1 March 2002 (17 Adar 5762)
I am totally exhausted with the typical Japanese manner of communication. Average native speakers of Japanese, especially if they have not spent a fair amount of time outside Japan, do not express explicitly what they think or feel, whether verbally or nonverbally. They can, however, be quite eloquent in speaking badly of you behind your back, while saying only agreeable things to your face. Every culture may have some degree of this linguistic hypocrisy, but in the typical Japanese manner of communication it is far more than I can bear. They seem to have little or no faith in words. In the minds of many native speakers of Japanese what they say, if at all, is not what they mean, and they seldom take what they hear at face value.
There may be people who maintain that this is a more sophisticated manner of communication than expressing directly what they think and feel, leaving much to the imagination and interpretation of listeners. I would rather consider it hypocritical than sophisticated, and if it were really sophisticated, then I would prefer a more "vulgar" manner of communication where what you say is what you mean, and language is assuming the role originally designed for it.
It may seem that this "sophisticated" manner of communication can contribute to the stability of a society, preventing possible conflicts, but this is, in my opinion, nothing but an illusion. The thoughts and emotions that are not expressed explicitly and stored in people's mind as frustration can burst out like an big eruption of a volcano causing more damage than a series of smaller eruptions. This manner of communication cannot bring any real progress to the society, and makes it only stagnant at best. This is what we witness now in Japanese society, be it in politics, economy or academia. Since such a fundamental thing as the manner of communication cannot change soon, I cannot help being pessimistic about the future of Japanese society.
8 March 2002 (24 Adar 5762)
Though there are enough people in Japan whom I admire as scholars, there are not, unfortunately, many whom I can respect as human beings as well because I cannot trust hypocrites who are double-faced in their words and deeds. Dr. Yuroh Teshima is one of those few in Japan whose linguistic and behavioral integrity as well as scholarly expertise I can truly admire. Several months ago he invited me to lecture about the world of the yeshiva to his students in Osaka. Based on my own learning experiences at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, I talked about the principles of yeshiva education and compared it with Japanese education, pointing out some grave limitations of the latter. Fortunately, the lecture was favorably accepted by the audience.
This Sunday I was invited by him again to deliver a two-hour lecture with the same title to his students in Tokyo. My lectures both for the general public and in the university are based on dialogs between me and the participants. I have to thank Dr. Teshima for giving me this opportunity as I really enjoyed active and spontaneous verbal interactions with the audience during my lecture, which is extremely rare in Japan. I could also reevaluate the beauty of the yeshiva learning and its intellectual and emotional impact upon me.
Instead of giving a brief survey of the world of the yeshiva, I chose this time two topics constituting the very foundations of Judaism in general and yeshiva education in particular: historical verification of the Torah and the importance of the Oral Torah vis-à-vis the Written Torah. Actually, they are based on the lectures I heard from two rabbis at Ohr Somayach Yeshiva in Jerusalem whom I greatly admire - Rabbi Dr. Dovid Gottlieb and Rabbi Mordechai Becher. Judaism, unlike many other spiritual traditions of the world, is largely based on intellect and not on emotions. Even among many thought-provoking lectures I heard from these two rabbis these two lectures were especially impressive in the depth and beauty of their logical argumentation as well as the implications they have on other areas. Of course, I had no illusion that I would be able to deliver all the details of their original lectures, but I hope I could share their sparks with my wonderful audience this time.
15 March 2002 (2 Nisan 5762)
I was formally notified this week that my application for a postdoctoral fellowship in my alma mater in Jerusalem had been rejected. Unfortunately, I am too used to having my applications for jobs and fellowships rejected in the past several years to be disappointed with such a notice. I am, however, still at a loss what to do next. Actually, this fellowship was not a purpose in itself but a means to realize the bigger plan of starting a new life back in Jerusalem, which in turn was a means to realize some even bigger plan.
Since my return from Israel to Japan in the summer of 1988 after spending five years there, I had been fluctuating between the two countries as the place to live in, until I finally decided several months ago to leave Japan for Israel for good, and applied for the above mentioned fellowship as the main economic basis in my first year in Jerusalem. I am afraid that with no alternative source of income in sight the option of moving there, at least this summer as was originally planned, has virtually disappeared from my agenda. I am still too confused to think about what to do next.
One positive implication of this rejection is that I do not have to worry for the moment about the possible separation from someone who has recently become quite precious to me.
22 March 2002 (9 Nisan 5762)
This week, thanks to the initiative of my close friend, I did something I had never done in my whole life: to travel inside Japan of my own will. Though I did visit several places in this country either on school excursions or for conferences, I had never made a trip inside Japan for its own sake, i.e., the so-called sightseeing. This is firstly because I am more interested in the human "landscape" than in the physical landscape, so prefer staying in one place and getting to know people more closely to traveling somewhere with no or little contact with people living there, and secondly because I had an erroneous preconception that Japan would be more or less the same everywhere in both human and physical landscapes. My friend, who has visited 46 prefectures out of 47 that make up Japan, had convinced me that this country has much to offer at least physically, and it is worth experiencing it firsthand with my five senses.
Taking a night ferry from Kobe on Sunday night, we left for Beppu and Yufuin, located along the eastern coast of Kyushu and famous for the number and variety of their hot springs, and stayed there for three days, until we came back to Kobe yesterday morning. If I had not read a travelogue about Beppu by an American colleague of mine teaching English at the same university where I am teaching Hebrew, it would not have occurred to me to visit there. Since then I investigated the place on the Internet and found out to my great surprise that it is one of the biggest spas in the world.
Though I always take only a shower instead of a bath even in the coldest winter, I have to confess that I enormously enjoyed the hot springs in Beppu and Yufuin as well as the time I could share with my friend. During our three-day stay there we tried ten hot springs, sometimes outdoors. I also fell in love with the scenic beauty of Yufuin. I was only sorry that we could stay there only for half a day, and felt like visiting there again for a longer period of time.
As my friend has convinced me, Japan seems to have much to offer physically, and it is enjoyable and consoling to visit scenic spots and experience their beautiful physical landscapes. I do not think, however, that I can live in such places as long as I have little or few intellectual and spiritual stimuli there though they may be ideal for certain types of people. I have reconfirmed that after all human beings and human landscapes interest me more than animals, plants and physical landscapes. This can also mean that as long as I have a stimulating and compatible sociolcultural environment, I can live even under quite severe physical conditions.
27 March 2002 (14 Nisan 5762)
The Passover starts all over the Jewish world this evening (there is a halakhic controversy as to where a new day starts; the so-called International Date Line is something arbitrary, hence has no halakhic basis; according to one halakhic authority the Japan Standard Time is not GMT plus 9 hours but GMT minus 15 hours). In the past several years I attended the communal seder at the synagogue in Kobe. When I was there last year with a good old friend of mine who came to visit me during her Passover holidays, I thought it might be my last seder in Kobe as I was planning to leave Japan for good. But I am still stuck here and celebrating the seder in the synagogue in Kobe again this year.
This will be my 14th consecutive time to experience the Passover seder. The more times I experience it, the more strongly I feel how true the following words are: the Passover has kept the Jewish people more than the Jewish people have kept the Passover. The first five times I celebrated the seder in Jerusalem, I was still too preoccupied with all kinds of peculiar customs that were totally new to me. But since I started to celebrate it in Japan, I have come to pay more attention to the symbolic meaning of the Passover - freedom from bondage - than its literal meaning - freedom of the Jewish people from the Egyptian bondage.
Every time I attend the seder, I have been asking myself for the past several years what my bondage is from which I want to free myself. Until the Passover of the year 5759 (1999) it was my doctoral dissertation, which I had shlepped too long. Since I could finally finish it somehow in the beginning of 2000, I have been thinking and will think today at the table of the seder about liberation from the present situation of having no tenure and/or being stuck in Japan, though this may not a bondage in the accepted sense of the word. I hope to be able to find a way to get out of this dark tunnel as I managed to get out of a purgatory called doctorate, which I thought might last forever.