Year in Review

My family Christmas celebrations have concluded. I spent a warm and happy time together with my parents, my sister Carleen and my brother-in-law Mike. Since I don’t really send out Christmas cards or even 年賀状 (new year’s cards) I’ve decided to try to compile a sort of “year in review” on my blog. It will be somewhat longwinded but I’ll bold the more major event markers.

This is actually quite a challenge, since I suffer from a mild case of the “memento syndrome” combined with a more regular long term amnesia. However, using the techniques of a historian and detective I have been able to reconstruct the only true and, of course completely accurate narrative of my past year with the use of three important archives: My calendar application, my email, and my blog entries.

Apparently I was in Oklahoma last Christmas as well, and spent it there with my family, including my uncle and cousins from Norway. I returned to Japan where, since October of 2002 I had been studying at Waseda University in Tokyo on a Japan’s Ministry of Education scholarship. During this time I audited lots of seminars at Waseda and Tokyo University, attended talks and meetings of various research groups, including my professor Hirano Kenichirô’s Sino-Japanese history group, and did lots of preliminary reading for my (then hopeful) future PhD studies. I was at that point still waiting to find out if I had gotten into any graduate programs at all.

When I returned to Japan I had only a few months left on the scholarship and apparently still didn’t know for sure where I would be in the near future. I had originally planned to leave for Korea when the scholarship came to an end , and get some real language study done there before coming to the US. One big thing kept me behind in Japan, however. Through I friend I got offered a job that was rather unique. I was interviewed and received the position as part-time english conversation partner to a former Japanese prime minister. I met with him every other week at his office and we simply read international news articles from various magazines and discussed world affairs in English. It was a bizarre but very exciting experience. He was incredibly kind and a very interesting conversation partner. We also had about half an hour of “free” conversation before starting each time when I could ask him questions about all manner of things.

Since this position kept me in Japan at least twice a month but didn’t pay enough to keep me in my little cottage in Kichijôji, I needed to get more part time positions to keep me alive a few months after my scholarship ended. My professor kindly offered to provide free housing for me in his library/work office for a few months and I continued to audit various classes and work on a research project which has provided me a good background on my future topic. I did various other odd jobs to keep myself afloat, translate some Japanese academic material, transcribe the English from various TV documentaries for subtitle creation, teach English at a train repair factory for the Keiô line, and work as a part-time English editor and occasional translator for Tôyô Bunko (The Oriental Library). I was also a Research Assistant at the COE-CAS (Contemporary Asian Studies center at Waseda) and sometimes edited their English papers and documents.

Around this time I also started visiting museums, archives, and libraries that I thought would be useful to know in the future and put them onto my online reference wiki. I still want to expand this wiki and transfer its contents to a better wiki software package.

All this time Sayaka continued her Chinese language studies in Taiwan and I visited her several times in Taiwan before I left Japan and she also came to visit me in Japan. Long-distance didn’t seem so “long” back then when we were only a cheap plane ticket away from each other.

Also by February 2nd, as a flood of emails in my records confirm, the graduate school waiting game was getting much more tense as I started getting unofficial hints from some quarters. What followed was a few weeks of extremely stressful emails, phone calls, and strategy planning. I won’t go into details but the somewhat strange outcome was that I ended up being offered and accepted a fellowship to begin a history PhD at the university I thought I was least likely to end up at: Harvard. I remember I almost didn’t mail the application to Harvard at the Kichijôji post office because its expensive application fee and what I thought were my nearly hopeless chances of getting in seemed to make the effort pointless. Also, I had some other initial doubts about a number of things about Harvard but after a brief meeting with my current advisor Professor Andrew Gordon in Shibuya and the fact that Sayaka might well be on the East Coast as of fall of 2005 in her own PhD program made a big difference.

March was spent mostly in Taiwan, where I went to watch the pro-Green “hold hands for Taiwan” rally and the KMT response. On a second trip there Sayaka and I watched the presidential election unfold there. In fact I arrived just as the president and VP were shot in an assassination attempt (KMT supporters and others still believe the attack was an elaborate pro-Green ruse). The KMT went into guerilla mode after the election and staged huge protests for days (weeks?) in the aftermath. We visited many of the protests and took lots of pictures.

When I wasn’t attending protests and rallies of both parties or dining with my deeply political Taiwanese friends, I hung out with Sayaka, watched movies, and visited libraries and archives.

In April I continued to visit new libraries and archives in Japan and a specially memorable moment was a nighttime urban hiking trip across Tokyo I took with my most spontaneous of friends, Lars. The second even more memorable April adventure was when I joined my friend Hiroshi for a trip to his family home in Mie prefecture, where his parents took me to many of its most wonderful attractions. More than any tourist attractions, however, I most enjoyed a day of bicycle riding with him through Mie’s countryside, which reminded me of happy days I spent one summer in Tateyama, Chiba prefecture almost ten years ago.

During this time I also beefed up my collection of strange Engrish T-shirts and sweaters and continued some Korean language exchanges with my Korean friends in Japan. In retrospect, I made very little progress…and even after a semester here again I’m very disappointed with my own progress in a language that Japanese should give me an advantage in studying. I think ultimately I must accept that I have never dedicated enough time to its study. I hope this will change when I study in Korea this coming and the following summer.

In May (and I think everyone can tell at this point that all my income from part time jobs that didn’t go towards soba and ramen noodles was being used on travel expenses) I travelled to Europe and my hometown Stavanger for the first time in five years. It was a trip filled with nostalgia. While there I was best man at Glenn‘s wedding. I also got to reconnect with friends there and my uncle and cousins. I also frantically prepared for a conference in New York where I gave a talk and two workshops on some software I designed. After the conference I returned to Stavanger for a time and then back to Japan.

In May I also wrote a rather long article for Chanpon.org called “Losing the Soul of Japan” which I really enjoyed putting together. I added another anecdote in a separate blog posting here at Muninn.

When I returned in June, I did some work and had a meeting with my “conversation partner” before leaving only two days later for another short trip to Taiwan to see Sayaka and, for the first time, do some real sightseeing outside of Taipei on June 11th. For the rest of June and early July I continued my studies and work in Japan although I already began saying good bye to all my friends there.

In mid-July I made my first (and so far only) trip to Korea. I left on the 8th and came back the 10th. My excuse for going was my friend’s birthday on the 9th. It was full of new experiences which prompted lots of blogging (1, 2, 3, 4
5, 6, 7).

When I came back I had to prepare for a final presentation I gave at Waseda to a group of professors and students at the COE-CAS on online resources for scholars of East Asia and the open access movement. I wished I could have stayed longer, it seemed to have sparked some interest and they invited me to present again. Unfortunately, the rest of my summer was pretty packed with more traveling. I left the next day for Takarazuka, Sayaka’s hometown where I spent a few days with her family. We also made a trip to Nara and Kyoto, my first really, where I finally got to see some of the places Japan is famous for. After a delightful time spent with Sayaka’s family, the two of us went on a cheap Iran-air flight to China, her first, and went sightseeing around Beijing and to Qingdao.

After returning to Japan briefly, I finished off some of my work and projects and returned to the US and my family’s home in Oklahoma where I made my final preparations to begin the PhD program. I would never have been able to travel so much during my last half year in Japan if it weren’t for the fact that my various part time jobs were very flexible and often involved checking English documents that I could take with me. I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to travel quite so frequently again but I must say that I really loved the jolt and excitement of waking up in the mornings and for a moment not knowing where I was. I also love airports, the bigger and more international the better, as I really feel at home there. It is kind of like a microcosm of the global village we live in.

My father and I packed his car up with my books and drove to Boston from Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Boston’s difficult streets had us lost and annoyed much of the initial days after my arrival. With his help I soon got settled into Perkins dormitory and quickly met the fellow Gordon student entering this year, Craig Colbeck. Craig has been a great friend since I got here and we have taken almost all the same classes here our first semester. We are also both interested in Korea and have been studying Korean.

I made other good friends since I have arrived but have had little time for more than spontaneous socializing between deadlines. My life quickly turned into a blurry cycle that went from one Wednesday to the next. My seminars are all Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and I was never able to balance my time effectively between them. I would be exhausted every Wednesday afternoon and spent Wednesday evening through Friday morning just catching up on sleep, only to have the madness begin again over the weekend. Considering that this was probably the easiest semester I will have (I had not research seminars, mostly just reading to do), I’m going to have to improve my time management skills for the next semester.

During the fall I attended talks on various interesting topics when I could, debated all sorts of strangeness with friends over coffee, and met older PhD students and recent graduates which helped give me some insight on what awaited me in the future. I’m still very much interested in doing a solidly transnational topic related to treason and traitors in East Asia, most likely focusing on the early post WWII trials and the role of traitors in serving as the negative aspect of national identity re-formation in the aftermath of war and colonization. I’m still working on how to include Japan more directly into the project…

The year was full of travel, relative freedom to read and study what I liked while in Japan, and the excitement of starting a new life (well, not all that new) as a PhD student. I learn a great deal, but regret that of the dozen or so projects I started this year, many of them have been left unfinished or abandoned. I hope that in the coming year I will find time to return to many of these so that I may finish them…I also hope that I will bring my Korean up to a decent level, get a good reading ability in German, which I have never studied, and make solid progress on my preparation for the general exam (Orals) that awaits me next spring in the fields of modern Japan, modern Korea, early modern European intellectual history, and “aftermath of war”.