7 September 2001 (19 Elul 5761)
This Monday I came back to Kobe after a four-week stay in Jerusalem. I hope I could recharge myself with spiritual energy in Jerusalem, but upon my return to Japan I immediately felt as if this energy started to evaporate in the air. Although I consider Kobe the most attractive city in Japan, and that is why I live here, it cannot be compared to Jerusalem in terms of the spiritual energy it emits. I do not know where it comes from, but I do feel spiritually elevated in Jerusalem.
Coming back to Japan after four weeks' absence, I was surprised anew at its material affluence, but I was not impressed by it. Actually, the contrast between this material affluence and the spiritual emptiness seemed quite conspicuous. Now I am more convinced that people are trying unconsciously to find easy and tangible compensation for their spiritual thirst in purchasing more and more things. They are easy preys to greedy commercialism. Considering the size and sophistication of this material affluence, I fear that these people constitute the majority of the population in Japan. I am sorry that they seem to have an illusion that they can become happier by purchasing more and more things, often needlessly.
In the course of time I have come to dissociate myself from the greedy commercialism. Everyone who comes to my flat for the first time is surprised to see its simplicity; a highly selected collection of books, CDs and clothes as well as a minimal array of electric appliances excluding a TV set are all I have. This does not mean that I am striving to be a hermit, which I consider is a wrong way of life. I am simply not trying to find spiritual wealth in vain pursuit of material affluence. Unfortunately, I do not find many people who can agree with this way of thinking here except for some Jewish friends I see in the synagogue in Kobe. This, coupled with my disagreement with many of the tacit rules of Japanese society, seems to make me a weird person in the eyes of many "ordinary" people here to my chagrin, and causes a tragicomical situation that living in Japan, I do not have far more chances to have meaningful conversations in Hebrew with the above Jewish friends than in Japanese.
14 September 2001 (26 Elul 5761)
Two shocking incidents that occurred this week have clearly shown me anew the vulnerability of the legal and bureaucratic systems of the central and local governments of Japan in national emergencies. The first incident is something personal: burglar(s) broke into my apartment on Friday evening while I happened to be away. The second is, of course, a series of unprecedented terrorist attacks in the US.
I had my computer, cash, passport and health insurance card stolen in this burglary. Strangely, I felt no anger against the burglar(s), but I could not appease my anger toward the local government. The first thing I had to do was to inform the relevant governmental offices about the burglary of my passport and health insurance card and annul their numbers as soon as possible. Not only did they have no telephone number for emergency on the weekend, but also has it turned out that there is no legal way to annul the numbers of these official documents immediately. I was shocked to find that in spite of the fact that there has been a rise in the number of burglaries in recent years, this apparent legal flaw still remains unchanged, and no civil servants working there seem to care about it at all. I could not help unleashing my anger on one of them who happened to answer my telephone inquiry though I knew that these civil servants would be able to do nothing to change the flawed system. It seems quite natural that burglars target passport and other official documents. This may be just a case of personal emergency, but it is not difficult to imagine how this and other flawed legal and bureaucratic systems would worsen the situation in national emergencies.
I was preoccupied with this incident in the first half of the week, until it was totally obscured by the news of the terrorist attacks in the US on Tuesday. Following the updates about this disaster and the Japanese responses to it, I could not help feeling how naive and unrealistic the present Japanese constitution is. The "famous" article there - Article 9 - says as follows: "Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. 2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
This article might be perfect in a paradise, but in the harsh reality of international politics it will be clear to everyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear that it is too dangerous to try to guarantee the security of one's country on such wishful thinking as if everyone and every country on earth strived for peace. Just as no one would keep the door of his or her house unlocked, wishing that there would be no burglars, no normal country would take the chance of keeping its door "unlocked". I am completely disgusted with the hypocritical idealism and irresponsible naiveness of some leftist parties in Japan and their unofficial organ Asahi Shimbun. No one, probably except for some terrorists, loves wars, and to arm oneself and be prepared for possible infringement of the sovereignty of one's country does not necessarily make one a militarist. I think that time is ripe for the amendment of the Japanese constitution, especially its anachronistic 9th article.
21 September 2001 (4 Tishrey 5762)
On the evening of the 7th of this month, when burglar(s) broke into my flat, I was in the synagogue of Kobe for shabat, and happened to hear someone talking about Internet security at the communal shabat dinner table. When I heard his naive remark that a computer cannot be infected with a virus unless one opens an attachment, I immediately responded to him, saying that this might not necessarily be the case. I did not expect then that I would witness the correctness of what I said "upon my own flesh" so soon. My computer - to be more precise, a computer which an ex-student of mine allowed me to use as mine was stolen by the burglar(s) - got infected with a virus this Tuesday, the very day when it was found and reported for the first time. This happened though I did not open an email attachment containing the virus; it simply opened itself automatically, using a security hole of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows.
This virus has turned out to be a highly sophisticated and infectious one. I was even more surprised to find a more complete picture of its sophisticated mechanism in an emergency seminar about it held at one of the Japanese branches of Symantec, a leading company about Internet security in the world, this afternoon. It took me a whole day on Wednesday to disinfect "my" computer of the virus.
After the burglary I was too preoccupied with the physical security of my flat to give a thought to the vulnerability of my Internet security. But it did not take me a long time to realize that the latter is no less critical than the former. Though I may not have been very cautious about the security of my flat, I thought I had been quite cautious about my Internet security, opening no email attachment sent by anyone I did not know, and disabling JavaScript and ActiveX. But how could I expect that I would receive an autoexecutive virus through a security hole? If I had not had my computer stolen, this might not have happened, as the Internet security was stricter. The onslaught of this dangerous virus happened precisely at the moment when I was most vulnerable.
Through this incident I have learned an important lesson about another aspect of security, i.e., Internet security. One should not spare one's time, energy and money to guarantee at least the minimal security both online and offline. I am sorry that this is not shared by the majority of the population in Japan, who seem too negligent of security in all its ramifications, whether private and national, due to mere ignorance and naive pacifism having infested Japan after the Second World War.
28 September 2001 (11 Tishrey 5762)
The two-month summer vacation is coming to an end as the second semester starts next week (for those who are not familiar with the academic calendar in Japan - the academic year starts in April here). The experiences I have undergone in these two months have been so intense that I feel as if at least a year has passed since the end of the first semester at the end of July. Generally speaking, one month I spend every year in Jerusalem is worth eleven months I spend for the rest of the year in Japan in terms of the encounters, both planned and unexpected, and the quantity of conversations, so the following month, September, is the "quietest" month of the year for me. After speaking so much in a number of languages including Hebrew, Yiddish, English, etc. in August in Jerusalem, I suddenly find myself with few chances to speak in any language including Japanese in September except with some Jewish friends I meet in the local synagogue in Kobe.
With no classes, this is the month when I feel how abnormal my life here is linguistically. I wonder how it can be that I have more chances to speak Hebrew or even English than Japanese, the language of the country where I live now. It is also supposed to be my mother tongue, but to be more precise, the dialect I used in the first 18 years of my life and still use with my parents is so different grammatically, lexically and socially from the quasi-standard Japanese I am trying to speak rather artificially. In a sense I feel I have no first language any more in that there is no single language in which I can be absolutely sure though many people say that I have little or no accent in the languages in which I am more or less fluent. But in exchange for this linguistic uncertainty, I seem to have acquired some kind of linguistic insight that does not depend on the use of a specific language. In other words, I do not care in which language to speak though I have some reservations about standard Japanese, which is too undemocratic in my opinion.
I am really happy that I can resume my teaching in the universities next week. Although I have already resumed teaching privately, it is not the same as teaching in class. I enjoy interacting with students and provoking them in class. And this is the single most important experience I cannot have during my annual stay in Jerusalem. The only thing that worries me every time I resume teaching after a long vacation is, however, that my Japanese might sound rather rusty, as I have had few chances to use it except for exchanging superficial greetings during the vacation.