[1] Sasaki was born in a village called Senya (now Misato) in the northeastern prefecture of Akita in 1942, during the Second World War.

After graduating from Akita High School in 1961, he went on to study political science at the Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo (UTokyo), where he was supervised by Kanichi Fukuda (福田歓一).

[2] He earned his PhD from the same university in 1973, with a thesis entitled 'Sovereignty, Resistance, and Tolerance: Jean Bodin's Philosophy of State' (主権・抵抗権・寛容――ジャン・ボダンの国家哲学).

The complacency wrought from three or four decades of economic prosperity has dulled our collective sensibility to such rudimentary truths, a malaise of the spirit that obscures even the most basic of understandings.He placed this turiningpoint in the university's governance in the wider context of the country's first long-term economic and political stagnation since the Second World War and the widespread pessimism that became widespread in the country.

It embodies a mentality of self-care, whereas neglect in self-cultivation can lead to a loss of self-identity, resulting in a tendency to merely follow others without a clear sense of personal direction.Analogous to this mentality he wished for first-year students, he advocated that the university itself should not be satisfied with merely being the premier academic and educational authority in the world's second-largest economy as it had been.