There is now a public uproar over rice, our country’s staple food. As the Japanese government could not efficiently handle the price of rice, which has curiously increased, even the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishers was replaced. And finally, the Minister ‘Shinjiro’ was born. It remains to be seen whether the ‘crazy rice price’ furore will now be resolved.

These flows remind me of something. That is, the time I visited the land of Shibushi in connection with ‘Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition’. It was in 2016, so already 9 years ago. I still vividly remember the excitement of finding a ‘monument of Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition’ in dense groves of trees.

Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition is the folklore that Emperor Jimmu, believed as the first emperor of Japan, went around Japan from Southwest to East while teaching rice farming or sometimes conquering the non-allegiance families. Since none of the historical materials has been found as texts to directly prove its ‘folklore’s’ historical evidence, this story has been seen as a ‘legend’.

Despite thinking of it as a premise, it is very interesting folklore that Emperor Jimmu and his party conquered ancient Japan not only by their power. To put it simply, the greatest method to lead society to allegiance was its ‘technology transfer’ of how to cultivate rice, which is stable to harvest in comparison.

Since then, it is the fact that Japan has become ‘the land of rice’, and it is well known among Japanese people that Japan is also called ‘Mizuho no Kuni’ (the land of vigorous rice plants).

And now, as stated above, the rice that forms the basis of our country, which is supposed to be the ‘land of rice’, has been shaking like a rock. At the same time, there is also a fact that shakes Japan. As discussed in the previous blog, amid the declining birthrate and ageing population, the various knowledge and experiences in Japan that had been amassed in the prosperity of the post-war period started to be in danger of disappearance while ‘Japanese Baby Boomers’ became advanced elderly. Quite so, it is not only in specific generations. In the first place, the successful experience of ‘Japanese miracle economic growth’ itself and losing its memory are the greatest problems. Nazism, which once swept through Weimar Republican Germany and Europe, is known to have favoured the term ‘biologische Loesung’ (biological problem-solving) in its attempts to genocide the Jewish population. It is such an atrocity expression, which cannot be tolerated in the modern viewpoint, but from the perspectives of the countries seeing Japan as an enemy, the memory in Japan as stated above, moreover, the demographically-based disappearance of success stories is truly a situation that should be derided as ‘biological problem-solving’. This is something we definitely have to act, definitely, I thought and believe that is not only me thinking of it.

Quite so, many people embrace the same spirit, and in this context, the application of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly ‘retrieval augmented generation (RAG)’ systems based on large-scale language models (LLMs), has become a popular topic of discussion. I will leave the question of ‘What is RAG?’ to the blog post written by the interns at our institute, but to put it very simply, RAG is a system that vectorises the language resources left behind by humans (text data; voice data can also be easily converted into text data by using AI to transcribe it), converts them into embedded representations, and stores them in a database. RAG is a system that refers to this and gives instructions to a large-scale language model (LLM) to provide the most appropriate answer to the input (question) by the questioner. Again, I would like to leave the details to a future blog written by our interns at our institute, but it is also true that these RAG systems are being built based on the linguistic resources that our senior generation has accumulated over the years, and attempts are being made all over the place to ‘inherit memories,’ so to speak.

However, as our institute, we believe that those attempts held all over Japan are not enough, to put it simply. It is because, for example, simply having an AI vendor build an RAG system with this intention would be like ‘we want to eat rice, so we ask an outsider to grow rice for us,’ and would not achieve the larger goal of transforming the social structure that accompanies rice cultivation and optimising and stabilising society. In other words, during the ‘Jinmu Eastern Expedition,’ Emperor Jimmu (Kamu-yamato-iware-biko) stayed in various places for several years himself, teaching rice cultivation on site and eventually the ordinary people who received his teachings began to grow rice and spread it throughout the country. Just like this, the establishment of the RAG system and the accompanying transmission of precious ‘memories’ in Japan after the war should be carried out, diffused and expanded not ‘from above’ but aggressively and autonomously at the ‘grassroots’ level. By this meaning, in the time of present=Reiwa, ‘Reiwa’s AI Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition’ is in need everywhere. By doing so, when the memory is eternally inherited to continuously ensure both stabilised and prosperity ‘successful experience’, Japan will finally lead the world, and the historical conversion = ‘Pax Japonica’ under the meaning of taking a role to open the next door will happen, I firmly believe.

This year (2025), our institute remarks the first year of ‘Reiwa’s AI Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition’ and starts to concretely act (nickname ‘Camphor Project’). We plan to start holding free seminars, especially for the Gold members in the membership service ‘Takeo Harada Gemeinschaft’ to DIY, in other words, ‘Do It Yourself’, and ‘RAG system’ at Tokyo and Osaka. This will initially be a trial seminar, but we will then gradually expand it to include more members and then open it to the general public. At the same time, we would like to work with interested local government officials to create a major wave of ‘regional revitalisation’ in the medium term. To that end, we are determined to ensure that the free seminar we will be holding this September is a huge success, and we are steadily making preparations.

On the other hand, this ‘Reiwa’s AI Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition’ at the same time should be the eternal movement that the next generation will carry on in Japan for the future. I have recently taken on various roles in academia and have been at the forefront of educating highly motivated students, but I am currently in the midst of training students in the nation’s capital, Tokyo, particularly those at the University of Tokyo and Gakushuin Women’s College, to take on the central role in this movement. In other words, while the students themselves are acquiring the latest AI technology and conducting educational activities at a field level, they are also working to get younger students involved one after another in the hopes of nurturing a major movement. Moreover, the power of the next generation does not reside only in Tokyo; after Tokyo, we would like to collaborate with and network with talented students in various parts of the country, such as in Hakata and even Hiroshima, where I have been fortunate enough to be appointed as a visiting professor, and provide them with education if necessary, turning this into a nationwide movement. In fact, they are currently quietly making preparations to make their next move, starting with Hakata, and they also hope to begin lobbying Hiroshima early next month (June).

‘Reiwa’s AI Jimmu’s Eastern Expedition’ is not a ‘revolution from the top’ at all. This is rather the ‘revolution for all by all’ and should be the thing to shake not only Japan but also the global society over generations. The warm summer is coming soon this year, we, IISIA, are striving to make the wind overcome the time of hardness now with the passion warmer than the summer. I will continue to report on this in the future. Stay tuned.

25 May 2025 Returned from Hiroshima, at my fabled residence in Tokyo.

Written by Takeo Harada, Founder/ CEO & Chairman/Global AI Strategist of IISIA