A LUNCH TO SAVE PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY

How often does one have a three and a half hour lunch with Diamond Head and Waikiki Beach in the background?  For me, this was a first.  As our photo was a bit dark, here are my luncheon companions.

Tomoyo Nonaka was mentioned in this blog site earlier this month as a fabulous keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Clean Energy Summit and Expo.  Click on her name for the details, but to summarize, she has been an NHK personality, CEO of Sanyo Electric, cheerleader for GAIA and potential leader of the Blue Revolution.  She serves as unofficial ambassador for Kumejima, where Japan has now operating THE ONLY power-producing ocean thermal energy conversion system.  She is passionately anti-nuclear, and presided over the main sessions at the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World in Yokohama last year.

Robert Toshio "Bob" Nakasone (left) founded the Hawaii Uchinanchu Business Group twenty years ago and was conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays.  At the East-West Center, he was Director of the Okinawa Special Project.  John Tasato (right) is president of the World Uchinanchu Business Hawaii, and spent most of his professional life in various Defense Department positions.

While the discussion was wide-ranging, we perhaps arrived at a possible strategy to Save Planet Earth and Humanity.  Not sure if Tomoyo actually agreed to this solution, but we thought she would be a splendid Prime Minister of Japan, as an important step to a more global challenge.  Her ultimate legacy could well be champion of the Blue Revolution, for she advocates a balanced green future, with the ocean as a key contributor.

We felt that there could be something special to the partnership between Okinawa and Hawaii, as we are both remote islands to our nation's capital, have just about exactly the same population with a military presence and tourism economy, but with the ocean around us as the key to our future.

Clearly, the Okinawa Prefectural Deep Sea Water Research Institute on Kume Island and the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority can lead the way, not only for our respective countries, but also the world.  The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), which began official teaching in 2012 with a budget of $154 million, could also play an important role.

Their president is Jonathan Dorfan (left) of Stanford, and the faculty is impressive.  This interdisciplinary (no departments, and separate from their Monbusho to provide independence) and international graduate school is focused on fairly esoteric branches of science to cultivate future Nobel Prize winners.  While admirable, we thought that a parallel realistic objective should be for OIST to also focus on real world problems, and an obvious locus of opportunity to take advantage of Okinawa's position in the Pacific Ocean and Japan's need to develop clean energy after Fukushima would be the Blue Revolution.

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