Mikhail was not the only person at the 1971 conference who offered support for my epiphany. Another noteworthy participant was Yoneji Masuda, a Japanese techno-economist. A native of Tokyo, Masuda had become a prophet of the computer age that lay ahead.
I was old enough to remember when his nation had attacked mine in 1941, killing thousands of Americans, and he was old enough to remember when my nation rained fire bombs on his home town and then obliterated two other Japanese cities with nuclear bombs. But those tragic events were set aside, because we were both focused on the future.
Masuda became a strong supporter of the Society and one of our institutional members. In 1980, when I went to Tokyo to speak at a Johnson Wax conference, I had an opportunity to call on Masuda in his office. There we worked out a deal for the Society to become the U.S. distributor of his book The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society (World Future Society, 1980). A few years later, our Board member Kenneth W. Hunter presented to Masuda the Society’s Distinguished Service Award at a ceremony in Salzburg, Austria.
Another person attending our first conference was Heinz-Hermann Koelle, who had been a pilot in Nazi Germany’s air force during World War II. As a correspondent in London in the 1950s, I had often wandered, during my lunch hour, amid the rubble-strewn lots where buildings had stood before being leveled by German bombs. One bomb had hit a building just across the street from where I worked.
But, as with Masuda, Koelle and I never even mentioned the war because we were busy thinking about the future. He had become chairman of the Berlin Center for Future Research, and he proudly showed me a mockup of the future-oriented journal, Analysen und Prognosen, that his group planned to start. Some months later, I began to receive copies of it.