6 December 2002 (1 Tevet 5763)
Having taught Japanese as a foreign language for many years, I have come to notice a certain incomprehensible and rather bothering tendency among my students coming to Japan from various countries. In spite of the fact that most of them major in Japanology, and many of them have almost native-like fluency in Japanese, they speak mostly English among themselves outside the classroom and sometimes even in the classroom. If those whose native language is English speak with each other in English, I understand it. What I fail to understand, however, is why speakers of languages other than English choose it as the unquestionable lingua franca of their communication instead of Japanese, which is supposed to be not only their object of study but also the language of the place where they live now.
I am not sure whether this phenomenon is peculiar to students studying Japanese in Japan, but I remember that when I spent five years as a student, I met few foreign students who did not speak in Hebrew if they had different native languages. I can hardly imagine two foreign students of Hebrew speaking in English in Israel unless both of them are native speakers of English. Should they do so, others would think that their command of Hebrew is poor - something worthy of pity.
So why on earth do so many foreign students of Japanese in Japan speak English instead of Japanese among themselves though this can be interpreted as a sign of their linguistic incompetence in Japanese? Since the proficiency of their Japanese is at such a high level that will definitely not hamper their communication, and they are not trying to convey their messages to the potential audience with no or little knowledge of Japanese as on the web, they must be making some other calculation, whether consciously or unconsciously.
I may be wrong, but I feel some kind of linguistic snobbery here. Seemingly, they are interested in showing their overall linguistic talent not by their command of Japanese but by that of English, which they might consider more prestigeous and "cool", thus serve this purpose much better. Of course, some of them may also be interested in improving their English in addition to Japanese.
Of course, I have no right to force them to stop this peculiar linguistic habit if it is what they want, but it seems foolish to my eyes and sounds unpleasant to my ears. If they really want to demonstrate their linguistic talent-shmalent to their colleagues, there must be better ways.
13 December 2002 (8 Tevet 5763)
I am flying to Los Angeles next Sunday to participate in the three-day annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies. As the deparature approaches, I am becoming more and more excited and nervous at the same time with expectations and worries though this is not the first time to read a paper in the US.
I have been feeling less and less comfortable and finding less and less significance in reading a paper on the areas of my interest in Japan as there is virtually no other researcher in these areas here. In the past several months I have been occupied mainly with Hebrew computational linguistics, and unfortunately, I have been unable to find any appropriate forum inside Japan for the paper I wanted to read and am reading this time in Los Angeles. It is concerned with the building of an annotated corpus and a lexical database of Modern Hebrew in XML. Some time ago I luckily found a notice in one of the mailing lists I subscribe to about the organization of a session entitled "Computing and Jewish Studies" in the coming annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies. I always wanted to participate in this conference, but I had no chance to do so thus far. Having seen the notice, I contacted the organizer, and fortunately I was accepted into this session. It seems to me that such a session would be possible only in the US.
I am not, however, free from worries. In spite of the fact that I am supposed to read a paper in the session dedicated to computing and Jewish studies, I am a little afraid that the topic with which my paper deals may be too complicated not only for the other lecturers of the session but also for the audience as it requires knowledge not only on computing, especially XML, but also on Modern Hebrew linguistics. Unfortunately, none of the linguists majoring in Modern Hebrew will attend this conference, and there are few Hebrew linguists who are also familiar with XML, which, according to Tim Bray, one of the authors of XML specifications, is the ASCII of the 21st century. Before reading a paper in some conference, I generally ask some of my colleagues for comments and suggestions, but unfortunately, I could receive no substantial comments or suggestions this time for this very reason.
Of course, I have more expectations than worries. I am looking forward to various expected and unexpected encounters I may have in and outside the conference rooms in Log Angeles. Human landscapes have always been more interesting for me than the natural landspaces.
20 December 2002 (15 Tevet 5763)
I came back home last evening from the three-day annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies held in Los Angeles. As a whole, I was rather disappointed with the conference. The audience who came to our session "Computing and Jewish Studies", where I read a paper entitled "Building of an Annotated Corpus and a Lexical Database of Modern Hebrew in XML", was very small, and unfortunately, there was not even a single Hebrew linguist among them. This may be partly because there were 14 sessions including ours at the same time, and partly because few researchers in Jewish studies are familiar or find enough interest in computing. I should be wise enough to know in advance that linguists are always a minority in such general conferences, and this one is not an exception. There were only four or five on linguistics among hundreds of presentations, and I am afraid that mine was the only one on Hebrew linguistics.
I decided to go all the way to Los Angeles, hoping to get comments and suggestions about concrete issues concerning the actual building of an annotated corpus and a lexical database. Unfortunately, however, I could receive no feedback on these issues though I receive words of encouragement from the other lecturers of the same session. In retrospect, I cannot dispel the feeling that I might have read such a paper of extremely technical nature somewhere else, but it was certainly an encouragement to see other researchers, though quite small in number, struggling to incorporate computing into Jewish studies, especially Heidi Lerner, an energetic librariarn at Stanford University who organized our session and kindly accepted my presentation into it. Anyway, an important lession I have learned from this conference is that workshops which are concerned with specific areas and where all the participants read their papers are the most fruitful meetings not only purely academically but also in forming connections with other researchers.
Although the conference per se was not especially fruitful for me this time, I did experience a few positive encounters outside the conference halls and site as is often the case with conferences. One of them is that I could finally meet Prof. George Jochnowitz face-to-face, who is a professor emeritus at the City University of New York and a renowned expert in Judeo-Italian and Judeo-Provençal among others. I felt privileged to suddenly receive an email message from him a few years ago concerning a short article I had written in Yiddish because I remembered not only his name from a number of his publications but also his face from one of the sessions at the 12the Congress of Jewish Studies held in 1997 in Jerusalem. Since then we have been corresponding regularly; he has not only the patience to send me comments about this very online journal but the kindness to share with me his essays full of warmth and cynicism, which incidentally is a term of praise for me. From time to time I am nudging him to open his website to share these essays not only with him but also with other people. I hope that the day will not e so far away when we will be able to read them online. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank him for his friendship.
27 December 2002 (22 Tevet 5763)
When I visited my sister and her husband in Tokyo on my way to our parents' house in Akita, where three of us are going to spend our winter holidays, my sister told me something new I had not known about our grandmother, our mother's mother, who is living with our parents: she has been bed-ridden since several days ago, hopefully temporarily. When I heard this, I could not contain myself, and tears started falling down my cheeks. Seeing this, my sister and her husband also started sobbing.
Visiting my hometown has always involved facing those aspects of life I generally do not ponder upon, but this time I had to face one of these aspects, tribulation of aging not only for an aged person but mainly for his or her family. In Japan the burden of taking care of aged parents has customarily been assumed by their children, especially daughters or even daughters-in-law. This is what my mother has been doing since her mother, that is, my grandmother, became partially paralyzed because of cerebral apoplexy about 15 years ago, and for the past several days bed-ridden. I may be mistaken or misinformed, but I have an impression that in other developed countries, probably except for the US, the national welfare system is taking care of the aged in these cases.
Actually, one of the main reasons why Japan boasts the largest amount of savings per capita by individuals in the world is lack of trust on the national welfare system. I agree that an economically developed country like Japan has the obligation to help developing countries, especially its neighbors. As a person who pays tax to the Japanese government, however, I cannot understand why our tax is not used first and foremost for the benefit of ordinary citizens as in welfare, but is wasted in an incredible amount as a foreign aid even to hostile countries that not only take this for granted and express no thanks to Japan but also intervene with the internal politics of Japan.