LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Following the appearance of one of the recent articles in this series on Japan in the global era, a colleague of mine, Dominique Turpin, who has been doing research on Japanese industry for some 20 years, came into my office and said, "Jean-Pierre, when are you going to start proposing solutions?" Some readers may be wondering the same thing. There are three answers to that question.

The first and simplest is that this series is due to run a year and that the emphasis on solutions will begin in the autumn.

The second is that, as I told Turpin, a lot of Japanese policymakers, policy thinkers and foreign pundits, are proposing solutions without sufficiently analyzing the problems and assessing their extent. Japan is not just an economic mess; it is also a very sick society. And one of the main causes for this sickness has been Japan's inability to adjust to the paradigm shift that has occurred with the advent of the "global era."

The third is that, although no explicit solutions are necessarily presented in the articles thus far, surely some of them have appeared implicitly.

When I say, for example, that Japanese universities are parochial, conservative, incestuous and, hence, mediocre, surely the simple solution is to get rid of the deadwood, recruit lots of high-quality foreign faculty and abolish the rigid career structure. IMD is ranked (by the Financial Times) as the world's third leading institution in executive education, for reasons that include the very international nature of the faculty but also for the fact that both tenure and hierarchy were abolished.

Everyone is a full professor, irrespective of age and experience, but no one, irrespective of age or experience, can keep his/her position unless she/he continues to perform well in research, teaching and institutional citizenship.

If Keio Business School were to adopt such reforms, then I am sure that very quickly it would begin ranking as a global player, instead of forlornly wallowing as a minor and purely parochial player.

Solutions of this nature at the educational level would also have a beneficial effect on Japan's standing in the global era and especially its contributions to global institutions. Following Japan's defeat in 1945 and its official abandonment of nationalistic militarism, it seemed that it might opt for internationalism. In the 1950s there was enthusiasm in many quarters in Japan with respect to the United Nations.

Today there is enthusiasm in the Foreign Ministry for Japan to become a permanent member of the Security Council, but beyond that no broad enthusiasm or commitment to international institutions in general or the U.N. in particular.

Although some of my close friends, for example, Hisashi Owada and Yukio Satoh, respectively former and current Japanese ambassadors to the U.N., are strongly engaged in the campaign for Japan to obtain a permanent seat, I have consistently opposed it. The fact that Japan is a major financial contributor to the U.N. is not enough; what we want are ideas, men and women, and especially leaders. In these, Japan has been woefully deficient.

Starting with the institution that I am most closely associated with, the World Trade Organization, it is frequently remarked by members of the secretariat and representatives of member states how little impact Japan has. Unless something specifically related to Japan is on the menu, Japan is not at the table.

The absence of leadership among the Japanese themselves, as well as the suspicion and turf battles between the various ministries, explain a good deal of the paralysis. When the Foreign Ministry representative in Geneva wanted to undertake an initiative on agriculture, he was prevented from doing so by the obstructionism of the representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture.

But no impact is probably stronger than negative impact, of which there has been a good deal. Japan does not seem capable of breeding men -- I shall return to women below -- who have the sensitivity and qualities required for leadership in an international setting.

Most cases of Japanese running international institutions have ranged from the disappointing to the disastrous. Toward the latter end of the spectrum, by all accounts the prime example is Hiroshi Nakajima, whose quite long stint as head of the World Health Organization was widely recognized as an unmitigated calamity.

A major problem is the inability or unwillingness of Japanese "leaders" in international institutions to be international. A constant refrain in institutions where Japanese are heads is that they surround and insulate themselves with a Japanese Praetorian guard, thus cutting off communications with people outside that circle and leading to deficient information gathering and analysis. This was said of Yasushi Akashi, when he was head of UNPROFOR in Bosnia-Hercegovina. It is also a comment heard in Paris about Koichiro Matsuura, director general of UNESCO. In Matsuura's case, this problem is also compounded by the fact that he is conspicuous by his absence.

The aloofness of the head also generates resentment, alienation and demotivation among subordinates. A few years back a friend of mine witnessed a scene at the Asian Development Bank, an institution in which the head is traditionally a Japanese, and that well illustrates the point. The Japanese president was going up to his office in the elevator, when on one of the floors came in a gregarious Australian. Seeing the president, he gave him a broad smile and said something to the effect of "well, hello there, Mr. Kawai (not his real name), how are you on this fine day?" Kawai clenched his teeth and gave the Australian an icy stare.

By the time the Australian reached his office, there was an e-mail from the president's secretary informing him that under no circumstances was he to speak to the president unless the president spoke to him first. One can imagine how the poor fellow felt for the rest of the day!

A former chief economist of the Asian Development Bank told me that while the Japanese influence is felt quite strongly at the administrative level, at the intellectual level it is as if the Japanese were nonexistent. This was especially the case at the time of the East Asian financial crisis.

The generally, albeit not universally, accepted exception to this rather dismal prevailing Japanese pattern is Sadako Ogata, until recently head of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

The "solution" to Japan's ineffectualness in respect to international organizations may be linked to another "problem" I shall come to in the near future: the status of Japanese women in the global era.