Today I heard back from Mr. Shiuchi Ohno, one of the founders of the newly formed Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA).  I had emailed them a few questions – here are his responses;

Q) How long has JSEA been in existence?
A) JSEA is an association just born in this month. We will have first meeting this weekend in Tokyo.  Last year, my friend and I went to Seattle to meet Mr.Michael and Mr. Tomas of Liftport company. We proposed them to start Japanese branch. But they couldn’t decide until now. Then we decided to start actual activity in Japan for the real SE.

Q) What kind of organization is it?  Academic only? General Interest?  Governmental?
A) At first, our activity will stay within general interest. But we are very conscious of academic study and commercial based research and development. We want to make effort to speed them up.

Q) What is the organizations charter?  Are they an information-only group or are they going to actively try and help build a Space Elevator.
A) We have not actual strategy for charter yet. (That’s the theme for this weekend meeting.) One idea for this is to be continuing private organization and found some companies that obey associate’s principles. Those companies will concentrate to build a SE.

So, there you have it.  Mr. Ohno has told me he will email me periodically with updates from the JSEA and I will certainly pass them along as I receive them.

I’ve added a link to their website on the Blogroll section of my sidebar.  Though it is almost all in Japanese, plugging the Japanese text into Babelfish gives a good enough translation to figure out what they are talking about (thanks, Brian, for the tip on Babelfish).