If you had many millions to spend to help future generations - to make life easier for people who will be born even a thousand years from now - how would you spend it? In November '94 I spent a week pondering this question at a lavish conference in Kyoto, Japan. This 'First Global Future Generations Kyoto Forum' was laid on for academics and activists around the world by the multi-millionaire Mr Katsuhiko Yazaki, who made his millions building up a mail order business called Felissimo.
As General Secretary of the Council for Posterity, a London-based educational charity which tries to act in an advisory role for the interests of future generations, I felt extremely hypocritical accepting his invitation: adding to the ozone problem by jetting people from around the world to a conference that probably cost well over a quarter of a million pounds would no doubt make future generations turn in their eggs and sperm.
Mr Yazaki, however, is a charming and genuine idealist, a handsome, long-haired, red faced, middle aged man of enormous dynamism and charisma and who seems entirely honourable. He was converted to a concern for future generations by a spiritual experience he underwent whilst meditating at a Zen temple. As described in his book Path to Liang Zhi [inner spirit] - Seeking an Eternal Philosophy which was given to all participants), on his third day of Zen meditation 'my whole body reacted to the sound of rain outside the temple, as if I were inside the downpour, my body started to give off heat and my sweat to absorb the rain ... I hadn't realised before that it was possible to have such a wonderfully direct experience of my body.' On the fifth day, his Zen master suggested that 'it's about time you went outside, isn't it'. Mr Yazaki borrowed his master's wooden sandals and gently stepped down into the garden. 'At the moment when I realised that the heavy pressure in my body was coming from the earth itself, I became aware of my whole body and soul standing on the earth. I was moved from the bottom of my soul, I couldn't help but wonder why I had been blind to the magnificence of this feeling until now. Compared to the world I saw in the Zen temple garden, it was as if the world I'd been seeing previously had been viewed through a clouded glass.'
Mr Yazaki gave all the overseas conference participants a replica of the blue Zen tunic he had worn when he became enlightened and also the wooden sandals - although the latter were several sizes too small for most of the Westerners attending. He also treated me and other selected delegates on two occasions to multi-course feasts with saké at the most expensive restaurant in Kyoto, where the set meal cost over £500 a head. I asked him there whether his Zen experience had faded for him over the years. No, he replied, it was still with him in all its force. Indeed his Zen master, Mr Kido Inoue, is now an integral part of Mr Yazaki's new operation, the Future Generations Alliance Foundation. Mr Yazaki devotes all his considerable energies to this, having left his brother in charge of the Felissimo company (although he remains the chairman). He has an elite and dedicated band of staff working for him, no doubt recruited from Felissimo. Just how elite the staff must be was illuminated for me by a young Japanese woman I spoke with. She was still at university but said that she had been accepted by Felissimo for next spring, one of the 20 who had succeeded out of 20,000 applicants. Staff dedication was demonstrated by one young woman who held up a huge poster for us to view for about ten minutes, whilst its virtues were described by the designer. I suggested to Mr Yazaki that she might be allowed to put her arms down. He heard or pretended to hear that she wasn't holding the poster up enough, and shouted an order for her to raise the poster higher. She complied and refused all subsequent offers of relief.
The path from millionaire to Zen initiate is not always a smooth one. In his book, Mr Yazaki lauds a shift away from consumption: 'We cannot find true meaning in life,' he writes 'by occupying spacious residences. At some point people will need to raise their desires to a higher level.' At some point poor Mr Yazaki may feel obliged to rid himself of his weekend-cottage-equivalent, his 250-bed castle and swimming pool near Dijon in France.
He is involved in a worthy programme in China to subsidise poor students through school, helping those who do not receive the Chinese government subsidy of £2 per student. Thus the cost of the conference alone, not to mention his French castle, could have put over 100,000 Chinese students through school.
Such were the churlish thoughts that ran through my mind as I suffered the interminably boring first two days of the conference, as we were subjected to hour after hour of plenary sessions with podium speakers mouthing platitudes.
At the first opportunity I told Mr Yazaki my brainwave. I confessed that I had been wondering how I would spend money if I were in his shoes, and that I'd had my own mini-enlightenment - I would set up a Future Generations Awards Scheme, asking for imaginative ideas from around the world. The announcement would simply say: 'Tell us the best way to spend money to help future generations, and the money is yours'. Nor (unlike the typical Japanese foundation) should it require the filling in of page after page of application forms - people would just send in their ideas on one sheet of paper.
Entries could be sifted by regional helpers around the world, with more details requested where required, resulting in many awards in many different regions, some awards for large sums, some purely honorary and some receiving organisational assistance and back-up from Mr Yazaki's foundation. All awards money would, of course, have to be spent on carrying out the ideas suggested by the winners, rather than for personal enrichment. Nevertheless, the scheme would have all the thrill of a lottery - and would stimulate imaginative thinking worldwide, for everyone loves to think how they would spend millions. A small entrance fee could be charged, at least in Western countries, as in a lottery, so that the awards could become more or less self-financing, and thus able to be repeated on a regular basis. Yes, the more I thought about it, the more excited by the idea I became. But Mr Yazaki's reaction was more forthrightly negative than I thought was customary among Japanese people - I heard later that his organisation may have in mind to set up a prestigious Nobel Prize type award for a future generations hero figure. But the utility of such an award - Nobel Prize winners being normally past their peak by the time they are honoured - is open to considerable doubt.
My other principal idea was that the foundation could pump money and resources into a run-down island such as Gomera in the Canaries, in order to create a sort of alternative Disneyland, a model exhibition centre for how the future could be, at its sustainable best. Such an idea should appeal to Mr Yazaki, I thought, as he had shown us a compelling video that a company had made for his foundation, with aerial views of a Japanese island off the coast that had been left abandoned and devastated after a mere 80 years of coal mining. This the video had gone on to contrast with the Ise Jingu Shinto shrines, where for generations the priests have tended their own cypress forest to provide timber for two alternative temple sites, one occupied and one made ready for the replacement temple - with a new temple built every 20 years by the craftsmen who were young apprentices during the previous round. This rebuilding programme has continued uninterruptedly for 1,200 years to date.
This was my first trip to Japan and I was shocked by the environmental disaster that the Western coast of Japan has become. Some speak figuratively of the planet needing to breathe through its soil; if so, it must feel entirely suffocated here by asphalt and buildings (built higgledy-piggledy in the worst Western styles, and with no signs of planning controls) for all the 50 miles inland from Osaka's Kansai airport to Kyoto. Even in Kyoto, the old capital city, there are only a few patches of greenery left up in the hills above the town, and here thousands of Japanese tourists congregate to shuffle through the temples and gardens. On our conference coach tour round the sites, I wrote a number of instant poem postcards to friends, bemoaning modern Japan, so overpopulated that it seems to me like a nightmare preview of the future. At Kiyomizu Temple, for instance, I wrote:
The future is despair
From the mountain of the gate
of the orange pagoda in the
East
we look down on the horrors of the
West
modern high rise Kyoto
filling every space in the valley
East meets West
East has retreated to the hills
The gate holds out against the Barbarians
The West was once a flood plain
May it be so again
At the conference, we spoke of our 'action plan' ideas for the future and I remembered a recent New Scientist item that told of a new aphrodisiac that was truly effective. My wish was to pour development money into the old Science Fiction dream of a lipstick which would be an aphrodisiac and contraceptive combined - surely the world urgently needs a way that would attract people to have fewer children. We humans have become something of a plague on the planet. It would be also be worthwhile to support and extend to other countries the State Dowry Project in Kenya, where a feasibility study has found that women would be willing to have fewer children if modestly rewarded financially for so doing.
My own main responsibility at the conference was to chair the final committee session on this very topic of 'Action Tasks for Future Generations'. My Japanese co-chair wanted more 10-minute set speeches by panel members, but I managed to persuade him to allow the experiment of a brainstorming session. Brainstorming has been around as a technique for over 30 years now, but it was apparently a novel experience for the Japanese participants, who seem accustomed to a more hierarchical mode of discourse. As an introduction, we gave all 80 people in the room one minute each to answer my 'lottery' question on how they would spend the millions of yen for future generations, if the choice were theirs.
I made a point of encouraging everyone to speak, even the lad looking after the TV cameraman's cables and the cameraman himself and the usherettes and the interpreters in their booths. And after the brainstorming, we then reported some of the best ideas back to the endless final plenary session. My favourite 'action plan', gathered not only from this session but from the conference papers and from previous work with the Council for Posterity, included:
- The idea of making a gift to future generations - although all we came up with was the idea of burying a capsule in Kyoto containing a Declaration of the Rights of Future Generations, a video of our brainstorming session and a summary of our plans, so that the future could evaluate our degree of success or failure.
- To establish a permanent 'Listserve' conference about future generations on Internet, along with news groups and working groups, leading possibly to an Internet Futures University, with students and teachers separated around the world, but connected electronically for the price of a local telephone call.
- Producing 30 second anti-consumer and pro-living-simply ads for TV.
- Allowing ethical and green companies to use the attractive Future Generations logo on their products, as long as they pledge an agreed percentage of their profits to relevant causes.
- Producing a TV series to be called Televisionaries, in which the panel, the audience and the viewers at home brainstorm a different social problem each week, again with prizes for the best ideas.
- Spreading the concept of Task groups, as run by Margarita de Antunano in Toronto, in which participants come together once a month, each pledging to carry out a task of benefit to future generations in the coming month, and reporting back on progress since the previous meeting.
- Setting up a Court of Generations to protect the rights of future generations, as designed by Dr Bruce Tonn for the USA, with representatives from all the States and with Supreme Court judges to resolve disputes.
- Appointing legal guardians not only for future generations of humans, but also for animals and for nature.
- Financing court cases where sample children (representing future generations) sue specific polluter companies.
- Celebrating a Future Generations day once a year - by analogy with the Orthodox Jewish Sabbath, this would be a day for avoiding consumption of energy and resources, a day for focusing on future generations.
- Helping companies to develop a group vision of a desirable world and to plan ways to work towards creating such a world.
- Expanding the Adopt-a-Planet scheme in which school classes adopt a locally vandalised or run-down area on a permanent basis, and use their imaginations to improve it, becoming 'Planetary Guardians' in the process.
- Training facilitators to run 'Future Workshops' in every part of the globe - workshops in which neighbourhood residents brainstorm how their areas could best be developed for the future, so that they end up with a positive alternative plan with which to confront unwanted redevelopers.
So, Mr Yazaki, all these would be good ways to spend your millions. No doubt you already have many such ideas in mind, but I was unable to find out what exactly, as I was told that all such future plans were 'secret' at this stage. Please do not take offence at my Western brashness and at my perhaps puritanically excessive response to your generosity - after all, what have you ever done for me but good? And at least you are trying to help save the world (one of the few honourable occupations at this stage in history) which is more than can be said for many of your fellow millionaires. But just as a Zen master might hit you with a stick as an aid to enlightenment, so may the suggestions in this piece help you on your chosen path. For as you say in your book, 'raising the level of one's ideology day-by-day' is a great challenge. Thank you for raising mine.
Nicholas Albery, The Council for Posterity, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 0181 208 2853; fax 0181 452 6434). Mr Yazaki may after all be coming round to the idea of awards as the latest brochure affirms that 'we are conducting projects that will encourage action in the interests of the needs of our future generations, through offering awards'.
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