During my 7 1/2 years of service in the 1990s as deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, I initiated a research project that produced, in 1997, a report titled "The World in 2020: Toward a New Global Age." In the course of this research I assumed that the 21st-century world economy would evolve into a tripolar structure comprising an enlarging European Union, an expanding North American free-trade area and a dynamically developing Asian economic zone.
On that premise, I came to believe that an East Asian Community must be established if Japan and Asia are to develop a mutually beneficent relationship with the EU and NAFTA. Since returning to Japan in 1997, I have talked and written on this subject extensively, but the responses have not necessarily been keen until quite recently.
The initiative for regional integration in East Asia came from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which had been hard hit by the 1997 Asian currency crisis. To prevent a similar bout of financial turmoil, ASEAN created a formula for regional integration known as ASEAN-plus-Three (Japan, China and South Korea).