# Being a Revolutionary

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2002-10-01T00:08:46Z


We had a joint dinner tonight with Enjin01, a group of cultural leaders that I co-founded and the Cultural Design Forum, where many of the people from Enjin01 had defected from. We talked about possibly merging the groups back again. There was a basic disagreement. The Cultural Design Forum wanted to continue to have big annual meetings and basically talk about stuff to the public. Enjin01 has seminars, but Saigusa-san explained that we are pro-actively trying to pushing reform forward.

I drove Saigusa-san home and I told him that it was time to be active, not just vocal. I remember I said something similar at dinner last night, but this is such a unique time in Japanese history... When I am in San Francisco, it is almost boring because they let you do anything you want. This horrible government, the pressure and the oppression give me a sense of purpose. It is almost exhillerating. It is the same feeling I have when I watch movies about revolutions. I am not an anarchist, but maybe I enjoy anarchy. There is such an opportunity to create value and impact history when stuff is so screwed up... I really think that good timing, the Internet and some organizational skills might wake up the Japanese people. This is possibly a once in a century opportunity to see an awakening of a country...

Or maybe I'm being too optimistic. Well, it is probably not a bad thing to be optimistic when everyone is running the other direction...





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#### Categories

Introspective