As a student, in my travels around South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, I came across many children without access to education, health care and electricity. When I returned to Japan, I started several highly successful businesses founded on mobile game applications, including for example early AI and PlayStation games, which used avatars on mobile phones.
With this success, and never forgetting the hardship suffered by many children around the world, I knew I wanted to find ways to change things for the better. With the support of the United Nations, and in collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), I founded the NGO, Eco Planet, based in the Second Building of their New York headquarters. This became my way to contribute to the world.
As a director of the NGO, I travelled to Kurdistan where I visited children in refugee camps. What I encountered made a deep and lasting impact on me which has shaped everything I do now. I saw young children, the same ages as my own three small daughters, living through hell, the surviving casualties of a war, looking at me with eyes which held no hope for a future.
These children were living in darkness, in fear of life in a refugee camp without even the basic electricity which much of the rest of the world takes for granted. I knew then that I would do anything I could to help. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t solve all the problems of the world. But around the same time, I learned about the carbon battery technology being jointly developed by Kyushu University and Power Japan Plus. In 2017, I bought the company and set up PJP Eye as a sustainable energy company which could provide energy solutions which could address both environmental and human rights issues.
We succeeded in commercialising a pouch-type cell in 2018. In 2019, we installed it in products such as electric-powered bicycles, e-scooters, and drones, using these products to showcase our technology. Through crowdfunding, we began to promote our technology and its uses worldwide. I know that in some regions of the world, the impact of Covid-19 means that children have to travel for hours on mountain roads just to charge the mobile phones that give them access to online lessons.
Electricity is an essential lifeline that we need to provide to them.
Our aim at PJP Eye is to provide a solution that allows children around the world to get an education and medical care at least until they are 10 years old. Improving the world’s environment and providing access to essential services to every child on the planet is PJP Eye’s vision and ultimate goal.
People ask where our name comes from. It dates back to the Cambrian explosion in the early history of our planet, when most of the major groups of animals first appeared. It was an important moment in the history of the Earth. At PJP, our “Eye” is firmly fixed on the future of our Earth.