Latest news with #Fukuyama
08-07-2025
- General
Keeping the Sea Clean: Japanese Efforts to Recover Oil from Wartime Wrecks in Chuuk, Micronesia
The waters of the lagoon shift from deep blue through azure, with dazzlingly colored fish darting just below the surface and coral visible in the shallows. Chuuk, a member of the Federated States of Micronesia some 5,850 kilometers west of Hawaii, is surrounded by such pristine seas, but its waters are at risk of an environmental disaster should the corroding oil tanks in dozens of Japanese ships sunk during World War II finally split open. Kazunori Fukuyama, a member of the Tokyo-based Japan Mine Action Service team based on Chuuk, states that the JMAS aims is to remove as much oil as possible from the wrecks that still litter the floor of the lagoon before tragedy strikes. And as time and the elements are inevitably taking a toll on the ships more than eight decades after they were sunk by US carrier-borne aircraft in Operation Hailstone, it is increasingly a race against time, he says. An Environmental Time Bomb The fear is that should one of the rusting ships experience a catastrophic rupture of key internal structures, perhaps brought on by a powerful storm, millions of liters of fuel could be released into one of the largest lagoons in the world. The Kiyosumi Maru alone is believed to contain more than 60,000 liters of oil, says Fukuyama. Lying in just 30 meters of water off the northeast coast of the island of Fefen, this 8,614-ton passenger and cargo ship rests on its port side with a gaping torpedo hole in her forward section. 'Our three main activities are to recover oil from the wrecks, to monitor the ships to see if some appear to be close to collapsing, and to train Chuuk government employees so that they can continue this work if we withdraw in the future,' says Fukuyama. Funded through Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the project has pumped a total of 60,000 liters to the surface since 2017. The pace of the team's work is picking up, with 21,214 liters recovered since June last year—a significant improvement on the target of 12,000 liters for the full fiscal year, Fukuyama adds. The initial focus of the team's recovery work was the Shinkoku Maru , a 10,020-ton tanker that sank upright in nearly 40 meters of water north of the island of Parem. JMAS divers believed they had recovered all of the oil from the ship before moving on to their next target, but during a subsequent descent on the ship, another leak was identified. Fukuyama Kazunori, at right, helps unload recovered oil from a wreck. (Courtesy JMAS) 'The Shinkoku Maru should have no oil left on board, but there is still a leak somewhere, and nobody really knows exactly how much fuel is still left in each ship,' Fukuyama says. 'We are working with best estimates.' 'Doing as Much as We Can' JMAS divers—former members of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces—built the equipment that is being used to bring the oil to the surface, utilizing a diaphragm pump powered by compressed air from a dive cylinder. This is placed inside an oil tank, or directly into conglomerations of fuel that have built up in pockets in the upturned ships. Using an electric pump is out of the question, Fukuyama notes, due to the risk of causing an explosion. Back at the JMAS facility, the oil is transferred to larger barrels to await disposal. 'We are doing what we can right now with limited resources,' says Fukuyama, who served as a warrant officer in the Ground Self-Defense Force until his retirement at the age of 60. 'What we are doing will not resolve all the problems that exist here, because if they really want to recover all the oil, that will cost billions of yen and require much larger pumps and tanks,' he says. 'But we are doing as much as we can with what we have.' Time is of the essence, agree local experts, who warn that the state and a vast swath of the central Pacific are at growing risk of an environmental catastrophe should the oil tanks rupture in one or more of the vessels in the lagoon. Given the inevitability of the sunken ships continuing to degrade and break apart, the experts are warning that steps need to be taken immediately to avoid the worst-case scenario of more than 100 million liters of heavy fuel oil and diesel being spilled into the largely pristine waters of the lagoon. Staving Off a Regional Crisis 'The environmental impact of a major leak would be disastrous,' says Peter Aten, head of the historic preservation office of the Chuuk State Government. 'The first reported leak from one of the ships was in 2007, and since then we have been trying to monitor other leaks,' he says. 'We have asked the international community for help because this is a daunting task. 'This is a question of the livelihood of the people of Chuuk, as we depend so heavily on fish as food as well as the main source of income for the state,' he goes on. 'If the worst happens, then it will be a humanitarian disaster because the results of a major leak would be felt for years. It would take that long for fish stocks to recover.' It would not solely be a crisis for Chuuk, he adds, with major oil leaks inevitably impacting Pacific states as far away as Guam and Papua New Guinea. Chuuk historical preservation officer Peter Aten (left) and Chuuk Environmental Agency head Bradford Mori are deeply involved with oil recovery work and awareness campaigns. (© Julian Ryall) Aten's department is charged with identifying new leaks from the wrecks and helping to devise mitigation plans should a major leak occur, possibly as a result of a ship corroding to the point that oil escapes or after a major storm or powerful tides shift a vessel on the seabed. An added concern is that the fuel in the ships still in the lagoon is the heavy oil that was commonly used in the 1940s, rather than the refined, lighter fuels that are typically used today. Tests have shown that while some spills have washed up on nearby beaches, an estimated 50% sinks to the seabed—'like a blanket,' Aten says—where it coats coral and other marine life. An Eye on the Broader Ocean Bradford Mori is executive director of the Chuuk Environmental Agency, the focal point for building international support for the campaign to remove the oil, and he shares Aten's concerns. 'For us, this is a threat to the health and well-being of every community in the state,' he says. 'The people of Chuuk rely on the marine ecosystem for their food and livelihoods, and we have received messages of concern from some of the remote islands about the safety of the ships. We urgently need action to make sure they are safe.' One of the vessels that has been the focus of concern is the Hōyō Maru , an 8,691-ton tanker that was hit close to the bow by a torpedo, broke in two, and sank a few hundred meter off the northeast coast of Fefen island. Oil from the ship has washed ashore after strong storms and high waves, with local residents finding layers of oil as much as 7 centimeters deep on the shoreline in 2007. Fifteen ships have been identified as priority targets for efforts to pump oil out of their tanks or from barrels that were stored in their holds, Mori says. A diver sets up equipment to collect oil from a pocket inside a sunken ship. (Courtesy JMAS) 'These are the fifteen with the largest amount of fuel still on board, but it would be absolutely devastating if the storage tanks on several of these ruptured at the same time,' he stresses. 'We have a limited capacity to respond to that situation, and it would pose a major challenge,' he adds. Chuuk has been given some booms to be deployed in the event of a release and is hoping to receive more in the coming months. Needed: An International Response For the equipment it needs, Chuuk is in the hands of its international partners—primarily Japan, the United States, and Australia—although there is concern that the present administration in Washington may no longer be as financially supportive as previous governments as it seeks additional ways to reduce spending. On August 27, 2024, then US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and Kōmura Masahiro, Japan's vice-minister for foreign affairs, met on the margins of the fifty-third meeting of leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga and released a joint statement directly addressing the danger posed by the oil. In the statement, the US side congratulated Japan's efforts to date to remove oil from the ships, adding that the United States was looking forward 'to working further to explore the possibility of a joint collaboration.' The statement stressed: 'As President [Joe] Biden and Prime Minister Kishida [Fumio] announced during the prime minister's visit to Washington in April, the United States and Japan are celebrating a new era of strategic cooperation. These efforts are a testament to the benefit the US-Japan Alliance brings to the people in the Pacific and the world.' Under an agreement with the Americans, oil recovered from some of the wrecks is due to be shipped off Chuuk in the coming months before being treated and safely disposed of. Officials declined to comment, though, on whether they believe that agreement will remain in place over the longer term. The Australia-based Major Projects Foundation carried out an extensive study on the situation in the lagoon in February, and a report is due this year. Peter Aten says he hopes the results of that survey will 'help to convince the world to help us.' Aten agrees that the cost of the clean-up will be high—but insists that the cost of doing nothing will be far higher. 'Nobody seems to want to accept responsibility for doing the work,' he says. 'We understand that it will be costly and will take a long time, but someone has to take that responsibility. 'We hope that the world will help us because the local people did not ask for these ships to be sunk here or for the war to come here,' he states. 'This was literally dumped in our ocean, and the people here now depend on that ocean for their survival. We hope that the politics can be put to one side and that we can get help to do what must be done.' (Originally published in English. Banner photo: The stunning waters of Micronesia lie above wartime wrecks that threaten to pollute them unless more is done. © Julian Ryall.)
08-07-2025
- General
Keeping the Sea Clean: Japanese Efforts to Recover Oil from Wartime Wreck in Chuuk, Micronesia
The waters of the lagoon shift from deep blue through azure, with dazzlingly colored fish darting just below the surface and coral visible in the shallows. Chuuk, a member of the Federated States of Micronesia some 5,850 kilometers west of Hawaii, is surrounded by such pristine seas, but its waters are at risk of an environmental disaster should the corroding oil tanks in dozens of Japanese ships sunk during World War II finally split open. Kazunori Fukuyama, a member of the Tokyo-based Japan Mine Action Service team based on Chuuk, states that the JMAS aims is to remove as much oil as possible from the wrecks that still litter the floor of the lagoon before tragedy strikes. And as time and the elements are inevitably taking a toll on the ships more than eight decades after they were sunk by US carrier-borne aircraft in Operation Hailstone, it is increasingly a race against time, he says. An Environmental Time Bomb The fear is that should one of the rusting ships experience a catastrophic rupture of key internal structures, perhaps brought on by a powerful storm, millions of liters of fuel could be released into one of the largest lagoons in the world. The Kiyosumi Maru alone is believed to contain more than 60,000 liters of oil, says Fukuyama. Lying in just 30 meters of water off the northeast coast of the island of Fefen, this 8,614-ton passenger and cargo ship rests on its port side with a gaping torpedo hole in her forward section. 'Our three main activities are to recover oil from the wrecks, to monitor the ships to see if some appear to be close to collapsing, and to train Chuuk government employees so that they can continue this work if we withdraw in the future,' says Fukuyama. Funded through Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the project has pumped a total of 60,000 liters to the surface since 2017. The pace of the team's work is picking up, with 21,214 liters recovered since June last year—a significant improvement on the target of 12,000 liters for the full fiscal year, Fukuyama adds. The initial focus of the team's recovery work was the Shinkoku Maru , a 10,020-ton tanker that sank upright in nearly 40 meters of water north of the island of Parem. JMAS divers believed they had recovered all of the oil from the ship before moving on to their next target, but during a subsequent descent on the ship, another leak was identified. Fukuyama Kazunori, at right, helps unload recovered oil from a wreck. (Courtesy JMAS) 'The Shinkoku Maru should have no oil left on board, but there is still a leak somewhere, and nobody really knows exactly how much fuel is still left in each ship,' Fukuyama says. 'We are working with best estimates.' 'Doing as Much as We Can' JMAS divers—former members of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces—built the equipment that is being used to bring the oil to the surface, utilizing a diaphragm pump powered by compressed air from a dive cylinder. This is placed inside an oil tank, or directly into conglomerations of fuel that have built up in pockets in the upturned ships. Using an electric pump is out of the question, Fukuyama notes, due to the risk of causing an explosion. Back at the JMAS facility, the oil is transferred to larger barrels to await disposal. 'We are doing what we can right now with limited resources,' says Fukuyama, who served as a warrant officer in the Ground Self-Defense Force until his retirement at the age of 60. 'What we are doing will not resolve all the problems that exist here, because if they really want to recover all the oil, that will cost billions of yen and require much larger pumps and tanks,' he says. 'But we are doing as much as we can with what we have.' Time is of the essence, agree local experts, who warn that the state and a vast swath of the central Pacific are at growing risk of an environmental catastrophe should the oil tanks rupture in one or more of the vessels in the lagoon. Given the inevitability of the sunken ships continuing to degrade and break apart, the experts are warning that steps need to be taken immediately to avoid the worst-case scenario of more than 100 million liters of heavy fuel oil and diesel being spilled into the largely pristine waters of the lagoon. Staving Off a Regional Crisis 'The environmental impact of a major leak would be disastrous,' says Peter Aten, head of the historic preservation office of the Chuuk State Government. 'The first reported leak from one of the ships was in 2007, and since then we have been trying to monitor other leaks,' he says. 'We have asked the international community for help because this is a daunting task. 'This is a question of the livelihood of the people of Chuuk, as we depend so heavily on fish as food as well as the main source of income for the state,' he goes on. 'If the worst happens, then it will be a humanitarian disaster because the results of a major leak would be felt for years. It would take that long for fish stocks to recover.' It would not solely be a crisis for Chuuk, he adds, with major oil leaks inevitably impacting Pacific states as far away as Guam and Papua New Guinea. Chuuk historical preservation officer Peter Aten (left) and Chuuk Environmental Agency head Bradford Mori are deeply involved with oil recovery work and awareness campaigns. (© Julian Ryall) Aten's department is charged with identifying new leaks from the wrecks and helping to devise mitigation plans should a major leak occur, possibly as a result of a ship corroding to the point that oil escapes or after a major storm or powerful tides shift a vessel on the seabed. An added concern is that the fuel in the ships still in the lagoon is the heavy oil that was commonly used in the 1940s, rather than the refined, lighter fuels that are typically used today. Tests have shown that while some spills have washed up on nearby beaches, an estimated 50% sinks to the seabed—'like a blanket,' Aten says—where it coats coral and other marine life. An Eye on the Broader Ocean Bradford Mori is executive director of the Chuuk Environmental Agency, the focal point for building international support for the campaign to remove the oil, and he shares Aten's concerns. 'For us, this is a threat to the health and well-being of every community in the state,' he says. 'The people of Chuuk rely on the marine ecosystem for their food and livelihoods, and we have received messages of concern from some of the remote islands about the safety of the ships. We urgently need action to make sure they are safe.' One of the vessels that has been the focus of concern is the Hōyō Maru , an 8,691-ton tanker that was hit close to the bow by a torpedo, broke in two, and sank a few hundred meter off the northeast coast of Fefen island. Oil from the ship has washed ashore after strong storms and high waves, with local residents finding layers of oil as much as 7 centimeters deep on the shoreline in 2007. Fifteen ships have been identified as priority targets for efforts to pump oil out of their tanks or from barrels that were stored in their holds, Mori says. A diver sets up equipment to collect oil from a pocket inside a sunken ship. (Courtesy JMAS) 'These are the fifteen with the largest amount of fuel still on board, but it would be absolutely devastating if the storage tanks on several of these ruptured at the same time,' he stresses. 'We have a limited capacity to respond to that situation, and it would pose a major challenge,' he adds. Chuuk has been given some booms to be deployed in the event of a release and is hoping to receive more in the coming months. Needed: An International Response For the equipment it needs, Chuuk is in the hands of its international partners—primarily Japan, the United States, and Australia—although there is concern that the present administration in Washington may no longer be as financially supportive as previous governments as it seeks additional ways to reduce spending. On August 27, 2024, then US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and Kōmura Masahiro, Japan's vice-minister for foreign affairs, met on the margins of the fifty-third meeting of leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga and released a joint statement directly addressing the danger posed by the oil. In the statement, the US side congratulated Japan's efforts to date to remove oil from the ships, adding that the United States was looking forward 'to working further to explore the possibility of a joint collaboration.' The statement stressed: 'As President [Joe] Biden and Prime Minister Kishida [Fumio] announced during the prime minister's visit to Washington in April, the United States and Japan are celebrating a new era of strategic cooperation. These efforts are a testament to the benefit the US-Japan Alliance brings to the people in the Pacific and the world.' Under an agreement with the Americans, oil recovered from some of the wrecks is due to be shipped off Chuuk in the coming months before being treated and safely disposed of. Officials declined to comment, though, on whether they believe that agreement will remain in place over the longer term. The Australia-based Major Projects Foundation carried out an extensive study on the situation in the lagoon in February, and a report is due this year. Peter Aten says he hopes the results of that survey will 'help to convince the world to help us.' Aten agrees that the cost of the clean-up will be high—but insists that the cost of doing nothing will be far higher. 'Nobody seems to want to accept responsibility for doing the work,' he says. 'We understand that it will be costly and will take a long time, but someone has to take that responsibility. 'We hope that the world will help us because the local people did not ask for these ships to be sunk here or for the war to come here,' he states. 'This was literally dumped in our ocean, and the people here now depend on that ocean for their survival. We hope that the politics can be put to one side and that we can get help to do what must be done.' (Originally published in English. Banner photo: The stunning waters of Micronesia lie above wartime wrecks that threaten to pollute them unless more is done. © Julian Ryall.)
New Indian Express
03-07-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Out with the new order, in with the old
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, in his acclaimed book The End of History and The Last Man, argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the 'end point of mankind's ideological evolution' and that the liberal template would be the default world order. However, in 1996, Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he argued that the epoch of ideology had reached an inflection point, and thereafter, humankind would regress into an age delineated by cultural conflict all over again. Clashes would be along religious, ethnic and cultural lines. Both Fukuyama and Huntington were gazing into the crystal ball, trying to predict the ebb and flow of historical impulses in shaping the post-communist world order that had led to a unique situation of unipolarity in international affairs. On September 11, 2001, when semi-state actors put the only omnipresent hyper-power, the US, on notice by crashing passenger-filled jets into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, liberal democracy certainly had not emerged as the global choice. The events of 9/11 inaugurated a new chapter in global affairs, wherein 'war on terror' became the new buzz phrase. The events in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021 demonstrate that despite the US spending $2.3 trillion on the war, or almost $300 million a day, the country did not turn into a democratic haven for the Afghans. In fact, Afghanistan was a classical test case for the Fukuyama thesis, courtesy the direct involvement of the US for over 20 years. Neither was it a clash of civilisations—for, if that had been, the US would not have engaged with the same Taliban it ousted 20 years ago. The Doha Agreement of February 29, 2020 paved the way for the return of the Taliban. It was a classical case of raison d'état at play. The invasion of Libya in 2011 under the rubric of Right to Protect did not turn that country into a democracy. The impulse was to get rid of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's despotic regime, as the Iraq invasion in 2003 was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Likewise, after the collapse of communism in the 1990s, China did not become democratic, nor is its ominous rise a civilisational struggle with other cultures. It is again purely driven by what China perceives as its national interest—the Middle Kingdom's destined place in the natural order of things. Therefore, the affairs of people and nations are still governed by two fundamental precepts, both dating back to the 17th century. The first, raison d'état, and the second, the balance of power doctrine and alliance system. Technology and economics can be drivers, but are not determinants. The determinant is still state sovereignty. We are indeed back to the old order. This would, unfortunately, be the fundamental underpinning of the new world order in the decades ahead. Manish Tewari | Lawyer, third-term MP and former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting (Views are personal) (manishtewari01@
Tokyo Reported
15-06-2025
- Tokyo Reported
Osaka scouting group illegally referred women to soaplands
OSAKA (TR) – Law enforcement in Aichi and Kagawa prefectures have rearrested four men from Osaka City-based commercial sex scouting group Seed Advertising for illegally referring women to soapland bathhouses, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Apr. 16). Takeru Fukuyama, 27, is senior member of Seed Advertising. Police rearrested Fukuyama and three associates for introducing women to a soapland in Takamatsu City, Kagawa. Three other associates were arrested in this case for the first time. Police accused the seven suspects of violating the Employment Security Act regarding introductions for harmful business purposes. Seed Advertising formed in January 2022. From that time until this past March, the group made a total of at least 1.3 billion yen in profits from women's introduction fees and other sources, according to Aichi Prefectural Police. The group, which has up to 10 members, has conducted transactions with approximately 400 adult entertainment establishments in 46 prefectures and administrative districts. It is suspected that freelance scouts arranged for women they recruited on social-networking sites to be placed in adult entertainment establishments and received 15 percent of the women's sales as 'scout kickbacks.' The rearrest charges for Fukuyama and his associates allege that they introduced a woman in her early 20s to a soapland in Takamatsu City around June 11 last year. Fukuyama and his associates had been arrested twice before on suspicion of introducing other women in their 20s to soapland businesses in Kaga and Kofu cities, Ishikawa Prefecture.
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Deliberative democracy: Sounds boring — but it just might save us
For more than 30 years, Stanford political scientist James Fishkin has been exploring and demonstrating the capacity of small, representative "mini-publics" to make thoughtful meaningful political decisions. The results of those explorations, and their potential for the future, are presented in his new book,"Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?" When Fishkin began his work around the end of the Cold War, most people in academics and the general public still believed that democracy was working well. Francis Fukuyama's influential bestseller "The End of History and the Last Man" even argued that we had reached 'the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." There certainly were academic debates about democracy's flaws, both practical and theoretical, but Fishkin's interests seemed marginal to most of them. Things have changed dramatically since then. Partisan polarization and voter alienation are key symptoms of worldwide democratic backsliding. Those are symptoms of mass dissatisfaction with democracy's effects on people's everyday lives, and Fishkin's work speaks directly to ways we might remedy the situation, and combat the dramatic rise of corrosive disinformation. While Fishkin's book takes account of the major issues in political philosophy and political science that have been debated in recent decades, what's most compelling about it are his empirical results. Those results suggest that ordinary citizens, in small groups composed of representative samples, can make sound, fact-based decisions — at the same public-spirited level that James Madison sought to ensure in his design of the U.S. Constitution. Fishkin draws on the deliberative aspects of Madison's design, along with the Athenian model of democracy — which involved multiple deliberative bodies fulfilling different functions — as inspirational guideposts. But the model developed in his own work over the last 30 years, along with collaborators around the world, provides the strongest argument. He clarifies what it means for democratic government to reflect the will of the people, specifying four criteria: Inclusion on an equal basis, meaningful choice, consequential deliberation, and impact on policy. And he demonstrates, through a diverse range of examples, that properly designed deliberation can vindicate the promise of democracy, even at a moment when global faith in that promise seems to be fading to nothing. In my recent conversation with Fishkin, I focused mainly on his results rather than on the underlying academic arguments — which are addressed at length in his book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The title of your book poses a question: Can deliberation cure the ills of democracy? But that in itself raises questions. Here's the first one: What do you mean by deliberation? By deliberation, I mean when people weigh the trade-offs for competing reasons for collective action for policy proposals. When they actually consider arguments for and against and discuss them in a civil manner, in an evidence-based environment, with fellow citizens. The core idea of deliberation, even the root of the word, goes back to the idea of weighing. But we have found that only when people discuss in moderated forums with diverse others do they actually consider the competing arguments. If you tell them an argument that's different from the position they already have, it may backfire. But if you engage them in a discussion with other citizens in a civil, evidence-based environment, magical things happen. We have a particular design for this deliberation, which has now worked in 160 cases on every inhabited continent around the world. It does a lot of quite surprising things in this era of disinformation and polarization. Could you say something about some of those 160 cases, to give a flavor of what they look like? There are a lot of cases in the book. We've done these things all over the world and have a track record. So, when President Moon Jae-in of South Korea came into office [in 2017] he had an anti-nuclear position. That is, his party did. But he had a couple of nuclear reactors that were half built and had to make the difficult choice: Does he continue building the nuclear reactors? If he doesn't, then not only are there sunk costs, but there's the problem of importing fossil fuels, and he's concerned about climate. We had done a number of projects with South Korean collaborators. So he announced that he would appoint a scientific committee and they would do a national deliberative poll to decide whether or not to build the reactors. Public opinion moved sharply in favor of building them, and they're now built. You also had another energy-focused deliberative poll, here in the U.S. Years ago, when I first started, we did a number of projects in Texas about how the state was going to get its energy, because it was growing very fast. The Public Utilities Commission sanctioned these projects with each of the eight utility companies in the state, and the result was a big surprise. We had an independent advisory group, we had good samples of each of the areas of Texas the utilities served and we had all the options for providing electricity: coal, natural gas, conservation — meaning cutting the need for energy — and renewable energy, especially wind power. The big surprise in all eight areas was that when people were asked if they would pay more on their monthly bill — and remember, these are representative samples, in some areas involving quite poor people — they were willing to pay more for wind power, because it was clean. The percentage willing to pay more went from 52% to 84%, averaged over the eight projects. This led the commission to sanction big investments in wind power, and the state went from being the dead last among the 50 states in the amount of wind power to be first by 2007, surpassing California. There's been no looking back. It's still the leader in the United States in the amount of wind power, and has also made big investments in conservation. I developed this process in order to assess the will of the people, because everybody's trying to persuade, manipulate and distort public opinion for their own interests. So what the people really think is the fundamental question facing democracy, because democracy has got to make a connection with the will of the people, and that's almost impossible to measure with all this noise and disinformation and misinformation. I developed this for that purpose, and it served it well, as I say, in 160 cases, on all kinds of topics, around the world. But while you've been doing this, democracy on a global scale has been struggling. We have extreme partisan polarization. This puts democracy at risk because it creates deadlock and a perception that democracies can't get anything done. So we need to deal with the polarization. So when we did this America in One Room project ... Which Salon covered ... I was very surprised that the deliberations produced dramatic depolarization between Republicans and Democrats on the most contested issues — and the most extreme people where the ones to change the most. I think that's probably because they were in their filter bubbles and had been the least exposed to the other side of the political divide and the arguments that were motivating them. We found on immigration, for example, that before deliberation, about 80% of the Republicans wanted to send all undocumented immigrants back to their home countries. After deliberation, that dropped to 40% and we had similar movements of opinion on all the other immigration topics among the Republicans. And we had some big movements among Democrats on the most expensive redistributive proposals. So both sides moved dramatically closer together. Talk about the one-year follow-up. We went back to those people year later to see how they voted in the election in 2020. We had a large control group, and they got the election almost perfectly right. The people who deliberated moved in dramatically different ways, according to their considered judgments on the issues, and it happened to lead them to support Biden over Trump. We sorted this out in an article in the American Public Science Review, which is informally summarized in the book, where we found that the people who deliberated became more civically engaged. They continued to spend a lot more time and attention on the campaign. They kept learning more. They developed a greater sense of political efficacy. They thought they had opinions worth listening to. And when it came to voting, they made a coherent connection between what they thought about the issues and how they voted. My political science colleagues — some of them have said that the only thing that explains voting is party loyalty. It's all tribalism, there's nothing else. If you find a deliberative voter, that's about as common as finding a unicorn. Well, the deliberative process created unicorns a year later. You followed that with an online project using AI. How did that work? We did the same thing on climate change. We had 1,000 deliberators, and we have developed an AI-assisted platform with computer scientists here at Stanford, so we don't need the moderators. We divided that 1,000 people into 100 small groups of 10. The platform controls the queue for discussion and makes sure that everybody speaks. It invites those who haven't volunteered to speak: Everybody gets 45 seconds, then you move to the next person. People begin to get the rhythm of that. It intervenes if people are uncivil to each other, and it guides people in coming up with the key questions that they want to ask panels of competing experts who represent different points of view. There's an hour and a half in small groups, and an hour and a half of plenary sessions where they asked the questions. The experts don't give speeches, they just respond to people's questions. Then another hour and a half in small groups and another hour and a half of plenary sessions. It goes on for an entire weekend. The platform works just as well as face to face, and people like it as much, but it's much cheaper. You don't have to fly people in, and you can expand to any number without training hundreds or thousands of moderators. We developed it with the idea that eventually we can spread this to very large numbers. But for deliberative polling, we have representative samples so we can show what the public would think. If we can spread the model, we could show what the public will think after the deliberative process. So what were the results? We had depolarization. Republicans changed very dramatically on climate change. For example, instead of about 35% of the Republicans thinking there was anything to climate change, it went to 55% pretty consistently, and both Republicans and Democrats moved closer to supporting most of the 68 or so specific proposals for what to do about climate change. We went back to them a year later, before the midterm elections, and we found that deliberators voted according to climate change as a preference, but the control group voted on all the other issues you'd expect — you know, immigration, crime, things like that. So we got a big difference. Looking at the big picture, how would you summarize your findings? We have a process which, every time we use it, produces surprises. The first surprise is that people change their views. The second surprise is that they change their views in a way that's depolarizing. A lot of political scientists have been saying that our divisions are not only polarized, they're calcified, meaning they're immovable. No, they're not immovable. If you have a condition where people actually learn to listen to each other in a civil way, they move in surprising ways. Then their voting is not just tribalism and party loyalty. When people actually have the experience of thinking about the issues, it has a lasting effect even a year later. So we think that if this kind of process became routine and it spread, it would cure the partisan divisions, it would cure the ambiguity about what on earth the will of the people could mean. Instead of people considering just an impression or soundbites or headlines, or not having any real opinion at all and just deferring to their parties or answering questions almost at random, we've shown that everybody is capable of informed judgment and deliberation on a reasoned basis. We've done this, as the book describes, all over the world, even in countries where literacy levels were low. Everywhere we go, we find that the public's actually very smart if you give them a chance to think about the issues and you make it easy and inviting for them to do so. As I mentioned, we covered America In One Room, which I thought was a great example. But the media as a whole ignored it. What can be done to make this research more impactful, to actually change how democracy works? In some countries we've had more success. I'll give you an exotic example. I'm just back from Mongolia, a competitive democracy in between Russia on one hand and China on the other. We had a big celebration of 10 years of deliberative polling. In Mongolia, before they can change the constitution they have to do a national deliberative poll, with an independently elected advisory committee supervising and vetting suggestions for constitutional amendments from the public. More than 700 people gathered from all over the country for face-to-face deliberations in the parliament building. They evaluate all the proposals and the results are sent by the advisory committee to the parliament. If the parliament approves an amendment by two-thirds majority, it's passed. That has now happened twice. Most recently, because the public thought they had two big parties that were at loggerheads and in deadlock. The people thought there ought to be additional parties, and proposed an amendment which would add additional members of parliament. You know how hard it is to get the public to pay for additional politicians? You can imagine, right? But the additional members would be elected by proportional representation, on the argument that would bring in additional parties. That passed by two-thirds vote, they had an election and, sure enough, more third parties were elected. That speaks to a profound problem that countries around the world face: How can they combine the thinking of the public and the thinking of the elected representatives in a coherent process? This combines the thinking of the public in the deliberative poll with the representatives in the parliament, and so they changed the constitution. That's a dramatic institutional change. But it's more common that you have examples responding to policy problems that are politically difficult, if not outright crises. We have done this a bunch in Japan. In particular, one happened when the government was about to privatize the pension system, because the Japanese population is aging and the ratio between the workers and retired people is worsening. They wanted private accounts, and in polls about 70% of the public was in support. But my colleagues in Japan at Keio University, working with us, created a deliberative poll. It turned out that when people actually understood that they would have to take responsibility for their private accounts and invest them in the stock market, they didn't want the risk. They wanted something guaranteed and they were willing to pay more taxes, particularly a consumption tax they thought could be raised to finance the pension system. So support for privatization went from 70% to 35%, it was cut in half. The government killed the proposal for privatization and adopted the proposal of raising the consumption tax instead. They actually implemented the results of the deliberative poll and were, in fact, impressed by the thoughtful considerations of the public. There are lots of cases like that in different countries. Your book also features a variety of other examples and impacts that could enhance democracy. Tell us about some of those. We found such lasting effects from deliberation. Once people do this, they have greater respect for what I would call the guardrails of democracy, for protecting the voting process and everybody's access to it. We did another project like that, America in One Room, and we think that should be a form of civic education that can spread in the schools. On our website, if you search for 'deliberation in the schools' you'll see that we've been doing projects in schools all over the United States. We think it should be spread in the schools, and we think it could be used to create ballot propositions. We did that once in California. There ought to be a process where these deliberations give rise to ballot propositions, instead of very wealthy individuals funding signature collection drives. It's $3 million or more to get something on the ballot there, even before you get to a campaign. There ought to be a way of getting public interest propositions on the ballot, and then you ought to have deliberation about the merits of the ballot proposition, and that's on the ballot as a recommendation. I think that deliberation, whether spread broadly in the schools or spread broadly before national elections, before referendums, before initiatives, could become part of everyday life. If it did, we would end up with more deliberative voters, more mutual respect, less extreme polarization. We would cure some of the things that are crippling our democracy. There are other forms of public deliberation out there that you distinguish from yours, such as the citizens' assemblies that have been used in Europe. Can you explain how your model differs from those, and what some of the problems are that your model avoids? The first thing is, if you're going to have a random sample of people deliberating, you need to have a good random sample. You need to know where the people in the sample start and whether they are representative. So in the French citizens' convention or the Irish citizens' assemblies — those are the most prominent examples — there was no measure of public opinion at the beginning. By law they couldn't collect it in Ireland, and the French didn't collect it. The French recruited their sample for their national citizens' convention on climate by sending out 400,000 text messages. They ended up with 150 people, and they never measured whether the people who were recruited were especially interested in climate or not. But of course they were — they were being recruited to deliberate for a whole year, and it ended up being two years. Who's going to give up a year or two of their life unless they are actually interested in the issue? Right. Your process is very different. When we recruit people, we don't tell them what the issue is. But before we invite them, they've taken a questionnaire and we find out their attitudes. Then we have a control group that doesn't deliberate and answers another questionnaire at the end of the whole process. So we can compare the deliberative group's views with the control group, and if it's a high-quality poll we know whether it's representative. It seems to me that the first question is, 'Why should other people pay attention?' The reason is that they should if the people who deliberate are representative of the country. If they are, and then they change their views for coherent reasons, it's worth listening to those coherent reasons and understanding why they change. That's the basic logic of the deliberative poll, but not the citizens' assembly. But it's not the only difference. The other problem is that a citizens' assembly has to come to an agreed consensus, sort of like a jury verdict. All the criticisms of deliberation come out of jury literature. Juries do a fairly good job of deciding certain questions of fact — is somebody guilty or not? — but they are dominated by the more educated people, the more advantaged. Jury foremen are almost always educated white males. So they are dominated by certain groups and then, as Cass Sunstein has shown, they move to more extreme positions as people go along with the rest of the crowd, because of the social pressure of reaching a collect our opinions in confidential questionnaires. People never have to say how they finally come out. Rather, they engage in a discussion. Sometimes they play devil's advocate. They think about the issues and then take a private questionnaire at the end. So we insulate the considered views from the social pressure to go along. That's very important, because we don't get the movement towards extremity that you get in jury experiments, we don't get dominant action by the more advantaged people, and we have samples large enough to be statistically representative of the country and for the opinion changes to be evaluated statistically. So we know what's a significant change and what is not. That's why our model is different. We want to protect the integrity of the individual opinions before and after, and we want to understand the opinion changes. So these other versions are not based in social science in the same way. I think we have to use social science to protect our credibility. I am interested in showing what people would really think, what the will of the people is on a given issue. As a byproduct, it has all these wonderful effects: People become more tolerant of each other, more respectful, more engaged in the public dialogue. They vote according to their considered judgments about what should be done, not necessarily just in terms of party loyalty. Finally, what's the most important question I didn't ask? And what's the answer? Well, why do I have a question mark at the end of the title of the book? I have a question mark because it's a question of collective political will. You don't need to change the Constitution to spread deliberation. You just need the political will to do it. It's very much like Benjamin Franklin's famous response to the question, "Are we going to have a republic or monarchy?" He said, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, you could have a deliberative system, a more deliberative society, if you had the political will to implement it. I have a whole list of things in the back, most of which we have tried and shown to be viable with important results. We've test-driven the process in all kinds of contexts. and if we could just get the attention of the public and had all kinds of venues to spread it, we could cure the ills of democracy. So the question mark is for us, not for me. It's for us. By employing technology we can make it more practical, but it's still the question of: Do we want to do things the way we've been doing them, where democracy is under threat because people have a perception that it doesn't get anything done? Or do we want change?
