1 February 2008 (25 Shvat 5768)
I started taking pictures in August 2005 as a way to share what I see in Israel with my parents, sister and friends in Japan and what I see in Japan with my friends in Israel and other countries in the four corners of the world. Of course, I see not only nature and buildings but also people, but I photograph mainly the former as I seem to have a certain psychological problem in taking pictures of other people and having my pictures taken by others.
When I take pictures of nature and buildings, I can feel assured that I am converting more or less faithfully what I see three-dimensionally into two-dimensional pictures, though professional photographers may say that I am totally wrong; there is at least no mutual emotional involvement between me and my inanimate objects. But when I photograph people, I feel as if I were dissecting them, choosing and perpetuating only tiny and not always faithful fragments from their complete wholes both physically and temporally. I take pictures of other people as people, naturally with their prior consent, only if they are very dear to me, and that as an aid to continue to remember some precious moments I spend with them. In this respect total strangers can be part of nature for the purpose of my pictures. I detest more to have my pictures taken by others without being notified in advance. Although I may appear more natural then, I feel as if they were sucking my blood. I am even more hesitant to make my own pictures publicly viewable online, or worse still, to have them publicized without being consulted.
I have met a number of people who do not stop taking pictures not only of others but also of themselves in every possible occasion and often publicize them online, hoping that they may be viewed as many people as possible. I have been wondering what makes them publicize their own pictures to the whole world. Are they neither aware of nor worried about their own privacy? I have been able to come up with only one possible explanation for such a behavior which seems to outweigh privacy concerns.
8 February 2008 (2 Adar I 5768)
There are a number of positive character traits I have failed to develop so far, though I am not sure if I can develop them at this age of mine. One of them is without doubt leadership. I have been good at working in the background as an assistant of some leader even if my work is neither recognized nor thanked, but when it comes to leading a group of people, I have been totally at a loss and have always shied away from assuming such a responsibility; unfortunately, however, the older I become, the more chances I have to be forced to do so. There are some possible reasons for this failure of mine. Becoming aware of them might help me overcome them.
One of them concerns how I was born. Having born premature (I weighed less than 1.5kg at my birth), I was always the smallest in class until I was in the 11th grade. We human beings are not so different from animals in this respect: those who are bigger have the upper hand on those who are smaller. It took me years to overcome my physical inferiority complex, until I reached the average height and started exercising physically (running, stretching and isometrics), but this inferiority complex seems to have left me an unerasable "stain" in my sub- or unconsciousness.
Another is the fact that I have always been unconventional in the way I think and behave. When I was a junior high school student in Japan, where it is a social crime to be different from others, I had to pay a heavy price for this. Since then I stopped expecting meeting someone like me, and every time I joined some club, I could never survive there more than a year, as I felt as if I had been choked. Being their leader was of course out of the question. I simply preferred escaping from them to changing as a leader what I thought was a problem so that I might not be choked to death in the process.
I have seen various kinds of leaders, whether charismatic, only self-proclaimed, etc. I am more and more convinced that leadership is among the character traits you cannot develop through your own conscious efforts. Then the natural conclusion would be that if you lack this character, you should simply stay away from a position that requires it. All my past failures in trying to lead others have already convinced me this. Instead I should put my heart and soul into what I have been good at since my childhood - to remain a lonely wolf who helps others anonymously in the background from time to time, while keeping away from groups of conformists. It seems too late to "domesticate" myself.
15 February 2008 (9 Adar I 5768)
I have come to realize that the time for commuting is for me the most efficient time for intellectual productivity and spiritual contemplation. It has not only the benefit of being in a quasi-library in that it is easier to get over my temptation to be lazy but also the benefit of being on the move thus receiving physical stimulus in my body, which in turn helps activate my brain. Unless I am really sleepy for lack of enough sleep at night, I therefore spend these precious hours reading books or working with a computer. These were (and probably still are) quite common behaviors you find on buses and trains in Japan, but they seem to be far less common in Israel, where many people simply sit still and more people are busy talking on the cellphone.
I used to take an intracity bus from my apartment to the central bus station in Jerusalem and take an intercity bus from there to my work place in Ramat Gan. But some time ago I decided to walk to the central bus station instead of taking a bus for several reasons, having seen that it takes me more or less the same time. It gives me a far better feeling to walk alone in the fresh air in the morning than to wait impatiently for a bus which never follows the timetable and start a new work day in a fully packed bus. But the problem is that I can neither read books nor use a computer while walking. Half an hour a day may not be a lot of time, but it can amount to a substantial amount of time in a year, which can be used for nourishing my brain or soul.
I am sorry that this idea did not occur to me much earlier, but this week I decided to purchase an MP3 player and started to listen to audio lectures by rabbis, including my ex-teachers at a certain yeshiva in Jerusalem, which are available for free and in abundance in a number of websites, such as Jewish Torah Audio, SimpleToRemember, TeachItToMe, OURadio and Chabad Audio Classes. I often find myself continuing to listen to these lectures even on an intercity bus after reaching the central bus station on foot. I feel as if I now had a portable yeshiva lecture hall I can attend whenever and wherever I would like to.
I have also found an unexpected positive side effect to this - I am not forced to hear and suffer from stupid noisy cellphone conversations. What a huge difference between starting a new day with insightful and instigating words of wisdom and with annoying and frustrating words of vanity!
22 February 2008 (16 Adar I 5768)
I have lived only in Japan and Israel, but I am quite sure that it will not be so easy to find two cultures that are so different in so many respects from each other as Japanese and Israeli cultures, though there are a handful of areas where they are similar to each other. One of the most fundamental differences concerns the way people speak.
When I still lived in Japan, I was irritated by formulaic roundabout speech of many people. It was especially frustrating to find that the more important the topic of a conversation is, the more formulaic and roundabout the speech tends to be. In such a mode of speech you can seldom take uttered words at their face value and have to rack your brain what they really mean. Those who cannot encode their words this way and decode others' words accordingly are considered ignorant of Japanese sociocultural grammar. Of course, we do not always have to or should not always say frankly what we really mean, but there are enough contexts where such a direct mode of speech is healthier and more productive.
In this respect I definitely prefer the Israeli mode of speech. But I have one reservation about it. Why does one have to speak aggressively to be frank? There is not and should not be any automatic equation between directness and aggressiveness. I think and would like to believe that theoretically, your interlocutor is more ready to listen to your frank words if you speak non-aggressively. Unfortunately, however, the situation here in Israel is that it is often the case that you have no choice but to speak aggressively so that others may listen to you. Worse still, this aggressive mode of speech is contagious. This explains why the default mode of speech here has become an aggressive one. I am often shocked to find myself this way. Since I am not a feminist, I can go so far as to say that I am even more shocked to find young women, who seem otherwise attractive, open their mouth and start speaking in a way even the most verbally aggressive man would not dare in Japan (and probably in many other countries, where verbal aggressiveness is not a sine qua non for sociocultural survival).
29 February 2008 (23 Adar I 5768)
[no update due to a busy schedule]