When I was a master student in the Crop Science Laboratory of Dr. Ryuichi Ishii (deceased), I had a graduate seminar on "What is Agricultural Sciences?" Ms Toshie Takagi, who was on the staff of the Breeding Science Laboratory, and others invited me to their study group.

During my PhD study on the differences in nitrogen utilization among sorghum varieties under the supervision of Professor Shu Fukai (Professor Emeritus, University of Queensland), I was instructed on how to conduct research on crop physiology, including cultivation trials, compilation, and thesis writing. After submitting my dissertation, I spent almost 3 years as a project researcher at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines, the famous key global agricultural research institute for Green Revolution, working under Dr. Len Wade on improvement of rainfed rice varieties. I was allowed to visit his rainfed rice consortium in Thailand, Bangladesh, and India.

I had a chance to visit the farm of Mr. Shinpei Murakami, a special farmer dispatched from Japan to support organic farming in Thailand, and had a chance to talk with him, but for some reason, we did not hit it off. Why was the talk not so constructive with Mr. Murakami, who was trying to develop organic agriculture in Thailand? This memory was a valuable experience for me in understanding the relative position of agricultural science in society. Later, in 1999, I started working as a faculty member at the University of Tokyo. Ever since, I opened a graduate course, "Sustainability and Agricultural Science" in which I include social justice. It is the responsibility and privilege of university faculty members to consider the state of agricultural science in a society composed of diverse members and to develop a better vision for it.

Compared to engineering, which also involves manufacturing, agricultural science, which deals more directly with nature and biological resources, presents an unparalleled variety of aspects due to the diversity of the natural environment and the degree of freedom in how we interact with living organisms. It also asks how we, as part of nature, design our own production and consumption activities.

Diversity includes not only the natural environment, but also historical transitions, cultures, ethnicities, and races, as well as diversity due to differences in economic power. If we recognize the diversity of agriculture on the basis of justice, rather than by the logic of power and numbers, we can expect that the agricultural insights will bring about significant change in reconciling and repairing the "divisions" that have become a problem in contemporary society.

We want to convey not only the body of knowledge, but also the heart of agricultural sciences. Agricultural sciences are not only described as the third person mode, but they can partly be portrayed in the second and first person modes. There must also be another mode of person. It may be possible to depict agricultural sciences metaphorically as the activity of tending the garden, sowing and reaping the fields, and stocking toward the city..