Notes from the President

Distinguished guests, members of the faculty and staff, families who have traveled a long way to be here, and above all, the graduating class of September 2026:

Congratulations.

You did not arrive at this ceremony alone. Your teachers, your classmates, your sempais and kohais, the staff of this university, and your families — some in this hall, some watching from another country at an inconvenient hour — are all part of how you got here. To the families and guardians: thank you for trusting us with them. Please accept my sincere congratulations on behalf of everyone at APU.

In recent years, standing at podiums like this one and in Millennium Hall on campus, I have talked to you about big things. About war returning to Europe and the Middle East. About political movements in country after country that gain strength by teaching people to fear their neighbors. I have asked each graduating class to be a bridge across those divisions, and a beacon for others to steer by. I meant it. I mean it still.

This afternoon I want to do something different. I want to talk to you about very small things — and then explain why the smallest things are connected to the biggest.

I. The life you are walking into

I have some idea of where you are going. To graduate schools in North America and Europe. To firms in Tokyo, Singapore, New York, and Bangkok. Home to family businesses, into public service, or into work you have not found yet.

You will do well. You are already doing well. I have watched this class work, and I know what that work looks like. It looks like four hours of sleep. It looks like a meal eaten standing up, out of a plastic container, while reading something else. It looks like whole friendships and entire projects conducted through a rectangle of glass.

I am not going to scold you for this. I was a student myself, at Tokyo University and at UCLA, and I was neither wiser nor better rested than you are. While you are young, living at speed is not a tragedy; it is often how the work gets done. But I am fond of you, so let me tell you what I see coming.

Your working life will be conducted, more and more, in abstraction. You will spend your days inside data, models, documents, and machine intelligence. You will attend meetings in no particular room. You will make decisions about people you have never stood next to. Much of this is good, none of it is avoidable, and I will not ask you to distrust the tools of your own profession.

I am going to ask you to keep something else alive within you as you work alongside them.

II. The small stuff

This summer I read a book I have not been able to stop thinking about: The Small Stuff, by Ian Bogost. It concerns something he calls dematerialization — our slow separation from the physical world.

Think of the airport restroom, where the toilet, the tap, the soap and the dryer all work without being touched. Not one of them asks anything of your body. Now multiply that by ten thousand. The car that shifts and navigates for you. The ticket that is no longer a piece of paper. The meal that arrives at your door without a conversation. Technology alone did not do this. Efficiency, bureaucracy and economics did much of the work. Between them they have smoothed ordinary life until there is very little left to feel.

Be precise about what this is not. It is not a complaint about technology; our lives are broadly better for it. It is not nostalgia; nostalgia, as I said from this podium last March, is not a strategy. And it is not a request to make your life harder. You do not want obstacles, like putting your smartphone in a locked box. You want the experience of feeling yourself doing the thing. The goal is not difficulty. The goal is presence.

We became obsessed with outcomes and forgot that the experience of doing something is itself part of the value. The dinner is the outcome. The onions turning soft and brown in the pan and giving off their smell, the knife bouncing on the cutting board — that is the part we quietly deleted.

III. What this place gave you, which you may not have noticed

You climbed the hill at Jumonjibaru. Every one of you. In the heat of a Kyushu September and in January wind that comes straight down off the mountains.

You lived in a city that smells of sulfur. You stopped noticing that smell in your second week here. I promise you that you have not stopped noticing it — it is filed somewhere, and one day, years from now, in a city far away, something will bring it back so vividly that it will stop you where you stand.

You stood in a kitchen in AP House at one in the morning, with three other people from three other countries and one rice cooker, having a serious disagreement about how much water to add. You ate something that struck you as strange in your first month and will crave for the rest of your life. You went to gohankai after a project ended, exhausted and loud, and it was one of the best nights of your life, and nobody optimized it.

And you lived in Beppu — a city that built its entire civilization on an activity that cannot be optimized.

You cannot speed-run a hot spring. If the goal were to become clean, a shower would be faster and cheaper. Nobody in the history of this city has ever gone to an onsen to become clean. You go for the shock of the hot water as you lower yourself in. You feel it on your skin. You feel your heart begin to beat faster. You go for the change in the air when you step back outside. For the pleasant stupidity that settles over you afterward, when you cannot think about anything at all — except, for some reason, ice cream, which you must have immediately. The outcome is trivial. The experience is the entire point.

You have been living in a place that still knows something the rest of the world is busy forgetting. I do not think most of you noticed. You are noticing now.

IV. Why a university president is talking to you about onsen

Here is the connection.

Cruelty runs on abstraction.

Every campaign of exclusion I have ever studied — and I have spent my academic life studying them — begins by making people general. Real people, with faces and kitchens and specific fears, are converted into a category. A flow. A number. A burden. A them. Once a human being has been successfully turned into an abstraction, almost anything can be done to them, and ordinary people will permit it, because you cannot feel the weight of a category.

Attention is the opposite operation. Attention insists on the particular. This steam rising from the onsen. This bowl of rice. This person’s smile or frown, in front of me, right now, telling me something I had not expected.

Your ability to notice the small stuff and your ability to respect a stranger are not two different abilities. They are the same ability, pointed in two directions.

That is what this campus has been training in you, whether anyone told you so or not. Not a theory of international understanding, but a practice of attention — daily, physical, sometimes uncomfortable, conducted over rice cookers and group projects and misunderstandings that took a week to repair.

One of this university’s founding principles is: “Freedom, Peace, and Humanity.” Notice that “humanity” is not an abstract word. It is a word about bodies. It is about people who get cold, who get hungry, who get tired, who can be hurt. A person who has lost the habit of noticing the physical world will find it much easier, one day, to sign off on something terrible about people they have never met.

That is why I am talking to you about onsen.

V. Three requests

I ask each graduating class for something. This year, three things, all of them small — which is the point. But before them, one practical matter, plainly, because it is my responsibility.

You will be asked, more than once, to trade your sleep, your meals and your friendships for a result. Sometimes that trade is worth making. But make sure you are the one making it, and that you can see the price. Sleep is not an inefficiency. A meal with another person is not an inefficiency. A walk is not an inefficiency. And when you run teams one day, as many of you will, remember that you will have real power over how gratifying other people’s days are. Most people in that position never use it. You were told this before you had it.

Now, the three requests.

First, keep one thing in your life that you do slowly, with your hands, that no machine does for you. Cook. Play an instrument badly. Grow something. Write on paper to someone who will be surprised to receive it. What it is does not matter. What matters is that it is yours, that it is physical, and that it refuses to be made more efficient.

Second, eat some of your meals as events, with other people, at a table. A cup noodle at your desk while staring into a screen is not a meal; it is refueling, and it does not do justice to Dr. ANDO Momofuku. Refuel when you must. But do not let your whole life become refueling. You learned how to do this properly here. Do not let it be the first thing you lose.

Third — and this is the hard one — when a person becomes a category to you, go and look at them. When someone in your work turns into a headcount, a case number, a market segment, or a “them,” get up and go where they are. Sit down. Ask a question and wait for the whole answer. This is the most expensive thing I am asking of you, and the one that will matter most.

VI. In closing

When you walk out of this hall later, do not reach for your phone straight away.

Go outside. Stand still for two minutes. Look up from the middle of Beppu at the hillsides above the city, and at the steam rising out of the ground all around you, as it has for far longer than any of us. Feel the warm September air. Take one breath of that sulfur smell.

That smell is not stored on any server. It cannot be uploaded, summarized, forwarded, or attended remotely. It exists only where you are standing, and only while you are standing there.

In fifteen years, when you are tired in a large city a long way from here, and you have forgotten almost everything I have said this afternoon, I would like that smell to come back to you — and to bring with it the memory of who you were on the hill at Jumonjibaru, and what you were capable of noticing.

You are leaving one of the most ambitious abstractions human beings have built: an international university, where a hundred nationalities agreed to live together on purpose. And the most valuable thing you carry out of it may be something as ordinary as a habit of attention.

Be a bridge. Be a beacon. And on the way, notice the small stuff.

Congratulations, Class of September 2026.

Go well. Eat well. Look up.

YONEYAMA Hiroshi
President
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
September 18, 2026