Gratitude to the Waseda University faculty.

Thank you for leading Waseda since 2018 with a political scientist's respect for evidence and institutions, and for pushing one of Japan's great private universities to think globally.

Thank you for carrying Waseda's humanoid robot lineage forward for four decades, teaching machines to walk, breathe, and even play instruments so that engineers everywhere could learn what bodies teach us about being human.

Thank you for uniting deep learning with real robot bodies, teaching machines to fold towels, open doors, and link language with action, and for training the researchers now spreading that approach worldwide.

Thank you for the OSCAR compiler and a career of squeezing more work from less power, and for serving as the first Japanese president of the IEEE Computer Society while still teaching at home.

Thank you for telling the true story of immigrant Japan with rigor and humanity, and for helping a country quietly becoming diverse understand the people who choose to build lives there.

Thank you for scholarship that takes Japan's emotions, culture, and politics seriously together, and for crossing the Pacific to teach it where the story actually happens.

Thank you for bringing rigorous comparative method to the study of Japanese party politics, and for decades of teaching Waseda students to test their beliefs about their own democracy.

Thank you for patient empirical work on carbon pricing and energy policy in Japan, giving policymakers evidence instead of slogans as the country works out its climate future.

Thank you for pioneering spoken language processing in Japan long before it was fashionable, and for serving Waseda as its president while keeping a teacher's heart.