6 April 2001 (13 Nisan 5761)
Since this Tuesday I have a special guest here - a good old friend of mine from Jerusalem. I have long wanted her to visit me here to show her the physical environment in which I live and think, and after waiting for seven years the dream has finally come true. At long last we could manage to find the common holidays and the money to share her traveling expense.
I have to confess that our relationship started when we studied together in my last year in Jerusalem, and I fell in love with her. I was in total delirium then, and when I look back now, I wonder how I could dare to do what I did then. Unfortunately, the relationship did not become more than one-sided love on my part, but it has developed little by little into a lasting friendship, especially after I left Israel for Japan in the summer of 1993, and we started corresponding. Every time I visited Jerusalem in the summer, she was the first person I met after arrival and the last I met before departure. Since our usual way of communication was correspondence, we always felt rather awkward in the first meeting after an interval of one year.
I appreciate her broad-mindedness to have kept in touch with me in spite of all kinds of daring things I tried in vain to find favor in her eyes. A platonic relationship between a man and a woman in the same age is something extremely difficult to achieve as their mutual interest in each other either has an element of sexual attraction or may lead to it eventually. So in light of my limited experiences it seems to me that such a platonic relationship is possible only after either of them or both of them have passed the stage of love.
Now we - at least I - feel comfortable consulting with each other even about our problems with our respective ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends. I cherish this friendship with her very much, and that is why I wanted her to visit me here. I am just worried that after spending a week together with her, I may have a sudden feeling of spiritual emptiness after her departure next Tuesday.
13 April 2001 (20 Nisan 5761)
A good old friend of mine in Jerusalem who came to visit me during her Passover vacation left Kobe on Tuesday. The whole story of waiting for her, spending all day with her for one week, and seeing her off has taught me something I did not know, and has reconfirmed something I already knew.
I thought that parting is painful in the same degree for those who come and depart and for those who wait for them and see them off. For the last twenty years I was almost always the one who went to visit someone and leave him or her after a while. For example, I visit my parents and grandmother once a year during the winter vacation and my friends in Jerusalem once a year during the summer vacation. My parents and grandmother always tell me how impatiently they wait for my annual visit and how painful it is to see me off. My mother also tells me that after I and my sister, who lives in Tokyo with her husband, leave them, she suddenly feels physical and mental fatigue. Having hosted my friend, I have fully understood for the first time what my parents and grandmother must have been feeling for the last twenty years every time I visit and leave them.
I have waited for her visit for seven years, but never have I felt how slowly the time passes as when I waited for her in the airport after the arrival of the airplane carrying her was announced. I felt as if I had waited for her to come out of the exit for ever in those thirty minutes. After she left Kobe on Tuesday, I felt the kind of physical and mental fatigue I had not experienced before - a kind of total emptiness, and I spent the following day staying in bed all day.
In spite of all this, I have reconfirmed the difficulty of living with someone else under one roof. Since she is not my girlfriend, she seems to have restrained herself somehow as a guest even though we are quite close to each other. But I could only imagine how difficult it might be to marry someone and spend days and nights with her. Of course, it is extremely important for me to share the philosophy of life, world view and sense of humor with my wife-to-be, but it seems no less important to be compatible with her in all kinds of daily habits that seem to be insignificant such as when to get up, etc. To find someone who attracts me intellectually and spiritually is a difficult task in itself, but the question of compatibility with her in daily life seems more troublesome, especially considering the fact that I have lived alone for twenty years, and have developed my own life style.
20 April 2001 (27 Nisan 5761)
The new academic year has started: four obligatory courses in English started last week, and three elective courses in Hebrew, and one obligatory and one elective courses in Japanese started this week. In spite of the hectic schedule of teaching a total of 15 courses a week including six private courses, I am happy to be back to "normalcy" after an interval of two months. I am enjoying afresh the joy of interacting with my students by bombarding them with questions they have never imagined. I am generally successful in sharing with my students the joy of using a language as a means of communication, but this year I clearly see two serious interpersonal problems I as a teacher have to tackle with on a long-term basis. They are confined mostly to the obligatory courses in English.
The first problem is deep-rooted suspicion of some students against teachers. I am sorry for them when I think of the circumstances that have made them develop such suspicion little by little. In the extreme cases they even seem to take any action I take in class as a form of punishment with malice against them. Their faces are mostly frozen, and show no external sign of emotion except for enmity, even without their knowing me at all. Fortunately, my past trials and errors with these students have taught me that it is possible to gain their trust though it takes time and patience.
The second problem, which is more serious, is the refusal of a handful of students, mostly male, to communicate at all even in their mother tongue. They simply neglect my repeated requests to answer my questions and keep silent without even saying they do not know. I believe that the will to communicate with others is something innate in every human being, so those who refuse to communicate must not necessarily have any will to do so. On the contrary, it seems to me that precisely these people are eager to communicate with others, but they simply do not know how. They are too preoccupied with themselves and are too worried about possibility of being disliked by others. This way they have developed a defense mechanism by refusing to communicate and deciding not to disclose what they really are, which, they think, is liable to make themselves disliked by others. What they do not understand, however, is that the fact that people generally like those who do disclose what they really are, including their shortcomings. As I am not a psychotherapist, nor is my class a mental hospital, I cannot spend my time trying too much to make them open their heart. Actually, I believe that no one can do that; they themselves have to decide to do so.
These two problems have not changed my conviction that a classroom must be a place for free verbal interaction between a teacher and students. On the contrary, they have only reinforced this conviction and encouraged me to pursue my effort to share the joy of learning and actually using a language as a means of communication and not as a set of grammatical rules on paper.
27 April 2001 (4 Iyar 5761)
Having been teaching both Japanese and non-Japanese students, I cannot help lamenting over the huge gap between them in communication skills in and outside the classroom. Anyone who has an experience in teaching Japanese students in any level of education knows that it is extremely difficult and takes a lot of time and patience to be able to base his or her course on bilateral communication. Students generally remain passive and silent in class, and even when they respond, they speak in a feeble voice with little self-confidence and poor reasoning.
I am afraid that there are more and more students, especially male students, who are poor at communicating with others. My seven-year experience as a university teacher in Japan has convinced me that the true reason why most of the Japanese students cannot speak English after so many years of studying is that they are poor communicators even in their mother tongue. I wonder why Japan has largely failed in making good communicators in contrast to its success in manufacturing sophisticated communication equipments. The answer must be in the educational system, which perhaps reflects the mentality of the society ultimately.
In the typical Japanese educational system more emphasis is placed on the unilateral impartation of information (but not necessarily wisdom) from teachers to students. In such a system bilateral communication between teachers and students or among students themselves is not required. Furthermore, they are not encouraged to ask questions. As one Jewish saying says, if one stops asking questions, one will eventually stop thinking, and start taking everything for granted. A good question is always a good impetus to starting communication. If one has been deprived of the chance to ask questions through the formative years of one's adolescence, it is natural that one will grow up to be a person poor at communication.
Good communication skills must be as one of the most demanded human resources in the global village where various peoples from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds have to interact. As long as Japan fails to make good communicators massively through its educational system, it will remain an obscure voice in the world. Paradoxically, seeing so many students with poor communication skills induces me to continue my struggle to remedy this situation through teaching, at least in the circles in which I am directly involved.