ABSTRACT
In a world facing crisis on several levels Japan must be, and must be recognized as, an environmentally responsible nation with responsible and sustainable policies of industrial technology. Increasingly, it will have to make a choice between allowing its highly creative nanotechnological innovations to be drawn into a deepening of geopolitical tensions and conflict or instead directing them into a global movement for cooperation, peace and environmental sustainability. To do this it will have to take much further its recent strides in breaking out of regional insularity, develop an understanding of civil society and promote the freedom of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and communities in contradistinction to the state, and adjust its intellectual and ethical framework to accommodate a grasp of new technologies that is beyond the merely technical and market-driven.
