Vision 2050 and the Role of Japan toward the Sustainable Society

An indispensable approach for realizing the sustainable society is to propose and discuss visions that indicate directions of our society and technological development. I have proposed Vision 2050 that suggests requirements for constructing the sustainable society in terms of energy and material circulation. Japan has confronted emerging issues, including the environmental contamination, shortage of energy resources, and shortage of final disposal sites, as a front-runner of the world and these issues are getting severer and severer especially in Asia. In this sense, Japan should work as a front-runner in EcoDesign area so that Asian countries can absorb various hints for solving these problems. And one of the key technologies is "structuring knowledge."