5 April 2002 (23 Nisan 5762)
I had been too preoccupied with myself these days to be aware of this very fact, until one casual remark my mother made in our telephone conversation a few days ago suddenly awakened me to the realization that actually I might be in an enviable situation since living alone, I have, in principle, to worry only about myself. She may not even remember the very fact that she made that remark, but I have not been able to put it out of my mind since then. She expressed rather indirectly her weariness of taking care of her own mother, that is, my grandmother, who is now 94 years old, and is living with her and my father in Akita.
I still remember clearly the news I heard from my parents on the telephone that my grandmother had a stroke and fell unconscious. It was on the very day in January 1988 when I had to travel from Kyoto, where I used to live then, to Tokyo to be interviewed at the Embassy of Israel for the scholarship to study in Israel. I was sobbing all night in the night bus I took, thinking about my grandmother, as I was very close to her throughout my childhood. Fortunately, her optimism has helped her recover from the stroke, but she has been suffering from the partial paralysis of her right hand, and needs someone who takes care of her. So since then, for the past 14 years, my mother has been unable to leave the house more than a day, except for very special occasions, in order to take care of her mother.
On the one hand, I am sorry for my mother's fatigue, both physical and mental, and feel guilty for not doing anything to help her; the very fact of writing this sentence may be nothing but hypocrisy. But on the other hand, I can say now that I truly respect her as well as my father. It seems to me that what counts most as a human being is not his or her intelligence, appearance, status or income but his or her good heart. Some time ago I told my parents that at least in one thing I am very lucky, that is, I have good parents.
12 April 2002 (30 Nisan 5762)
I had to go to Tokyo in order to take part in some academic meeting held there. A close friend of mine, who had nothing to do with the meeting, so did not take part in it, joined me in this three-day trip. I took this opportunity to visit the place where I used to live in my first year after coming back from Israel, which was probably the most difficult period of my live, struggling to readjust myself to Japanese society, and then my sister and her husband living in Tokyo. Four of us spent the evening together, shmoozing over bottles of nice wine at a cozy restaurant and singing in a karaoke box. This was a good chance for me and my sister to see each other, which does not happen every Monday and Thursday as I live in Kobe - and reappreciate each other.
Since I left my parents' house when she was still a junior high school student, I could not witness her gradual change from childhood to adolescence. Then my five-year stay in Israel prevented me from following her drastic internal progress in the first half of her twenties. So my sister as I know her now is someone different from the one I knew in my childhood that I had to get acquainted with anew. She may be feeling the same about me.
Though we were born from the same parents, we have taken totally different paths of life. I am a student of linguistics still trying to find tenure somewhere, while my sister is a quite successful graphic designer working with some big name companies as well. Even physically we are not so similar to each other, probably except for eyes as many people point out. Of course, our characters are also quite different, but it seems that we are similar to each other at least in one point, which may also be common to our parents. We express in words what we think is right, whoever we are dealing with, be it our parents, teachers, friends or whatever.
I feel - and many people who know both of us say so - that though I am biologically older than my sister by four years, she is more mature when it comes to life in Japanese society, as I never worked for any company here, was away from Japan for five years, and live in a kind of ghetto rather detached from the "normal" Japanese society. I appreciate her as I can often ask for her advice when I encounter some sociocultural problem specific to Japan I cannot decipher and/or solve.
19 April 2002 (7 Iyar 5762)
With the start of the new academic year I also resumed my teaching of Hebrew, English and Japanese at two universities this week. Though I really like teaching and it is a great intellectual stimulus to go back to the classroom, I cannot help feeling depressed. When I started teaching at these two universities in April 1994 after I came back from Israel, I never imagined that I would end up working with no tenure so many years. There is nothing intrinsically inferior in being a part-time lecturer. Once in the classroom, you can have the same intellectual pleasure as a full-time lecturer. But once outside the classroom, you have to face the harsh reality of being underpaid, hence being forced to work more hours, and having neither social security nor social recognition. I can somehow manage to cope with the fact that I have an unstable small income. But I find it quite difficult to keep on living with the feeling that I am not recognized socially, hence am useless socially, especially because I have some pride in what I am doing as one of the few specialists in Hebrew in Japan, which has no single department of Hebrew and Jewish studies in any of its numerous universities.
Considering my age, specialty, character and especially lack of personal connection with influential professors, I am afraid that I have little hope of finding tenure in a Japanese university. I have seen enough cases of nepotism as the main or even sole criterion of employing someone as a member of the academic staff. Actually, I found conferences of many of the so-called academic societies in Japan are nothing but places of rituals where non-tenured young scholars are trying to find personal favor with influential professors, and newly employed ones are flattering them. For this reason I have already withdrawn from as many as five academic societies in Japan, and I am about to withdraw from the last one whose member I still am. As I am not the kind of person who is ready to flatter even for my own future, I can see no reason to remain there. I have even come to think it rather useless to write in Japanese, which has little or no audience in my area of specialty.
What is "interesting" is that I seem to have less and less opportunities, e.g., less and less number of university and private courses I teach, here in Japan, as if some cosmic energy is helping me get out of Japan with no resentment, after I have decided to leave for Israel, though I have been unable to find any source of income there, at least in my first year of immigration, hence am still stuck here. Since I can see no future for myself in Japan, whether academically or privately, I should probably look for a job in Israel more seriously, even outside the academia.
26 April 2002 (14 Iyar 5762)
This week I finally withdrew from the last Japanese academic society whose member I still had been after quitting as many as five other academic societies. So I now have membership in academic societies only in Israel and the United States, which are two "superpowers" in Hebrew and Jewish studies. I am surprised to find that there were as many as six academic societies I could join in Japan in the first place; one has to join something in order to quit it.
I am aware that membership in an academic society is not something that should be judged purely on the basis of cost and benefit. But I have lost any rationale for paying a not so cheap membership fee to this society I have just left, to say nothing of the other ones I had left. This is in spite of the fact that academic societies in Japan are more like social clubs where you flatter influential people for your own benefit than places for pure pursuit for academic truth and the sincere exchange of opinions regardless of the age and social status of participants. The fact there are few other specialists in my field of Hebrew linguistics was another reason for this withdrawal. I know this on my own flesh from an incident I had sometime ago; in one seasonal meeting of this society I read a paper which I had read abroad among specialists of Hebrew and Jewish languages, mainly from Israel, and had been accepted very favorably, but the only thing I received as a response to it in this Japanese society was total lack of response except for some irrelevant remark by someone who is considered a prominent figure in this society.
I am fully aware that having no membership in any academic society in Japan can further restrict my chance of "marketing" myself, hence finding tenure in some academic institution here. After quitting this society, I have even come to find it futile to write anything in the language of the country that has no institutionalized Hebrew and Jewish studies. I cannot find any significance any more in any activity or membership whose sole or main purpose is self-promotion without any real audience.