Congratulations, New Students! (2021 Entrance Ceremony)

2021 Entry Ceremonial Address from the President

Dear new incoming undergraduate and graduate students, Congratulations and welcome to TUFS!

It is my great pleasure to be able to hold this ceremony today on our campus even though we are still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of you are attending this ceremony remotely from different rooms. I really wish I could see you smiling and speak to you in person. Yet, all of the faculty and staff members at TUFS are very glad that we could gather on campus to celebrate this good day.

This past year our lives were disrupted greatly by the COVID-19 pandemic. That must have been especially true for those of you who had to prepare for the entrance exams under the pandemic. I would like to express my heartfelt respect to all of you for overcoming these difficulties, successfully passing the entrance examination, and becoming a member of our university community.

The Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, which you have joined today, is a university that studies and tries to understand languages and cultures of the world and also politics and economics of various regions of the world from perspectives of the local people. In other words, our research and education take the diversity of the world as its foundation.

You may think that the world is becoming more homogenized through globalization. It is true that we live in an age where e-mail and social networking services are available all over the world, and that the same chain stores can be found everywhere. All of these are indeed making the world a rather boring place. However, it is precisely because the world is becoming closer together that differences in language and culture are becoming more apparent, and problems that were once buried in different parts of the world are now interacting and influencing each other. Globalization is drawing disparate things to a single place, and in fact, it is playing a role in highlighting the diversity of the world.

We can see this state of the world in the COVID-19 pandemic. In the pre-globalization era, when there were relatively limited mobility and interaction, the epidemic could have ended as a local disease somewhere in the world. However, it can now spread all over the world in the blink of an eye. The plague in the Middle Ages and the Spanish flu after World War I also spread globally, but they took a long time to spread. The global spread of COVID-19, in contrast, took only a little more than a month. A rapidly growing number of mutated viruses are also spreading around the world very quickly, and this douse hopes for rapid containment of the pandemic.

In the face of the outbreak of COVID-19, countries tried to constrain contacts by closing boarders and shutting off international movement of people closing boarders. Japan was one of such countries. Even within the country, movement across prefectural boundaries became a problem. This came to highlight the local administrative units like prefectures. Why, then, were these prefectural boundaries used as the basis for restricting movement?

Needless to say, it is because countries and other administrative units function as a domain of government of a single system. The current control measures are based on the premise that each of us is a citizen of some country or prefecture, and that national systems and laws, as well as prefectural ordinances and instructions, function within the scope of such uni