The 137th Installment
Offering Wine
by Seiichi Kawata,
President of AIIT
It has almost been sixteen years since I first started writing for this column. I am tasting the trueness of the saying, “Time flies like an arrow.”
I started my first piece with “That the terms ‘bright future’ and ‘it’s all darkness one step ahead,’” quoting the opening of an editorial I wrote for a professional journal on safety and security. After that, I was appointed President of this Institute in April 2016 and reappointed in April 2020. As my six-year term in total will end this March, I will be stepping down. In retrospect, there has been no other period in which the phrase “it’s all darkness one step ahead” struck home to me more than during these six years.
It was the summer immediately after I became president that on my way home from a fun trip to the Shimanto river basin with five friends of mine from university days, the groundwater problem surfaced in Toyosu, where the fish market would be relocated from Tsukiji. When I returned from Kochi to Tokyo and arrived at the campus, the staff asked me to respond to mass media. This was because I was a member of the technical committee for the new Toyosu market. When I agreed to do so, an NHK reporter arrived with a camera crew. My face hit the headlines of NHK's 7:00 and 9:00 news that day. After that, truly “it’s all darkness one step ahead.” For three months I was being tossed around by mass media in various ways including newspapers and television. I wasted those three months in vain, which I will not detail here.
Shortly prior to my reappointment in 2020, the new coronavirus infection spread worldwide, without any signs of end to this day. Again, “it’s all darkness one step ahead.” Fortunately, AIIT had established a system to film and distribute basically all the lectures and had installed a dedicated line between the Akihabara and Shinagawa Seaside Campuses to enable real-time interactive classes to be held simultaneously on both sides. These experiences helped us to implement real-time interactive remote classes using Google Meet and Zoom as well as on-demand classes using recorded classes relatively smoothly and quickly. Thanks to this, we have had no major problem to date. I could not thank the faculty and staff enough for their collaboration and cooperation, which have been a powerful impetus for overcoming this darkness.
The next thing that “is all darkness one step ahead” is my future. Will I start a comfortable and carefree life after retirement, or will I start a new business venture? I also have some volunteer activities that a past friendship obliged me to continue doing… As I was contemplating my own future, a new job offer popped up. It is a job as an educator and researcher at a foreign university, in other words, a university professorship. An interpreter and a research group will be set up for me. I may likely devote myself to a full-time professorship abroad for a few years following the end of my career at AIIT.
I entered university at the age of 18. Then, I became a university faculty member and have been working as academic up until this year, when I turned 67 years old. For those 49 years I have never been outside the university. (Of course, I do not mean I have not physically stepped outside the campus. That would not be a normal life as a human being.) However, I have transferred twice: first, from Osaka University to Tokyo Metropolitan University, and then, after its name change, reorganization, and integration, to AIIT. In total I have changed workplaces twice. Moving from one university to another was a parting of ways from the students and faculty that I had grown close to. This will be the third time for me to say goodbye. Should I take this as a big event or as just the way the world goes around? There is no point in discussing it. Simply, I would rather conclude my last contribution to this column quoting my favorite poem about farewell.
It is a poem composed by Yu Wuling, Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, and titled “Offering Wine.”
Offering Wine
I offer you the golden flagon;
do not disdain its brimming gift.
Wind and rain await the opening flower,
and partings make up too much of our life.
(English translation by Burton Watson)
This poem has a famous Japanese translation by Masuji Ibuse, which I cite here as my valedictory speech to this Institute:
Please accept my cup
Let me fill it up
Like flowers always fall in a blast
Life means saying goodbye to the last