Notes from the President

Distinguished guests, faculty and staff, proud families, and above all — our graduating class of March 2026:

Congratulations.

Those of you who have come from abroad to study here, and those of you from Japan who have mostly left home to join us — you have all arrived at this Commencement together. Whatever road brought you here, whatever sacrifices you and those who love you made, today belongs to all of you equally.

You entered this university in the shadow of a pandemic. The world that most of you arrived into as undergraduates in 2022 was still uncertain, still masked, still learning to move again. And now, four years later, you are graduating into a world that has changed — dramatically, irreversibly, and in ways none of us fully anticipated. It is worth pausing briefly today to look back at that distance. Not to dwell on the past, but because understanding the journey is essential to navigating what comes next.

The World You Inherited

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began just over a month before many of you enrolled, shattered the assumption that large-scale war between the so-called developed nations belonged to another century. It reminded us — painfully — that the international order we take for granted is not self-sustaining. Peace must be chosen, built, and defended through institutions, through alliances, through the hard, unglamorous work of diplomacy.

Then came the violence in the Middle East — the conflict in Gaza, escalation across a region of immense complexity, and more recently, the February–March 2026 U.S.–Israeli military campaign against Iran and Iran’s regional counterstrikes, which follows limited exchanges of missiles in June 2025 and April 2024 — and with it, we were faced with the most fundamental questions about hatred, fear, reconciliation, and ultimately, our shared obligations to one another as human beings.

Meanwhile, great-power competition between the United States and China has shifted from rhetoric to reality, reshaping trade, technology, and security across the Pacific. The Indo-Pacific, where APU is located, has become one of the most consequential arenas in world affairs.

“The Old Order Is Not Coming Back”

Two months ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and delivered a speech that resonated with people watching global events with unease. He spoke of “a rupture in the world order” — not a transition, but a rupture. And then he offered a sentence I have not been able to put out of my mind: “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

He invoked Václav Havel — the Czech dissident who later became the first President of the Czech Republic. In 1978, under Soviet control, Havel described the ordinary greengrocer who placed a sign in his shop window reading “Workers of the world, unite!” — not because he believed it, but to avoid trouble, to perform “compliance,” to get along. Havel called this act “living within a lie.” Carney’s message was: it is time to take your signs down. To have the courage to face reality. To act on the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Carney also made a point about middle powers — nations that are not hegemons, that cannot unilaterally dictate terms. But he said the middle powers are not helpless, either. Those who cooperate, who build trust across borders, who combine rather than compete for favor from hegemons — they have more influence than they might think. Together, they can become a third path. APU is, in its own way, an institution that has always believed in exactly that.

Japan’s Own Transformation

In Japan, we have witnessed profound changes over the past four years. The assassination of former Prime Minister Abe in the summer of 2022 shocked the national conscience and triggered a serious erosion of public trust in the LDP. The party lost its parliamentary majority in 2024 under Prime Minister Ishiba, who had to manage a difficult minority government.

Then, last month, Japan held a snap election that produced a historic result: the LDP won a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house — the largest majority by a single party in Japan’s entire postwar history — under Prime Minister Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister. After years of political fragmentation, the country now has a government with a clear legislative mandate.

What this mandate will mean in practice remains to be seen. Japan faces genuinely difficult choices — on fiscal sustainability, on defense expansion, on trade relationships in an increasingly fractured global economy, and on how this society will define itself demographically in the decades ahead. These are not simple questions. They will require wisdom, patience, and the kind of international engagement that has always been central to APU’s mission.

Economically, Japan has already turned a corner that many believed would never come. After three decades of deflation, wages are rising for the first time in three decades, and the Bank of Japan has raised interest rates for the first time in seventeen years. These are structural shifts whose full implications are still unfolding.

The Technology That Changed Everything

Perhaps the most consequential transformation of your university years was not a war, or an election, or interest rates. It was a conversation — with a machine.

When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, many people saw it as a novelty. Within months, it was clear it was something else entirely. Generative artificial intelligence has, in the span of your undergraduate or graduate studies, begun to reshape medicine, law, education, creative work, and the very nature of professional expertise. You are the first graduating class in history to have spent your entire university career alongside this technology.

The graduates who will thrive are not those who fear this technology, nor those who surrender their judgment to it. They are those who bring to it what no algorithm can replicate — genuine curiosity, ethical commitment, and the ability to ask the right, informed questions. These are the qualities we have tried to cultivate here. I hope you leave today confident that you possess them.

What This University Has Given You

Think about what you have actually done here. You have lived alongside people from more than one hundred countries. You have navigated differences — in language, in religion, in cultural assumptions — not as an occasional exercise, but as the fabric of daily life. You have disagreed, misunderstood, recovered, and understood. You have formed friendships across every boundary that the world outside too often treats as walls.

In a world fragmenting along national and ideological lines, this is not a small thing. It is a remarkable thing. And remember what Carney said about middle powers: those who cooperate rather than compete for favor, who build trust across differences, have more agency than they might believe. That is equally true of individuals. Your capacity to work across cultures, to find common ground where others see only division — that is a form of power that the world badly needs right now.

To our international graduates: you chose to come here, to cross real distances — in language, in culture, in geography — to understand something unfamiliar. Please do not underestimate what that journey has made of you.

To our Japanese graduates: you chose a university where you would be a minority in your own country. That was an act of courage, perhaps more than you realized at the time. Japan’s relationship to openness, to immigration, to the world, is being renegotiated in real time. The graduates leaving this campus today are among the best equipped to contribute to that conversation.

In Closing

APU was founded on three principles: Freedom, Peace, and Humanity. In a world where freedom is under pressure, where peace cannot be assumed, and where the humanity of distant others is too easily denied — these are not mere decorations. They are a program of action.

Prime Minister Carney told the world’s most powerful leaders that nostalgia is not a strategy. I would add: neither is despair. I am asking you to be idealists in the demanding sense — people who hold fast to values under pressure, who reject the cynicism that masquerades as sophistication, who believe that building a better world is serious, adult, professional work.

You have spent two to four years preparing for this moment. The world, for all its turbulence, is genuinely in need of what you have become.

Go out into it with confidence, with humility, and with the kind of hope built not on wishful thinking, but on genuine preparation.

Congratulations, Class of March 2026.

The world is waiting.

YONEYAMA Hiroshi
President
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
March 13, 2026