3 October 2003 (7 Tishrey 5764)
For most university professors and lecturers one of the greatest intellectual pleasures must be to teach courses on what they are currently occupied with in their respective areas of academic pursuit without making any compromise. I fear, however, that probably a very few of us are given such a privilege. Instead, many of us, including myself, are asked to teach either things that have little or even nothing to do with what we are studying or things in our areas of interest at an elementary level.
With the start of the fall semester, I suddenly felt a strong desire to share with students what really occupies me now. I am aware, however, that perhaps such a wild dream will never be fulfilled in Japan, especially as long as I have no tenure. And even if I should, most of the courses I would be asked to teach might be language courses at an elementary or intermediate level at best. I would probably have to wait several decades until there would be even a small audience of students for specific issues of Hebrew and Jewish linguistics.
Of course, this does not mean that I hate teaching language courses at an elementary or intermediate level. I do enjoy it a lot, especially because every year I have new students. Furthermore, I believe that in a sense those who teach elementary subjects such as language courses for total beginners can have more decisive influences on students, hence more responsibility because these students, unlike advanced ones, have a tabula rasa on the new subjects.
But on the other hand, it is also true that there is much less room for innovation and originality in elementary courses. And for not so widely taught languages such as Modern Hebrew, new textbooks are not published every Monday and Thursday, so we generally use the same one(s) for several years. Although this gives us the advantage of becoming more familiar with the materials included in the textbooks, they will sooner or later stop inspiring us intellectually. This is what scares me most as I am convinced that just like in riding a bicycle, we will fall down unless we constantly move forward.
10 October 2003 (14 Tishrey 5764)
The present situation in Japan may be compared to a seemingly extravagant banquet in the Titanic: people are too busy satisfying their immediate materialistic needs to realize that the ship is sinking. There are also a number of social symptoms in Japan now that probably characterized the fall and decline of many empires. They include materialism-cum-mammonism, which has become the most popular religion in Japan. To make the matters worse, many people, especially the young, are so indifferent to and/or ignorant of the politics of their own country. In short, I am afraid that Japan would not need any external threat from its neighboring hostile countries to collapse.
Unfortunately, I do not seem to be the only person who fears that Japan is sinking; a number of publicists who have more knowledge and insight are also repeating the same or similar warnings. I feel more helplessness than anger every time I find that the majority of my students do not read newspapers and have no political opinion whatsoever about their own country. And it is least likely that they have ever read such warnings or thought that Japan may become another Titanic.
The fact that politics is not the only area about which average university students in Japan have no opinion testifies the seriousness of the sickness that affects Japan today. You suffer the worst aftereffect of a disease if you are not aware of the disease itself and continue behaving frivolously as if nothing were wrong.
I am not blaming specific students for having no opinion about anything serious in life. Actually, they are victims of the social, especially, educational, system. In the present-day Japan there are few opportunities that make people think seriously about fundamental issues of life and society while they are in school or university. The other side of the same coin is that few of them are trained to think critically on their own, so even if someone should express his or her opinion, they have nothing to say as a response. As a result, Japan is full of shallow conversations, even among university students, though there must of course be good exceptions. The problem is that these victims are producing new victims.
The only thing I can do (and have been doing) as a teacher is to induce my students to start thinking about things they have never thought about in their life. I do not know how successful I have been. Some students seem to reject my inducement instinctively by closing their eyes and ears so that they may continue to live in their illusionary world where they can lead a nonstimulative animal-like life without thinking about anything serious about life and society. Then I can only wish them bon appetit.
17 October 2003 (21 Tishrey 5764)
Although I may sound pretentious, I feel I have realized what the very essence of Japanese society is. This is a society where people try to stand in each other's way (and are often successful in doing so) out of envy at others' success (whatever it means). Japan is often characterized as a society of harmony, but I think this is only a half truth. This harmony is not the result of discussions and subsequent mutual consent but of social pressure or violence that does not allow alternative opinions and/or behaviors. You will see harmony only on the surface, but if you observe carefully deep below the surface, you will find all kinds of negative emotions swarming there and waiting for opportunities to surface in subtle ways.
Unfortunately, most of us, including myself, cannot be totally free from negative emotions. It would be healthy if we could at least express these emotions directly, without, of course, having recourse to physical violence. In Japanese society, however, you have to violate many social taboos in order to express your feelings directly, not only when they are negative but even when they are positive. Not everyone is successful in suppressing negative emotions, and has to find ways other than expressing them directly.
In every society envy must be one of the strongest negative emotions people have toward others. It seems especially strong in Japanese society, where being different from others is not so accepted socially, hence it seems to arouse more envy than in other societies. Many people simply stand in the way of others instead of feeling happy for their success.
This principle underlying Japanese society seems so deep-rooted. In face-to-face direct communication there are too many social barriers that prevent most people from standing in the way of others, but in contexts where these barriers are removed partially or totally, you can easily become a prey of brutal envy.
Various kinds of online anonymous bulletin boards must be among the most disgusting examples of these contexts. It would be enough for you to spend a few minutes reading messages posted there in order to realize that many of them are for expressing envy at other people's success and/or standing in their way. Now I understand why these bulletin boards are so popular in Japan. Unfortunately, however, those who flock or even get addicted there may not be aware that this and other negative emotions are like epidemics. For this reason I simply stay away from these bulletin boards.
24 October 2003 (28 Tishrey 5764)
One of the seven wonders in contemporary Japan is that Asahi Shimbun (English edition) is still subscribed by as many as 20% of the households while two dwindling leftist political parties that make the same or similar claims are supported by less than 5% of the population. What characterizes this self-proclaimed "quality paper" as well as these two parties is, in my opinion, fanciful idealism and hypocritical double standard, of which, I fear, many subscribers to Asahi are not so aware.
Its fanciful idealism is reflected most clearly in its blind faith that repeating the word "peace" like a mantra is enough to bring peace to the whole world, so Japan should stick to the present constitution, made by the American Army after the Second World War, that denies the possession of an army to defend itself. What a naive view! This is like denying the use of locks etc. to defend one's own house from possible intruders. Besides, a constitution is not a Torah from Sinai; it must be amended as the situation in and outside the country changes. The present constitution is apparently old-fashioned and may do more harm than good to the country and the people.
Of course, it has the right to write what it believes is right. But what really makes this paper unreliable is its hypocritical double standard. It is highly critical of what democratic countries, including Japan itself and the United States, do, but is amazingly tolerant of what totalitarian communist regimes do; it can read almost like a Japanese edition of the official organ of one of these totalitarian regimes. The same thing is described totally differently, depending on who did it. Worse still, it is critical of others, but when it often makes the very mistakes it criticizes about others, it does not admit and correct them nor apologize for them.
There is, however, one thing in which it has been very successful, that is, in making so many people believe that it is a quality paper for intellectuals. Give me a break. If you compare Asahi with real quality papers of the world, you will immediately understand that it is a chutzpha for it to call itself a "quality paper". Even linguistically, its editorials (English edition) and daily column Tensei Jingo (English edition) in particular are good examples of bad style wasting words to say nothing or something irresponsible at best. It is possible to explain its unproportionally high circulation only by its successful propaganda.
You may expect that I do not read this paper. On the contrary, I do read it regularly though only online (I do not want to help this paper economically by purchasing a print edition), together with other papers. This is not because I respect it but simply in order to check what naive stupidities it is writing. Unfortunately, it never "disappoints" me in this respect.
31 October 2003 (5 Kheshvan 5764)
Although the terms "mother tongue" and "first language" are generally used interchangeably, they are distinguished here to refer respectively to the language one learns first in his childhood and the language in which one uses most frequently, is most proficient and feels most comfortable in the all the four areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking in a given moment. In other words, one's mother tongue is a given fact that one cannot change, while one's first language in this sense is subject to change in the course of one's life.
My mother tongue is a northern dialect of Japanese, and it is probably the only language of all the languages I have studied which I speak without thinking about forms. But it is definitely not my first language, not only because I do not read or write in it but also because I do not speak it now except with my parents. Then what is my first language now? There are three candidates: standard Japanese (henceforth simply Japanese), Hebrew and English.
As far as listening is concerned, I feel equally comfortable in the three languages. But in the other three areas I am leading a rather complicated life of triglossia. I read more in English than in the other two simply because there are more materials to read in it, but I read much faster in Japanese. I am forced to write more in English, but I probably write better in Japanese, of course on condition that I can use a computer, which can convert hiragana to kanji automatically.
When it comes to speaking, I feel most comfortable, like a fish in the water, in Hebrew probably because of the way people generally speak it, i.e., in a less constrained and more egalitarian manner. Although I speak English more or less fluently, I feel some artificial barrier as I have never lived in any anglophone country. Speaking Japanese all the time really tires me because I have to constantly think about the relative social status of my interlocutors in order to choose forms that are socioculturally the most appropriate forms to them in a given context. Furthermore, it seems that even in speaking Japanese, I continue to think not in the Japanese sentence order of subject, object and verb but in the order of subject, verb and object as in Hebrew, English and all the other languages I still remember. As a result, I often find myself mumbling, looking for an object which in my brain is ordered after a verb.
So what is my first language now? I fear that I have none though I seem to have three second languages.