2 January 2004 (8 Tevet 5764)
What I regard as the minimal courtesy in any interpersonal relationship is to remember the names of the people I have to and/or do meet more than once, be they my colleagues, students or friends. Although there are cultural variations in the way people greet each other physically, I think that to remember others' names is probably universal across various cultures as a form of showing minimal respect, consideration and lack of hostility to them. It is not sufficient just to remember their names; one must also pronounce or write them.
Purely linguistically, names are nothing but sequences of sounds or characters, whether they have any meaning in their respective languages. Emotionally, however, they are more than mere phonological or orthographical sequences even for those who have no or little emotional attachment to their own names like myself. So the first thing I do as a teacher in a new semester is to (try to) remember the names of all my students, sometimes even by repeating them on my way to school.
Surprisingly and unfortunately, I have met enough people who do not share with me such minimal courtesy. The most offending people are not those who consistently ignore others' names but those who selectively ignore names of certain people. For whatever reasons I have often been a victim of such a selective (or discriminatory) treatment with my name. The fact that no malice is involved here makes the matter even worse and offends me deeply.
What would you do if someone who claims to be your friend did not even remember your name? Such a thing happened to me this week. I still do not understand how someone who claimed to be a friend of mine could dare to tell me that she did not know my name in reply to my reaction to the bothering address forms she had always used instead of my real name, while she did remember and use the names of our common friends? Such an insult was simply more than I could bear; even I have some self-respect. I had to tell her my intention to put an end to this deceiptful friendship.
9 January 2004 (15 Tevet 5764)
I wonder how children learn moral and social values that are not taught systematically in words. They can be either common to all human beings or specific to particular societies. I may be totally wrong, but I imagine that the process of learning these values is probably analogous to that of acquiring one's mother tongue: every human being not suffering from some mental disorder is born with a kind of black box with a universally human, thus innate, core that develops into a specific set of moral and social values according to the input they receive in their respective social environment.
I started thinking about this because I suddenly noticed a certain bothering behavior in the classroom common to all my students (in four classes in one university). It concerns one of the values I seem to have learned unconsciously in my childhood by watching adults and peers around me: to use what belongs to the public with much greater care than what belongs to yourself so that someone who uses it after you may use it pleasantly. This applies to the use of books in public libraries, facilities in public places, etc. I am not sure if this is a universally human value or specific to Japanese society, but I was shocked to find that what I consider self-evident is shared by none of my students in their late teens or early twenties. It was even more shocking to see that none of the students seems to think that what I consider a problematic behavior can be a problem at all.
Unfortunately, however, such egocentric behavior with little or no public awareness is not restricted to university students. It is seen in all the walks of life not only among young people but also, though less widely, among adults. From this imbalance between generations I must conclude, though tentatively, that the social environment in which children can learn moral and social values by watching respectful adults around them is rapidly disappearing in contemporary Japanese society. I wish I were wrong, but my impression which is becoming a conviction is that more and more people, especially the young, misequate freedom with egoism without any moral and social obligations. Is there then any solution that will stop or at least slow this trend that is gaining momentum? I am afraid not; at least I cannot think of anything.
16 January 2004 (22 Tevet 5764)
I am not sure whether I am exceptional in Japan in terms of the (small) number of friends who visit my place. I have an impression that people who live in a big city away from the workplace and have more or less the same socioeconomic condition as I seldom have visitors in their houses. Since I remember having many visitors constantly at my parents' house, where I was born and brought up, I am rather sorry for my present situation as I consider it a privilege and pleasure to have my friends as guests in my place and to be invited in theirs as a guest. I may personally be responsible for this situation, but it may have other general sociocultural reasons specific to Japan, including the bigger physical and emotional distance between friends and the smaller size of houses here.
The greatest privilege and pleasure in this respect would be of course to have my friends from across the border of Japan. The last time I had such an opportunity was when I invited my very close friend in Jerusalem to spend her Passover holidays in Kobe a few years ago. I had such a rare occasion this week again.
This time my guest came from New York. It was from Yokohama that he came to visit me last time, probably about six years ago, when I was still living in Osaka. In the meanwhile I also visited him in New York when I went there to take part in a Yiddish speaking summer camp. I would not be surprised if he should come from a very unusual place in his next visit to my apartment, which may also be in a totally unexpected place by then.
Life is full of strange and unexpected encounters. My encounter with him must be one of them, especially because in retrospect there was a very small probability of our meeting in the normal course of our lives. I first met him in our last year in Jerusalem before I returned to Japan and he, a new immigrant to Israel from Moscow, moved to New York. Then I was rather crazy about Russian for a certain personal reason, so I put a notice on one of the bulletin boards of the Hebrew University, looking for a native speaker of Russian ready to teach me spoken Russian in exchange for my teaching him spoken Japanese. It was he who called me after a short while through this notice of mine.
I am not sure how much we could improve each other's speaking ability in Russian and Japanese respectively. But as far as I am concerned, he opened before my eyes a world that had been totally unknown to me until then, that is, the world of the Russian intelligentsia. He turned out to be the crème de la crème of this world. He is one of the most amazing people I am in touch with in terms of the intellectual and linguistic wealth and depth. Although I could spend only several hours with him in Kobe this time, first in a Japanese-style pub, then in my apartment, I was greatly inspired by his thought-provoking words as usual.
23 January 2004 (29 Tevet 5764)
There are two things whose temptations I cannot easily resist: good beer and good dictionaries. Dictionaries are probably the dearest to me not only of all the kinds of books but of all the commodities one can buy for money. Every time I use dictionaries, especially my favorite ones, I am filled with sense of gratitude to their authors and publishers for enabling us to benefit from years of their intellectual efforts in exchange for a (relatively) small amount of money.
What constitutes good dictionaries depends on the level and purpose(s) of the user. As for the five languages I know more or less well and use frequently in my daily life, i.e., Japanese, Hebrew, English, Yiddish and Esperanto, my ideal dictionary, whether monolingual or bilingual, would be the one with the following characteristics or types of information: 1) unabridged, with as many entries as possible, including encyclopedic ones, but preferably in a single volume for ease of use and portability; 2) sufficient, if not too detailed, orthographical, phonological (e.g., accent), morphological (e.g., inflection) and syntactic (e.g., valency) information.
For Hebrew, to which I am probably most closely attached not only academically but also emotionally, I spent a lot of time and money in vain in pursuit of a good dictionary, until רב-מילים המילון השלם was published in 1997. Although it is not perfect, it far exceeds other dictionaries in my opinion. Although I keep myself up-to-date with the state-of-the art technology of computing, I am old-fashioned when it comes to dictionaries; I prefer conventional ones printed on paper to electronic or online versions. For the sole purpose of searching, the latter may be far more efficient and faster, but for me dictionaries are not only something to search but also something to read without searching anything specific.
As for the best unabridged single-volume dictionary of Japanese, my opinion may be different from that of the majority of the other lay people. It is interesting to note that in Japan once something establishes itself for whatever reason, even if it is unsound, its name starts to have its own life regardless of the quality of the contents. It is amazing to see how many people do not or cannot judge things with their own eyes. This is also the case with monolingual Japanese dictionary. It seems to me that Iwanami, like Asahi, is extremely good at propaganda. Somehow it has succeeded in making the majority of the public believe that its Kojien is the ultimate authority of the Japanese language. I myself was one of the tens of millions of people who naively believed this until several years ago when I took the trouble of comparing unabridged single-volume dictionaries of Japanese. On the basis of what little knowledge I have on linguistics and lexicography I have come to a conclusion that Kojien is a bad dictionary to say the least. I do not understand why so many people dare to say such a naive thing as "according to Kojien, the word blah-blah-blah means ...", as if it were the authority. Give me a break. In my humble opinion Sanseido's Daijirin is much superior to Kojien in many respects.
A good unabridged single-volume monolingual dictionary of English is another thing had failed me until this week. Since the level of English lexicography in Japan is extremely high, I have not felt a special need for a monolingual dictionary of English. As a lover of language and languages, however, I have tried a number of such dictionaries, starting with a small one I acquired in the 11th grade. I had not been making a special effort to look for a dictionary for English meeting the two conditions mentioned above, but I luckily stumbled upon such a dictionary and fell in love with it: Oxford Dictionary of English (not the famous Oxford English Dictionary) with as many as 355,000 entries. Unlike other English dictionaries that found their way into second-hand bookstores, it will find a secure place in my private library and give me intellectual pleasure. In the meanwhile I read it with utmost pleasure every night before going to sleep.
30 January 2004 (7 Shvat 5764)
Every time I hear expressions like "global", "international" and "universal" in those areas related to human soul, I almost instinctively feel suspicious about what are really meant and what belief or ideology is hidden behind them. Both the use of these expressions to mean "Western", "European" and/or "American" and their use in their literal sense, as if a single culture common to all human beings were possible, seem to me nothing but a naive wishful thinking.
Of all the civilizations still existing in the modern world (Samuel P. Huntington, for example, enumerates eight in his monumental The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order), the Western civilization encompassing Western and Central Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand has been dominant than any other in the past centuries, hence has a higher chance of being a single civilization shared by all human beings. However, "a higher chance" in relative terms does not mean a high chance in absolute terms. There seem be more differences between the civilizations than commonalities. For the same reason a single global/international/universal civilization not based mainly or exclusively on a certain preexisting civilization is even less realistic without many things common to all human beings in the core of human soul.
Considering the fact that language and culture are tightly interrelated and interdependent, I wonder what kind of international culture they have in mind when fervent proponents of Esperanto propose their language as a planned international language vis-à-vis an ethnic language like English. I am bothered by the naive (or highly sophisticated) ideas by mainly leftist Esperantists as if a truly international culture were possible. I respect this as a noble idea, but it seems to be illusionary idealism like communism that is unattainable at least in the near future and advocated by people who are detached from the reality of intercivilizational differences (and even conflicts).