A Memorable Hometown | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2007.11.02
It was a shame about the Keio-Waseda match, wasn't it? It was a good, tense game, the first in a while. It's all "what ifs" now, but if only our offense had exploded in the ninth inning of the second game... I once wrote about how my friends and I jumped into the fountain at Hibiya Park after a Keio-Waseda match during my student days (in a piece called "A Ritual from My Student Days"), and I really hope that first-year students get to experience the Keio-Waseda match.
Now, regarding the topic of a "hometown of the heart," for me, having been born and raised in Tokyo, my family home in Tokyo might be that place. However, I have several other "memorable" hometowns.
One is a "Tiger's Den" type of hometown: the lab of the Computer Communications Network Group (CCNG) at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where I was rigorously trained during my Doctoral Programs. Every day after dinner, I would always return to the CCNG office and work hard on building systems with my colleagues. What we were researching and developing was a distributed software testbed called Shoshin. It was a distributed system that facilitated the development of various distributed software, consisting of two PDP-11/45s and ten LSI-11/23s connected by a bus.
CCNG had many international students from places like Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Brazil, and every day around midnight, we would all have a tea time and passionately discuss our research and future dreams. I have particularly fond memories of the "ccng.lunch," a potluck party started by the international students where we would take turns introducing dishes from our home countries.
The second is what I should call my second home: my lab at Carnegie Mellon University and the city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was a steel town, so it was famous as the "Smoky City." The word "smog" is a portmanteau of "smoke" and "fog," and it is said to have been coined to describe the mixture of smoke and fog around downtown Pittsburgh. By the time I arrived in 1983, downtown redevelopment was already underway, and it had actually become a very beautiful downtown with no smoke at all. When you drive from the airport toward downtown, you emerge from the final tunnel to a beautiful downtown spreading out before your eyes, and everyone has a moment of surprise, thinking, "Is this really Pittsburgh?" From my lab, the view of the neighboring Carnegie Museum of Art and the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning spread out before me, always soothing my tired eyes after staring at a terminal for too long.
Every Friday evening, there was a department party called TGIF (Thanks God, it's Friday), and the group in charge would creatively prepare various foods. There were times when they gathered every kind of junk food imaginable, and I have fond memories of things like spicy Buffalo chicken wings.
I believe that for each person who has graduated from SFC's undergraduate programs, or who has earned a master's or doctoral degree, their "hometown of the heart" will be different. But I hope that each of them can find at least one "memorable hometown" somewhere within SFC.
(Date Published: 2007/11/02)