When I took the job at Keio in 1989 we were still up to our ears in death in San Francisco. AIDS was raging out of control, and I didn't hide the the fact that I felt, upon arriving in Japan where AIDS was largely unknown, a sense of blessed relief.
For the first few months, at least. Then, gradually, it began to get under my skin how clueless everybody was. How can you not see what's going on in the world, I heard myself thinking all the time.
Because I had a tenured professorship, I had free rein to teach almost anything I chose to focus on. I decided to massage my "cross-cultural" credentials a little bit and proposed a seminar with the title, "Cross-Cultural Responses to the AIDS Crisis." It wasn't exactly a roaring success. Only four students signed up. Keio, I want to acknowledge with gratitude, let me go ahead with it and we dug into responses around the globe to the AIDS crisis to see what they might tell us about the attitudes, values and beliefs of the people of the various countries involved. We dug up lots of interesting stuff. The French were offering condoms with long-distance train tickets. The Brazilians assumed that advice would only be taken seriously if they never lost sight of the fact that having sex was fun, and thus couched messages in samba music and sexy poses. The Japanese avoided possible embarrassment by using real people in their public messages and used stick figures instead. The Dutch posted messages like, "When you fuck, use a condom!"
By the end of the semester, our little group had become quite close and their interest in AIDS had intensified to the degree that we all decided to attend the Tenth International Conference on AIDS that year which, conveniently, was going to be held in Yokohama. I can't remember how I did it, but I managed to wrangle some money out of the university to enable us all to go. The normal registration fee was outrageous - about $1000, if I remember right. But that made sense when you realized that they set the fee this high so they could give lots of radically reduced tickets to people from poor countries, countries suffering the most from AIDS.
No sooner did I get involved than I learned the conference directors were embarrassed by the fact that Japanese people were not signing up. The apathy I first encountered when first arriving in Japan was still there. In the end, the government decided to provide free, or next-to-nothing, tickets to Japanese doctors and their families. Not academics, for the most part, not people accustomed to attending academic conferences.
The result was we got to see a large number of cultures in contact which otherwise would not likely have been in contact. Typical of many of the presenters, for example, were sex workers from Rio de Janeiro and typical of many of the Japanese audience members were high-society ladies in high fashion clothes and shoes costing a Rio slum dweller's annual income. You can imagine the look on the faces of these ladies when the speaker's Portuguese presentation was translated into Japanese and they heard, "Some of our biggest problems come from doctors who prescribe medicine before they've even had a look at your dick!"
An unforgettable moment of that conference that remains with me came during the plenary given by the head of the World Bank. Somebody asked him, "What is the single most important thing we can do in confronting this crisis?" I expected, given his role in dealing with the world economy, he might say something like, "write letters to your congress people and urge them to fund better health care," or something to that effect. His actual answer was: "Educate women."
Another unforgettable moment, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, was listening to the Japanese Minister of Health predict that AIDS would not become a problem in Japan because "there are few homosexuals and Japanese are very educated." At the same time, his ministry was publishing the information that 50% of 20-24-year-old males and 20% of females were having sex outside of a partnership and only a third of those were using condoms.
During one presentation a (Mr.?) R. Msiska, head of the National AIDS Control Program in Zambia, put it out there in black and white: "We are undone by this disease. Our economy is in shambles. Our productive workers are dying. Not a single Zambian individual is untouched by this disease." At the same time, in another part of the conference, Norio Hattori, who I believe was press secretary at the Japanese foreign ministry at the time, urged "all the people of the world to work together." I shouldn't be too hard on him, strong as my inclination to disparage the work of Japanese bureaucrats is. I understand his ministry was pledging billions of dollars by the year 2000. I just checked and I see they actually followed up, so maybe it's time I stopped biting at the heels of Japanese bureaucrats.
The fact that the seminar had only four students attending had the upside that the university was willing to pay their entry fee. I doubt they saw anything at Keio to match that level of educational experience. On the last day, to quote from my own notes from 29 years ago:
I walked out of a meeting at 7 p.m. in a state of near total mental exhaustion, because I simpy couldn't take any more. I went out onto the plaza where, despite the heat, people were mesmerized by a razzle dazzle high tech multimedia presentation on PWAs (people with AIDS) in all stages of life and in death, poetry written by and about them, scenes of protest juxtaposed with official responses, etc. When you can't stand it anymore, out come the dancers and the rock music. Even at age 54, I understand the need to be loud.
That was 1994. Just over twenty-nine years ago. Today we struggle over how to deal with the transgender issue, we worry whether there will be fighting in the streets if our gangster-president gets sent to jail, Covid lingers on, the German economy is in full stagnation, people are throwing democracy into the trash can in several places simultaneously around the world, and global warming is making fools of us all.
But we are no longer terrorized by AIDS.
I remember vividly when we were.
Sometimes things actually do get better.
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