Using memories to avoid house repairs

 That guy in the photo on the left with shoes to die for and a very transparent desire to look a lot taller is the previous Japanese Emperor Heisei, known while he was alive as Akihito. Japan uses two calendars, the Gregorian one we and most of the world use for modern-day international business exchanges and the official Japanese calendar, which changes with each emperor. I was born in Showa 15 [Showa = Hirohito], first went to live in Japan in Showa 45. And while teaching at Keio University, I applied for a sabbatical to run from September of Heisei 9 to March of Heisei 10. I know that because I've been avoiding the task of getting people to come fix the walls of my house by cleaning out my closets and trying to throw away the tons of stuff there gathering dust.

I never get very far in these moments. Something always grabs my attention and I get carried away with memories. This morning it was coming across that sabbatical application in Heisei 9 (1997) and the fateful decision to fulfil Taku's lifetime wish to come to the States. We were just starting out as a couple and didn't want to be separated, so we calculated I'd take a sabbatical for a semester while he came to live in my house in Berkeley. It worked. He got into San Francisco State in women's studies, I got my sabbatical and Taku got his first taste of living in what would become his adopted country. Good times.

Lots of water under the bridge since those days. Taku decided one day he had gone into women's studies not so much out of a desire to study women, but because he wasn't up to telling the world his real academic interest was in gay studies - and the opportunities in that area were far fewer. He switched to graphic design and got a job with a Japanese company in San Francisco. When we first met, we spent a lot of time talking about Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir and the state of feminism in Japan, and I rode him about wanting to give that fascinating stuff up just to become "another fairy who wants to make things pretty." But he was undeterred.

To read my sabbatical application is to roll your eyes and wait for your bullshit detector to go off in your head. But it wasn't all bullshit. I really was interested in postmodernism, still a new idea to me in those days, and I had no doubt I would be picking things up I could use in my seminars in culture theory. And that came to pass, even though I never pursued anything to publication.

I am still plagued by postmodernism and how to walk the line between holding to the conviction
there is such a thing as objective truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, recognizing the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz,

that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun…I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.

These days the struggle is less over political correctness per se than the best way to approach the T in LGBT.

I went into retirement seventeen years ago already, and no longer have seminar students to toss ideas around with. Taku is now an American citizen and wonders aloud after dinner sometimes whether he made the right decision to leave his home country for one that sometimes seems to be eating itself alive. 

Life goes on.

And I still need to get those damned crumbling walls fixed.