2017 Graduation Ceremony/Completion Ceremony Speech

This is the speech given at the 2017 graduation and completion ceremony.

March 27, 2008
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology Chief Hiroyuki Ohno

Congratulations to all of you graduating from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology today, and to those of you who are completing your graduate studies. On behalf of the faculty and staff of the university, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations.
This year, there will be 316 Faculty of Agriculture degree holders, 577 Faculty of Engineering degree holders, and Graduate School of Engineering 337 master's degree holders, Graduate School of Agriculture 162 master's degree students, Graduate School of Bio-Applications and Systems Engineering 74 master's students, 31 students from the Graduate School of Technology Management, and doctoral degree holders. Graduate School of Engineering 28 doctoral students, Graduate School of Bio-Applications and Systems Engineering 12 doctoral students, United Graduate School of Agricultural Science A total of 1,578 students, 41 doctoral students, will be awarded degrees from the university. With a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree, you have taken several steps in your life and are filled with a great sense of accomplishment. I don't think it was just you who were able to put together a dissertation. Supervisor I think there was a lot of cooperation from the professors in the department, seniors, juniors, and many others. In addition, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to your family, friends, and associates who have continued to support you in various ways. We, the faculty and staff, would like to express our sincere gratitude and respect to those who have supported your growth, and share the great joy of today's sunny day. The fact that there are many grateful people means that we are receiving various kinds of support from many people. It's a real blessing to have friends who can influence each other. Please continue to interact with the people you have been involved with, maintain your network of people, and strengthen that network even after you go out into the world.
From April, some of them will go on to graduate school, while others will enter the workforce. For those of you who have taken the break of graduation and completion and are moving on to the next step, I believe that you have grown significantly at our university. In particular, I believe that those of you who are completing graduate school have actually been involved in research at our university and have had a variety of experiences that cannot be experienced in classroom lectures. It would have been fun. You must have worked hard to achieve various goals, such as talking for a long time with friends, laughing out loud at other things, examining research results from various angles, constructing your own thoughts, summarizing the results and presenting them at academic conferences, and submitting papers to specialized journals for publication. On the other hand, I think there were a lot of difficult times. If you disagree with a friend, if the experiment doesn't go well, if you try and don't get the results you want, or if you can't do it anymore? You might have wondered. But is it the happiest life when everything you do goes well? I don't think you were just hoping for things to work out. Human beings make mistakes and grow by getting discouraged. You are energetic young people who still have a lot of room to grow. Speaking of room for growth, I think the success and interview of Yuzuru Hanyu, who won the gold medal at the Winter Olympics in February this year, are still fresh in our memories. He was seriously injured in training and even his participation in the Olympics was in jeopardy. However, he came back brilliantly and was able to show his ability on the big stage. Behind the scenes, there must have been a series of tooth-clenching efforts. It's the same for everyone who is going to go out into the world, and not everything will go well. There will be a lot of failures. However, be strong enough to think, "Failure is an opportunity to improve yourself." Komori Yamanaka's famous phrase, "Hopefully, give me seven tribulations," may be an outdated idea, but a glass heart that cannot be recovered after failing even once is not suitable for graduates of our university. Please live in a resilient and flexible society. Even if you keep failing, you just have to find success in the end. Have the tenacity to not give up until you succeed. Also, think carefully about your methodology for success. Arbitrary thinking that ignores the rules is not science. Earning a degree doesn't just mean acquiring specialized knowledge. It is your way to strive for the peaceful progress of the world and the happiness of mankind with a high sense of ethics.
Now, you don't have to cut ties with university when you graduate. I think it would be great if we could maintain a stronger bond with the university and build a relationship that inspires each other. In the future, when you return to our university on occasions such as Homecoming Day and school festivals, please tell us about your failures. Please tell us how you managed to achieve success through that failure. We will continue to strive to be your alma mater a proud home and to support you at any time. All faculty and staff will work together to become a competent university that is useful to the world and recognized by the world, and will strive without fear of failure.
I would like to conclude my remarks by congratulating you on your graduation, completion, and conferral of degrees today, and wishing you all the best in your future endeavors.