Message from the Dean

When I was a young researcher having just started my career, a professor in English literature asked me a question: “Do you know what the sentence ‘Man is social being’ means?” I stood silent, hardly saying any word. I did not understand what he was asking me. “It means,” the professor smiled and said, “we cannot live alone.” A human society cannot exist without human interaction and a man never lives alone.

Keizai, the Japanese word meaning economy, comes from an ancient Chinese phrase 經世濟民 (jing shi ji min, Kei sei sai min in the Japanese pronunciation), which literally means “improve world and save people.” We the School of Economics and Business cover a wide range of fields, such as economics, management, accounting and statistics, and aim to make people happy by improving the whole society.

Our society has become complex in the last decades. As academic researches have become highly developed and segmented, our graduate school has also conducted various reforms and adjustments. We became a research-oriented graduate school after Prioritization of Graduate School in 2000 and established Accounting School in 2005 and Regional Economy and Business Network (REBN) Research Center in 2011. The School of Economics and Business also participates in the inter-disciplinal graduate schools such as Hokkaido University Public Policy School (HOPPS) established by the School of Law, and Graduate School of Global Food Resources established by the Graduate School of Agriculture. Those reforms and adjustments allow us to conduct researches both at the global and local perspectives and contribute to the diverse needs of the students and society.

To understand the fundamental nature of the complex and transient society where we live, the importance of scientific knowledge has been amplified. We the School of Economics and Business welcome ambitious people aiming to learn the science to improve world and make people happy and contribute to the progress and development of that science.