6 April 2007 (18 Nisan 5767)
I never fail to surprise people by telling them that I have no mobile phone, nor do I seldom use even a regular phone except with my close friends. What makes me detest and avoid using any telephone as a means of business communication is the fact that I always have to accommodate myself to the convenience of those who call me. In this respect email has a clear advantage over a telephone in that I can answer whenever it is convenient for me.
Seemingly, email is a very efficient means of business communication, and I cannot simply work with people who never or seldom check it regularly; those who do not have email addresses do not even exist for me unless they are my close friends. But has email helped me manage my time efficiently, not in relative terms but in absolute terms? Unfortunately, I only have a negative answer to this question.
The problem is that when I am home, I am connected to the Internet all the time and my mailer-cum-aggregator is set to automatically check email and feed messages every ten minutes. Since I receive about 50 email and 200 feed messages every day, I am constantly alerted to one of them. I can seldom (probably never!) resist the temptation of checking them, so I end up spending at least one tenth of the time I spend when I am home checking email and feed messages, though naturally I do not answer them immediately.
Apparently, I waste a lot of time this way, and this is really harmful to my professional life. So I really feel I have to put an end to this obsessive habit just as I recently stopped drinking beer, for I see how I mismanage and waste my time. But the problem is how I can do so. The simplest way would be to disconnect from the Internet except during certain hours every day, but I am not so sure whether I will be successful in implementing this.
13 April 2007 (25 Nisan 5767)
The first new Hebrew word I studied when I came to Israel for the first time was שביתה ('strike'). This is very symbolic because from the very beginning until now I am suffering from strikes by various groups and I have no idea to whom to complain. Right after the end of the two-week Passover holidays on Tuesday, students launched a strike in all the universities in Israel; I am afraid that it might continue. Furthermore, we university teachers are supposed to start a strike next Tuesday. I am really bothered by strikes by members of the public sector, including students, teachers and bureaucrats, for several reasons.
First of all, I do not trust in strikes in general as an effective means of getting what we demand. But naturally there are other things that bother me much more than this. When students or teachers in the university strike, who decides to do so? I was a student and am a teacher here in Israel, but I have never ever asked if I also want to strike. Only a handful of people in the administration of students' or teachers' union must decide without asking those whom they are supposed to represent. Even if they struck without the consent of the majority of the members, they would have the responsibility to tell us about the achievements of the strikes; unfortunately, I do not remember receiving such a report. I am afraid that for these "representatives" strikes are ends in themselves.
But what really bothers me about strikes by these people is the fact they seem to forget that their strikes do harm to other members of their own groups as well as to the general public. They may have the right to protest for their own causes but not at the expense of those who do not identify themselves with them or those who have nothing to do with them. I have to say that these strikes are more like egocentric behaviors. Let them demonstrate for themselves instead of striking, thus involving and bothering innocent people. I am still looking for ways to protest (and even strike!) against these egocentric people who claim to represent me against my own will.
20 April 2007 (2 Iyar 5767)
I have been wondering why it is that many of the talented students in the humanities who enter competitive universities in Japan become mediocre researchers by the time they become professors in the humanities, while many departments in the humanities in Israel universities are far easier to enter but their graduates become brilliant scholars by the time they become professors. I think I have realized one of the reasons when I attended an annual ceremony this week for awarding prizes to outstanding undergraduate and graduate students in our department.
It is to treat BA and MA students as our potential colleagues and PhD students as our virtual colleagues. Recognizing their academic accomplishments in public is not the only way of doing so. Supervisors often allow or even ask their PhD and sometimes MA students to call them by given name in Israel. For cultural reasons this will never be possible in Japan. Outstanding PhD students in Israel are asked to teach courses, while their Japanese couterparts are not allowed to do until they finish their doctor's course with or without doctorate in hand; in certain prestigious universities you have to have tenure elsewhere to teach courses there.
It seems to me that by being treated as equals, whether potentially or virtually, students do their best to live up to the expectations of their teachers who can be real colleagues in the course of time. On the other hand, being a student of someone means never being an equal to him or her in Japanese universities. Again, this will not change in Japan in the foreseeable future for cultural reasons. Nor will many people who are higher on an academic ladder in Japan try to learn from those who are lower on this ladder. But I really think PhD students can at least be allowed to teach. Perhaps this is significant not only practically in experiencing and experimenting to teach but symbolically in feeling that they must already be independent researchers.
Of course, there are outstanding scholars in Japanese universities, but I am afraid that they have achieved what they have achieved in spite of all kinds of obstacles in the academic culture in Japanese universities. They may have been able to achieve more and earlier if there were a similar system like in Israel that treats them as colleagues of their teachers before they officially joined them.
27 April 2007 (9 Iyar 5767)
As a single man with no girlfriend (hopefully temporarily) right now I really appreciate hospitality in Israel. Naturally, not every person here may be hospitable, but hospitality is part and parcel of the Jewish and Israeli culture, together with other nice things such as helping drunkards stop drinking by not offering them any alcohol even on Sabbath. :-( I am invited to one or sometimes two meals almost every Sabbath at my frum friends' and mentors'.
I do not know whether spontaneous communication with strangers was part of the traditional Jewish culture in the Diaspora, but it does seem to be part of the contemporary Israeli culture, probably due to the fact that Israel is an immigrant society. I think that starting to communicate with strangers is the first step to hospitality. In principle every human being, including introverts (and especially introverts), probably has an instinctive urge to communicate with others. So the mere fact of being spoken to by a total stranger must mean a lot to someone who is new in a foreign country away from his or her country of origin.
I was born in a place in Japan where everyone knows everyone else. People I see on the street when I visit my parents once a year still recognize me and greet me though it is more than 25 years since I left the place and I disguise myself with a beard and a mustache. ;-) But this never leads to hospitality there, that is, I was never ever invited by someone who is not a close friend or relative of mine to his or her house. In big cities there you have less chance of being invited to someone's house, as few people even greet their neighbors, which was and still is foreign to me because of my background.
Here is a fundamental difference between Israel and Japan. I think that the highest form of hospitality you can show to someone is to invite him or her to your house, but this must be extremely uncommon in many parts of Japan. Again, I really appreciate my friends and mentors who continue good old Jewish tradition by continuing to hospitalize me regularly, mostly on Sabbaths. This and other manifestations of warmth are the main reasons why I would prefer Israel to Japan as a place to live in in spite of all kinds of prices I have to pay.