by Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D.
Note: This is a rough draft of this chapter. Watch this Web site for the final version appearing soon.
History of science is science. -- Andrew S. Targowski
After almost a year of literature survey, I decided to investigate the effect of the heat of chemical reaction to the rate of diffusion, for my Ph.D. thesis research at the Chemical Engineering Department {1} of Polytechnic University (formerly Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn) in Brooklyn, New York. It was around 1960. Such chemical reaction was a common phenomena, e.g., absorption of sulfuric or nitric acid gas into water, etc., which later became one of major concerns for the prevention of air pollution.
Basing on the McCabe-Theile s two-film theory {2}, I constructed a mathematical model of several highly non-linear simultaneous ordinary differential equations with two split boundary conditions for the chemical reaction {3}. I took a course on numerical calculations, and started to solve the set of equations with a hand-cranking "Tiger" calculator (see footnote {4} about an incident which led me to create the logo of our GLOSAS/USA) {5}. My arm soon got tired. I then found an electro-mechanical (not electronic) {6} "Monroe" calculator in a professor s room, and begged him to let me use it. It still took me many hours and days to come up a single case study of such a set of highly non-linear simultaneous differential equations.
A friend of mine then suggested that I should take a programming course for a new electronic computer IBM 650. It was with a tedious machine language, and I easily got lost with it. I said to myself "Down with IBM!!" and quitted the course after a few days of attendance. I was completely lost and frustrated, couldn t find what to do for many weeks and was deeply depressed. However, I had to solve the mathematical model to finish up my Ph.D. study.
One day, I was wondering around the floor of Electrical Engineering Department and found a strange machine. It was a slow-time analog computer with about 200 to 300 amplifiers {7}. It was 6 to 8 foot high, about 20 to 30 foot long, and 2 to 3 foot thick -- there were two banks of them, each having one servo multiplier immersed in an oil bath. The programming board was just like a telephone switching board with long codes which were to be inserted in large holes on the programming board. When a code was released from a hole, it snatched back into its place on a table.
I started using it with amazement. After programming my model, it became a spaghetti board as running the codes from corners to corners. I could see a multiplier disk floating in an oil bath slowly moving to finish a multiplication. To change a numerical parameter, I had to turn a large potentiometer on the desk. The computational outputs were plotted on a large (almost a foot by a foot) plotter which was often used for industrial process control in chemical plants. It was very slow and insensitive to parameter changes. I had to watch patiently the outcome on the plotter if a new parameter setting could shoot its target value at the end of computation. Since my goal was to come up a chart of coefficients of chemical reaction with the level of its activation energy, I had to spend many nights to repeat similar computations, but I still could not see when I could finish my research study {8}.
One of the professors then kindly introduced me a part time job for the operation of a newly acquired "repetitive" analog computer (manufactured by Electronic Associates, Inc. (EAI) in New Jersey) at Shell Oil Headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza Building in Manhattan. I assisted their jobs of simulating chemical reactions, process control, business operation, etc. in day time, and worked on my thesis in night time -- often till mid-night -- with free of charge for the computer usage {9}. This analog computer gave me substantial speed increase. I could watch the computational results on an oscilloscope if a parameter setting could shoot a desired target, and if did, I could read its digital number out of analog/digital converter {10}. Though I had to record the number manually, this repetitive operation could save my time tremendously for trial and error calculations. However, its 500 or so amplifiers were quickly used up for my simulation model so that I had to hang up many extra capacitors and resisters on the programming board to supplement amplifiers {11}.
Soon after I moved to Mobil Oil Headquarters in Manhattan in 1964, I encountered with a continuous system simulation language program, Modified Integrator Analog Digital Simulator (MIDAS) made by Martin Marrietta Corporation in Florida. It used a digital computer (e.g., IBM 704 with vacuum tubes, 7040 with transistors, etc.). Its programming language was, however, very tedious, just like for analog computer programming diagram with adders, integrators, multipliers and potentiometers, etc. The diagrams with their pictorial icons and connecting lines often overflowed even on large sheets for complex modeling. Each of those mathematical operations had to be punched on a separate card. It did not have any graphic print-out feature so that a friend of mine (George Armstrong) brought me a subroutine program which could plot the computational results with ASCII characters on x-y axes by high-speed line-printer, which graphic was similar to the one I could plot with the slow-time analog computer at the Polytechnic University {12}. A few months later, Martin Marrietta upgraded MIDAS with MIMIC to circumvent the difficulty of analog computer type programming, i.e., MIMIC was equation-oriented digital simulation programming system so that we could just copy differential equations with its programming language without separating each mathematical operation.
Probably because one of external board directors of Mobil Oil was James Watson, then Chairman of IBM Corporation, Mobil was a beta testing site for IBM at that time. One day, an IBM salesman brought me a deck of punched card and a user manual of Digital Simulation Language for IBM 7090 (DSL/90), another continuous system simulation language program. The user manual was stamped as their internal secret program {13}. This and its successor, Continuous System Simulation Language 360 (CSSL/360) was much easier than MIDAS or hybrid computer, though the computer speed was much, much slower than analog or hybrid. Although there was a merit with MIMIC, I chose to use DSL/90 for my simulation work, and often called its originator (a Chinese from Singapore) at IBM/San Jose, California office whenever I encountered with any error messages {14}.
As being the beta site of IBM, there was also an IBM 1401
with a large magnetic storage drum which was hooked with telex
system, a forerunner of in-company global time-sharing system.
One evening when I was using it for my statistical analysis,
its response got suddenly slow down. A friend of mine exclaimed
"Aha, Australians must have started using it!" since
it was about when their office time began in Sidney {15}.
At the central research lab of Mobil Oil in New Jersey, I
had an occasion of simulating chemical reactions in the shale
oil retort in Colorado. This was to extract oil out of rocks
from Rocky mountains, which reservoir was said more than that
in Middle Eastern countries. It was around 1965 to 1966 when
major oil companies were getting afraid of oil crunch which came
in early 1970s. Crashed shale oil rocks were fed from the top
of the retort. Hot heat from burning oil was fed from the bottom
of the retort tube, and heated air was fed from the middle of
the tube. The simulation model was consisted of several highly
non-linear simultaneous partial differential equations in four
dimensions (xyz-axes of space and time) with three split boundary
conditions at the top, the middle and the bottom of the retort.
I could use a newly constructed Beckman Instruments hybrid computer
in Richmond, California, for almost exclusively about a half
year -- continuously day and night. The computer had two banks
of analog computers (with 500 amplifiers on each) which were
hooked to Xerox s Sigma real-time digital computer {16}.
I then had to convert this model with DSL/90 (and later DSL/94),
as running it on IBM 7094 at Mobil Oil Headquarters many nights
{17}. It was around 1966 to 1967. Even though
I used the 6th-order predictor/corrector numerical integration
method, some graphical outputs from a line-printer often had
very severe fluctuations on concentration curves which were out
of sense. I later learned that it was caused by the truncation
error, and a scientist at M.I.T. dubbed it as a "Butterfly
Theory" {18}.
While I took some courses at Sloan School of Management of
M.I.T., I worked at Stone and Webster Engineering Company in
Boston on the design of ethylene plant, the most basic of petrochemical
industry, with computer simulation of chemical reactions in naphtha
cracking furnace and of process control of the entire ethylene
plant which total cost ranged from $800 million to $1 billion
dollars. Since the plastic industry with synthetic organic chemistry
was just getting to bloom, and since Stone and Webster was one
of a few major design companies, demand for building such ethylene
plants from around the world was enormous.
By that time, IBM produced Model 360, and their Continuous
System Modeling Program (CSMP) with MIDAS type programming was
converted to the one with the DSL/90 type equation-oriented simulation
language, and dubbed as CSMP/360. I had a dumb terminal in my
office which was hooked to IBM 360 time-sharing machine in Danver,
Connecticut, one of the first time-sharing service offering vendors
-- via a leased line. Instead of submitting our job with many
boxes of punched cards to an IBM/360 in a computer room, I could
operate the time-sharing machine from my office with similar
graphical output as the one from a lineprinter. We then attached
a storage type oscilloscope made by Tektronix and could view
the computational output on it -- it was in late 1960s and the
forerunner to the similar computer screen outputting with a desktop
personal computer nowadays.
In parallel to the above activity, I also developed a combination
of CSMP/360 simulation model for a petrochemical process control
dynamics with a large material balance program, a statistical
analysis program (BMD) and various hill-climbing optimization
programs (including linear-programming). We dubbed it as Stone
& Webster All Purpose Simulator and Optimizer (SWAPSO) [Utsumi,
T., C. H. Jones and L. Chin, 1970]. While CSMP simulated the
dynamics of ethylene plant process control, the material balance
program checked the input/output balance of individual units
with statistical analysis at a specified time interval. Each
of three component programs were huge at that time. This was
the so-called "All-in-One" approach nowadays {19}.
I presented our papers on those activities at the Conference
on Applications of Continuous System Simulation Language in San
Francisco, California in 1969 which was organized by Bob Brennan
of IBM. After listening those papers, he requested me to organize
the following year s conference as Program Chairman. I duly accepted
his request with the condition of changing its long name to Summer
Computer Simulation Conference (SCSC), since there was a similar
conference in competition for discrete simulation group, which
was usually held in winter time. General Chairman of the 1970
SCSC was David Miller of Denelcore in Denver, Colorado, which
company produced analog and hybrid computers for the U.S. defense
and NASA facilities. Since the computer simulation was becoming
wide-spread, ubiquitous tool in research and development and
engineering fields of every disciplines, I designed the conference
with multidisciplinary approach (Utsumi, T., 1970, "A Message
from the Program Chairman"). It was a tremendous success
and the first of its kind. The most memorable presentation was
the computer simulation of global climatology by Dr. Kasahara
of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder,
Colorado, with the use of Cray's supercomputer. His presentation
let me understand that the computer simulation of such a global
system was possible with rational and critical thinking and analysis.
This notion led me to have a session on macrosystem simulation
during the following 1971 SCSC.
Thanks to the success of this SCSC in Denver in 1970, I was
then appointed to conduct the 1971 SCSC in Boston as General
Chairman {20}. It gathered more than 600 attendees,
the largest ever for SCSC (Utsumi, T., 1971a, "A Message
from the General Chairman" {21}). We could
peek the future of virtual reality with 3D graphics of an airplane
circulating over an air field to land on its runway. A session
on macrosystem simulation was moderated by John McLeod, and a
team member of the "Limit to Growth" project at M.I.T.
presented an overview of their activity prior to its publication
a half year later. A professor from the U.S. Naval Post Graduate
School in Monterey, California presented his work on war gaming.
His last words were "War gaming cannot be perfect without
having its models tied together with simulation models of civilian
sectors" (Utsumi, T.., 1971b, "Peace and War Gaming")
As recalling industrial, urban and world dynamics studied at
M.I.T., I said to myself "Well, we may be able to help them
as doing, at least, the simulation of the civilian part"
(Utsumi, T., 1971c, "Comparison between War and Peace Games"
{22}). This culminated in my motivation for
creating Globally Collaborative Environmental Peace Gaming {23} and Global (electronic) University System
to supply its game players -- more later.
After moving to Mitsubishi Research Institute (MRI) in Tokyo
in 1972 {24}, I devoted myself for the promotion
of the use of computer simulation and systems dynamics with time-sharing
of IBM/360 (which was only one of the two in Japan at that time).
I also had to come to the U.S. to attend many conferences. This
frustrated me greatly, not only with its hectic schedules, but
also by the fact that I could not keep contacts with valuable
friends whom I had fruitful conversations at those conferences,
due to slow airmail and high cost of overseas telephone calls
and telex messages from Tokyo. On the other hand, GE s time-sharing
service (GEISCO, the predecessor of GENIE) was extended to Tokyo
out of Cleveland, Ohio around that time. I immediately subscribed
to it {25}. Whenever I found its users during
my trip in the U.S., I borrowed their terminals of GENIE and
could contact my secretary in Tokyo by e-mail. However, its users
were a few among my American colleagues, and its e-mail service
was only for its users in the same organization, but not with
any persons of other organizations.
On the other hand, the "Limit to Growth" (which
was the outgrowth of the World Dynamics by Jay Forrester of M.I.T.)
was published by Readers Digest in the spring of 1972, and severe
criticisms started appearing in many journals and newspapers
{26}. The main point of the contentions was
on the credibility of the data they used, i.e., how a group of
only a few scientists could claim that they knew everything of
the world. My thought to the criticisms was then why not do we
take Greyhound Bus Company s motto "Leave the driving to
us," i.e., distributing computer simulation submodels representing
functions and responsibilities of individual sectors and countries,
to appropriate locations where they should have belonged and
connecting them via telecommunications. Credible data and model
structure could have been brought by the experts of those sectors
and countries to which no one could complain or blame.
In the summer of 1972 in Tokyo, I had an occasion to meet Carl Hammer, Director of Computer Science of UNIVAC in Washington, D.C. {27}. He invited me with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation to present a paper about our GLOSAS project at the first International Conference on Computer Communications (ICCC) held in Washington Hilton Hotel in October, 1972 -- that was my first public presentation of the project.
At this conference, I saw two technological advancements; one was the demonstration of ARPANET, though it was still primitive with 64 or so participating universities around the U.S. {28}, and the other was EMISARI computer-mediated conferencing (CMC) system which later became the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) of New Jersey Institute of Technology -- more later.
The ARPANET (Maps of ARPANET) was a narrow-band (64 Kbps) data communication network which was based on packet-switching technology invented by Paul Baran at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California (Malik, R., September 8, 1977). John Postel of the University of Southern California constructed the so-called TCP/IP protocol. Paul Baran and John Postel were true founding fathers of the packet switching data communication networks which is now called as Internet.
I thought this ARPANET could be utilized for global peace gaming, and started working on to extend it to Japan. This was also because I heard that it had already been extended to the U.K. (actually via Western Union International s satellite link to Norway and from Norway to the U.K. via undersea cable) {29}. I visited ARPA and BBN many times {30}, and also tried to persuade Bob Kahn (successor to Larry Roberts for the ARPANET) when he visited Tokyo. My efforts were in vain everywhere I visited. I later learned that the reason why it was extended to Norway was to detect the seismic wave of the underground nuclear testing in Soviet Union {31}. I also later learned that the reason why nobody was interested in extending it to Japan was due to the fact that Japan was an island and thus was not suitable to effectively detect the seismic wave of the underground explosion from Soviet Union -- I later found that there was a node of the ARPANET in Seoul, Korea, to which Japanese governmental research labs were connected via terrestrial line, and then to access ARPANET via satellite from Seoul. Japanese universities were also antimilitarism so that none of them were interested to do anything with the U.S. Defense Department.
After attending the 1972 SCSC in San Diego, California, I visited Bob Noel of the Political Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. A conference room had a wall-size world map with an American flag standing by. It was as if a situation room of a governmental agency. The adjacent room was a control room with a short-wave radio which could receive world news instantaneously. The room s wall adjacent to the conference room had a glass window from which they could video tape the activities of the conference. He was conducting a political gaming simulation on international affairs around ARPANET {32}, as assigning several schools for the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, Japan, China, etc. Students had to study about the assigned countries prior to their gaming started.
I asked him who was acting Japan. He said the University of Southern California. So, I said to him, "However hard Americans may study about Japan, they cannot think as Japanese, since they eat a stake with a knife and folks while Japanese eat noodles with chopsticks." So, I proposed him to invite the University of Tokyo to play a role of Japanese government. During my conversation with Bob Noel, I also proposed him that every participating game players should have their systems dynamics type computer simulation model to test and predict their proposed policies so that they could make quantitative discussions basing on reliable facts and figures {33}.
Jay Forrester of M.I.T. once said that the primary purpose of systems dynamics simulation is NOT for its prediction/forecasting, but for the clearer understanding of such interdependent relationship of social factors. I thought that this with scientific and rational analysis and critical thinking ought to be the basic principle of global education for peace (Millennium Institute) {34}.
This was the time when the original idea of Globally Collaborative Peace Gaming was born -- more later -- (Nikkei Shimbun, November 4, 1973), and my inquiries to Bob Noel were based on the words John McLeod once mentioned that the first step of simulation was to make simulation exercise as close to the simuland (i.e., the target to simulate) as possible {35}, since simulation projects often consume huge resources.
In the spring of 1973, I conducted the world-first global
"Peace Gaming" with Bob Noel with the use of e-mail
over computer networks. I invited the University of Tokyo and
he invited the University of Brussels and the University of London
in addition to several universities in the U.S. It was a "normative"
gaming as exchanging diplomatic e-mail messages without the use
of quantitative computer simulation models. American universities
sent their messages through ARPANET and overseas universities
through GEISCO. Students acted as if the heads of states and
cabinet members of assigned countries. All messages were accumulated
and re-distributed by a node at the University of California
in Santa Barbara. The scenario designed by Bob Noel assumed an
international crisis with a border incident between Iran and
Iraq -- which actually happened about 10 years later A few weeks later, a salesman of GEISCO came to my office
and asked to terminate this exciting global gaming upon instruction
of KDD. Another few weeks later, however, the same salesman of
GEISCO handed me an e-mail message from a Norwegian in Oslo (who
was one of the team members of the "Limit to Growth"
project at M.I.T.). The e-mail asked me the name and address
of the person who installed DYNAMO simulation language in the
GEISCO time-sharing service mainframe computer in Cleveland,
Ohio {37}. Upon my insistence, the salesman
explained that our gaming simulation had to be stopped due to
the Japanese telecommunications regulations, which strictly prohibited
the message exchange through a computer without changing its
contents -- more later, -- though such message exchange was performed
by the node at Bob Noel s office in Santa Barbara, California,
which was clearly outside of the Japanese judicial domain {38}. On the other hand, his e-mail from Norway
was permissible because it was transmitted by a salesman of GEISCO
in Oslo to him in Tokyo -- both were in the same organization.
I thought that this was patently unfair, and this triggered my
deregulation efforts on the use of e-mail {39}
-- more later.
In 1974, NSF indicated a grant (about $150,000) possibility
to our American counterparts (Oregon State University and Bettelle
Northwest Lab) and the Japanese Ministry of International Trade
and Industry (MITI) a grant (about $320,000) to the Japan Team
of GLOSAS/JAPAN Association at Mitsubishi Research Institute
for our conducting a U.S.-Japan Energy, Resources and Environment
(ERE) peace gaming with a joint simulation model in a host computer
of GEISCO in Cleveland, OH In 1973, I created GLOSAS/JAPAN (Dr. Schun-ichi Uchida, former
president of Tokyo Institute of Technology as its Chairman, Mr.
Jiro Yoshikuni, former vice minister of finance as its Vice Chairman,
and I as its Technical Director).
One day, I visited the headquarter of Chichibu Cement Company
in Tokyo and witnessed their videophone via microwave between
the headquarter and their plant which was located about 150 miles
north of Tokyo. The plant was in a remote area surrounded by
the mountains. It took almost 6 hours by train for their staffs
to visit it from Tokyo office. Albeit very expensive set-up,
this saved considerable time and money for their business.
On this visit, I found a transceiver on their roof top which
was about to be discarded. I asked them why. They replied that
its frequency had to be moved to other location, since the administration
of Advanced Technology Satellite-I (ATS-I) of NASA was about
to be transferred to the research laboratory of Nippon Telegraph
and Telecommunications (NTT) due to its wobbling by the depletion
of its fuel and hence drifted to the west of the Pacific area.
The frequency of ATS-I was the same as the one Chichibu was using.
I then arranged for their donation of the transceiver to the
University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, since they were
about to start their link with the Aloha project at the University
of Hawaii. They sent their instructional data to Hawaii via telex,
and received the computer output via ATS-I with the use of large
Yagi antenna.
I later visited Norman Abramson, who originated Aloha project
as adapting the packet-switching technology for wireless data
communications -- he was the inventer of wireless Internet. He
showed me his experimental setup which was regularly receiving
weather data from the top of Diamond Head of Oahu Island to his
office through clear line-of-sight. He later agreed to be one
of the advisors of my profit-oriented Global Information Services,
Inc. which was established in 1977 in New York.
Late Professor Juro Oizumi of Tohoku University (a renown
wireless telecommunications expert) was helping the people at
the University of Electro-Communications. He was surprised to
learn that Norman Abramson was experimenting the transmission
of data embedded into a voice communication channel -- which
is a norm nowadays (like computer-mediated multimedia system,
e.g., ShareVision -- more later). He told me that the Japanese
government which controlled monopolistic telecommunication industries
would never allow it even as an experiment, since their mind
was totally dominated with the concept of circuit-switching technology
-- more later.
Around that time also, Oizumi s group was also testing a very
interesting way of data telecommunications. They mounted a transceiver
and antenna on an automobile and investigated reflection of microwave
by buildings and city noises in Tokyo, albeit very slow speed
at that time {41}.
Telenet (which became GTE/Telenet and now Sprint) was established in 1976 by BBN with Larry Roberts (former BBN man and then Director of ARPANET) as its president, in order to commercially provide packet-switching data telecommunication services -- the so-called unregulated "enhanced services" or value added network (VAN). I immediately visited them in Washington, D.C. and started helping their overseas expansion and use of e-mail (then, Telemail, and later SprintMail). They confronted with a decision on either their overseas extension should be conducted by themselves or to rely on the already existing telex service providers, e.g., ITT World Communications, Western Union International (WUI) or RCA Global Communications (Globcom). I commended them to take the latter {42}.
Because of anticipated resistance by the Japanese telecommunication industries (e.g., the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), KDD and NTT), I promoted the awareness of Japanese on the new packet-switching technology with many publications in professional journals which resulted articles in major newspapers appealing to retrieve "treasures" of abundant information from the U.S. {43} (Nikkei Shimbun, November 27, 1978) (Asahi Shimbun, March 12, 1979) (Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun, March 22, 1979). I also helped American telex service providers to extend Telenet s service through their networks to Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, etc. {44}.
During this process, I visited the governor of Guam Island, since Guam is the hub of underseas telecommunications cables around the Pacific rim countries. I also visited British Telecom and Cable & Wireless (C&W) in London, since C&W controlled the telecommunications of Hong Kong. I thought that if Hong Kong would get Telenet, KDD would have to follow the suit since C&W in Hong Kong was a keen rival to KDD. In February of 1978, I attended the First Transnational Data Regulation Conference organized by European Parliament and held in Brussels, Belgium. I appealed the delegates from European telecommunication industries and governments for globalization of VANs.
However, I was shocked to find the articles in a major British computer industry journal to oppose my appeal (Computing Europe, February 16, 1978), especially in such a country as Britain where global governance of colonial commonwealth was once prominent -- another example of how difficult it is to change "mind" for new technology.
After Taiwan got the extension of Telenet, KDD finally decided to have it also. In response to the KDD s decision, American telex service providers submitted the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) their applications to extend their services to Japan.
The American telex service providers applications met with counter-petitions from GEISCO and CDC to block their extensions to Japan until Japan de-regulated their telecommunications policies. This was because GEISCO had serious difficulty to extend their services to Japan compared with the case when they extended their services to Hong Kong with Cable and Wireless of London. CDC s contention was this (Norris, William C., "Limiting Japan s Access to Our Research," The New York Times, July 24, 1983); Previously, IBM sold their time-sharing service in Cleveland, Ohio, to CDC due to their consent with the Justice Department, which service was then extended to Japan. CDC tried to provide their Cyber service in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Japan, also. Instead of having a direct leased line from Minneapolis to Tokyo, they wanted to connect their mainframe computer in Minneapolis with the time-sharing service computer in Cleveland, and use its leased line from Cleveland to Tokyo. This meant that the computer in Cleveland had to route data from Minneapolis without changing its content. This was an infringement of the Japanese telecommunication policy, though such routing was to be done outside the jurisdiction of Japan. I submitted a thick petition with many letters of support to the FCC for countering with GEISCO and CDC, with contention that Japanese were not totally ignorant, and if it was allowed, they would realize by themselves how their regulations were so ridiculous. A famous law firm in Washington, D.C. said on behalf of CDC (billions dollar revenue firm) that my favor to the American telex service providers was "patently unfair." The FCC finally announced their decision saying that they duly considered my contention for their decision {45} (Nikkei Shimbun, December 15, 1979).
In spite of the FCC s decision, KDD took several months to
adjust with their VENUS operation to inaugurate their International
Computer Access Service (ICAS) (Asahi Shimbun, July 16, 1980)
in September of 1980 (Nikkei Shimbun, July 31, 1980), until they
learned that Bundespost (Germany s monopolistic telecommunication
company) airshipped a router from the U.S. ICAS was an instantaneous
success drawing many crowds to its demo (Nikkei Shimbun, September
5, 1980) with ten times more than expected users (Nikkei Shimbun,
September 12, 1980) (Nikkei Shimbun, December 22, 1980).
However, when I read the user manual of ICAS, I found a fine
print saying that the exchange of a message by a computer without
changing its contents (e.g., e-mail, etc.) was prohibited. KDD
was also cunning enough to have deliberately used the word "processing"
instead of "changing" in its English version for overseas
users, as if it would have complied with ITU s CCITT recommendations.
According to this regulation, a Japanese user had to use bulky
and expensive telex to send his request for a full paper after
searching a desired paper by abstracts in a databank, to the
information service providers in the U.S. KDD affirmed this when
I inquired about it. This was obviously against my original intention
of extending the U.S. data telecommunications network to Japan,
for using e-mail for collaborative communications among peace
gaming players and for questions and answers (Q&A) between
instructors and students and among students of my planned Global
University System {46}.
After investigating the situations with the Japanese Ministry
of Post and Telecommunications, Diet members, NTT, KDD, and information
service providers in Japan in the spring of 1981, I reported
it at a meeting at the U.S. Commerce Department, which gathered
staffs from the White House, State Department, USTR, USTFC, FCC,
NTIA, USIA, etc. I urged them to pressure the Japanese government
for the de-regulations of their telecommunications policies,
particularly for the use of e-mail and computer conferencing
system. I also warned them that severe U.S.-Japan trade conflicts
would rise soon after the divesture of AT&T. In order to
secure my appeal to them, I submitted a thick petition with many
letters of support to the Commerce Department in August of 1981.
When Late Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldrige visited Japan
in October of 1981, he requested the de-regulation of the Japanese
telecommunications policy for the use of e-mail and computer
conferencing through U.S.-Japan public packet-switching lines,
as one of three non-tariff barriers (Chunichi Shimbun, October
31, 1981) -- this was the first of many subsequent U.S.-Japan
trade issues on the non-tariff barriers. The Japanese Ministry
of Posts and Telecommunications and KDD finally complied with
my request and started allowing the use of e-mail from April
1, 1982 (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1982, Letter of Notification)
{47}.
Around this time, KDD inaugurated their VENUS data telecommunications
service. I requested a U.S. Commerce Department officer to obtain
its user manual for me, since I could not trust their operation
from my previous experiences. I found the prohibition of e-mail
with VENUS in the user manual, even though its use was approved
via ICAS by the economic ministers committee. I had then again
to spend several more months for its de-regulation through another
agency of the Japanese government. Even after this de-regulation,
it was only for Japanese using American e-mail services but not
the other way around.
In April of 1984, the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications
made a major revamping of telecommunications policies. I sent
again many thick petitions to the U.S. and the Japanese governmental
agencies, AT&T, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, Honeywell, Telenet/Tymnet,
CSC, CDC, Lockheed, SDC and many other major industries, and
President Reagan, Commerce Secretary Baldrige, etc. I urged the
U.S. Trade Representatives (USTR) to pressure the Japanese government
{48}. Almost all of my requests on the complete
liberalization of data telecommunications and penetration of
American service companies to Japan {49} were
conveyed by the USTR and American Ambassador to the Japanese
government and finally approved.
The above efforts helped achieve a de-monopolization and liberalization
of the Japanese telecommunication industries, thus enabling various
private terrestrial and satellite communication service companies
to emerge. This easing of restrictions included a statutory provision
allowing the entry of foreign enterprises (particularly IBM s
network) into the Japanese telecommunication markets. This enabled
cost reductions of telecommunications -- down to one fifth to
one eighth of the previous cost in only one decade. The European
Economic Community (EEC), Latin American countries and others
have followed the suit (now 80 countries with Internet access
and 180 with e-mail access). Japanese initiatives were a model
for the world (Berger, Michael, 1987, "Newsmaker: Japan
s MPT chief seeks less regulation, endorses standards,"
Data Communication, January, Page 97 to 98) {50}.
The way has been paved for the global educational exchange with
experiential learning via various telecommunication media in
the service of better understanding of global issues.
Computer Science Research Network (CSNET) of the U.S. National
Science Foundation (a predecessor to Internet) was a general
purpose communication network capable of linking all computer
science research groups in universities, industry and government
in the United States. CSNET was a logical network spanning several
physical computer communication networks, including ARPANET,
public packet networks (e.g., TELENET and TYMNET), and PHONENET
(a telephone based message relay system). PHONENET used telephone
links to incorporate hosts not residing on any network into CSNET.
As new public networks were established, CSNET expanded to accommodate
hosts connected to them.
Gateways connected the component networks (Diagram of CSNET).
Adoption of a common addressing method and a uniform protocol
architecture enabled communication between any two CSNET hosts.
As the project developed, interprocess communication protocols
and additional capabilities were added. CSNET evolved by adopting
new technologies as it became available; it continued to offer
state-of-the-art computer communications services to the computer
science research community.
CSNET used existing facilities where they were available.
Some sites had ARPANET connections. Other sites gained access
through public packet network connections. Sites that could not
justify connection into a public packet network gained access
to CSNET via PHONENET. Individual researchers who could not gain
access by any of these methods could still use CSNET via a so-called
Public Host. Every computer science researcher therefore had
some access route to this complex.
Communication services provided initially included message
services, file transfer, and access to remote database and system
resources. Message service permitted rapid exchange of messages
or documents from one researcher to another. The impediments
to communication posed by differing work schedules, time zones,
delivery delays, and the higher cost of long distance telephone
were thereby avoided. File transfer permitted software packages
or data to be shipped along with the network from one computer
to another. For instance, design files for fabrication of integrated
circuits could be transported in this way. Remote database access
involved the reading and writing of data in files of other researchers
at remote locations. Thus, a variety of databases could be maintained
over the network such as software directories and technical papers.
The availability of these services amplified the effectiveness
of communication among computer scientists.
In 1981, I made an initial effort of extending this CSNET
to Japan as contacting echelons of Japanese government and Liberal
Democratic Party (Extension of CSNET to Japan). This project
was later undertaken by Professor Haruhisa Ishida of the University
of Tokyo (Ishida, H., 1991).
At the International Conference on Computer Communications
(ICCC) held in Washington, D.C. in October, 1972 (which was mentioned
above), I saw a demonstration of EMISARI computer conferencing
system. This was used at the Executive Office of the President
for Wage and Price Control program under Nixon administration.
I thought this would be the most suitable coordination media
among peace gaming players.
The successor of EMISARI was the Electronic Information Exchange
System (EIES) of the New Jersey Institute of Technology {51}.
After the de-regulation of e-mail in Japan, I started marketing
it to many secondary schools in Japan. However, it was a difficult
task because Japanese were usually shy to express themselves
in addition to their language problem with English.
Although this was only text-oriented message exchange system,
it was used for several pioneering distance education programs
with students from around the world. One of the interesting results
was that, if distance education was used, oriental students often
submitted twice much materials than American students, though
orientals were usually shy and not to raise questions at the
face-to-face classrooms. Same is said about female (Datamation,
April 1, 1994, "E-Mail Or E-Female?").
Equivalently excellent computer conferencing system around
that time was NOTEPAD made by Jack Vallee, which was used by
many industrial firms, non-profit organizations, and even by
NASA. When it was proliferated among NASA employees, its echelons
were bewildered with many messages they received everyday so
that they had to stop the use of e-mail. Right after this, Challenger
disaster occurred, since the message warning the deficiency of
O-ring in cold weather from an engineer of Thiokol could not
reach to the top of NASA just a few days prior to the disaster
{52}. The engineer was happened to be my junior
graduate from the Chemical Engineering Department of Montana
State University in Bozeman, Montana -- he received a medal from
the university later.
In January of 1985, I had an opportunity to receive a scholarship
to take the first distance learning seminar with the use of EIES
for six months, which was organized by Western Behavioral Science
Institute in La Jolla, California. The lecturers were prominent
scholars, such as Walter Roberts, founder of the National Center
for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, and the
former president of American Association for the Advancement
of Science, etc. Students were from industries and governmental
agencies. Prior to the distance learning seminar, they conducted
a face-to-face workshop and conference where lecturers presented
the outlines of their planned courses and students could learn
how to log on the EIES with their personal computer and a modem
at their office or home. Albeit only text-oriented messages,
discussions through EIES were very intensive and interesting
-- for two months for each lecturer. However, our discussions
were sparse during the session of the lecturer who missed the
face-to-face meeting in La Jolla.
This experience taught me how important and effective the
face-to-face meeting prior to the distance learning seminar is.
In other words, if we can have a good human contact with a face-to-face
meeting, we need not always have video of instructors during
distance learning -- more later.
In early 1970s, there was an international conference on computer
simulation in Tokyo. I met David Miller of Denelcor (mentioned
above) there and discussed the possibility of massively parallel
digital processor as replacing amplifiers of analog computer
with digital processors. He later developed Heterogeneous Element
Processor (HEP) with Max Gilliland, who developed the hybrid
computer at Beckman Instrument (mentioned above), for the U.S.
Army Ballistic Research Laboratories. This was the first commercially
available parallel digital computer with 50 digital processors
with "Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD)" stream
structure to achieve 500 million instructions per second {54}. I helped him to market it in Japan, but
in vain -- due to the difficulty of its programming, compared
with some successful installations in the U.K., Germany and other
European countries {55}.
In 1990, I also made an effort to de-regulate the Japanese
telecommunication policies for the use of receive-only antenna
to receive signals directly from INTELSAT satellites for educational
and nonprofit purposes.
Extending communications through a global network and sharing
ideas and educational opportunities with other locations is of
a paramount interest. The quality of education for those unable
to attend conventional universities in disadvantaged countries
could be greatly enhanced. Such distance educational service
can also become an exportable commodity to remedy American trade
deficits.
The INTELSAT system was originally established for satellite
telecommunications. Because of its monopolistic structure, downlinking
(including micro-waving from its signatories earth stations to
user sites) cost an amount that was prohibitive for any educational
use, in contrast to the fact that uplinking from the U.S. was
de-monopolized and became inexpensive. On the other hand, due
to the advent of the Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) antenna,
signals from INTELSAT had been eavesdropped (unofficially) at
various sites (in a similar way as a home TV set) for testing
and educational purposes in Japan. It was technically possible
to utilize INTELSAT satellites inexpensively for one-way broadcasting
of educational courses from the U.S., if the monopolistic regulation
was cleared. Once the Japanese policy was de-regulated on this
matter, other countries might have followed the suit, as was
the case for the use of e-mail and computer conferencing, etc.,
in Europe, East Asia, Australia, and Latin America, as mentioned
above.
This affordable trans-Pacific educational services would be
the basis of our planned Global/Pacific (electronic) University
(GPU) when other Pacific periphery countries followed the Japanese
lead, since the foot-print of the INTELSAT satellite could well
cover some of those areas, too. Private international satellites,
such as PAN-AM, ASIASAT, etc., would also provide us with a glut
of international satellite capacity to make the cost even cheaper
-- more suitable for the educational use.
Thanks to the letters of support from more than 50 universities
and organizations I received, the Japanese Ministry for Posts
and Telecommunications de-regulated this issue in 1994.
I have achieved so far a part of my life task with my considerable
time, efforts and private funds in the past two decades -- it
was certainly a long, lonely strenuous road {56},
since dealing with Japanese, particularly its government and
monopolistic telecommunication industries (e.g., KDD) was like
peeling the onion, as many American trade negotiators criticized!!
I was, however, fortunate to have the generous support and help
from the U.S. White House, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR),
the U.S. Department of Commerce (particularly the Late Secretary
Malcom Baldrige), the U.S. Federal Communications Commission,
American educational and industrial organizations, and the Japanese
Liberal Democratic Party (especially, Mr. Tadashi Kuranari, former
Minister of Foreign Affairs and one of my family friends), to
name but a few among many in the U.S., Japan and other countries.
As the result, the use of e-mail (the so-called PASOCON-TSUSHIN
(= personal computer telecommunication) in Japanese) became proliferated
in Japan as reforming a hierarchical structure of the Japanese
society to horizontal, achieving a goal of my effort (Nikkei
Shimbun, August 2, 1989 {57}). I was particularly
happy when I saw an article in Nikkei Shimbun a few years ago
which the results of a survey reported that almost 50% of Japanese
youngsters now do no longer want to have life-long employment
system.
A Japanese newspaper described that the inauguration of international
data telecommunication services (ICAS and VENUS of KDD) was the
"Third Opening of Japan," following the second of introducing
democracy by General Douglas MacArthur and the first by Commodore
Perry s black ship about 150 years ago.
In view of my effort of introducing the U.S. packet-switching
data telecommunication network to Japan, de-regulation and de-monopolization
of the Japanese telecommunication policies and industries, and
their consequential impact to the Japanese society, Rector Hironaka
of Hiroshima University (former dean of mathematics at Harvard
University and Field Award laureate) termed me as a revolutionist
as Ryuma Sakamoto, who initiated Meiji revolution about 130 years
ago (Tashiro, Ku, 1993) {58}.
I was also very happy to learn that 80 million people now
use e-mail worldwide (40 million in the U.S.) and 60% of Internet
usage for e-mailing. A colleague in Croatia said "GLOSAS
project is the Archimedes lever." {59}
"The GLOSAS Project is Dr. Utsumi s second social revolution!"
said a high ranking officer of the Japanese Ministry of International
Trade and Industry (MITI) in the summer of 1991, referring to
the fact that the deregulation significantly contributed to and
continued to exert influences on the change in the Japanese society
and industry.
Information and telecommunication are the very basic infrastructure
of economic development, as attested by the rapid rise of Japan
to the world economic power after the de-monopolization and liberalization
of the telecommunication policies and industries in early 1980s.
This also brought a transformation and upheaval of the Japanese
society from being feudalistic (vertical) to democratic (horizontal).
Yet, that was after her reformation of only hardware oriented
information infrastructure. Our projects now focus more on substance
and content of the information, i.e., knowledge and education.
This was the reason why the above comment was made by the MITI
officer.
In one evening, I had to call my mother in Japan, as regretting to miss courses. When I got through to her with a fading voice due to the reflection of short-waves on ionosphere, I said to her "Good Evening!" She replied to me "Good Morning." Although I knew the globe was round by head, I realized it by heart, and I found that some time slot of day was available for extending excellent American teachings to Japan for those unfortunate youngsters who could not come aboard to study in the U.S.
This finding, which had been lingering in back of my head ever since, further promoted my desire to extend American teachings to overseas when I later saw a lone student studying with a TV monitor (probably with a VCR player) in a large auditorium in the U.S. Navy's Post Graduate School in Moterey, California in early 1970s. This later became my motivation to create a Global University System with global electronic distance education -- more later.
Every time when I entered his office in late afternoon, I bowed to him as a Japanese traditional greeting. One day, he jumped up from his chair and shouted at me with an angry red face; "You shall never bow to me any longer!! I am not a god!! I am just a student before the truth of science as same as you are!!" I could not understand what he was saying for a while because of my poor English at that time. However, when I realized it, my whole body was shaken and my eyes were full of tears. This was because I was educated with Japanese militarism and feudalistic Confucianism to subserviently respect my superiors, elders and teachers. (A journalist of Asahi Shimbun, one of the largest newspapers in Japan, once said that Japan is the country of slavery.) I could not expect to hear such words from a revered professor in Japan.
This incident taught me American democratic spirit and entrepreneurship. Ever since, my subconscious desire was how to let my Japanese friends have the same experience. This was one of the reasons for the creation of the logo of our GLOSAS/USA. My acceptance speech for the Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education in the fall of 1994 described the meaning and reasons of the logo -- more later.
The GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A. (GLOSAS/USA) was established in 1988 as a New York publicly supported, non-profit, tax exempt (501(c)(3) and 509(a)(1)), educational service organization. Its membership is international and open to all. The objective is to promote the quality and availability of education and training through international course exchange by means of telecommunication and information technologies. It will also seek to provide in global scale all kinds of educational, cultural, information, knowledge, vocational and community activities, rather than being confined only to traditional educational offerings. One GLOSAS project is to create a Global (electronic) University (GU) System to facilitate communication between educators and learners regardless of their location, socio-cultural background or physical characteristics. GLOSAS attempts to provide cooperative, experiential learning opportunities on the widest possible scale and for the purpose of fostering peace and sustainable development.
On November 1, 1994, I had an honor of receiving the Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education from the University of the World. The Award is the most prestigious accolade in the field of distance education. Lord Perry established Open University in the U.K., which was emulated in many other countries. A distinguished group of prior recipients includes Professor Yash Pal of India, a theoretical physicist, former Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology and Laureate of Marconi International Fellowship Award; Dr. Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, of the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka, well known author and the first to suggest the possibility of using geosynchronous satellites for communications; and His Excellency Jose Chaves, Ambassador of Colombia to the United Nations. This award gives credibility to the fledgling academic field of global electronic distance education. It also encourages our colleagues who are now striving for its spread to every corner of the world with the use of various telecommunication media for betterment of mankind and world peace keeping in the 21st century.
Experience shows that the expertise necessary to participate in peace gaming does not yet exist in many parts of the world. The GLOSAS/Global University Project can help educate future participants and promote peace by educational course exchanges and joint research.
As combining this concept with packet-switching network, I coined a term "global neural computer network" in 1981 which was later used by Vice President Al Gore in his speech. Sun Microsystems now has its motto "Network is Computer."
Several systems will be interconnected via Internet to form a virtual computer, and the total system will act as one system with parallel processing of those subsystems in individual countries. Here each game player (more later about global peace gaming in distributed mode) with his/her submodel and database corresponds to a neuron, an Internet node to a synapsis and the Internet to the nerves of a global brain.
I also learned that this gun bombarded Hitachi-City (located about 150 miles north-east of Tokyo) in the spring of 1945, where Hitachi originated their business. This slow-time analog computer had to be used to aim the big guns on the Battleship Missouri. At that time, I was at my home in Ina-City, Nagano-Prefecture, which is about the center of Japan main island, northwest of Mt. Fuji and about 150 miles from Tokyo. We could hear the roaring of the gun bombardments. All family members were huddled together and trembled with scare throughout a night.
Professor Akira Onishi of Soka University in Japan (also the creator of FUJI socio-economic simulation model -- more later -- and Vice President of ISAGA/Japan) told me his horrible experience of witnessing heavy casualties (even those victims whose heads were blown away) in Hitachi-City, where he was at that time.
In the summer of 1972, I visited a scientist in Santa Barbara, California. He showed me his new digitalization equipment for music. He played a symphony by Beethoven and fed into ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network of the U.S. Defense Department, the predecessor of Internet), which started with only four institutions (*) in late 1960s to receive it with another mini-computer. I could not distinguish the one I heard directly with his LP record player from the one which went through ARPANET. This was probably because the ARPANET trunk line was not much congested with a few users at only sixty four universities at that time. We now often encounter with poor quality of Internet telephony, especially in international arena across oceans -- more later.
(*) The four institutions were the University of California in Los Angeles, the University of California in Santa Barbara, the University of Utah, and Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California.
We were prepared to die at guerilla war (which could have been much fierce than Vietnam war) -- we were trained by fanatic Japanese militarism to die only after killing, at least, one enemy, with a bamboo spear!! This was for the glory of Emperor, a living God of Japanese Shintoism, and his hiding cave after American s landing on Japan main island, was being constructed in a mountain near to our town. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and saved my life. (In spite of such fanatic training, I was skeptical if Japan could win the war, and studied secretly in a hiding place, mathematics, science and English, which was prohibited as the enemy s language.)
After hearing Emperor s declaration to end the World War II from a noisy radio on August 15, 1945, my father and I visited a friend who lived about 5 miles away in a rural mountain area. While walking through a forest, a dove descended on my shoulder. My father was scared and tried to drive it away with his straw hat and stick. The dove flew up but came back on my shoulder again and again, and finally left into the woods. Later, I learned that the dove is a symbol of peace when Raymond Roy designed the box of a Japanese cigarette named "Peace" with a dove. Recalling the incident with my father and Bible s words "Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God," I thought I had a mission to devote my life for the world peace-keeping with the use of advanced information and telecommunication technologies.
A few days later, my brother and I heard that Japanese army were disposing their materials. We hurried to a nearby Japanese army air base and found a big box in their warehouse. It was very heavy so that we thought it had to be very valuable. We loaded it on a cart and started running to our home. An army officer chased us as swinging his Japanese sword high over his head and shouted to us "That belongs to Emperor!!." We yelled back to him "War is over, what's the heck with Emperor!" He stopped chasing us with a sad face. It happened to be something of a short-wave transceiver with large vacuum tubes and transformers. We buried it in deep underground if an American GI might visit us to find it out. However, fiddling of it made me getting interested in electronics, e.g., transistor radio with a tiny stone, ear-phone and antenna across my small studying room a few years later.
While I was studying chemical engineering (which is on the design of petroleum refinery, petrochemical and chemical plants and cement factory, etc.) at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1949 to 1954, my interest in electronics grew to build super-heterodyne radios, high fidelity audio set, and even a TV receiver for which experimental broadcasting was just started by NHK (a quasi-government broadcasting corporation) in Tokyo. I often designed them with a copy-and-paste procedure, as taking one part of a set from one example circuit diagram and another part from another diagram. I visited many stores in Akiwabara in Tokyo, which became a mecca of electronics discount stores in the world. I could earn a small money as selling some of them I built -- I received even a job offer from some of those electronic shops. Incidentally, Sony was a small shop and they often visited our professors for technical consultations. TDK was established by our alumni. When I found miniature vacuum tubes in some of the shops in Akiwabara which were disposed by the U.S. Army camps, I was completely surprised with American s advanced electronic technology, since I was accustomed with large vacuum tubes of diode and triode. My desire to study abroad in the U.S. was then triggered.
One of the important things I learned with this hobby was that there was analogy between those distillation columns of refinery and vacuum tubes of electronic set. This analogy was later extended my interest in to the process control simulation of petrochemical plants with analog and digital computers. This was also extended to analogy and simulation of socio-economic simulation models after learning systems dynamics methodology from Professor Jay Forrester at Sloan School of Management of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in the summer of 1967. Although I did not take, I was offered a research job there which later became "Limit to Growth" of the Club of Rome.
Once I decided to study in America, I gave up all of my electronic hobby, and concentrated on learning English as immersing myself all day from morning to night. I woke up by American Army s radio broadcasting, went to English conversation school in day time, and took a tutorial lesson from an American missionary in evening -- sometimes as exchanging with my teaching Japanese to him. On several weekends, I took sandwiches and went to a movie theater where "Gone with the Wind" was being shown, after studying its scenario with a dictionary. It was a very long movie, but I stayed in the theater from morning to evening. Even after many viewings, I could not still get what a black woman shouting from a window to beautiful Vivian Lee with a heavy southerner s accent. Vivian s silhouette over a large red sun setting on the horizon at the end of the movie caught my heart. She became one of my idols ever since. This experience on immersing oneself to learn English was inherited in my pursue of creating global electronic distance education.
With my previous experience with analog computers, such graphical plotting was by nature. However, other colleagues who never had analog computer experiences clung with tables of rows and columns of numbers printed by digital computer. They insisted to have many digits by digital computer, even though 3, or at the best, 4 digits were mostly good enough in chemical fields due to crude measurement equipments. I learned how difficult it was to change "mind" for new technology, even among high-tech specialists on computer programming. When I went back to Japan in 1972, I was surprised to find that Japan Club of Rome led by a professor of the University of Tokyo used MIDAS to simulate world dynamics in three dimensional mode, i.e., with the use of a mathematical model which consisted of several partial differential equations. They were several years behind of the U.S. on the use of simulation languages, and their use of partial differential equations were mere mathematical play -- not simulation, since there is no continuous diffusion of socio-economic activities across national boundaries, except climatological consideration. Yet, a Japanese industrial group led by Koji Kobayashi, then CEO of NEC and a senior alumni of my Matsumoto junior college, spent millions of dollars to support their activities.
Such misleadings of the Japanese national policies and projects by the graduates of the University of Tokyo were common; e.g., (a) the designs of the world largest battleships, Musashi and Yamato, of Japanese Navy were led by Rector Hiraga of the university, which big guns were no use when aircraft was a major decisive factor -- they should had been converted to aircrafts, (b) Japanese Zero fighter pilots were surprised to find American and British fighters already waiting when they flew to Manila, Philippines or Singapore. They later found a strange electronic equipment in their air bases, and that was a radar with Yagi antenna invented by the president Hidetsugu Yagi of my alma mater, Tokyo Institute of Technology, which later became household use for TV reception throughout the world. A TV documentary told me that, since Japanese Navy did not have the radar, they lost Midway sea-battle which became a turning point of the World War II, i.e., Japanese lost their war because they did not use their own technology effectively, (c) now defunct NHK s analog oriented High Definition TV (HDTV) project with $3 to 5 billion dollar R&D funds, (d) the 5th Generation Computer project with $300 to 500 million dollars, (e) political and financial scandals of Japanese Ministry of Finance and prominent banks and security firms such as Sumitomo, Daiwa, Dai-ichi Kangin, Nomura, etc., etc. No body whistles a blow to them lest they should risk their lives -- in Japanese society, such whistle-blowers were often assassinated or murdered by mafia (yakuza) -- see "BlackMail" in Business Week, July 21, 1997, Page 42-43.
Similar incidents: When I attended the national conference of Fulbright Association in Washington, D.C. a few years ago, an elegant lady approached me and thanked me earnestly. I could not get why. She was expressing her sincere gratitude for the deed what Mr. Sugihara, Japanese Consulate General in Lithuania, did for Jews just prior to the World War II. He issued visa to thousands of Jews so that they could escape the holocaust of Nazi, via the Siberian railroad to Japan and then to Shanghai or Hong Kong. Since he did so against the instruction from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (which minister, Mr. Matsuoka, made a Japan-Germany pact with Hitler), he had hard time to find his living after he came back to Japan at the end of the war.
I told the lady of his aftermath, and said to her that I was also in the same situation, e.g., a black sheep among Japanese or even expelled from her society, after expended my efforts of extending U.S. data telecommunications networks to Japan and of de-regulating the Japanese telecommunications policies on the use of e-mail. The lady then said to me with a solemn face, "That s because you believed in the Absolute God!" I was shocked to hear that, because I did not tell her that I was educated to be a Christian by my mother who was educated by the father of Ambassador Reischauer at Tokyo Women's University and was one of the close disciples of Kanzo Uchimura, who was educated by Professor Clark from Amherst College and who originated the so-called "Mukyo-Kai = non-churchism" Christianity in Japan. After hearing her voice, Bible s words flashed my mind; "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled" and "Bless are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven." I felt that I might have lived to fulfill God's will.
Ever since, this has been continuing to this date, i.e., whenever I encounter with any difficulties on the use of newly purchased software, I often consult to its technical support by phone. This subsequently led to my conviction that electronic distance education requires well trained facilitators, as is the case of the successful operation of National Technological University. This will be the key factor for our Global University System to succeed -- more later.
According to The New York Times a few years ago, Kaiser of Germany sent a telex message to the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. as soon as the World War I started, saying that if Mexico would ally with Germany and if Germany would win the war, Mexico could have their old territories of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and a part of Texas. The telex was eavesdropped by British in London. However, British could not send it directly to President Wilson with fear of infringing privacy of telecommunication. British forged it as if it was found at the German Embassy in Mexico City, and submitted to President Wilson.
This incidence showed how important global telecommunication system is, especially for international affairs.
I then realized that computer simulation was at the cutting edge of science, engineering and technology, and I was very excited to help promoting it when I later created SCSC -- more later.
On the other hand, if education bases on understanding, it will foster trust among children. The situation will be for the so-called plus-sum game, i.e., the participating parties will collaboratively and collegially try to increase the size of a pie with peace gaming, which ultimate goal is to prevent war, thus reaching win-win cooperation.
When I was working on my Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Donald F. Othmer (*) at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in late 1950s, my Japanese employer, Asahi Chemical Industries, Ltd., ordered me to return to Japan. Dr. Othmer stopped me saying "Finish your Ph.D., then you can deal with the whole matter of Japan." (This was realized with my effort of introducing the U.S. packet-switching data telecommunication networks to Japan -- more later.)
After serving General Chairman of the SCSC in Boston in 1971, I thought it would be the time to return to Japan. I reported a job offer from MRI and bid a farewell to Dr. Othmer. He then said to me with a sad voice "Haven t you graduated from Japan yet?" As a metaphor, his suggestion in 1950s seemed me to encourage my climbing to the top of Mt. Fuji, the highest mountain in Japan, instead of Mt. Hoei which is located just below the summit of Mt. Fuji, and his words in 1972 were to direct me to climb Mt. Everest, the highest mountain on the world.
Our GLOSAS projects (e.g., establishments of Globally Collaborative Environmental Peace Gaming and Global University System, etc. -- more later) may correspond to the climbing up Mr. Everest. They are formidable, but challenging tasks -- Professor Clarke of Amherst left his famous words at his farewell, to students (including Kanzo Uchimura) of the University of Hokkaido, "Boys, Be Ambitious!!" They may last millennium as many of universities in Europe (e.g., Coimbra University in Portugal, etc.).
These incidents obviously changed my life course, and I have been grateful to those great educators for their guidances -- they taught me wisdom more than knowledge.
(*) Dr. Othmer was the world renowned educator, chemical technologist and philanthropist. While at Eastman Kodak, he invented a process which can concentrate acetic acid (vinegar) and it was the inevitable necessity to produce Celluloid for photographic film. Kirk/Othmer Encyclopedia (more than 10 volumes) can be found at libraries of almost any chemical firms. He hold more than 100 patents, and gave away tens of millions dollars to hospitals, libraries and churches.
Right after the war, he was one of the team members who investigated the status of Japanese chemical industry during the war. He was surprised to find that Japanese produced aviation gasoline in North Korea out of rocks with abundant hydroelectric power from a newly constructed dam on a river between North Korea and China (then, Manchuria) (i.e., from calcium carbonate to acetylene and to butanol by isomerization, the so-called Reppe (Czechoslovakian chemist) Process), compared with German s production from coal (i.e., by reaction of carbon monoxide with hydrogen by Fisher-Tropsh Process). He then became fond of Japan and made many trips there.
This incident showed how Japanese employment system was more like paternalistic, a family style with life employment system. The system with vertical hierarchical command and control structure helped Japan making economic stride during the age of manufacturing in 1980s. However, because of this structure, Japan is now having difficulties to transcend to the age of information/knowledge. Only hope would be Japan s conversion from vertical, to horizontal, and even to inverse-vertical hierarchical social structure -- see my acceptance speech of Lord Perry Award in later chapter. This transformation, the so-called "Open Society" by George Soros, is now gradually happening among young Japanese as shown with their detestation of life-long employment system, which was brought thanks to the proliferation of e-mail use for which realization I made a considerable time and effort -- more later. In a sense, Renaissance, which happened in Italy in 14th century, is now finally happening in Japan.
We therefore need here to include "normative gaming" approach with the use of negotiation techniques by participating game-players of various countries whose traditions and cultures are different from one another, to exercise conflict resolution, and hence the collaborative environmental peace gaming. Namely, quantitative simulation approach basing on facts and figures should be complemented with qualitative, normative gaming. Gaming players dealing global issues from their own locations will utilize all available telecommunication media for communicating with their counterparts. This is why we need distributed collaborating global simulation models -- more later.
Because of the limitation of our human knowledge, we will try to rely on expertise of participating regions and sectors for their database and simulation model building, which database and submodels will then be tied together through global neural computer network (i.e, Internet) to have the connected whole act as a single system. However, technical know-how of building such databases and simulation models should not be left within the domain of professionals, but we should foster such capabilities among youngsters, say, in upper level of high school and university/college. By this do-it-yourself (or experiential) approach, they will gain insight of complex, interwoven interrelationship of various social factors, with critical thinking and rational analysis. -- this is one of my motivations why we are now pursuing on our "Secondary School Teacher Training Program (SSTTP)" project -- more later.
Therefore, the construction of this "cause-and-effect" diagram is the most basic approach for understanding interwoven inter-relationship of various socio-economic-environmental factors -- an officer of the U.S. governmental agency once told me that its use among them was common. This understanding with rational analysis and critical thinking, I believe, is now the vital necessity for world peace keeping.
I then mentioned him of my conversation with Bob Noel and our global gaming with the use of ARPANET and GEISCO. They later established a global affair study center at the university and introduced the use of e-mail -- almost 20 years later than our global gaming. (*) Late Buckminster Fuller was the Genius in Residence of the University City Science Center in Philadelphia (which is now the home base of our GLOSAS/USA) in 1960s.
I was very happy when I learned that the World Game Institute
recently started using Internet and web for their World Game
with Bucky s Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map (Wallace, David J.,
"World Game Achieves Inventor s Vision of Global Play,"
The New York Times, October 3, 1997, Professor Leopoldo Schapira of University of Cordoba in Argentina,
then performed similar gaming simulation on drug trafficking
with his colleagues around Latin American countries. One of its
participants was Professor Jose Brenes at the University of Costa
Rica, who participated in our GLH in October, 1995 -- see his
contributing paper later.
The other similar follow-up is Project IDEALS (International
Dimension in Education via Active Learning and Simulation) at
the University of Alabama which is a computer-assisted learning
environment based on multi-site, semester-long, socially-interactive
simulations.
These projects are (a) to develop competence and confidence
in communicating with people from other cultures, and so help
create international friendships, (b) to give students greater
knowledge and understanding of international events and issues
and to provide a context for interdisciplinary studies, (c) to
enhance professional skills in such areas as team work, decision
making, problem solving, leadership and negotiation, and to develop
computer literacy, clear writing and critical thinking.
This was because I advocated the use of data telecommunication
in simulation field as conducting a panel discussion session
on the "Gaming-Simulation with Computer Communication Network"
for distributed computer simulation system at the 1973 SCSC in
Montreal, Canada, and also presenting a paper of "Joint
USA/Japan Project on GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation (GLOSAS)
of Energy, Resources and Environmental (ERE) Systems" at
the 1974 SCSC in Houston, TX.
However, I was surprised to learn of a critic against our
GLOSAS project by a scientist of the Club of Rome in the U.K.
saying "What good would be the data telecommunication for
simulation?" This was another example how difficult to make
"mind change" even among those scientists who were
supposed to foresee the future of the world.
One of my major motivations to extend Telenet to overseas
countries, particularly to Japan, was to provide Japanese with
their access to those information, rather than they were to be
confined with the limited services available only from GEISCO
host computer in Cleveland, Ohio -- i.e., more freedom of choice
to users.
This meant severe business competition to GEISCO, as evidenced
with their petitions submitted to the U.S. FCC which opposed
the extension of Telenet to Hong Kong by Cable & Wireless, and
later to Japan by the U.S. telex service providers.
This is the basic tenant of conventional telephone industry.
This is also because inherent interference of conversations by
analog telephone technology need to be minimized. Advent of packet-switching,
digitization of analog (or audio/voice) current, and data compression
technologies completely changed this picture for telephone industry.
I learned that almost 75% of our telephone conversation is empty,
if the conversation is effectively compressed, though such empty
gap between words is necessary for clear understanding of our
conversation. It is said that telephone companies nowadays effectively
compress our telephone conversations and mingle with other parties
conversations during their transmission through high-speed trunk
lines, thus cost effective use of valuable and expensive trunk
line -- and possible cost reduction to users by the "shared"
use of the line.
Therefore, it would be a false perception if we consider that
the entire circuit between point-to-point is always exclusively
reserved for the use of the parties at the both ends. This notion
and the similar use of Internet telephony technology will lead
to the complete revamping of telephone charge from per minute
usage to per kilo-byte usage, which can bring a drastic cost
reduction in the near future. This will revolutionize telecommunication
industry, as I did with the de-regulation of the Japanese telecommunication
policies for the use of e-mail. This is why of my motivation
to promote Internet telephony.
"Sharing" concept will also be extended to the sharing
of information and knowledge with our Global University System
project -- Japanese words say that "Ultimate pleasure is
to share your happiness and acquiring knowledge is a joy."
Not only Japanese Ministry of Post and Telecommunications
but also telecommunication industries could not switch their
"mind" easily from analog to digital and from circuit-switching
to packet-switching -- even International Telecommunications
Union (ITU), a technical agency of the United Nations, did not
include Internet until recently This regulation was also due to the Japanese government s
intention that such message exchange should be done by the government
controlled monopolistic telecommunication industries, since e-mail
could threaten their businesses, particularly of KDD, which had
almost 60% of revenues out of telex.
Most of the telex users in Japan were large trading firms
which had many leased telex lines to overseas countries around
the world, as paying tens millions of dollars to KDD. I was very
glad when I read an article in a Japanese newspaper a few years
ago that those trading firms finally terminated telex completely,
since their communications were advanced with fax and e-mail
at much less costs than telex.
However, even though MITI wanted to express their view to
U.S. government, all of their messages had to be sent through
the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This subsequently leaked
out the messages to the MPT. So, MITI wanted to have a channel
which could convey their messages to the U.S. government without
going through normal governmental channel. This was why I was
their consultant.
"The first reaction to a new idea is usually, That s
crazy," says Alan Huang, a computer scientist. "The
next is That s impossible, then, That s impractical. Followed
by, It s not that significant. The last is, I had that idea before.
" -- quoted from Markoff, J. and T. Race, "Wizards,
Wonders And Wonks," The New York Times Magazine, September
28, 1997, Page 71.
At the 1975 SCSC in Chicago, a scientist presented his computer
simulation of an airplane design with ILIAC-IV (4 parallel digital
processors) eliminating wind tunnel experiment. This might be
the beginning of all simulation approach for complex engineering
projects.
This HEP was the start of the so-called massively parallel
processing machine such as Thinking machine, etc. JANUS, the
current world fastest supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories
in Albuquerque, NM, has 9,072 Pentium Pro processors with teraflop
speed.
Scientists are now predicting to have a petaflop machine which
can perform one quadrillion (a thousand trillion) operations
a second by 2010 [Johnson, George, 1997, "Giant Computer
Virtually Conquers Space and Time," The New York Times,
September 2, 1997].
(*) They showed their interest in HEP, so that Denelcor provided
them with ample information. A few years later, they declined
to purchase it, and some years later they developed similar products
to compete American products.
This is because their culture (which is based on their religion)
is idolatry -- not giving any values to "in-tangibleness,"
"in-visibleness" -- more later.
A snag here is that, by the time when Japanese thought that
they have caught up with American technological front, American's
technology has already moved to the next higher level. Japanese
are always the "second best." Examples are Japanese
world-largest battleships, Musashi and Yamato, NHK s HDTV project,
etc., as mentioned before. Even the race of the developing mainframe
supercomputers has already been peaked out in the U.S. and American's
interest is now how to link them with broad-band Internet for
distributed computer simulation for the study of, say, global
climatology, etc., as having those interlinked supercomputers
work as a single system. This was what I have advocated since
a quarter century ago.
Hundreds of Japanese has recently sent angry e-mail messages
to their Japanese Prime Minister to bring down his cabinet member
for his misconduct "Being a visionary is not the same thing as being popular.
Odds are, if you re a visionary, most of your years have been
a struggle to get others to see what is so apparent to you. This
requires arguing people out of long-held beliefs, absorbing countless
verbal assaults and clinging to your judgement while friends
wonder when you ll start explaining your position to your dog.
Yet with every passing day, you grow more certain that you re
right." -- quoted from Ramo, Joshua Cooper, "How AOL
Lost the Battles but Won the War," Time, September
22, 1997.
Utsumi, T. and A. Garzon, 1991, "Global University for Global Peace Gaming," Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference of the International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA), Kyoto, Japan, 15-19 July, 1991, Pages 112 to 120, Springer-Verlag
Utsumi, T. and E. A. Eschbach, 1974, "Joint USA/Japan Project on Global Systems Analysis and Simulation (GLOSAS) of Energy, Resources and Environmental (ERE) Systems," Proceedings of 1974 SCSC, Houston, TX, July, 1974, Pages 343-353.
Note: This is the so-called "cause-and-effect" diagram which is to be drawn as the first step of systems dynamics simulation study. Some of connecting lines may be designated with ( - ) sign for negative feedback, and the others with ( + ) sign for positive feedback. The former dumps the effect of system change and the latter accelerates it. After these preliminary studies, a mathematical model of the systems dynamics simulation can be constructed.
Therefore, the construction of this "cause-and-effect" is the most basic approach for understanding interwoven inter-relationship of various socio-economic-environmental factors. This understanding, as expanding it in global scale, is now the vital necessity for world peace keeping.
Originally posted at the Website: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/GN/ by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated April 9, 1998. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.