Gratitude to the Tokyo University of the Arts faculty.

Thank you for leading Geidai as a working artist, and for a career of socially engaged projects that treat art as a way for people and communities to meet.

Thank you for paintings that hold light, space and quiet feeling in perfect balance, and for giving young painters permission to work slowly and look closely.

Thank you for sculpture that gives form to phantom sensations of the body, from the Japan Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale onward, and for training sculptors unafraid of new materials.

Thank you for monumental installations that make air, gravity and memory visible, and for teaching students to work at the scale of wonder.

Thank you for bringing the energy of Japan's creative front line into the classroom, and for showing students that design can cheer people on, in campaigns, in music and in community projects.

Thank you for houses and pavilions of playful, precise invention, and for teaching architects that lightness is a form of rigor.

Thank you for flute playing of singing clarity across concertos, recitals and recordings, and for the patient studio teaching that passes it on.

Thank you for carrying what you learned at Herbert von Karajan's side into decades on Japanese podiums, and for training conductors with equal parts rigor and humanity.

Thank you for a life of Bach and Monteverdi sung at the highest international level, including long service with Bach Collegium Japan, and for training singers who understand style from the inside.

Thank you for Mt. Head and A Country Doctor, hand-drawn films that carried Japanese independent animation to an Academy Award nomination and the world's great festivals, and for teaching animators to trust their own line.

Thank you for the joyful craft of Knyacki! and your stop-motion worlds, and for keeping the patient art of frame-by-frame animation alive in your students' hands.

Thank you for teaching animators to think like producers as well as artists, and for building a graduate program where independent Japanese animation can thrive.

Thank you for a life in metal that carried Japanese craft to the highest levels, and for serving the whole country as Commissioner for Cultural Affairs after leading Geidai for a decade.

Thank you for decades of violin playing and teaching that shaped Japanese string culture, and for leading Geidai with a musician's ear before receiving its emeritus title in 2022.