Welcoming Mr. Akira Tsuchiya and Mr. Daisuke Kotegawa to My Keio SFC Class

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I assume that you are aware that I have a class at the Keio SFC campus  (Ref.1, 2) during the autumn semester of 2010. 

Mr. Akira Tsuchiya is a graduate of Keio SFC.  He also studied at the graduate schools at Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown, has been working for several years at the administrative offices of the World Economic Forum (popular as the Davos meeting), in Geneve and Japan.  I have known him for almost 10 years. We’ve worked together on various occasions.  Unfortunately, I was unable to attend his lecture due to my trip to Doha, but later, he kindly let me know how it went.  The lecture was well received by the students, too.  I assumed this since Mr. Tsuchiya is their senior. He works at a global institution and he talked about his experience first hand.  I would have liked you to see his lecture on video but unfortunately it is only for access within campus because many of the Powerpoint slides used were not intended for public viewing.

The lecturer of the week after was Mr. Daisuke Kotegawa. He is a top-scale, unique, international leader. He is the current Director at IMF, recently having returned from Washington DC, and resigning from the ministry of finance. (I searched and hit many sites on him in Google, but could not find the link just right to introduce to you…) It is hard to find a person like him these days.  One might call him a kokushi, a Japanese term for a patriot who devote one’s life for the good of the nation.  On a side note, he is competent in many languages, and is currently learning Chinese from a private tutor.  I think he is polishing his skills.

The lecture by Mr. Kotegawa was on international finance and was given in English.  He talked about the bubble bursting in Japan 20 years ago, the fail of Lehman in 2008, lessons to be learned from these events, future perspective of Japan and the world, and so on.  It was truly a top-scale talk, just like him.  What he said had a huge impact and a sense of reality because everything was based on his actual experience. He was one of the people in charge of these problems at the ministry of finance at the time the bubble burst, and he was at IMF at the time of Lehman issue in 2008.

It was a good learning for me, too, since I am also one of the many outsiders, just like the students.  Thank you very, very much to these two invited speakers.