Nagahiro Minato, 27th President
Today, Kyoto University is proud to award 2,194 master's degrees, 159 professional master's degrees, 148 juris doctor degrees, and 575 doctoral degrees. Of these graduates, 477 are international students. Let me begin by offering my sincere congratulations to all of you on your accomplishments.
With today's ceremony, Kyoto University will have awarded a cumulative total of 92,733 master's degrees, 2,688 professional master's degrees, 2,914 juris doctor degrees, and 48,757 doctoral degrees. On behalf of the executive vice-presidents, deans and directors, and the Leading Graduate School Program coordinators here today, as well as all of the other faculty and staff of our University, I would like to extend my congratulations to each and every one of you on receiving your degree.
Having completed your graduate programs, each of you now steps out into wider society as a graduate degree holder. What roles degree holders play, and in which spheres of society, has in recent years become a matter of considerable interest not only for universities but also for other actors in society, such as governmental organizations and businesses. According to the Science and Technology Indicators, published by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) of 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, which is lower than the United Kingdom (6,520), South Korea (6,363), and the United States (6,229), but higher than the most recent figures for Germany, France, and China. However, the number of people who obtained a master's degree in Japan in the 2020 fiscal year was just 579 per million population, which is an exceptionally low proportion when compared with the other countries surveyed. The most recent data shows that the United Kingdom has the highest number of master's degrees awarded with 5,459 per million population, followed by Germany with 2,689 and the United States with 2,613. When it comes to doctoral degrees, in the 2020 fiscal year the number awarded per million population in Japan was 123, far lower than in countries such as the United Kingdom (340) and Germany (338).
Various reasons have been posited for these figures. One of them is that graduate schools in Japan historically have had an extremely strong orientation to academic research, with their students—especially doctoral candidates—generally expected to be headed for careers in research or higher education. This is markedly different from the situation in North America and Europe, where graduate degree holders have long played leading roles not only in academia, but also in a broad range of other sectors, including national and local governments, industries, mass media, and education as well as in a wide variety of non-governmental organizations, think-tanks among them. In recent years, however, there has been a rapidly growing sentiment in Japan that we, too, should create conditions enabling graduate degree holders to play a wider, more diverse spectrum of roles across society.
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 this 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 can expect to gain from these efforts, I believe, has more to do with what you experienced and mastered through the process of producing a paper than with your research findings themselves. This can also be described as the aggregate of the qualities and capabilities you can apply in wider society toward solving the problems you may encounter in various situations. These are often termed "transferable skills", which 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", which enable one to tackle issues with initiative and autonomy. 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 skills are undoubtedly in greater demand than ever, especially in light of the problems we are currently facing.
I am sure that you have your own thoughts about the path you will take from here on, but you have also probably been seeking advice and opinions from those around you. In 1970, as part of his doctoral studies at Harvard University, the renowned American sociologist Mark Granovetter investigated how professionals, technical experts, and other white-collar workers in Boston found employment information and were matched to their jobs. Granovetter found an intriguing tendency in which people more often obtained valuable information from contacts they only met occasionally rather than from their close connections. These human connections are known as "ties", and his dissertation describing these results was later developed into a hypothesis on the "strength of weak ties", with tremendous impact on the field of economic sociology (Readings in Social Networks: Family, Community, and Social Capital, Shinji Nozawa, Keiso Shobo, 2006).
Granovetter introduced the concept of the "strength of interpersonal ties" to sociological research. He named four factors that determine the strength of these ties: the amount of time shared, the emotional intensity, the degree of intimacy, and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie. On this basis, Granovetter concluded that in the transmission of valuable information between individuals, "weak ties" are manifestly more effective than "strong ties". Highly novel information is rarely exchanged within groups and social cliques bound by strong ties, which naturally have an extremely high degree of homogeneity. We are more likely to receive truly new and personally valuable information from those with whom we have weaker ties, although it is certainly more comfortable to be part of a group or clique that shares the same orientation and way of thinking. As we often say in Japan, we can "understand each other without speaking a word". Today, many of our personal connections are being formed via highly sophisticated social media, a key factor to consider when discussing ties. In any case, relationships with people who are not completely unknown but are nonetheless slightly distant from us can serve as bridges to diverse information sources, offering access to useful material and often enabling more objective and appropriate decision-making.
Granovetter's "weak ties" theory reminds me of the innovation theory of Joseph Schumpeter, a political economist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Schumpeter contends that the most significant factor for economic growth is technological innovation, and that the kind of innovation that enables dramatic economic advancement emerges through the creation of new forms of value, which in turn involves combining elements that are distant from and ostensibly unrelated to one another. His "new combination" or innovation refers to technological development that significantly disrupts the existing economic equilibrium. "Entrepreneurs" carry out such combinations, distinguishing them from business owners. It seems to me that Schumpeter's emphasis on new combination or value creation, involving the combination of distant and unrelated elements, has something in common with Granovetter's theory of the "strength of weak ties" in interpersonal relations.
Recently, much attention has focused on what we call university ventures or startups. Many of you may be interested in venture activities yourselves, and some of you may already be engaged in one. In general use, "venture" refers to launching a new business, so it includes the idea of a "startup". Such businesses or startups, however, are not just about making profits. Regardless of their size and field of activity, they seem to be underpinned by a strong desire to "change society" in some way. Perhaps we could call this the frontier spirit. These diverse and creative initiatives can potentially combine with each other to generate major technological evolution and innovation, paving the way for a dramatic transformation of society or economy.
Now you are about to set out to assume new roles in society. Regardless of where these roles may take you, I sincerely hope that you will achieve great success, confidently demonstrating the transferable skill set that you honed through your graduate research amid the pandemic and other difficulties. This will require going beyond your closed world of strong ties and keeping your heart wide-open to society. If graduate degree holders with experiences like yours play active roles and deploy their capabilities to the full in a wide range of fields across society, they can surely be a consistent driving force for societal progress and transformation. I look forward to the great contributions you will make to the future of society and humanity as holders of academic degrees from Kyoto University.
Once again, let me offer my sincere congratulations to each and every one of you.