I have successfully reversed the nocturnal existence I have been leading ever since I recovered from jetlag in October and have been an early riser for almost a week now. Zheesh, it was like kicking cocaine or something. Of course, I don’t know why I bothered given that I’m leaving for New York on Sunday.
The Taiwan conference was postponed until October. I lost my ticket but hopefully can afford another one by October. Also, let us all hope that SARS has been successfully contained by that time. It would be sad indeed if China steaming economy were truly derailed by the fear of the disease.
At school, reading is keeping me busy and I want to start focusing more on reading primary documents from the 20s, 30s and 40s in Japanese, one of the primary goals of this time in Japan. Up until now I have been reading mostly secondary materials in Japanese and English. I am so far pretty awful at reading primary materials that really shouldn’t be that difficult, and have a lot of work to do before I will be comfortable with it.
I will not feel fully satisfied with my time here in Japan if I haven’t accomplished these goals: 1) become solidly familiar with the narratives of modern China and Japan in Japanese scholarship and have a solid command over the events and people involved. 2) become reasonably comfortable with reading primary Japanese materials from the first half of this century 3) become reasonably familiar with the common sources/archives that I can mine for information on my period and topics of interest 4) familiarize myself with the leading scholars in Japan within my field of interest and the leading trends in research here 5) have a number of ideas concerning the direction for any potential PhD level work in history 6) do some solid original research on at least one topic and either write a paper or have a paper’s worth of material collected 7) improve my Japanese to the point where I can speak fast and fluently within my field with full and active mastery over the relevant specialized vocabulary 8) get to know other graduate students in my field, learn from them 9) learn 2 academic years worth of Korean and be capable of basic conversation 10) make content for ChinaJapan.org and if possible complete the “Open Introductions” software for it 11) Successfully complete PhD applications and give my best shot at getting in somewhere I want to go. 12) Not lose my Chinese language ability beyond salvation 13) Read many of the things I didn’t have time for during my masters studies and get some of the theoretical foundations down before plunging into a history PhD.
In my almost 8 months here so far, I have only really accomplished or nearly accomplished about 3 of these goals, and am not making sufficient progress on the other 10 or so to really be that optimistic…
10 months to go…