Hiroshi Yamakawa is a chairperson of The Whole Brain Architecture Initiative (WBAI), a non-profit organization, director of the AI Alignment Network (ALIGN) and a principal researcher at the Graduate School of Engineering of The University of Tokyo. He is an AI researcher interested in the brain. His specialty includes brain-inspired artificial general intelligence, concept formation, neurocomputing, and opinion aggregation technology. He is a former Chief Editor of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. He received an MS in physics and a PhD in engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1989 and 1992, respectively. He joined Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. in 1992. He founded Dwango AI Laboratory in 2014 and was a director until March 2019. He was co-founder of WBAI in 2015 and became a chairperson of it. He is also a visiting professor at the Graduate School of the University of Electro-Communications, the Director of the Intelligent Systems Division (visiting professor) at the Institute of Informatics, Kinki University, and a chief visiting researcher at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research.
Including the above discussion, I have considered the reasons why Japan tends to be passive in AI X-Risk discussions.
Cultural Factors
Cognitive and Psychological Factors
International Factors