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“Get a job that you can devote yourself”

Today’s story teller is a professor of political science at Tokyo University, [W:Shinichi Kitaoka].

In the story, he talked about his experience of fulfillment at the graduate school where he studied about the military in Meiji and Taisho era.

When he was researching on an old letter with damaged postmark and date, he couldn’t determine the date when the letter written.

Because a letter with no date isn’t worth as a reference material, he frantically looked for something that he could conjecture the date in the letter.

Examining the letter from every angle including the barely stayed postmark and brush stroke, he was somehow able to determine the date.

After he accomplished the task, he remembered a sentence in “Science as a Vocation” written by [W:Max Weber].

“Weber stated that scientific achievements can be made only by strict specialization, and ‘whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science.’ It’s a famous sentence that everybody knows.”

Remembering the Weber’s word, Kitaoka thought “I can become a scolar”.

It was thirty years ago from now, and now he is a scholar.

The NIKKEI Aug/27/2009  by Shinichi Kitaoka (professor at Tokyo University)

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