Address by the President of the University of Tokyo at the AY 2025 Spring Diploma Presentation Ceremony

　Congratulations to all of you receiving degrees from the University of Tokyo today. On behalf of the university, I would like to express my deep gratitude and heartfelt congratulations to your families and to all those who have supported you through your years in graduate school.

　This is a day devoted to celebrating the completion of your graduate studies. However, I am aware that many of you may be concerned about the incidents of misconduct involving the University of Tokyo that have been reported in the media since last year. I would like to offer my sincere apologies once again for the worry and inconvenience this has caused you. We are reflecting deeply on the circumstances that led to our failure to prevent those repeated incidents, and we are committed, with unwavering resolve, to rebuilding the appropriate governance mechanisms for the university and the crisis-management system that needs to be in place.

　It is in that spirit of self-admonition that I would like to speak today about what it means to consider how the choices we make here and now might be judged when people in the distant future look back.

　A book titled The Good Ancestor has attracted attention in recent years. Written by Roman Krznaric, a philosopher who has explored the cultural history of humanity, it is a critique of contemporary society that poses the question of whether future generations will look back on us and judge that we were good ancestors.

　Modern life is, indeed, remarkably convenient. The online world has expanded; social media have become pervasive; and we can learn about global events instantly through the news, shop online at any hour, and quickly look up information and reviews about any establishment that catches our interest. What Krznaric criticizes is the short-term values and ways of thinking into which modern people and societies so easily fall. A “me-first” mentality that fixates on immediate gains and prioritizes the satisfaction of present desires is intensifying division and conflict across the world. Considered in this light, it is, in fact, a profound problem.

　Krznaric points out that the risks of short-term thinking include the destruction of the natural environment, global warming, climate change, and the disposal of nuclear waste. He states that we have “colonized the future,” sharply criticizing the absence of a long-term, public-minded perspective. Just as modern capitalism developed by pushing its problems onto external realms not yet developed, have we not squandered resources that should be shared with future generations and put off the resolution of problems, just to prioritize our affluence and convenience today? That is the question he poses.

　In the face of this, future generations—who do not yet exist—can neither voice their opinions nor protest against what we have done.

　The question Krznaric poses draws upon the words of the medical scientist Jonas Salk: “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” In 1955, Salk developed a vaccine against the poliovirus, and he is also celebrated for declining to assert intellectual property rights over his vaccine. “Could you patent the sun?” he asked, refusing to seek private or exclusive profit. This spirit of dedication became a driving force, and today polio has been brought to the brink of eradication in nearly every country in the world.

　The idea of becoming forerunners who will be judged favorably by the future might not quite resonate with you. The future is, after all, unknowable. Some of you may even feel convinced that the future will only grow worse, and at times find yourselves gripped by a sense of resignation that we are heading somewhere beyond all remedy. It is true that the future encompasses both freedom, because nothing has yet been decided, and anxiety, because nothing is guaranteed.

　Yet the future is not merely an imagined world that exists only in your minds. It is also the road ahead, one that your own actions will create and that you yourselves will walk. That is precisely why it is important, as a desirable goal, to give shape to the future of yourselves and of society—in other words, to design that future.

　The question of whether you can become a good ancestor is ultimately a question of what kind of person you want to become and of what kind of society you want to live in.

　In my address at the 2021 Matriculation Ceremony, I proposed the concept of design as an important approach for leveraging accumulated research knowledge to tackle social challenges and “to connect cutting-edge engineering research with the real world.”

　When you hear the word “design,” you might think of visual patterns, motifs, or the making of attractive clothes. But that is merely a narrow meaning, confined to our modern consumer society. Researchers across a wide range of disciplines have proposed far more fundamental ways of understanding the concept.

　The critic Alice Rawsthorn has stated that design is about change, while the economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon defined design as an act of problem-solving that seeks to bridge the gap between a desired state (the goal state) and the current situation.

　The philosopher Donald Schön went a step further back, to what comes before problem-solving itself. He stated that design is the process of naming and giving meaning to complex, ever-changing circumstances through dialogue with the situation, providing a framework for interpretation and thereby setting the problem anew.

　Design can be understood as the process of identifying problems within a given situation, establishing frameworks for recognizing what we are dealing with, determining the resources and methods needed for a solution, and steering things in a better direction. It is, in essence, at the heart of the scholarship you have pursued. Seen in this light, Salk’s development of the polio vaccine can itself be called the practice of creative design.

　At the same time, the question posed in The Good Ancestor contains another important challenge: to confront short-term thinking and short-term values. What is criticized as something to be overcome are solutions that amount to nothing more than the treatment of symptoms to postpone problems and measures that go no further than satisfying immediate desires.

　The social psychologist Tamotsu Shibutani, who studied rumors in internment camps in the United States, raised a very interesting point on this question of problem-solving. Shibutani reframed rumors not as abnormal pathological phenomena but as “improvised news”—ad hoc attempts at problem-solving limited to the immediate situation.

　In other words, outlandish rumors were pieced together from whatever knowledge was at hand by people trapped in a closed situation where the future was unclear and access to information had been severed. The observation that stories which would never have been believed in less troubled circumstances were collectively invented, spread, and accepted by many people is, I think, a perceptive one.

　This analysis applies far beyond the reality of internment camps in the 1940s. It is deeply relevant to our own era, when information reported by newspapers is scarcely consulted and people are increasingly swayed by interpretations drifting through the closed spaces of social media.

　To design frameworks grounded in a long-term perspective, I believe we must move beyond human-centered thinking.

　Consider, for example, the sociologist of science Bruno Latour’s proposal of a Parliament of Things. Latour envisioned a deliberative forum in which not only humans but also animals, plants, the environment, and technology—“nonhumanity”—are treated as equal participants. Latour observed studies being conducted on soil erosion at the boundary between woodland and savanna in the Amazon forest of northern Brazil. When the scientists, who came from many different fields, rendered the realities of the ground into diagrams, symbols, and other forms of knowledge, they were, in effect, giving a voice in that Parliament of Things to the land that has nurtured crops and forests. Latour argued that scientists must become spokespersons for a voiceless nature, dissolving the divides between the natural and the social and between science and politics.

　This would mean transforming the social institutions of dialogue—human parliaments included—from human-centered to more-than-human-centered, envisioning a consultative forum, a constituency, in which humans deliberate together with nonhuman animals, plants, and the natural world.

　The idea that we humans might address social challenges together with nonhuman entities would, not long ago, have seemed like nothing more than science fiction. Yet this is now becoming reality.

　I once collaborated with Project Professor Hajime Asama of Tokyo College on research to build autonomous decentralized robot systems, drawing inspiration from the cooperative behavior observed in groups of social organisms such as ants. We enabled cooperation among robots based on two principles: that individual robots should not hinder one another in achieving their goals, and that they should help each other accomplish what no single robot could achieve alone.

　A further evolution of such systems would be robots designed to coexist with humans. The ability to accumulate experience by touching and grasping various objects—much as humans do with our hands—and then to apply that knowledge to unfamiliar objects, expanding the range of possibilities, is a technology now emerging as physical AI. Rather than having robots simply take over human physical and cognitive functions, robots and humans should each assume their respective roles. In the world ahead, it will be important to consider what this more-than-human-centered way of being truly means.

　Let me return once more to my central theme. The question of whether you can become the kind of forerunner who will one day be seen as a good ancestor is asking what kind of person you want to become and what kind of society you want to live in. In psychology, the term “self-actualization” refers to achieving your dreams and goals, that is, becoming the self that you want to be. Self-actualization is fundamentally different from egocentric self-satisfaction.

　The psychologist Abraham Maslow posited that above our physiological needs, our need for safety and security, our need for interpersonal relationships, and our need for recognition by others, there is—integrating all of these—what he called the desire to become one’s ideal self.

　In this sense, self-actualization is a uniquely human motivation toward the future, one that has created and continually expanded the possibilities of the coexistence that we call society. An aspiration toward self-actualization is expected not only of individuals but also of the organizations that constitute society. As one such organization, the university is also called upon to demonstrate our commitment to building a better world.

　It is the future actions of each and every one of you that will shape the tomorrow that we hope for. And you will not be alone. Learning from the past, refusing to flinch before the unknown, confronting head-on what you do not yet understand—those challenges will be met with the wisdom you have cultivated in graduate school here and by your dialogue with others whom you encounter as friends and companions. I hope that you will continue to walk with us as alumni of the University of Tokyo.

　Once again, congratulations on the completion of your studies.