2011 and held an event in which we
critiqued the manuscript chapter by chapter. However, virtually noneof us had research funds for FD, so the book turned out to be a
declaration of intent, in which we laid out the kind of research that
we would do if we had the funds. This was followed by several moremeetings and the results were published in the spring of 2015 as
Future Design: A Society That Thinks Seven Generations Into the
Future (Keiso Shobo).
KUT distributes over 1 million yen per head in research funds.
Using this, the first FD-related study began in 2014. I started bybuilding the simplest model possible for climate change, debt
accumulation, and other such problems. Each generation would
make a choice between options A and B. Say that the benefit from A
is larger than that from B, at $36 and $27 respectively. If the current
generation chooses A, the benefit to the next generation from A and
B will be reduced by $9 each to $27 and $18. If the current
generation chooses B, the benefits of A and B to the next generation
will remain unchanged. We named this the Intergenerational
Sustainability Dilemma Game (ISDG).

Future Design Begins

ISDG Results

The Seventh-Generation Study Group became a forum for young
researchers to present the seeds of creative research, and the timecame to change its name to “The Ministry of the Future Project”.
Research on the political organizations that included the perspective

When conducting experiments with subjects, the size of eachgeneration must be determined. I wanted to use just one person as
an imaginary future person. That meant that the sum of the numberof people in each generation had to be larger than two in order toJapan SPOTLIGHT • March / April 20195

COVER STORY 1

avoid the possibility of deadlock between two persons representing
the future and current generations respectively. Furthermore, I
wanted to keep it simple while creating an environment thatminimized the effect of an imaginary future person, so I decided touse three subjects – two of whom would constitute the current
generation. This way, if the current generation chose A and theimaginary future person B, it would be more difficult for theimaginary future person to have an effect since it would be in theminority. If the imaginary future person was still effective in thisenvironment, which made it difficult for it to be effective, it would
mean that the effect of the imaginary future person was robust, an
example of experimental economics at work.
When the ISDG framework was explained to researchers in theeconomics field, the response that came back was that there was noway that B would be chosen whether or not there was an imaginary
future person. So, I designed the experiment, wrote the instructions,collected the subjects, secured classrooms at KUT, and tried to
conduct the experiment on my own. At that point, I was stymied:
there were too few students in my seminar to conduct theexperiment, busy as they were working side jobs. It was then that
Nobuhiro Mifune and Asuka Komiya, social psychologists, gave metheir support, and Yoshio Kamijo also came to my rescue over andbeyond his role as a research economist.
In the experiment, with some 200 subjects, B was the choice of
28% of the groups without an imaginary future person and 60% of
the groups with an imaginary future person. The effect of the future
generation was clearly verified. Given these results, I did what I
should have done in the first place and began to search for studies
along similar lines that used the concept “imaginary future
generation”. Several days of searching confirmed that there werenone, so the study was published as the first outcome in FD studies
as “Negotiating with the Future”, by Kamijo, Komiya, Mifune andSaijo (Sustainability Science, 2017).

Kamijo. Ryuta Aoki has started neuroscience research in FD with
Kotani. Meanwhile, during a business trip in October 2014, I
happened to be watching Close Up Gendai (a popular NHK news
program) when it was showing how the unsustainability of a water
utility was being overcome. It was a presentation of a workshop
conducted by Ritsuji Yoshioka and his fellow residents in Yahaba, a
town in Iwate Prefecture. Although this was not FD itself, Yoshioka
came across to me as a pioneer in FD. I asked Hara, who was moreor less of the same generation as Yoshioka, to contact him, which
led to the FD work in Yahaba.
Yahaba Mayor Shozo Takahashi issued a declaration designating it
as a “Future Design Town” and drafting has begun on acomprehensive plan under Yoshioka and Hara’s command. Shinshu
University Professor Naoko Nishimura is collaborating with the cityof Matsumoto to use the FD method in drafting the city hallrestoration plan, reviewing the traffic system, and the like. KUT’s
Nakagawa has been working with Kyoto Prefecture and the cities of
Uji and Nagaokakyo to use FD on increasingly hard-to-maintaininfrastructure. Toshiaki Hiromitsu in the Ministry of Finance has been
conducting FD experiments on his own with positive results; Reiko
Aoki at the Japan Fair Trade Commission is attempting to use FD for
innovation; and Keio University Professor Keiichiro Kobayashi isgiving FD its place in economic thought and philosophy.
There are many more examples of FD studies and applications, butthey will have to wait till the next opportunity since I have run out of
space.

Growing Number of FD Participants
The first results above were obtained in February 2014. When I
reported them to the FD group at Osaka University, its membershipgrew dramatically. It apparently had stimulated the intellectual
curiosity of young researchers. From then on, the experimental
research at KUT began to produce a wide variety of results under theleadership of Koji Kotani, Yoshinori Nakagawa, Yoichi Hizen, and6 Japan SPOTLIGHT • March / April 2019

Dr. Tatsuyoshi Saijo is founding director of the Research Institute for Future
Design, Kochi University of Technology, and program director at the ResearchInstitute for Humanity and Nature. He is also senior fellow of the Tokyo
Foundation for Policy Research and visiting professor at the Institute forTechnology, Enterprise and Competitiveness at Doshisha University. He has a
Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota, and has held teachingpositions at numerous universities in both the United States and Japan.