From the Dean

 Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences
From the Dean
YAMAMOTO Satomi

The research and educational foundation of the Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences (GLAS) is rooted in the humanities in the broadest sense. According to a dictionary definition (from the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, second edition), the term ‘humanities’ is “a general term for disciplines concerning human history and culture.” To put it another way, the humanities is an academic field which seeks to solve the question, “What is a human being?”. And the humanities attempts to solve this question by looking at what humans have done (history) and what they have created (culture).

In terms of the time axis, it looks not only at the past but also at the present and future. In terms of the spatial axis, starting from “here” where you stand, it expands to every corner of Earth. At times, it can even encompass the universe (for example, many religions include cosmologies) and otherworldly realms (such as heaven, hell, or the Dragon Palace).

I believe that the reason why we, both in the present and the future, need to address the question “What is a human being?” is that humans are the only living beings on Earth capable of consciously passing down memories. In other words, transcending the lifespan given to us, we can share memories that span the past and future through language and images. By doing so, we have continued to tackle survival challenges on a scale of a hundred, a thousand, or tens of thousands of years. This is also related to the fact that many fields of the humanities place linguistic literacy, including foreign and classical languages, and literacy in image culture, including plastic arts, film, performance, gesture, and space, at the foundation of their research and education. One can say that the humanities explore ways to access the memories of others, the past, and ancient times, which tend to be lost in daily life, seeing as how daily life tends to operate on the short-term memories of yesterday and today. The various issues we are forced to confront in our daily lives and modern society, as well as the diverse joys and sorrows that color our daily lives, are things that past generations of humanity have experienced in one way or another.

I mentioned earlier that humans are the only living beings on Earth capable of consciously passing down memories. Is this truly the case? Do animals, forests, flowing rivers, mountains, and valleys not possess eternal memories? Or what about the memories and thoughts of AI? If there are memory systems passed down through methods different from language and images, they should open a new door to the question “What is a human being?” once again viewed from a relative perspective. Today’s humanities also encompass perspectives that reexamine humanity from the outside.

Currently, GLAS offers 23 master’s programs and 21 doctoral programs. Our greatest asset is an environment where researchers with diverse expertise can engage in daily dialogue with each other, where numerous visiting scholars and international students from both inside and outside Japan come and go, and where diverse research is mutually respected. What kind of future will the new humanities knowledge nurtured in this space create? Our questions are endless and the world is vast, but our intellectual curiosity is also boundless.