Graduation address for the 2024 academic year

To the 2,516 graduates of Tohoku Gakuin University, the 50 students completing Graduate Schools 's programs, and the 6 students obtaining their doctoral degrees, congratulations on your graduation. We can only imagine the joy of the parents who have eagerly awaited this day. On behalf of Tohoku Gakuin University, I offer my heartfelt congratulations.

Now, four years ago, when all of you undergraduate students first enrolled, it was the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the entrance ceremony was held at the Tohoku Gakuinラーハウザー Memorial Chapel on the Tsuchitoi campus with only representatives from each department and major in attendance. Four years have passed since then. Your college life, which began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, is coming to an end today.As you graduate from Tohoku Gakuin University, I would like to share some thoughts that I hope you will keep in your hearts.

This refers to the significant population decline and aging of our hometown, Tohoku, which is the foundation of our lives. The British population theorist Malthus once published the famous proposition that "food supplies increase arithmetically, but population increases geometrically." In short, he argued that food supply cannot keep up with population growth, and that population growth leads to poverty. This proposition was compelling as a model before the Industrial Revolution, but what has happened? In post-industrial Japan, and especially here in Tohoku, population decline is threatening to bring poverty.

Nearly half of the graduates here will likely leave their hometowns and find employment in areas outside the six Tohoku prefectures, primarily in the Tokyo metropolitan area. With the outflow of working-age people like yourselves, Tohoku's population structure is projected to change so 20 years from now, in 2045, when you will reach the prime of your working lives at age 42, that the elderly population (65 years and older) will exceed the working-age population (15 to 64 years old). In other words, the elderly will outnumber the working population. This will lead to labor shortages, decreased consumption, and difficulties in business succession, weakening the "earning power" of the regional economy and society and further accelerating population decline. During the COVID-19 pandemic, teleworking helped to curb the concentration of people in Tokyo. However, with the end of the pandemic, the concentration in Tokyo has gained momentum, and Sendai, a city of one million people that had previously attracted people from all over Tohoku and acted as a kind of "population dam," has finally collapsed. Over the past two years, Sendai has also begun to experience population decline.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to stop this trend. Starting salaries at large corporations are skyrocketing. In areas like the Tokyo metropolitan area, where the division of labor is well-developed and competition is fierce, one's work skills will likely improve. And if one says that the Tokyo metropolitan area is where you can find the work you want and the work that gives you a sense of fulfillment, then there's no arguing with that. In fact, not only young people, but also women are more likely than men to migrate to the Tokyo metropolitan area because it's easier to find the work they want and the work that gives them a sense of fulfillment. While we talk about the childbearing population, there are five prefectures nationwide where the population of women aged 15 to 49 is projected to halve in the 30 years from 2015 to 2045. All of these are prefectures in the Tohoku region. The sixth prefecture is Miyagi, and the six Tohoku prefectures dominate the top spots. It seems that not only will aging and declining birth rates progress in Tohoku ahead of the rest of the country.

As the declining birthrate and aging population progress, how will the landscape of our lives change? It's already starting to happen, but vacant lots are spreading among houses and in shopping districts. Shopping will become inconvenient. Due to store closures and an aging population, stores that we could walk to will close, and the delivery service we rely on will cease to function due to a shortage of manpower. With fewer workers and a lack of successors, small and medium-sized businesses such as shops and factories will disappear. As we talk about an aging society without children, there will be no children, elementary, middle, and high schools will be merged or closed, and universities will be eliminated. With the aging population, there will also be a shortage of care workers, and eventually, municipalities will be forced to merge. In addition to schools and government offices, hospitals, banks, department stores, and even movie theaters and Starbucks in prefectural capitals—all the essential infrastructure that you have come to love—will disappear.

To all of you who are about to graduate from Tohoku Gakuin University and enter the workforce: It is you who, having experienced the Great East Japan Earthquake as children, know Tohoku best, and who will support the future of Tohoku. Tohoku Gakuin was founded 139 years ago as Sendai Theological Seminary, but five years later, it changed its name to "Tohoku Gakuin" (North Japan College), which provides higher education. The origin of the name of the "Kahoku Shimpo" newspaper company is that in an era when it was said that "a mountain of clay dolls costs 100 mon north of Shirakawa," that is, in the southwestern part of Kyushu, clay dolls sold like hotcakes, but north of the Shirakawa Barrier in Fukushima, clay dolls had to be sold at bargain prices of 100 mon a mountain to sell. It was an era when Tohoku was said to have such little purchasing power that one of its founders, Professor Masayoshi Oshikawa, stated the purpose of Tohoku Gakuin as "to make Tohoku the Scotland of Japan."

I believe that Professor Oshikawa's ideal was Scotland in the late 19th century, located in the northern part of Great Britain, a stronghold of Protestant Christianity due to the Reformation, which surpassed England in locomotive manufacturing and shipbuilding due to the Industrial Revolution, and which was culturally and economically prosperous. In fact, Theobald Palm, a Scottish medical missionary for whom Professor Oshikawa worked as an assistant, saved many Japanese people with his Lister embalming method, an advanced surgical technique that prevented infection, and was known as "the bread doctor" and "Palm brings the dead back to life."

You are graduates of Tohoku Gakuin University, carrying on the ideal of "making Tohoku the Scotland of Japan." In your long lives ahead, some of you may have to leave Tohoku for various reasons. The science and technology you learned at this university, as well as the warm and beautiful imagery of your hometown Tohoku, will support you. Tohoku Gakuin University is a university founded on Christian character education, and its school motto is LIFE LIGHT LOVE. LIFE represents the importance of life and individual dignity. LIGHT represents illuminating the world with the knowledge and skills you learned at the university. And LOVE represents building relationships of mutual love and service. I pray that your long lives ahead will be blessed by God and that you will contribute to the future of Tohoku. Congratulations on your graduation.

March 19, 2025

Haruki Onishi, President of Tohoku Gakuin University