Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda attended the 46th ceremony held in Tokyo inaugurating the joint training for new civil servants, and delivered an address to them.

Prime Minister Noda said, "This era may be called a national crisis. Precisely for this reason, I believe that government offices must be a place useful for people. Whether each office can be truly useful in this era of national crisis depends on whether the office has personnel that serve the people, in other words 'civil servants.' We do not need personnel who cannot serve people. The question will be whether you are useful in serving people.
What are the requirements for being able to serve people? One is aspiration. I would like you to always keep aspiring and to make efforts. I would like to ask you to strive from your first year with an intention to develop your original aspiration into an even greater one by further advancing your career.
Another requirement is to understand the subtleties of humaneness. In order to overcome this national crisis, you must exercise unprecedented wisdom. I believe that the motivating force for exercising such wisdom is a feeling of trying to commit oneself to the people. There are cases where the judgment of a single civil servant in the area in which he/she is responsible may change a person's livelihood or work. I would like to ask you to always have understanding of such subtleties through your efforts from now on.