NEWS
2022 Autumn Matriculation Ceremony
Update: September 1, 2022
On Thursday, September 1, ICU welcomed over 240 new undergraduate and graduate students including those graduating from high schools abroad, international schools in Japan, and exchange students from partnership schools, at the Matriculation Ceremony held in the University Chapel.
The Ceremony started with a hymn and prayer by Shoko Kitanaka, Acting Director of the Religious Center. Next, Assistant Professor Adam Randall Smith read Romans 11:16-18. Then, as is the custom at ICU, the names of the new students were called one by one.
Following President Shoichiro Iwakiri's address, Representative students read out the Students Pledge, promising to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And, the all new students signed the "Student Pledge" .
2022 Autumn Matriculation Address by Shoichiro Iwakiri, President
A warm welcome to all of you who are entering our College of Liberal Arts and our MA and PhD programs. At the same time, I extend my warmest regards to all your family members and friends who are joining us online.
ICU was founded as the citizens of Japan and North America came together in a spirit of regret for the atrocities of World War II and raised the funds to purchase the land which forms our current campus. The aim was to provide the education and research opportunities required to nurture human beings who can work towards peace building in global society. This remains - and will continue to remain - our primary objective.
As the war in Ukraine over this past half year shows, all that is destroyed in a situation without peace is what has been painstakingly cultivated and built up over time - the substance of human life itself. What we must preserve for the sake of the principle of peace is a space where we are allowed to live as human beings, not only a space where people are freed from war and conflict, but also from social injustice and exploitation.
Today, you are all about to embark on your student life here at ICU. I hope that it will be meaningfully connected to your future, and to your contribution to the creation of a better world.
As September entrants, many of you will be studying Japanese in our JLP program. Through your study of Japanese language and culture, as well as through the other classes we offer in English in our various majors and programs, you will expand your learning in a wider area.
Every one of you has your own study goal at ICU. It is my hope that through your efforts to achieve your goals, you will explore that which gives your life meaning, and that, if possible, you will discover some answers. We are all different in this regard. The twentieth century French author, Albert Camus gave his answer as "love, intelligence and beauty". And he added: "what is required in order to realize this is time and maturity". I think that this kind of idea must be developed as a certain conviction within ourselves in our relationship with others. I hope that, during your studies here at ICU, you will all succeed in deepening your understanding of human nature that will become your guiding principles throughout your future lives.
When we start considering such fundamental concerns, we often find ourselves rather alone - because such thoughts oblige us to confront our own selves. One of the important aspects of student life is precisely this - to confront oneself.
Here at ICU our "mission of education" tells us that we are committed to encouraging students to "acquire the ability to think, critique and make reasonable judgments as individuals serving truth and freedom". While acquiring such a way of thinking, sometimes we need to place ourselves in what Hannah Arendt calls "solitude".
Arendt was a German political scientist and intellectual who escaped the Nazis and settled in the US. She argues in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism that there are three aspects to being alone: loneliness, isolation and solitude. Among these three conditions, solitude was extremely important to Arendt as she believed that "all thinking is done in solitude".It is the state of being alone, not in a social or political sense, but in an existential sense. Solitude prepares the process of reconceptualizing one's own sense of self, or, if we use Arendt's expression, the "confirmation of one's own identity".
We encourage you to ponder the question about your own identity by reflecting on yourselves and, perhaps, also by reflecting on God. Please pay good attention to dialogue with yourselves. At the same time, you will be encouraged at ICU to discover that which is of value in life through dialogue with others around you in a diverse environment.
The 19th century German botanist, Albert Frank coined the word "symbiosis". He also came up with the term "mycorrhiza" to denote the symbiotic relationship between plants and the fungi in the soil. (By the way, these fungi are right now beginning to bloom as kinoko mushrooms on our campus here.) In his Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake introduces an experiment that Frank conducted: he grew some pines in sterilized soil and some in soil collected from a nearby pine forest. The result was that "those that grew in forest soil formed fungal relationships and developed into larger, healthier saplings than those grown in sterile conditions".
Another researcher "who had been growing strawberry plants with different communities of mycorrhizal fungus found that different fungal communication did seem to change the flavor of the fruit". In fact, "some had more flavor, some were juicier, some were sweeter".
If you were a pine tree or a strawberry, you would not know how you would develop or what flavor you would exude. You would change, depending on the environment in which you would be raised.
The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, advocated the concept of the rhizome to denote the model of knowledge interconnected in mesh-like formation. This horizontal network bears striking similarity with the concept of Liberal Arts at ICU. And if we take this one step further, the attention of us 21st century humans is drawn to the type of networks the roots themselves are constructing in the environment of the soil, whether that be the trees that symbolize the vertical hierarchy that Deleuze sought to reject or the grass with its rhizomes. Rhizomes too inhabit the mycorrhizal world.
Every university, particularly every private university, has its own founding principle, its own university spirit. If we were to try and encapsulate the ICU spirit in a single phrase, maybe it would be as a campus that prides itself on freedom and dialogue. As, one by one, each of you matures like a tree in the light and the air, or as you bear fruit in your lives and in society, the mycorrhizal networks that support those processes may not be visible. It is only as you come to live and learn on this campus that you will come to know this from personal experience.
Please allow me to speak figuratively now. As each of us absorbs various types of intellectual nutrition as 'minerals' from the world, it is very important to realize what kind of fungi we are coexisting with. We can compare the characteristic of comprehensiveness which is so valued within the ICU Liberal Arts system to the soil that is not sterilized, that remains naturally rich with fungi. From today, each of you will begin to spread your roots in the ICU terrain with its wealth of mycorrhizal fungi - or, to rephrase that, in the terrain populated by the thoughts and sensibilities of a diverse array of fellow members of the university community and the intellectual nourishment offered by the various majors on offer here. At the same time, please remember that, within this relational context, each of you is an individual tree, a blade of grass, a mycorrhizal fungus.
Humans cannot exist in an environment choked with rubbish. Yet equally humans cannot sustain their health in too clean and sterilized an environment. My wish is that you will have many encounters with that which is wild and diverse, and that this will offer you a rich learning experience.
Your student life at ICU begins today. Let me conclude with another quote from Arendt: "Beginning is the supreme capacity of man". And to that let me add my own personal reflection. Human beings are born twice: firstly when they utter their first cry as new-borns. But then there is a second birth when you come to recognize exactly what you were born to this world for. It is my sincere wish that ICU may be the place of second birth for each one of you.
Lastly, I'd like to mention a book that we are giving to all new students here at ICU. The book is entitled "Illustrated Trilingual Edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: in Japanese, English and French".
This is a book that ICU students created last year by making the English translation in spite of the constraints occasioned by the coronavirus.
It is a gift from the ICU students to all of you. Please treat it with great respect and use it as a reference when thinking about the peace and human rights that lie at the core of ICU's values.