Living Two Lives in One Lifetime | Tomoyuki Kojima (Dean, Faculty of Policy Management)
2005.07.11
"If only I had done that," "If only I hadn't done this." Life is a repetition of such regrets and reflections. That is likely why the desire for reincarnation, expressed in phrases like "If I could be reborn" or "I want to be a shellfish," never ceases.
Although I never wished to be reborn as an animal or plant, it's not that I didn't have my own desires for reincarnation. Having lived in Hakata as a child, I wanted to be a baseball player during the golden age of the Nishitetsu Lions, with players like Takakura, Toyoda, Nakanishi, Oshita, Sekiguchi, Kono, Ogi, Hibino, and Inao (unfortunately, few people remember them now!). I also wanted to become a newspaper reporter after watching the popular NHK TV showJiken Kisha(The Reporter), and I once dreamed of being a Central Asian explorer after reading Sven Hedin's "The Wandering Lake: Lop Nor." I also fondly remember agonizing in July of my fourth year in the Faculty of Law, when the job-hunting season began, over whether to take the exam for a newspaper company or the entrance exam for graduate school within Keio.
The desire for "reincarnation" likely arises from the feeling that one cannot become all these things in a single lifetime. However, now that I am over 60, I have no desire for "reincarnation" at all. One reason is a strong feeling that I would rather not be "reincarnated" only to struggle again in this human world. Another is likely the thought that I still have much left to do, and that I can draw on my past experiences to accomplish it. In the field of Chinese studies, there is the great master Shizuka Shirakawa, who produced major works after turning 90, and one of my own mentors, Professor Minoru Takeuchi, published a book on the Chinese economy titled "Yokubo no Keizaigaku" (The Economics of Desire) after he turned 80. I am not sure if I will live to be 80, but I would like to see myself still continuing my research on China at that time.
Furthermore, I also have the thought that it might be possible to "live two lives in one lifetime." In his "An Outline of a Theory of Civilization," Professor Yukichi Fukuzawa used this expression to describe his experience of the fundamental shift in eras before and after the Meiji Restoration. Today, the world, and Japan, are facing a major paradigm shift. In that sense, I too may come to "live two lives in one lifetime." However, it is all of you, the SFC generation, who will truly "live two lives in one lifetime." I hope that you will write the "An Outline of a Theory of Civilization" of the 21st century.
(Date Published: 2005/07/11)