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

　Congratulations to all of you on your graduation.

　To everyone celebrating this milestone today here in Yasuda Auditorium, on behalf of the faculty and staff of the University of Tokyo, I extend my heartfelt congratulations. I would also like to express my gratitude and congratulations to your families and to everyone else who has supported your studies here.

　The paths you will take from here will differ, and the arenas in which you will flourish will be equally varied. Yet wherever life may lead you, I firmly believe that the experience of pursuing your studies and research alongside your fellow students at the University of Tokyo—competing with one another, yet also helping each other—will surely prove valuable in overcoming whatever trials and difficulties you may encounter.

　Today, I would like to explore a question that may serve as a guiding principle as you envision your futures. That question is this: what kind of society should we build for the next generation? It is also a question about your own ideals and aspirations, what kind of life you believe is desirable.

　What do we need in order to confront this question directly?

　Around the world today, conflicts are intensifying and divisions are deepening to an unprecedented degree.

　In country after country, assertions of nationalistic self-interest have grown louder. We are entering an era of profound uncertainty, one in which the frameworks for maintaining the international order established under the post-war United Nations can no longer, by themselves, provide an adequate response.

　The most extreme manifestation of such conflict and division may be war. Modern warfare extends far beyond the armed clashes fought with guns and drones that continue in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere. People’s daily lives are threatened in many other forms as well: through cyberattacks, disinformation, and shortages of food and energy. The repercussions ripple across the entire world through economic turmoil and refugee crises.

　How, then, can we create an order that is peaceful, free, and just?

　International relations in the twenty-first century cannot be understood simply as a system composed of sovereign nation-states. Those relations form a multilayered and complex web in which diverse organizations and groups are intricately intertwined. If we reduce everything to a simplistic binary of friend or foe, we make dialogue that might otherwise have been possible more difficult, and we deepen the divisions rooted in a refusal to understand.

　In such a world, how can we envision new forms of society and forge paths toward coexistence?

　I believe that confronting today’s tangled challenges requires us to resist confinement to any single perspective. Instead, we must view things from multiple angles and open up new possibilities. In the business world, people often speak of the importance of holding multiple viewpoints, captured in the metaphors of the bird’s eye, the bug’s eye, and the fish’s eye.

　The bird’s eye lifts our vantage point and enables us to survey the world from above. We are all too prone to interpreting the world from within our own positions, affiliations, and value systems. Yet when we look out from an entirely different dimension, new possibilities come into view.

　In an era when the airplane was just becoming a practical reality, the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in Wind, Sand and Stars (“Terre des hommes”) about war: “Why should we hate one another? We are bound together, carried on the same planet, crew of the same ship, sharing a common destiny.” As a pilot himself, Saint-Exupéry must have gazed down upon the earth from the sky and been struck anew by the realization that the borders drawn by humans on the ground simply do not exist in the natural landscape. He must have felt that even those with whom we are in conflict are fellow beings living on the same Earth.

　When we elevate our perspective and take in the broader view, we begin to see not a stark choice between A and B but the gradations between them, an intermediate ground where compromise may be possible. We may even arrive at a mode of coexistence that embraces contradiction itself—being A and B at the same time—a way of seeing that the philosopher Kitaro Nishida, an alumnus of this university, called the “self-identity of absolute contradiction.” If we seek to live together without eliminating differences and contradictions, the bird’s eye—the capacity to think from different viewpoints—becomes indispensable.

　This past February, Tokiko Kato, also a graduate of this university, held a charity concert here in Yasuda Auditorium paying tribute to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” That song, too, gives voice in its lyrics to the theme Saint-Exupéry articulated half a century earlier.

　Lennon’s song reminds us that you do not need to board an airplane to see from a bird’s perspective. The wings of imagination alone are enough.

　Of course, the bird’s eye alone is not sufficient. To engage with the feelings and circumstances of those living in the midst of conflict—and to reposition their experiences within a larger web of relationships—we also need the bug’s eye, which allows us to draw closer to others.

　The bug’s eye, as I use the term here, means approaching your subject directly in the actual setting—observing closely and in detail, feeling things with your own body. The “bug” is a metaphor for keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground and walking forward under your own power.

　A bird’s-eye view allows us to grasp the broad outlines of a situation in abstract terms. Yet it is equally vital to immerse ourselves in the actual setting and encounter the realities of others firsthand. It is precisely the experience of the bug’s eye that makes possible dialogue through which we can deepen our understanding while confronting differences head-on.

　The German philosopher Hegel systematized the dialectical method as a way of generating new perspectives through dialogue. When a thesis—an initial proposition—encounters an antithesis—a contrasting claim—the goal is not to negate one or the other and be done with it. Instead, through persistent dialogue, both are embraced and developed into a third, new perspective: the synthesis.

　The first step is to become a good listener. It is essential to respect the words of others and to listen attentively, using that same bug’s eye to imagine the experiences and values that lie behind what is being said.

　Becoming a good speaker is equally indispensable for sustaining dialogue. What a good speaker needs is not the power to defeat an opponent in argument but the ability to convey one’s thoughts and convictions logically and with sincerity.

　Dialogue does not end with a single exchange.

　It continues as a back-and-forth process, confirming differences while building understanding layer by layer. It is through the steady accumulation of such dialogue that the capacity to think from a broader, more panoramic perspective is cultivated. Dialectical dialogue is, in essence, a practical intellectual method, a means of transcending conflict and repairing division.

　If we broaden our view still further, we find that this way of thinking resonates with the workings of our own bodies—nature at a human scale. The T-cells of the immune system, which attracted wide attention following last year’s Nobel Prize, include those that mount attacks against foreign invaders and those that restrain excessive responses. It is the balance between them that maintains the peace we call health.

　Now, what kind of perspective does the third viewpoint—the fish’s eye—offer?

　Just as a fish reads the currents of the ocean, the fish’s eye generally refers to a perspective that incorporates the axis of time, the flow from past through present to future. To address the question I posed at the outset—what kind of society should we build for the next generation—we need precisely this temporal perspective.

　Looking ahead through this lens, we see the imperative of tackling global challenges: addressing global warming, preparing for the threat of pandemics, and more.

　I hope that all of you will cultivate these multiple ways of seeing—developing a conscious awareness of the environment that sustains you, summoning the imagination needed to overcome the conflicts now growing ever more severe, and working to heal the divisions of our time.

　In recent years, Diversity and Inclusion—D&I—has been emphasized across many sectors of society. Yet the ideal of recognizing and embracing diversity can, in practice, amount to little more than pressure on minorities to assimilate to the majority. For example, even when gender-equal employment policies are applied uniformly, if the socially entrenched burdens associated with childbirth and childcare remain unevenly distributed, women end up at a disadvantage. This is one case where the ocean current itself must be changed.

　Here the concept of equity becomes crucial. Equity does not refer to formal equality. Rather, it means recognizing that each individual’s circumstances differ, bridging those gaps, and providing support so that everyone can express their abilities to the fullest. Rather than giving everyone a step stool of the same height, equity means providing a taller stool to those who are shorter and recognizing that taller individuals may need no stool at all, thus creating conditions in which everyone can participate freely. Today, the framework of D&I has evolved to incorporate the “E” of equity, giving rise to DEI.

　The principles of DEI extend to challenges surrounding disability as well. Chieko Asakawa, a Fellow at our Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of Miraikan—the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, has developed voice browsers and the AI Suitcase for people with visual impairments, working to support their access to information and mobility.

　Six decades ago, in 1963, then-President Seiji Kaya of the University of Tokyo spoke at commencement about the importance of “small kindnesses,” urging graduates to “have the courage to practice them.” Embedded in these words is the conviction that a university education is not merely the accumulation and storing of knowledge; it comes alive only when shared with others and expressed through action. Asakawa echoes this spirit when she says, “What we need is not sweeping transformations but small acts of ingenuity.”

　To all of you who will live in this age of division, I hope you will carry this spirit one step further and, with courage, keep building one small dialogue at a time.

　As the University of Tokyo approaches its 150th anniversary in 2027, we have adopted the theme of kyōzon—a term that joins hibiku, “to resonate,” with sonzai suru, “to exist.” We chose this theme because we believe in a vision of organizations and society in which diverse beings do not merely exist side by side but live together in mutual influence and resonance.

　The empathy and lived understanding born of small dialogues also resonate with one another, gradually becoming shared and taking on meaning within society. They become vital clues for reexamining and reshaping our institutions, our rules, and our economic systems.

　One concrete example of such an effort may be the Strategic Organization for Learning, Venturing, and Empowerment, or SOLVE!—an initiative grounded in the principle of people helping one another. Within this coalition, individuals from business, civil society, and the public sector engage in ongoing small dialogues, exploring new frameworks in which solving social challenges itself becomes a driver of economic growth.

　In endeavors like mutual-aid capitalism, trust is paramount. Regrettably, however, the trust placed in our university has been seriously damaged by the misconduct reported since last year. As president, I take very seriously the fact that we failed to prevent this situation from arising in the first place, and I once again offer my sincere apologies for the concern it has caused you. To ensure that such matters never recur, we will build stronger governance mechanisms for the university, drawing on the very multiple perspectives I have discussed today.

　The society we should leave for the future cannot be built on ideals and philosophy alone. And yet, precisely for that reason, we must never give up on spreading the wings of our imaginations and articulating a vision of what society ought to be and the values it should uphold. Even small voices, when their dialogues connect with one another and resonate, can change society little by little. This is what it means to live as a creative global citizen in an age of conflict and division. I sincerely hope that each of you will take up this role—standing firmly on the ground, moving forward step by step.

　Once again, my heartfelt congratulations on your graduation.

FUJII Teruo
President
The University of Tokyo
March 25, 2026