Address by the President of the University of Tokyo for the AY 2026 Spring Undergraduate Matriculation Ceremony [Translated Version]

　Congratulations to all of you on your admission to the University of Tokyo today.

　Throughout your years in junior high school and high school, you read many textbooks and absorbed a vast body of knowledge. Every line in those textbooks reflected something that many predecessors explored and discovered, or hypothesized and then tested through experiment and trial and error, before it was shared as knowledge. Science, as a form of knowing that systematically wields knowledge to produce appropriate solutions, is the crystallization of the wisdom that humanity has built up across generations. The University of Tokyo has embraced precisely this mission: the creation of knowledge.

　For that very reason, I hope that your time here at the University of Tokyo will be more than an exercise in absorbing accumulated knowledge. I hope you will grow into people capable of creating new knowledge through your own efforts. I urge you to take that first step, from a mode of learning in which you take in knowledge as information, toward the joy of creating knowledge that the world does not yet possess or has not yet explored.

　Today, let us unpack the mechanism by which new knowledge comes into being, from the perspective, to use a mathematical metaphor, of reconfiguring origins and coordinate axes.

　Knowledge is not mere information written in books and textbooks or retrievable on the internet. It is something far more comprehensive and actively engaged in, something practical, vital, and alive with movement: something we might equally call wisdom.

　Even the seasonings we consume almost without thinking every day are crystallizations of practical wisdom, born from generations of trial and error and creative ingenuity. Consider soy sauce, one of the most representative elements of the food culture of Japan. When we trace its history, we discover a chain of innovation that could well be called the birth of new knowledge.

　In the early period of Edo’s development as a city, the only soy sauce available was kudari-jōyu—literally “soy sauce shipped ‘down’ from the capital region,” as it had been transported all the way from the area around Kyoto and Osaka. Although excellent in flavor and quality, it was far more expensive than miso or salt, and was therefore never widely consumed by ordinary townspeople. By the mid-Edo period, however, full-scale production of dark soy sauce had begun in the Kantō villages of Noda and Chōshi. Trading companies soon harnessed the river-transport networks of the Tonegawa and Edogawa, and this new soy sauce was brought into the city of Edo in large quantities.

　The aroma and components of soy sauce suppressed the fishiness of raw seafood while enhancing its flavor, spurring the development of sashimi and giving rise to fast foods such as nigiri-zushi. Eel had once been eaten as sanshō-miso yaki, that is, seasoned with Japanese pepper and miso. The invention of the sweet, soy-sauce-based glazing technique called teriyaki made kabayaki—broiled eel—very popular. Tempura served with tentsuyu, a soy-sauce-based dipping broth, likewise became a staple.

　Fast-food stalls and new restaurants lined the streets, an urban dining-out culture flourished, and the dishes that came to represent what we now call washoku—traditional Japanese cuisine—took definitive shape. What triggered all of this was the spread of soy sauce. When the origin—in the sense of our mathematical metaphor—of soy sauce production shifted from western to eastern Japan, new innovation was set in motion.

　History also teaches us that networks governing the distribution of goods nurture new origins and generate innovation. Kombu—the kelp that has long sustained the umami of Japanese cuisine—offers an excellent example of how trade networks served as infrastructure for the maturation of new cultures.

　The kitamaebune were coastal trading vessels that linked Osaka and Hokkaido through the Sea of Japan. They carried premium kombu to communities throughout western Japan. In Osaka, for instance, that kombu was processed into shio-kombu—salt-cured kelp—which became a celebrated local specialty. The trade routes extended as far as Okinawa, where kombu gave rise to the regional dish kūbu-irichī, a stir-fried preparation made with simmered kelp. On their return voyages to Hokkaido, meanwhile, the same trading ships carried old cotton garments and scraps no longer needed in Kansai cities to the colder regions of Tōhoku. There, the materials became the origin of traditional crafts such as sakiori, a form of rag weaving. We can regard kombu and the fabric trade as flip sides of the same phenomenon.

　Much of our everyday culture can thus be understood in terms of the formation and migration of origins made possible by new infrastructure and networks and in their development, maturation, and refinement. This phenomenon, in which the birth of a new tool or device triggers a cascading generation of new coordinate axes for culture and industry, is equally visible in the modern world.

　Smartphone-related technologies, which underpin so much of our daily lives, offer a quintessential example. Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in January 2007. Since then, developers around the world have created an extraordinarily numerous and diverse array of applications on the new smartphone platform. Those applications now support virtually every aspect of our daily lives, from navigation to payment and far beyond.

　The smartphone made it part of everyday life to take photographs, add a few words, and instantly share them with people we have never met, something not anticipated at the time of its development. This combination of visual sharing with reflection and critique has become a new origin for many contemporary trends and cultural forms, and a new coordinate axis for modes of creative production that did not previously exist. Beyond the visual alone, the sharing of video complete with sound has likewise become another new origin. Talented artists are discovered through that medium, and its reach has become a new coordinate axis along which their work becomes widely known around the world.

　This structure, in fact, closely resembles the history of the Edo period, when advances in printing technology and its diffusion into everyday life supported the flourishing of senryū, the short poems in which people freely and uninhibitedly satirized the world around them and laughed together.

　The evolution of infrastructure—the means of communication, transportation, and information sharing—serves as an origin from which new foods, clothing, and cultural forms are created. New coordinate axes carrying fresh vectors then take shape, giving rise to new dishes and new works of art. These creations in turn become the next origin. Such knowledge-generating chains can be found throughout history. It is precisely this reconfiguration of coordinate axes that constitutes the discovery of new origins. And within that reconfiguration are hidden clues for creating new knowledge.

　Remarkably, our brains perform this process of recognizing origins and reconfiguring coordinate axes on a daily basis. We can understand this as a flexible toggling between subjective and objective perspectives, a function of our brains that is supple and rich with possibility.

　Consider, for example, the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for spatial cognition. It contains neurons known as place cells. As you walk from point A to point B and then to point C, the cells corresponding to each location fire in sequence. Our brains already contain an internal map of space, and by integrating the activity of place cells with this map, we recognize where we are within a given environment. This mechanism was elucidated by John O’Keefe of University College London and his colleagues, and they were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

　Their research revealed that the brain employs two distinct coordinate systems to comprehend the world. The first is an egocentric coordinate system, a subjective frame that takes the self as its origin. The system governs questions such as “Where is that object relative to me?” The second is an allocentric coordinate system, an objective frame, akin to GPS, that indicates where the self is located within the broader spatial environment.

　The brain toggles flexibly between these two coordinate systems—and at times superimposes them—thereby enabling rich and supple spatial awareness. In other words, in the course of our daily lives we are constantly redefining our origins and reconfiguring our coordinate axes unconsciously as we continue to make sense of the world.

　Closely analogous frameworks are employed in the fields of physics and engineering.

　When describing the motion of fluids or physical bodies, scientists draw on two perspectives: the Eulerian frame, which observes conditions at each fixed point in space, and the Lagrangian frame, which tracks individual particles as they move with the flow. The former can be likened to a camera fixed in space, an objective perspective that views the motion of the object from the outside. The latter resembles a camera attached to the object itself, following its motion from within: a subjective perspective.

　It might also help to think about robots. If a robot needs to avoid only obstacles directly in front of it, a complete map of its entire workspace is not strictly necessary. However, the moment we assign the robot a task such as “Carry this package to the third floor of that building,” a systematic body of knowledge—maps, destinations, and the like—becomes indispensable. The same holds true for living organisms. Simple behavior can be managed with local, subjective information alone. Yet as behavior grows more complex and social life more sophisticated, the organism must acquire a larger coordinate system, one that answers the question, “Where am I within the world?”

　The mathematical symbol “0” is also deeply connected to this concept of coordinate systems. The discovery of zero consisted in placing a symbol for “nothing” at the origin of positional notation and the rules of arithmetic. By establishing an origin and coordinate axes, we gained the ability to represent every point in the physical world numerically, to compare locations, and to reason about motion.

　The mutually complementary coordinate systems of subjectivity and objectivity extend well beyond spatial cognition. We can identify analogous structures in our perception of time—past and future—and in our understanding of society and of relationships among people.

　Each of you arrived here today already carrying your own origins and coordinate axes. In high school, you may have studied along relatively clear-cut axes of assessment. At the university, however, it becomes essential to consciously choose anew and, at times, reconfigure the origins and coordinate axes within yourselves—to redesign the very way you learn.

　The University of Tokyo employs a model known as Late Specialization: during your first two years, in the Junior Division, you will acquire a broad liberal arts foundation, and then high-level expertise during your third and fourth years, in the Senior Division. We also emphasize what might be called Late Generalization. This is a form of advanced liberal arts education in which students, having attained a degree of specialization, learn to relativize that expertise and reconnect it in new ways. Both approaches rest on the same conviction: that by reconfiguring your origins and coordinate axes, you can create knowledge with a breadth that is not confined within any single discipline.

　Of course, origins and coordinate axes are ultimately no more than guide lines for understanding the world. The moment any single axis begins to behave as though it were the sole and absolute standard, we end up making the attainment of high evaluations our goal, binding ourselves to a manner of thought that merely adapts to that coordinate axis rather than pursuing inquiry in the true sense. What you need is the capacity to relativize the measuring sticks the world employs and to measure the world anew in your own words, in other words, to create new origins.

　To cultivate this capacity, you must engage in dialogue with your future companions seated around you today. Through sincere and earnest dialogue, we inevitably move back and forth between the two coordinate frames of our own perspective and that of the other. The conflicts and divisions that exist across the world, and the challenges of diversity and inclusion closer to us, likewise demand that we measure the distances between differing subjectivities and move back and forth between one another’s coordinates. Is it not precisely through such endeavors—building together the world as it ought to be—that paths toward resolution are opened?

　I urge you to use your time at the University of Tokyo freely to rediscover the importance of each of your own origins and to hone your own distinctive coordinate axes. I also want you to have the courage to embrace entirely new origins unlike any you have known before.

　I sincerely hope that the curiosity, imagination, and passion of every one of you will become a source of new knowledge for the world to come—a true origin, like a spring from which water wells up.

　Once again, my warmest congratulations on your admission.

FUJII Teruo
President
The University of Tokyo
April 13, 2026