2020・2021 Entrance Ceremony University President Address

In these current circumstances, we need to pay close attention to preventing infection so it is vital that we avoid the so-called 3 Cs: closed spaces, crowds, and close contact. In any other year, we would witness many big welcoming events and family celebrations for new students around this time, but right now it is not possible to gather together for meals and celebrations as we have done in the past. In the on-campus student cafeteria, we have erected acrylic partitions, spaced out the seating, and directed students to talk as little as possible while eating. I would also ask you to avoid eating lunch chatting with your friends. Rather, please keep quiet when eating and then put on a mask when you want to talk together. If everyone takes these precautions and seeks to prevent infections on campus, then it will be possible for you to come to the University and attend face-to-face lessons in the classroom and to hold extracurricular activities.

With that aim in mind, unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, we will not be able to offer the kind of campus life that you might have imagined prior to COVID-19. There are many different students from all over the country at Hosei University. Our diverse student body also comprises international students from different countries and mature students. In our scientific research laboratories, undergraduate and graduate students sometimes study together, and many people in responsible positions at the forefront of society are enrolled in our graduate schools which offer courses for working adults. When on campus, all these people are students of Hosei University. You might not come across each other often in the classroom if you are in a different faculty or year group, but you might sit next to each other in the library or meet at extracurricular activities or events held within the University. That means that you will have the opportunity to meet people at Hosei University who you wouldn’t have met through your high-school career.

It is possible to make new friends in this environment and enjoy various opportunities to interact with others from a free standpoint that doesn’t involve securing your interests or fulfilling basic life needs. That is an extremely valuable experience that can be gained in your student life at Hosei University. The specialist knowledge that you will gain through your studies or research is of course also important, but meeting and interacting with friends is equally important. Having said that, we know that we can’t do that in the same way as in regular years. Normally, you would be able to live a regular student life on campus without really thinking about it and make friends “naturally.” However, under current circumstances, it might not be possible to make friends by just going about your day. Instead, we need to consciously think of ways and take decisive action to overcome current constraints.

You might wonder why only your generation who happens to be entering university at this particular time should have to live under such restrictions during this special once-in-a-lifetime university stage. I am sure that all of you feel this way to some extent in your heart. It is natural to feel dissatisfied or discouraged when such a situation is forced upon you with little margin for choice. It would be extremely unfair to ask you to forcibly crush those emotions or to strive to deny them and I don’t think that you have to do that.

However, if you succumb to those feelings, do you just have to accept it and resign yourself to the restrictions?

No matter how hard you try or highly motivated you are, under current circumstances, these constraints on your actions are not going to disappear any time soon. In that sense, we just have to accept and work with them. Also, if you get used to just letting it go, then you might be able to get through it. But if you do so, you might feel empty and lack motivation, and, even if you did get involved in something, it would only ever be a pale copy of what it could have been in the absence of any restrictions. There might be some people here today who are experiencing that exact feeling right now.

However, I would urge you to ask yourself whether the very fact that you are experiencing such circumstances and operating under such restrictions right now could inspire you to come up with ingenious ways of proactively overcoming those difficulties and you might find that interesting. For instance, the sport of soccer has some unreasonable rules. Most people can move their hands with greater dexterity than their feet and if you want to manipulate a ball, you should be able to do that better with your hands. However, the very rule that you can’t touch the ball with your hands is what makes soccer a sport. At that point you have two options. Are you going to feel dissatisfied with the unreasonable rule of not being able to touch the ball with your hand and hold onto that unconvinced feeling while playing soccer? Or are you going to practice how effectively you can control the ball with your foot, even if it is not normally as dexterous as your hand, and work to maximize the power you can generate by kicking the ball with your legs because they are more powerful than your arms? Depending on which choice you make, your progress will different and so will the intrinsic enjoyment of playing soccer.

People always experience some kind of constraints in their life and find themselves having to operate under somewhat reluctant conditions. Often, there is nothing you can do about many such restrictions on your own. In actual fact, restrictions that the human race as a whole, let alone an individual, can do nothing about are not uncommon. We have no choice but to accept those restrictions and it is not at all productive to expend time and energy lamenting or hating them. Conversely, you can’t evolve if you simply roll over and passively accept restrictions. In a restrictive environment, it is only when you feel inspired to properly devise as many ways as possible to overcome any constraints and proactively seek to maximize your possibilities in the environment in which you find yourself that you can hope to grow as a person and enjoy the fruits of your labors. So, I ask you earnestly not to only complain about or be easily defeated by any restrictions, but to think of ways of still achieving your goals in some form or other.

Your way of thinking is the basis upon which to nurture such action, but you have to apply some different wisdom and ingenuity in order to translate that thinking into actual results. I’m talking about the very wisdom laid out in the Hosei University Charter message Practical Wisdom for Freedom. Hosei University classes and extracurricular activities offer abundant hints on practical wisdom. You can learn so much more from our teachers than simple lesson content. You can gain expertise on some wonderful ways to convey concepts and ideas, to listen to different views from a diverse range of people, or how to convince those with lingering doubts. Sometimes, that includes learning about counterproductive actions. You can learn similarly from friends studying and engaging together with you in classrooms and extracurricular activities, but you would not notice those hints if you were not looking for them. Yes, you are living under much more restrictive conditions due to the current environment. So I would ask you to learn how other members of Hosei University are striving to overcome those restrictions and still achieve their aims and to work together to progress those ideas even further. We could say that, given the tough current restrictions, now is the perfect time to refine your own Practical Wisdom for Freedom in your own way.

It is not only students who find themselves in an unprecedented environment, but faculty and staff as well. Basically, our whole society is living under similar restrictions. In that sense, it is not only you students who are being asked to hone your Practical Wisdom for Freedom, but our faculty and staff as well. Let’s spend this university life working together to polish our practical wisdom skills. I firmly believe that the results of those efforts will always be meaningful to broader society, which is experiencing similar restrictions, so I would like us to work together to ensure Hosei University can make a useful social contribution.

I will close this congratulatory address by once again welcoming you as new participants in that drive and I look forward to the various activities we will be working on together in the future.
 

Over the past year, it has become increasingly clear where the risks of COVID-19 infection lie, that we don’t need to excessively fear it, and that we must always remember to be vigilant. That’s how we were able to decide to hold this year’s entrance ceremony at the Nippon Budokan, while restricting the number of participants and taking measures to prevent infections. We also decided to create this opportunity to welcome all who entered Hosei University last year once more. You have been a student at Hosei University for a year now, but I imagine you do not yet feel the campus space is your own school. We wanted you to really experience what it is like to enter Hosei University and so we thought it was important to gather you all together in the Budokan. Furthermore, while some large-scale courses and discussion-driven lessons will offer hybrid classes, in principle, we will be conducting face-to-face classes from now on.

Having said that, under these current circumstances, we must take sufficient care to avoid spreading COVID-19 and it is vital that we avoid the so-called three Cs: closed spaces, crowds, and close contact. In any other year, we would witness many big welcoming events for new students around this time, but right now it is not possible to gather together for meals as we have done in the past. In the on-campus student cafeteria, we have erected acrylic partitions, spaced out the seating, and directed students to talk as little as possible while eating. I would ask you to please keep quiet when eating and then put on a mask when you want to talk together. If everyone takes these precautions and seeks to prevent infections on campus, then we will be able to protect your opportunity to come to the University and attend face-to-face lessons in the classroom and to hold extracurricular activities.

With that aim in mind, unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, we will not be able to realize the kind of campus life that you might have imagined prior to COVID-19. There are many different students from all over the country at Hosei University. Our diverse student body also comprises international students from different countries and mature students. In our scientific research laboratories, undergraduate and graduate students sometimes study together, and many people in responsible positions at the forefront of society are enrolled in our graduate schools which offer courses for working adults. When on campus, all these people are students of Hosei University. You might not come across each other often in the classroom if you are in a different faculty or year group, but you might sit next to each other in the library or meet at an extracurricular activity or event held within the University. I think you will also have the opportunity to actually meet those people who you have only seen so far as names, voices, or in video on the online screen.

It is possible to make new friends in this environment and enjoy various opportunities to interact with others from a free standpoint that doesn’t involve securing your interests or fulfilling basic life needs. That is an extremely valuable experience that can be gained in your student life at Hosei University. The specialist knowledge that you will gain through your studies or research is of course also important, but meeting and interacting with friends is equally important. However, you have not been able to do that hardly at all over the past year.

You might wonder why only your generation who happened to enter university at this particular time should have to live under such restrictions during this special once-in-a-lifetime university stage. I am sure that all of you feel this way to some extent in your heart. It is natural to feel dissatisfied or discouraged when such a situation is forced upon you with little margin for choice. It would be extremely unfair to ask you to forcibly crush those emotions or to strive to deny them and I don’t think that you have to do that.

However, if you succumb to those feelings, do you just have to accept and resign yourself to the restrictions?

No matter how hard you try or highly motivated you are, under current circumstances, these constraints on your actions are not going to disappear any time soon. In that sense, we just have to accept and work with them. Also, if you get used to just letting it go, then you might be able to get through it. But if you do so, you might feel empty and lack motivation, and, even if you did get involved in something, it would only ever be a pale copy of what it could have been in the absence of any restrictions. There might be some people here today who are experiencing that exact feeling right now.

However, I would urge you to ask yourself whether the very fact that you are experiencing such circumstances and operating under such restrictions right now could actually inspire you to come up with ingenious ways of proactively overcoming those difficulties and you might find that interesting. During an online seminar held last year, one first-year student said, “Take a card game for instance, some people will glance at the cards they have been dealt and abandon the game straight away, but I’m the sort of person who thinks about trying to win as much as I can with the cards I’ve been dealt. However hard we try, we can’t go back to the time before the COVID-19 pandemic, so I think it is definitely better to try to make the with-Corona world a better place.” I understand the senior students in the seminar were also impressed by these remarks. The comments are still up on the University website, so you can read them yourself.

People always experience some kind of constraints in their life and find themselves having to operate under somewhat reluctant conditions. Often, there is nothing you can do about many such restrictions on your own. In actual fact, restrictions that the human race as a whole, let alone an individual, can do nothing about are not uncommon. We have no choice but to accept those restrictions and it is not at all productive to expend time and energy lamenting or hating them. Conversely, you can’t evolve if you simply roll over and passively accept restrictions. In a restrictive environment, it is only when you feel inspired to properly devise as many ways as possible to overcome any constraints and proactively seek to maximize your possibilities in the environment in which you find yourself that you can hope to grow as a person and enjoy the fruits of your labors. So, I ask you earnestly not to only complain about or be easily defeated by any restrictions, but to think of ways of still achieving your goals in some form or other.

Your way of thinking is the basis upon which to nurture such action, but you have to apply some different wisdom and ingenuity in order to translate that thinking into actual results. I’m talking about the very wisdom laid out in the Hosei University Charter’s message of Practical Wisdom for Freedom. Hosei University classes and extracurricular activities offer abundant hints on practical wisdom. You can learn so much more from our teachers than simple lesson content. You can gain expertise on some wonderful ways to convey concepts and ideas, to listen to different views from a diverse range of people, or how to convince those with lingering doubts. Sometimes, that includes learning about counterproductive actions. You can learn similarly from friends who work together with you in classrooms and in extracurricular activities, but you would not notice those hints if you were not looking for them. Yes, you are living under much more restrictive conditions due to the current environment. So I ask you to learn how other members of Hosei University are striving to overcome those restrictions and still achieve their aims and to work together with such people to progress those ideas even further. We could say that, given the tough current restrictions, now is the perfect time to refine your own Practical Wisdom for Freedom in your own way.

It is not only students who find themselves in an unprecedented environment, but faculty and staff as well. Basically, our whole society is living under similar restrictions. In that sense, it is not only you students who are being asked to hone your Practical Wisdom for Freedom, but our faculty and staff as well. Let’s spend this university life working together to polish our practical wisdom skills. I firmly believe that the results of those efforts will always be meaningful to the wider society, which is experiencing similar restrictions, so I would like us to work together to ensure Hosei University can make a useful social contribution.

I will close this congratulatory address by once again welcoming you as new participants in that drive and I look forward to the various activities we will be working on together in the future.