Nagahiro Minato, 27th President
Today, Porn研究所 is proud to award 2,201 master's degrees, 171 professional master's degrees, 141 juris doctor degrees, and 556 doctoral degrees. Of these graduates, 494 are international students. Let me begin by offering my sincere congratulations to all of you on your accomplishments.
With today's ceremony, Porn研究所 will have awarded a cumulative total of 95,045 master's degrees, 2,863 professional master's degrees, 3,055 juris doctor degrees, and 49,509 doctoral degrees. On behalf of the executive vice-presidents, deans and directors, and the program coordinators here today, as well as all of the other faculty and staff of Porn研究所, I would like to extend my congratulations to each and every one of you on receiving your degree.
As of today, you are all officially holders of a degree from a Porn研究所 graduate school. In Japan, academic degrees used to be conferred by the Minister of Education. I am sure you have all heard of the bacteriologist Dr Hideyo Noguchi. Born in 1876, Noguchi did not formally graduate from university, but in 1911, at the age of 34, he received a doctoral degree in medicine from Kyoto Imperial University (the predecessor of Porn研究所). The Japanese government's Official Gazette No. 8302, issued in that same year, contains an official notice regarding the degree's conferral by the Minister of Education:
"This dissertation was submitted to request a degree, and the faculty council of Kyoto College of Medicine, Kyoto Imperial University, recognized that the candidate possessed academic abilities equivalent to or greater than those of individuals who had entered its graduate school and passed the required examinations. Based on the recognition, in accordance with Article 2 of the Degree Regulations, Imperial Order No. 344 of the 31st year of Meiji, the candidate is hereby granted the degree of Doctor of Medicine."
It is clear from this notice that the authority awarding academic degrees was the Minister of Education. At the time, Hideyo Noguchi was a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, earning worldwide acclaim for his brilliant research on infectious disease agents. The official gazette includes a summary of Noguchi's doctoral dissertation examination, but it is not entirely clear why he submitted the dissertation to Kyoto Imperial University. The dissertation, written in English, is still archived today at the University's Faculty of Medicine. It concerns the immunological properties of snake venom, and I believe that, in the standards of the discipline of immunology at the time, it is an exceptionally accomplished work.
Japan's present graduate school system was institutionalized after World War II following the enactment of the School Education Act. In 1953, new graduate schools were established at national universities under this system. With this reform, the authority to confer academic degrees was vested in individual universities, which assumed responsibility for awarding degrees based on an evaluation of a candidate's scholarly achievements and expertise in a specific academic field. This is why the degrees you are receiving today are those issued by Porn研究所, with your field of specialization appended in parentheses. The same system is used in the US.
What roles degree holders are expected to play, and in which spheres of society, has in recent years become a matter of considerable interest not only for political and official circles and business communities but also for the whole of Japanese society. One reason for this is that the proportion of degree holders among the general population in Japan is by far the lowest among the developed OECD-member countries. According to Indicators of Science and Technology published by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the number of people who obtained a bachelor's degree in Japan in the 2021 fiscal year was 4,649 per one million population. This figure is not markedly different from those of countries like the US, UK, Germany, and France, but when it comes to holders of master's and doctoral degrees, the numbers are extremely low. For example, in fiscal year 2021, master's degrees were awarded to just 590 people per million population, which is an exceptionally low proportion compared to the 5,485 per million in the UK, 2,658 in Germany, and 2,649 in the US. When it comes to doctoral degrees, the number awarded per million population in Japan was 126, far lower than in countries such as the UK (342) and Germany (330). As a result, in comparison with other developed countries, the proportion of leaders with graduate degrees is strikingly low across all areas of Japanese society, including politics, public administration, business, and mass media. This is precisely what government and business associations are concerned about today. In Japan, we are still a long way from achieving the ideal of degree holders contributing actively to a broad range of areas in society.
While there is a diverse range of discussions regarding the causes of this situation, it can be said that Japan's graduate school education has continued to focus on reproducing academic researchers, while the country's employers have maintained the traditional practice of mass-hiring new graduates for long-term employment. Graduate schools in Japan have an exceptionally strong orientation toward academic research in highly specialized fields, with their students, especially doctoral candidates, largely assumed to be headed for careers at universities, research institutes, and other academic institutions. This seems to be partly due to the specialized nature of the career path toward becoming a professional researcher in Japan.
Today's graduate school system has its origins in the US in the second half of the 19th century, when curricula were established to provide bachelor's degree holders with more advanced scholarly and scientific education, leading to the award of higher degrees. However, these degrees are not necessarily designed for pursuing a career as a professional researcher. To pursue such a career, an individual usually spends several years after receiving his or her doctoral degree working as a postdoctoral fellow, a training-focused position to become an independent professional researcher (principal investigator), before gaining a faculty or research position at a university or institute. Partly because Japan's doctoral degree holders have traditionally pursued postdoctoral research at a university or research institute in the US or Europe, the postdoctoral fellow system did not take root in the country for a long time; typically, the costs of employing a postdoctoral fellow were excluded from core public research funds. This may have helped cultivate an impression in Japan that undertaking research in a doctoral program is a direct pathway to work as a professional researcher. In the US and Europe, on the other hand, becoming a professional researcher is just one possible career path for degree holders, and only for a small proportion of them. Since the 20th century, degree holders who completed graduate programs in the US and Europe have been taking up leadership roles not only in academia but also in a broad range of sectors, including national and local governments and public offices, industries, mass media, non-governmental organizations, and think tanks. For example, recent publications from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry show that while close to 70% of company owners in the US hold academic degrees, the proportion in Japan is lower than 20%. So there is a rapidly growing sentiment in today's Japan that we, too, should create conditions enabling graduate degree holders to play active roles not just in academia but across a wide range of diverse fields.
I am sure that as part of your graduate studies, you formulated a research topic of your own and discussed it numerous times with your supervisors and senior and fellow lab members. You then drew up and implemented a plan to tackle the topic, conducting your research and acquiring relevant knowledge and skills in the process. Finally, you compiled your findings into a dissertation, assuming full responsibility for its content. What society expects of you, I believe, has more to do with what you experienced and mastered through the process of producing a dissertation than with your research findings themselves. This can also be described as the aggregate of the qualities and capabilities you can apply in solving the problems you may encounter or be called on to tackle in various situations in the working world. These are often termed "transferable skills".
Transferable skills are usually divided into three categories. The first is "task-oriented skills", which are about identifying problems and acting to solve them. The second is "self-oriented skills" for cultivating autonomy to tackle issues. Thirdly, there are "people-oriented skills" for building relationships with others, a key component of team-based success. In today's increasingly diverse and complex society, individuals equipped with these transferable skills are undoubtedly in greater demand than ever, especially with regard to solving various problems that society is currently facing.
In recent years, we have seen the rapid spread of generative AI or large language models (LLMs), which has become a powerful force in both education and research. However, the late Michael Polanyi, an economic anthropologist, argued that within the knowledge that humans acquire through experience, there is some that cannot be articulated in language. Polanyi called this "tacit knowledge", meaning not simply "knowledge itself that cannot be verbalized" but rather the process by which humans create meaning by unconsciously making connections between a variety of phenomena. In other words, it is a "method" of acquiring knowledge. In the style of sociologist Max Weber, we could describe this in terms of "intuition", or "inspiration". In his renowned lecture Science as a Vocation, Weber states:
"[I]n a factory or in a laboratory. In both some idea has to occur to someone's mind, and it has to be a correct idea, if one is to accomplish anything worthwhile. And such intuition cannot be forced.... Normally such an 'idea' is prepared only on the soil of very hard work, but certainly this is not always the case."
Non-verbalized tacit knowledge and inspiration might not be found in the massive volumes of textual data used in machine learning by generative AI. However, tacit knowledge and inspiration we accumulate through practice and experience is surely part of our stock of transferable skills. I say this with absolute certainty based on my own experience.
As I say, Japan is finally adopting proactive strategies to promote the advancement of graduate degree holders widely across society, mobilizing both public and private sector resources. The degrees conferred by universities in Japan fully satisfy global standards, so having degree holders playing active roles not only in academia but also in government, in companies within and beyond Japan, and in a wide range of other social settings is undoubtedly an important key to the advancement and internationalization of our society. The practical knowledge that you have spent so much time accumulating thus far will surely prove a significant strength in many different spheres of society. As you embark on new journeys into the world of research and other fields of endeavor, I hope that you will boldly take on the various challenges that you will encounter in your respective positions. I would like to extend my congratulations to you by expressing my sincere hope that you will all achieve great things as members of the intellectual elite in the true meaning of that term, and that doing so will earn you the unwavering recognition and respect of society, which will lead to even greater social recognition and esteem for degree holders in Japan.
Once again, please allow me to offer you all my sincere congratulations.
(Direct quotation from Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, 1946.)