From the Person I Was Thirty Years Ago to You Thirty Years from Now | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management

New students bring a new season with them. This April, the Faculty of Policy Management welcomed 394 new students, including two students admitted as second-year transfers. Students entering in April bring fresh green to the campus, while those entering in September bring vivid yellow. In this way, SFC suddenly comes alive with color. SFC is also a place that has cultivated learning through which students, amid such new encounters, envision their own futures and grasp them for themselves. Right now, the campus is this shade of green.

For thirty-six years, the Faculty of Policy Management has asked what kind of policy can open up the future at SFC, and has pursued scholarship that puts such thinking to work in society. We understand policy as “the choices and decisions people make in order to take some form of action,” in the words of founding Dean Hiroshi Kato. We also believe that “human behavior constitutes society, and the science that analyzes that society cannot be established unless it is grounded in comprehensive judgment.” Policy Management has taken this understanding as its point of departure.

The Faculty was established in 1990. The world was undergoing enormous change: the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Cold War between East and West was drawing to a close. I believe people at the time felt firsthand that the era was changing. It was an age filled with hope, but also one marked by anxiety about an uncertain future. It had become difficult to imagine the future simply as a continuation of what had come before.

We too are now living in an era of major change. The values and interests we once took for granted are becoming unstable, and the norms and institutions that have supported society — the very “rules of the game,” so to speak — are being called into question. For example, there was a time when people expected that advances in information and communication technology would further deepen liberal democracy. In reality, however, such technologies can also work to strengthen authoritarianism. The idea that globalization and economic interdependence would support peace and prosperity is likewise confronting harsh realities. In today’s international community, the scenario in which peace can be achieved simply by advocating international cooperation is no longer self-evident.

These changes are not confined to questions of abstract ideals. They are also clearly visible in the realities of East Asia, where we live.

And now, the strategic environment surrounding Japan is in the midst of an extremely significant transformation. If we take a long view spanning roughly two hundred years, China, which once lost its dominant position in the Far East, has restored its national strength against the backdrop of rapid economic development and has become a force driving changes in the regional order. Today’s China is too vast and consequential a subject for us to indulge in arbitrary images of it and remain complacent. The students in my laboratory who study Chinese politics and foreign policy are also learning every day as they seek to understand this China.

In “Introduction to Policy Management,” a required course for new students, we ask them to consider the question: “What will you learn at SFC with an eye to thirty years from now?” For new students, it is surely not easy to imagine the world thirty years into the future. Of course, this is not a question with a single correct answer. Yet the future is not something simply given to us. It is something we envision, choose, and create ourselves. I believe that one of the great meanings of studying at SFC lies in envisioning the future in your own way and encountering peers with whom you will create that future together.

Looking back, I too entered the Faculty of Policy Management more than thirty years ago, and there I encountered peers with whom I sought to open up the future. For me, the appeal of learning at SFC lay in the freedom to design my studies according to my own interests, without being confined by the frameworks of existing faculties or disciplines. But such learning is not something one completes alone. The presence of peers who think together and stimulate one another is indispensable. I hope that all new students will encounter such peers here at SFC and go on to open up futures of their own.