Nov 24, 20202 min
I first met Mr. Okamoto in his office at MIT's Center for International Studies, where he was a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in 2013. He said, "I'm disappointed with the fact that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was unable to retain talents like you."
“I'm a hawk on national security issues, but a dove on history issues,” he said in 2013.
One of the secrets to his drawing many people into close friendships with him seemed to be his excellent sense of humor that produced self-deprecating jokes. Despite his rich experience serving as national security advisor to Japanese prime ministers, he said he became a senior fellow at MIT in the hope that he might one day be admitted as an M.A. student to its security studies program. "The faculty just laughed at my plea for admission," he complained to me.
I think he had the conviction that justice, not power, would ultimately prevail in international relations because any interstate relations boiled down to human-to-human relations in his view. As an outside board member of Mitsubishi Materials Corp, Mr. Okamoto spearheaded the company's decision to issue landmark apologies to former POWs, who were brought to Japan and subjected to abject labor conditions at Mitsubishi mines and factories during the war. "We are not the only country that used forced labor during WWII, and many countries did with impunity, but that doesn't exempt us from apologizing," he said. He minced no words when it came to Imperial Japan's expansionism and wartime sins in the first half of the 20th century. Although I don't know exactly why he left the foreign ministry when he was still young, but his commitment to justice got me thinking that his sensitive soul full of empathy must have had a hard time in that work environment.
Over the last few years, he was writing a book about his efforts to maintain a good alliance relationship with the United States. I had a privilege to read and comment part of his manuscript. I sincerely hope that his research assistants will be able to publish it in a not-so-distant future.