“Are you five years old?” Tadashi Yamamoto’s wife would tease him as he bounced out of bed like a little boy early every morning, excited about all the adventures that lay ahead that day.  That sense of excitement and joy infused everything he did, and it is jarring to realize that somebody so defined by his vibrancy has now been gone a full 10 years. It is also surprising how prescient his vision of US-Japan relations remains today.

When Tadashi founded JCIE in 1970, he was taking a massive gamble. He felt deep in his heart that nongovernmental voices merited an important role in international relations—an almost heretical view in Japan at the time, where matters pertaining to foreign policy were strictly the domain of government bureaucrats. He had his own chances to go into government, in a sense. When his boss at the time, Shin-Etsu Chemical CEO Kosaka Tokusaburo, won a seat in the Diet, he assumed that Tadashi, who had served as his campaign manager, would become his legislative secretary. But Tadashi instead chose to roll the dice by splitting from Kosaka. He felt it was his calling to continue running the small exchange organization he had been heading on Kosaka’s behalf, the Japan Council on International Understanding, rechristening it as the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE) and vowing to forever keep it fully independent of any corporate or government overseer. (Likewise, three decades later he also rebuffed Prime Minister Obuchi’s entreaty to consider becoming foreign minister in order to ensure that his beloved JCIE could stay alive and strong.)

In retrospect, it was a minor miracle that JCIE and Tadashi stayed afloat in those early years. It took a deep faith that enough people would support an upstart, independent, nongovernmental organization; a handful of loyal colleagues who knew how to stretch meager resources and were prepared to suffer financially alongside him; and a remarkably patient wife who was willing to put up with a household full of toddlers and a husband with little to no income. This resolve drew on deep roots. As a youth, Tadashi had set out to become a Jesuit priest, like his older brother. However, study abroad in Wisconsin convinced him that he was not cut out for the priesthood, even while exposing him to the possibilities of making the world a better place. Instead, he sought to emulate what inspired him while overseas—the holy trinity of JFK, MLK Jr., and the Vatican II—in becoming, as one journalist termed him, a missionary for civilian diplomacy.

In his eyes, independent nongovernmental organizations like JCIE were uniquely positioned to host dialogues bringing together legislators and government leaders from Japan, the United States, and elsewhere under conditions in which they could exchange views more frankly and constructively than when meeting in an official governmental capacity. Nongovernmental hosts could involve opposition party members whom government officials would often keep at arm’s length, and they could gradually engage other diverse voices in foreign policy dialogues, from the brilliant women who were too often locked out of more traditional forums to younger, up-and-coming leaders and representatives from the nonprofit sector, labor, and activist groups. Tadashi also recognized that independent institutes in Japan could and should become alternative sources of policy advice for government decisionmakers in the way that think tanks had decades earlier in the United States. This is why he spoke so often about the pressing need to strengthen the nongovernmental underpinnings of international relations.

Looking at how Japan and the United States have evolved over the past decade, Tadashi would surely be gratified to see how more diverse voices have played a growing role in US-Japan relations. As somebody who reveled in face-to-face interactions and who drew his energy from these—he was famous for his table at the Hotel Okura’s Orchid Room where he started most days hosting up to three breakfast meetings in quick succession—Tadashi would have been anguished by the isolation and travel restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the fact that networks among policy thinkers, legislators, and others from throughout Japanese and American society could be sustained online and via video calls has been a testament to the resilience of the web of people-to-people ties that he dedicated so much of his life to nourishing.

All the same, Tadashi would surely be concerned about the overall health of the nongovernmental infrastructure underpinning US-Japan relations today, and not just because of what the pandemic has wrought. He dreamed that Japan would one day develop a strong, independent think tank sector, a “marketplace of ideas,” like that of the United States, but it seems Japan is just as far from that goal as it was 10 or 20 years ago. He built up JCIE in an era when businesses, the philanthropic sector, and both governments took farsighted approaches to investing in US-Japan organizations. That time has ended, though, and the lack of resources on both sides to encourage US-Japan strategic dialogue is discouraging. Tadashi had grown accustomed to the US government’s reluctance to consistently invest in nurturing nonprofit ties with Japan, rationalizing that US foundations and the private sector usually took up the slack. The steady decline in American private sector funding for all but the most narrowly targeted initiatives was already a cause of concern during the last decade of his life, and it is even more acute today. Tadashi would be particularly vocal, though, about trends closer to home on the Japanese side, such as the stagnation of the country’s nascent foundation sector. In particular, moves such as the downgrading and absorption of the leading funder of US-Japan policy study and dialogue, the Center for Global Partnership, into the Japan Foundation would greatly pain him.

From early in his career, when he helped to arrange the 1962 Japan visit of Robert F. Kennedy and the inaugural Shimoda Conference in 1967, Tadashi was convinced that US-Japan relations needed to extend beyond trade ties and the security alliance. “Shared values” and “common challenges” were constant refrains with him. The ways in which collaboration between Japanese and Americans in a wide range of fields—environmental policy, humanitarian assistance, science and technology, and much more—have since become almost organic is very much in keeping with his vision. He was critical of the creeping partisanship he saw in American politics in the last two decades of his life and would clearly be disturbed by the corrosion of so many of the American democratic institutions that he looked to for inspiration. But the ways in which Japan and the United States are increasingly partnering to advance democratic values around the world—including through the Kishida Cabinet’s more proactive approach to Ukraine—would surely resonate with him.

He was convinced that Japan should take a more comprehensive view of security issues, espousing the belief that people and communities need more than military protection to be truly secure, and that instead human security approaches that take into account the multitude of interlinked threats to their survival and wellbeing need more attention. He often talked about a 1998 trip to Indonesia, when he took then Foreign Minister Obuchi to speak to people in a Jakarta slum, as being pivotal in encouraging Obuchi to embrace the concept of human security and later elevate it as a pillar of Japanese foreign policy. The disruption and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that his instinct was right and that Japan and the United States ignore health threats and other human security challenges at their own peril. After becoming a champion of global health cooperation late in his career, Tadashi would undoubtedly have been delighted to see the initial joint work on global COVID relief that the United States and Japan have pursued, both through coordinating funding for international vaccination campaigns as well as through initiatives such as the Quad Vaccine Partnership. But it would have been in his nature to push for Japan and the United States to do even more together in leading the response to the pandemic, the greatest human security challenge to the world in recent memory.

Tadashi’s vision for US-Japan relations was one of two countries able to interact on equal footing, bound by personal ties and mutual affection, invigorated by a diverse set of nongovernmental voices, and truly collaborative in action—not just in name—in overcoming common challenges and implementing human security approaches that make the world a safer and fairer place. Much has changed in the ten years since his death; progress has been made on many fronts in US-Japan relations, and we have taken steps backward in others. But throughout, that vision he set forth has remained relevant and compelling. There are miles to go to achieve it, but it was his habit to always get excited about the big task ahead.