Memorable Moments - Part 3

Between 1988 and 1991, I spent my time as a novice graduate student in southern Arizona. I recall this time as the most-enlightening years of my life in terms of getting to know evermore about the world. I was still a naive, petit-bourgeois Japanese boy when this shot was taken in 1989 as I stood on a foothill of Tohono O'odham Reservation. I began to learn in spot about the existing tension between native Americans and Anglos. I began to learn that such a problem was deeply rooted in, but not limited to, the sociohistory of the American continent. It was the moment I began to cast doubt upon Euro-American Orientalism to which I was so assimilated. My image of the Spanish pioneer named Christopher Columbus began to crumble around this time.

Another significant opportunity for me to be awakened to one of the essential problems that our post colono-industrialized lifeworld face came as I became friends with some of the Latin-American students who attended the same university where I was studying. Hernan from Argentina, Marcela from Columbia, and Laura from Bolivia brainstormed me about the living conditions of thousands of impoverished Latino-Americanos, and they took me as a case study to a local fishing village in Baja California, Mexico - the place I repeatedly visited since this first occasion in 1990 to see and feel the local lifeways of fishermen with Mayan ancestry as well as their ongoing struggle against the dominant forces of Anglocentric capitalism. At the center of this picture is Mocoro, who led a lively life in spite of various challenges that he had to face on the daily basis.

Since the end of 1990, I repeatedly pilgrimaged in Mexico, and thanks to some of my Latin-American colleagues, I have for the first time in my life felt how serious those politico-economic issues that are related to the North-South problem (e.g., poverty and social injustice) could be. I also learned through these pilgrimages how locals coped with socioeconomic-qua-political problems in their everyday lives, which opened my eyes to all sorts of local knowledge and wisdom. Here is a slice of this wonderous exploration: three Mexican greengrocers in a local Michoacan market who taught me how to develop a positive attitude toward life.

My pilgrimages also took me to northern Arizona, where I got to know the sociohistory of native Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni peoples. What I would like to call the "Mayan Problem" began to take a clear shape. My hikes into beautiful mountains and valleys of Northern Arizona, such as this one from Canyon de Chely, accompanied many reflections about human conditions and ways of being in our contemporary world.

Somewhere sometime on the extention of all these pilgrimages I was conducting, I came to know Sen~ora Lazo, an old friend of Salvador Allende from Chile. She kindly crowned the great enlightenment of mine with her socialist guidance - the guidance that provided me with the idea that democratic struggle would and should never end, and one should never lose faith in human conscience!!!

On the other side of the universe, Azusa was undergoing a simlar path toward her realization of the living conditions of those who were considered impoverished population. In 1997, she visited the Philippines, where she acted as a social worker who assisted the members of a local Smokey-Mountain household live up to their sustainable development ...Well, in theory that is. In reality it was Azusa who was assisted - in her realization of life. She was taught so much about how to lead a positive life that could overcome the impoverished mental state of those who are "rich and peaceful enough to grow senile."

After a series of serious reflections about the socioeconomic conditions of life that beset many of those I met in the harlems of North- and Central America, I wanted to know more about the culture of my own upbringing - the one that spoiled me over all the years I lived monotonously. Thus, I cultivated a new field of study in Japanese pop culture in order to better-understand the ideological mechanism of my own, capitalist-oriented consumer lifestyle. Most of my time spent in Tokyo during the latter-half of my doctorate program was dedicated to conducting ethnographic fieldwork amongst Japanese entertainment industry. I hanged out with popular personalities and media agents to learn exactly how these people shape and are shaped by the fantasies of affluent consumer society. In much the same way as how feminist critiques were launched against male-dominated institutions of our contemporary world, I tried to carry out my own intellectual campaigns that ultimately aimed at demonstrating how post-/modern subjects are assimilated into capitalist ideologies through spectacles that stimulate their desires (most notably their sexual desires) - to the extent of great excess. I have seen so many of these subjects being directed toward commodity fetishism - mindlessly or otherwise!

My postdoctorate years spent at Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts (1999-2000) provided me with an invaluable opportunity to observe the lives of rich and famous careerists who were somehow seriously out of touch with social conditions and realities that stood outside of their intellectual territories. How scary, I thought, for one to be dragged into dialogues and debates by prestigeous groups of neo-/libearal intellectuals concerning poverty and injustice - typically taking place in some of the most luxurious cafes on the surface of our universe. It was truly interesting for me to observe how much time these privileged self-esteemers had to engage in "intellectual masturbations" (not to say that they are totally useless) thinking that they were knowledgable enough to put their mouth (if not their fingers) onto any problems and issues that occur in the world (but not doing anything much about them beyond their sophistication). I was assured that many of the scenes I saw in those cafes could be compared with those from the metropolis of ancient Greece - those that provided the basis for Socrate's reflections on selfhood. Ecce Homo academicus! Yet, it was (and continues to be) even more scary for me to imagine that many members of these privileged groups may move on in their career-oriented lives as well as their power-loaded networks within our matrix to hold substantial positions in policy-making institutions. "No wonder that the world never really becomes a better place, however it is presented!" - I thought. Many debates about the course of humanity at the time were, for me, as illusory as the statue of John Harvard that stood in Harvard Courtyard: a make-believe form of representation... (!?)