7 February 2003 (5 Adar I 5763)
I often wonder what a difficult creature I am to deal with psychologically. It sometimes happens that what I think or feel controls my body in such an embarrassing way, especially when it happens in public. The most complicated case of this is that when some incident makes me aware of something in the context where I am not supposed to be aware of it too much, I try to persuade myself not to be aware of it, but I become too aware of this self-persuasion and, as a result, of the very thing I try not to think about.
I have been suffering from this complicated problem for quite a long time, and I am afraid that it is worsening as I experience it more and more frequently. When I am functioning normally, I am both cheerful and verbally aggressive in interpersonal communication, looking people straight in the eyes and joking spontaneously. But once I start suffering from this problem, I become awkward and can look no one in the eyes, which everyone will be able to detect easily as I cannot conceal my feelings.
What bothers me is that this something is not necessarily what interests, attracts or worries me most. And I am more bothered by the impression I have that people who see me in such a situation may interpret it as a sign that I am interested in, attracted by or worried about that something too much though there are rare cases where this is true.
14 February 2003 (12 Adar I 5763)
I used to consider it a great privilege to be relied upon by others, especially in my areas of expertise, and offer them as much help as possible, but I might as well finetune this way of thinking. Although my colleagues and close friends also ask me from time to time about Hebrew and some other languages as well as computing, the majority of questions and requests I receive by email or telephone almost on a daily basis are from people who are not so close to me and more frequently from strangers through my website or by word of mouth. When I receive such questions and requests, I generally put aside all my jobs temporarily and try to answer them as soon as possible.
In principle, I used to answer all these questions and requests unless they were beyond my ability, but I start wondering if I should stop answering them unless they are from my colleagues and close friends. It is true that preparing answers can often be quite time-consuming, and in almost all the cases I receive no monetary compensation for my time, but this is not what bothers me.
Although I am not trying to help these strangers and distant acquaintances to be thanked, I think it minimal (n)etiquette to confirm the receipt of my answer with words of gratitude; this is at least what I always do when I ask someone a question and receive an answer. I do not know any longer whether I am outdated or demanding too much as there are so many people, mainly strangers who send me questions by email, who do not have this netiquette; though not so frequent, there are even people who do not write their own names anywhere in their questions. The problem is that I can never know in advance whether a stranger who emails me has this minimal netiquette or not.
The people who bother me most are those distant acquaintances, i.e., neither colleagues nor close friends, who contact me only when they think they can gain some benefit from me and my help, but once they have received what they wanted, they behave as if I did not exist. Many of them know how to "flirt" me, and often stress the urgency of their questions and requests and even their "friendship" to me just to make sure that they get my help. A few of them even have the chutzpah to ask me something they can do by themselves but are too lazy to do. I used to help them in all these cases, hoping that what they call "friendship" will be not only when they ask me something, but in many cases this turns out to be my illusion, nor does it help much to change their lack of respect toward me. Since I answer them too easily, they may be considering me as a kind of automatic answering machine they can use for free whenever they need some help. Ironically, if I ignore some (or all?) of their answers and requests, they may treat me with more respect. Or is this a petty idea?
21 February 2003 (19 Adar I 5763)
I have to admit that I have just suffered a complete failure in my quixotic fight against silence resulting from linguistic self-censorship in Japanese society. As so many people in this society cannot but keep silent even in those contexts where expressing their opinions is absolutely required, the power of silence seems so overwhelming as to subjugate their linguistic behavior. Of all the attributes ascribed to us human beings, homo eloquence is in my opinion the most significant one. We are sharply distinguished from the rest of the animal world in that we have linguistic faculty. It seems, therefore, that to fail to make use of this faculty is nothing but intellectual degeneration.
There must be a number of sociocultural reasons for this silence in Japan. The first possible reason is that many people here are intellectually emasculated so that they may take everything for granted and never question anything. I do not know whether this is intentional or not, but the emasculation of pupils is systematically and efficiently done through the educational system. Only those who are highly individualistic from birth or have spent at least a number of years outside Japan can be free or liberate themselves from this brainwash. But of course, spending some time abroad is no guarante against this effect.
The second possible reason, which is closely related to the first, is that many people are not trained to develop intellectual and emotional immunity to linguistic confrontation with others and resulting criticism by them. They keep silent because they are afraid of being criticized. It is true that the surest way not to get drowned is never to enter water, but I think this approach is totally wrong, and this is what pupils are encouraged in a subtle way through various channels in and outside school instead of being taught the danger of drowning and trained how to swim. The biggest problem of this approach is that they assume that as long as they stay away from water, they will be safe. But in real life they may face this danger. Then they are not prepared to cope with it at all.
These two and other factors that silence people make Japanese society and people inhabiting there extremely immature and fragile both intellectually and emotionally. This may be convenient for bureaucrats who abuse their power to manipulate Japan as they like because nobody criticizes their egocentric policies, but this silence is liable to backfire sometime in the future, especially when they face some danger they have never imagined. As long as this mentality persists, I can see no future for Japanese society. I therefore would like to recommend those who are thinking of studying Japanology to look elsewhere unless their purpose is to learn from failure.
28 February 2003 (26 Adar I 5763)
I seem to have an extraordinary linguistic "talent" to conflict with people in Japanese society. What I mean as an intellectual dialog or an invitation to it is interpreted so frequently, to my great surprise, as an emotional conflict or even threat. Although Japanese is supposed to be my first language, I have noticed that ironically, the more logically I express myself in form and content, the less natural my Japanese seems to sound to the average Japanese ears. It often occurs to me that I would be able to communicate much more smoothly with Martians than with average native speakers of Japanese who have a culturally conditioned phobia about confrontation. I am constantly looking for opportunities to receive intellectual stimuli through dialogs, but unfortunately, this humble desire is seldom fulfilled, thus I often feel deprived.
There was a time when my linguistic and extralinguistic behaviors changed according to the languages I spoke, but I have passed this phase and behave more or less in the same way in all the languages I speak. Quite interestingly, however, I am considered rather quiet in a society like Israel where verbal assertiveness is a norm rather than an exception, while in Japanese society, where silence is valued more highly than eloquence, they consider me as extremely and sometimes intolerably aggressive verbally. Actually, Israel and Japan are the opposite expremes in this respect.
Although both types of societies have pros and cons, and the ideal would be something between them, I would definitely prefer the Israeli extreme to the Japanese antipode if I were asked to choose one of them. There are many people, especially in Japan, who maintain that to be always forced to express themselves verbally tires them, but for me it is much more tiresome and frustrating to be constantly forced to guess real intentions behind and/or beyond what is expressed verbally or what is not expressed at all. The problem with the latter type of society as I see it is that it is based on deep suspicion and pessimism about language. With all due respect to the so-called cultural relativism, such a linguistic principle depriving people of speech seems to me hopelessly pathetic.