This is what makes me pass often as one of them in Israel and makes me rather unpopular and sometimes even disgusting for certain people in Japan. However great they may be as researchers, I simply cannot respect or feel close to university professors of this sort, who seem to constitute the majority in Japan, as human beings, in order to ask them to be my guardians in finding a permanent position somewhere. I have thought many times of moving to Israel for good as I manage there both linguistically and socioculturally much better than in Japan, but at the same time I am aware of my grave limitations as a non-native speaker of Hebrew who has to compete with talented native speakers in order to find a position in my major in Israel. Although I was offered a position to teach Japanese at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I was and am not ready to make the compromise of making the teaching of Japanese my profession. I do not know how long my patience will last with no permanent position, but I really hope that sometime in the near future the day will come when I will be able to make my humble contribution through the teaching and research of Hebrew as there are few people who major in it here.
Japan has much to learn from the culture which has nurtured Hebrew.
As a person who is strongly influenced by East European Jewish humor, which I think is surpassed by none in its intellectual sophistication and cynicism, I cannot help peppering my speech with cynical humor. Therefore, I find it rather difficult to communicate with people, whether students or colleagues, who do not have enough sense of humor. One of the greatest intellectual pleasures of shmoozing with someone is to receive an immediate response from him or her to any verbal manifestation of my cynical humor, often with better cynical humor, and this is something I cannot expect even from the best books. A close Jewish friend of mine, who himself is a living example of East European Jewish sense of humor, seems to be right when he pointed out to me recently that I cannot make any non-cynical statement. Of all the expressions of emotions, laughter seems to be the most typical of human beings as I have never seen or heard of a cat, a dog or even a monkey that laughs cynically, and humor, which induces laughter, is equally typical of human beings.