Autumn on the Open Sea | Naoyuki Agawa (Vice-President in charge of Shonan Fujisawa Campus)
November 5, 2009
The crisp, autumn-like days continue. It rained toward the end of the week, but the skies cleared again at the start of the new week, and it turned cold. Until just the other day, the weather was warm enough to work up a sweat, but now there is a hint of winter in the air.
Since the fall semester began, I have been commuting to SFC once a week. For a body tired from work at Mita, the wide-open spaces of SFC are a comfort. My eyes, weary from staring at documents and computer screens all day, are soothed by the green trees and autumn leaves of SFC. Above all, the classes are enjoyable. Students I know call out to me.
Having moved to Mita, I have come to understand anew that a great many people work and perform all sorts of roles to keep the large mechanism that is Keio University running. There is a nearly infinite amount of work that must be done and chores that must be taken care of, and it is amazing how everyone manages to get it all done. I am exhausted.
Slack off, slack off, yet the work piles high.
With this much work, there are also many documents that must be reviewed. In particular, there are documents called *ringisho* that seek approval for decisions, and my responsibilities require me to read them carefully. But some of them are impossible to comprehend even after reading. The logic is disjointed. They are full of typos and omissions. They are contradictory. The writers themselves do not understand what they have written.
On top of that, some documents are packed from beginning to end with Sino-Japanese compounds and katakana loanwords, with not a single break. They are exceedingly difficult to read. The university as an organization loves its Sino-Japanese vocabulary and foreign loanwords. Instead of saying *kokoro no yamai* ("illness of the heart"), they say *seishin shikkan* ("mental disorder"). Instead of *samazamana waza no atsumari* ("a collection of various skills"), they say *sukiru mikkusu* ("skill mix"). To begin with, the faculty names themselves are a parade of kanji: "Faculty of Policy Management," "Faculty of Environment and Information Studies," "Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care." I wish we could cut down the kanji by two characters or so. The same goes for the SFC curriculum. Take "The Creation of Policy Management Studies," which I was in charge of as dean. I sometimes misspeke and called it "The Policy of Creation Management Studies." Come to think of it, the theme of this year's ORF is apparently "The Feel of a Cross-Section" (*Danmen no Shokkan*), but it sounds to me like "The Texture of Ramen" (*Rāmen no Shokkan*).
Of course, since the Tenpyō era long ago, Japan has absorbed civilization from abroad by using foreign words—Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and German. It is inevitable that we rely on loanwords to some extent. English, too, is filled with words of Greek, Latin, and French origin. In Japan's case, Sino-Japanese vocabulary is particularly well-established, and it can be concise and easy to understand. After all, even Yukichi Fukuzawa, who so disliked classical Chinese scholars, used nothing but Sino-Japanese compounds for his catchphrases: "independence and self-respect," "I myself will make history," and "learning while teaching, teaching while learning." We can hardly rewrite Fukuzawa's words now as "Stand on your own and walk strong," "Watch me as I create the traditions of the past," or "I learn from you, I learn with you, and I teach you."
Nevertheless, the overuse of Sino-Japanese compounds and katakana words is not good. I would like to mix in a certain amount of native Japanese words, or *Yamato kotoba*. Since ancient times, *tanka* poets, *haiku* poets, and other poets have used and created beautiful Japanese. "The old pond / A frog jumps in / The sound of water" would hardly be a haiku if it were rendered as "To hear a frog of a former pond leap and submerge." Even today, the stock market uses *Yamato kotoba* such as *yoritsuki* (opening), *takadomari* (remaining at a high price), *kohaba* (narrow range), *yowabukumi* (weakening tone), and *ōbike* (closing). The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, following a tradition from the old Imperial Navy, uses rigid Sino-Japanese compounds for its commands, such as "Prepare to get underway," "Both engines full speed ahead," and "Prepare for battle." Yet for some reason, many of its ship names are gentle words that sound as if they came from a poem in the *Kokinshū*, such as *Murasame*, *Sazanami*, *Setogiri*, *Matsuyuki*, and *Takashio*.
Incidentally, at the Self-Defense Forces fleet review on October 25, I boarded the lead ship of the review force, the *Inazuma*, for the first time in nearly ten years. On the waters of Sagami Bay, where a strong wind was kicking up whitecaps, we sailed ahead of the review ship *Kurama*, which carried the reviewing officer, Deputy Prime Minister Kan, and the host, Minister of Defense Kitazawa. We then passed on an opposite course from the fleet being reviewed, which included the *Ashigara*, *Hatakaze*, *Sawakaze*, and the new helicopter-carrying destroyer *Hyuga*. But I will stop here, as writing about that would take too long.
I have lost track of what I was writing about, but for these reasons, I do nothing but work. And when I do, I get an irrepressible urge to go out to sea. As it also happened to be the momentous occasion of our 30th wedding anniversary (or so I rationalized), in early October my wife and I took a three-day, two-night sea voyage from Yokohama to Fukuoka. We sailed on the Mitsui O.S.K. passenger liner *Nippon Maru*. In recent years, I have been taking short cruises to sea almost annually.
The sea is good. The sea is wonderful. Our country, seen from the sea, is beautiful. The *Nippon Maru* proceeds along the coast of Honshu, cresting one gentle wave after another. When I lean out over the deck rail and look down at the water's surface, the bow cuts through the sea with a pleasant sound, and the waves foam white and flow away behind us. The waves break and scatter into spray, then eventually become swells that recede astern. The ship rises and falls slowly, and with each movement, the distant coast, the towns, the mountains behind them, and the clouds in the sky all move up and down.
Early on the second day of the voyage, we entered the port of Kobe. Some passengers disembarked, new ones boarded, and we set sail again immediately. On this day, we would spend the entire day traveling through the Seto Inland Sea from east to west. In the morning, we passed under the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge; in the afternoon, the Great Seto Bridge; and around sunset, the Kurushima Kaikyō Bridge—three massive suspension bridges. The bridge that came into view ahead of the bow grew larger by the second. We could see the cars driving on it, and soon the ship was underneath it, the enormous structure passing from front to back directly over the deck. Once we passed through, it gradually receded astern, growing smaller until it was no longer visible.
At the base of the Great Seto Bridge on the Shikoku side, there is a place called Shamijima. It is now connected to the mainland by landfill, but in ancient times it was a small island called Samine no shima, about two kilometers in circumference. A few years ago, someone guided me there, and I learned for the first time that there is a monument to the poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro on the island. Hitomaro probably visited this island from the sea. Perhaps he was on a journey through the Seto Inland Sea by boat. He came ashore and, among the rocks on the beach, found a young man lying dead. Had he been shipwrecked in a storm and washed ashore, or had he collapsed and died on the rocky coast? In ancient times, such deaths were not uncommon in the sea or the mountains. Hitomaro mourned the death of this unknown youth and composed a poem.
"On the rugged shores of Samine Isle, I look from my shelter and see you, my lord, lying on a rough bed, the sounding shore of waves your fine-spun pillow. If I knew your home, I would go and tell them. If I knew your wife, she would come to you and ask."
This is part of a *chōka*, or long poem, by Hitomaro, collected in Book 2 of the *Man'yoshu*.
In the evening, we approached the Kurushima Strait, the most difficult passage in the Seto Inland Sea. The sky was covered with thick clouds, and it had grown quite dark. The setting sun in the west cast a soft light on the surrounding islands, and the surface of the sea glowed faintly in its reflection. Looking back to the east, the darkness was already deep. The western half of a nearby island was still bright, while its eastern side was black and dark. Two channels are established in the strait, and the one a ship passes through changes depending on the tidal current. Following the instructions of the tidal current signal station on the mountainside of an island, the *Nippon Maru* turned its rudder to the right and slowly headed for one of the channels. As the ship turned, the surrounding islands moved, and the scenery changed. The setting sun shifted to the left. At that moment, from the edge of an island, a small fishing boat appeared.
Where the island's shadow
Divides the light from the dark,
A fishing boat
Has rowed into sight.
By the time we passed under the bridge and through the Kurushima Strait, the sea had grown even darker. The surrounding islands starkly defined the sky in the faint afterglow. The boundary between sea and land was no longer distinct. They merged into one, and I felt as if I myself were being embraced by the sea and mountains. I even felt a desire to stop time and remain still upon the sea.
(Posted: November 5, 2009)