Notes from the President

New students — welcome to Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University.

To the families, guardians, and friends who supported you in getting here, whether in this hall or watching from far away: thank you. This day is yours as much as theirs.

From this afternoon, you are members of the APU community. Look around you. In this room are people who grew up speaking languages you have never heard, who eat foods you have never tasted, whose grandparents lived through histories you have never studied. In four years, when you walk down this hill at Jumonjibaru and out into the world, you will be a different person because of them. That is not a slogan. It is simply what happens here.

But first, I must speak about the summer that has just ended.

Those we have lost

On August 26, near the border between Nepal and Tibet, an avalanche of rock and ice fell more than a kilometer into the valley below, so violently that seismographs worldwide registered it as an earthquake. The water, mud, and debris that followed destroyed whole communities in minutes. The numbers are updated daily, and as of now, close to 1,500 people are confirmed dead. round 6,300 remain missing, including citizens of many countries. 80 students from Nepal are studying at APU, and some of them are sitting in this hall today.

On July 28, much closer to home, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto, the highest level on Japan's seismic intensity scale. 38 people lost their lives. Buildings collapsed, bridges fell, and the damage reached Oita — the prefecture where you now live. Throughout August and into September, communities across Japan were struck by severe flooding and landslides caused by record-breaking rainfall and a succession of typhoons.

At the same time, the world continues to face serious public health emergencies. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an Ebola outbreak that began in May is now the largest in the country’s history. More than 7,700 cases have been confirmed. More than 3,700 people have died.

To every student here who has lost someone this summer, or who is anxious about family in an affected area: on behalf of this university, I offer you my deepest sympathy. You are not alone. APU has support available, and I would rather you ask for it early than carry it silently. Please come to us.

I ask you all to hold those people in your thoughts for a moment.

The world you are entering

You deserve the truth on your first day, not a comfortable version of it.

The climate is changing, and the changes are arriving as disasters. Scientists studying the Nepal collapse have been clear: global warming is thawing the permafrost that held high-mountain rock and ice together for thousands of years. As the mountains warm, the odds shift year after year in the wrong direction. This summer Western Europe recorded its hottest June and July ever measured. And Nepal, which did almost nothing to cause this, has been hurt first and worst.

Diseases that start in one place no longer stay there. The Congo outbreak is an Ebola species with no licensed vaccine and no treatment. It crossed into Uganda; it reached Europe through returning medical workers. It has spread fastest in a region already burdened by conflict and displacement, because outbreaks travel furthest where trust has broken down and institutions are weakest.

Armed conflict has become normal again. The war in Ukraine has entered its fifth year with negotiations stalled. In Gaza, a ceasefire has held since last October, but the United Nations still describes conditions there as at a breaking point. Since February, there has been open war between the United States and Iran, disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — which is to say, disrupting the price of fuel and food arriving in Beppu. And in January, one government sent its military into another country's capital and removed its head of state.

I will not tell you what to think about any of these events; forming your own views is what you are here to learn. But they have one thing in common.

The gap

Every event I have just described crossed a border that nothing authorized it to cross.

The ice fell in one country, killing people in two, and among the dead or missing are nationals of many more. A virus that emerged in a remote province of the Congo appeared in Kampala, then in Germany, then in France. The heat that broke records in Spain came from emissions of every industrial economy on earth, including this one. And a strait closing in the Persian Gulf changes what a family pays for groceries in Oita.

Our problems have become thoroughly global. Yet the institutions we built to handle them — the United Nations, the World Health Organization, treaties, alliances, the unglamorous machinery of cooperation — are being weakened at exactly the moment we need them most. More and more governments are concluding that looking after their own is enough, and that force is an acceptable way to settle disputes.

That is the gap: problems no country can solve alone, and a world drifting away from solving anything together. That gap is your inheritance. I am sorry to hand it to you on your first day, but seeing it clearly is the first step toward solving it.

Why this university exists

One of APU's founding principles is expressed in three words — Freedom, Peace, and Humanity. They are not decoration on a wall but a working method, and this campus is where you practice it.

Consider what you have already done. You have chosen to live among people who are not your own — our international students crossing real distances to do it, our Japanese students choosing a university where they would be a minority in their own country. You have each, as individuals, done exactly what the world is currently failing to do collectively.

And starting tomorrow, you will do it in the most ordinary way imaginable. You will share a kitchen in AP House with someone whose assumptions about cleanliness, noise, food, and time are not yours. You will be assigned a group project with five people from five countries and a deadline. You will misunderstand someone badly, feel the flush of embarrassment, and have to go back and repair it.

It will sometimes be annoying. Honestly, it can be exhausting.

It is also the hardest problem on the international agenda, in miniature, in your dormitory. Learning to live well with people genuinely different from you — not tolerating them, not avoiding them, but coming to value them — is the skill the world is running out of. You will practice it every day for four years, by accident, simply by living here.

Do not waste that. It is the real curriculum.

What I ask of you

Three things, then — small, concrete, and starting now.

Learn people's names, and learn to say them correctly.
Not approximately. Correctly. Ask twice if you need to. Saying someone's name properly is the first act of respect, and costs nothing but attention.

Have the difficult conversation rather than avoiding it.
You will meet people whose country is in conflict with yours, or whose views genuinely offend you. The temptation is to stay with those who agree with you. Resist it. Ask how they came to see it that way, and listen until they finish. You are not obliged to agree. You are obliged to understand.

Check before you believe, and check before you share.
Every event I described this afternoon will reach you again on your phone, compressed into something furious and certain. Some of it will be false. Some is designed to make you angry at a whole group of people. Find out where it came from before you pass it on. This is a survival skill now, and a university can teach it.

Finally

You are arriving at a difficult moment. I have not pretended otherwise.

But the people who repair the world are almost never the ones who despair loudly about it, and almost never the ones who pretend everything is fine. They look at the situation accurately, then get to work on the part of it they can actually reach.

That is what this university is for. We want APU to be a beacon — a light others can steer by in a dark sea. But a beacon is not a building or a mission statement. It is people. It will be you, twenty years from now, in a ministry, a company, a laboratory, or a classroom, being the person who can talk to everybody.

Your first challenge begins in about thirty minutes. Before you leave this hall today, introduce yourself to someone from a country other than your own — and get their name right.

Welcome to Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. I look forward, very much, to learning alongside you.

YONEYAMA Hiroshi
President
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
September 25, 2026