Professor Satoshi Tomioka is an ICU alumnus from the class of ’87. He is currently a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Delaware, and recently returned to ICU as a JICUF Visiting Scholar to participate in the Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics conference.

Paul: Thank you for agreeing to this interview Professor Tomioka.

Prof. Tomioka: Thanks for having me!

Paul: So first off, what year did you graduate from ICU?

Prof. Tomioka: 1987.

Paul: What would you say were some of your best memories?

Prof. Tomioka: I was a Sociology Major, and there was this class called Research Method and Sociology. It’s a one year course, and it consists of planning some kind of social research, and we go somewhere in summer. You go to the computer lab and do the stats, and then write up a report in winter. It’s a year long class. It’s kind of a bonding experience for Sociology Majors, so I got to know people. We went to a remote village in Okayama prefecture, pretty close to where I was born actually… So that was fun! One of my favorite memories of the academic life at ICU, of course I met lots of people and friends. The class was taught by a Canadian from Newfoundland, so the class was taught in English and it was very, very hard. Everybody suffered, but it was a bonding experience because everybody suffered together.

Paul: What led you to become a professor of linguistics?

Prof. Tomioka: Oh it’s a long story! What really happened was I was supposed to graduate in ’86, but I changed my major. At the time I was in the division of humanities, and I switched to social sciences because I wanted to do sociology. But the foundation class is a social research class, you need to take certain pre-requisites to take that class, but that class is itself a pre-requisite to write a senior thesis. So, it’s a chain reaction that led me to postpone my graduation. My father already told me he was not going to pay for tuition, so I thought. “I have to do something!” At the time there was an organized course for teaching Japanese as a second language. I had already taken some of Japanese History and Professor Bill Steele’s class, the study of language, so I thought “I’ll do it, I’ll develop some skills.” I ended up liking it and I got a recommendation from the teacher who taught the teaching methods class, to this school in Roppongi. It was a Franciscan chapel, they had a Japanese school, primarily for people who come to Japan to work for the church, but they had lots of international people. I liked what I did, so I thought I should get a Master’s degree so I could teach Japanese at the university level. So, I went to the states, I got a scholarship from the Rotary Foundation. There, some people tried to talk me into doing a Ph.D in linguistics, because I was good at it. So I went to UMass Amherst, where they have a well-reputed linguistics program.

Paul: So, after graduate school what was your life like?

Prof. Tomioka: I went to Cornell for one year, because they needed a replacement for one year, and then after that I had a program in Germany lined up for me, in Tübingen, Germany. Tübingen is a small city in southern Germany, good school good city. My Cornell gig ended in August, and my next gig started in January. I thought, “What should I do?” and then I was asked to teach in San Diego for three months. So I put everything, all my possessions into this old Volvo I was driving, and drove from New York to California, THAT was fun. My Volvo started overheating in 105 degrees. I was delirious! I had to stop a couple times for ice coffee. I had a great time in San Diego. I still have some contact with other people and a few students even, because some of those students are now professors; it’s been almost 20 years I guess. So then I went to Germany for one year thinking I would spend three, but I got an offer for my current job right after I moved to Germany, so I asked them to wait for one year so I could complete the requirements for my grant. Now I’ve been here for 15 years.

Paul: It’s pretty impressive that you’ve been to so many places.

Prof. Tomioka: I’ve been to a lot of places. I liked what I did, and where I lived. Now I live in Philadelphia, which is very close to Delaware. Everybody worries that I might not like being there, but my closest friends are like “He likes whatever he does!” I’m very easy, I adapt. Indeed I went back to Germany for my first sabbatical, which was also fantastic. It was the year they hosted the World Cup, 2006. It was a lot of fun.

Paul: It was brave to go all around the world; do you think ICU had anything to do with that?

Prof. Tomioka: Yes I think so. For instance, my senior thesis was about college seniors’ attitudes towards job hunting. I originally thought I would use the stats and methodology I learned in my Research Methods class, but my professor actually actively discouraged me to do it because ICU students have a completely different attitude anyway. If you do it, you have to go out of ICU and look at people from different colleges. People have different attitudes at ICU in the sense that people have a little bit less loyalty. Even then, I don’t think there were too many people in my cohort who thought “This is it, I’m going to work for this company for the rest of my life” type of attitude. People were a LOT more relaxed, they thought “Oh maybe I’ll go there for a couple years, maybe I’ll get an MBA, maybe go to law school, maybe I just want to be freelancing.” Of course there are people who really are just like other schools. They have everything lined up with the Nikkei 500 companies and such. But, I think proportionately, there are enough oddball people that make them not oddballs at ICU. For me, I was one of them. I was thinking about going to grad school but I didn’t want to commit myself, and then I thought “I’ll do this teaching job for a couple years, that’s what I want to do.” The thing about that is it was considered extremely odd among my high school classmates, people thought I was making an odd choice. It was not particularly odd at ICU even then.

Paul: Do you think you took full advantage of ICU’s international status?

Prof. Tomioka: Yes, I think I did. I could have done more but retrospectively, the linguistics professor, Tomo Yoshida, he is a close friend and he is the one who invited me there. He said something interesting. For instance, typical Japanese students at ICU, they think that their English sucks. There are so many September students who come in from this and that, and they are completely fluent and communicating and so and so. They feel a little bit not up to the standard that some people might expect from ICU students. But the professor said that if you go to Waseda or Keio, they think they can speak English but their English is far worse than ICU students. I don’t know if there’s a comparable saying in English, but the saying about a frog in a well. If a little champion goes to the top of the well, he is no longer at the top. I think ICU was that kind of environment where you always know what’s out there. You never feel like you’re in that kind of small environment. I think that was the most important thing despite that I didn’t do study abroad, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to international students, but the entire atmosphere is such that the boundaries are a little bit vaguer, and I think talking to people who are from more traditional colleges I feel that the atmosphere was quite unique.

Paul: So recently, you went back to ICU? How was your trip and what did you think about the changes on campus?

Prof. Tomioka: I enjoyed every bit of it. I stayed in Dialogue House, which is completely new. It’s well maintained, right on campus… ICU changed a lot, the new buildings and so on and so forth. I went to the gym to work out, and that was exactly the same. It’s exactly the same as 30 years ago. I thought that was interesting, a scene from the past. I met the undergraduates, they are great. I really like them a lot. So Yoshida-san and I tried to figure out a way that I could teach for one term there in the future. I can spend most of winter semester teaching the course. I can finish here and start the very beginning of winter term. I can teach right up until the first or second week of February, which is manageable if you have a makeup class or something. I think one of the professors is on sabbatical next year or something, so that would be a good time for me to go. That would be great, because I really liked being there; it was so nice to be back. … Other than that, I only met about 15-16 people so it’s difficult to generalize, but I think they are good students, eager to learn, very curious, and many of them want to do study abroad, possibly grad school abroad, so that was very encouraging.

Paul: What lessons or ideas do you think ICU students learn from their experience?

Prof. Tomioka: Well I think it depends on the person, and of course you can most of the things without the word “international” attached to it. You can hang around with mainly Japanese folks, you mainly take classes taught in Japanese, and you go to your clubs where all the members are Japanese. But it’s also possible that if you choose NOT to do that, it’s very easy. I think that’s the other thing. Whether or not you end up doing it, it’s nice to know the choice is there, and that’s very unique at ICU. At other schools if you WANT to do something non-traditional, like meeting lots of international students, you really seek out events if you are an undergraduate student. Even if you do not do it (At ICU), your friend is doing it, or your friend’s friend is doing it. There are always people surrounding you who are doing something quite unique.

Paul: College is an important time for young people to develop who they are, their interests, and what they want to do. I think it’s important, like you said, to have the opportunities. You can only have Japanese friends, or you can make the effort to practice other languages with people at ICU or study abroad.

Prof. Tomioka: Yes it seems to me that if you want to have no contact with the international aspect of the life, you may actually have to make an effort at ICU. At other campuses, if you don’t make an effort that’s what you end up with. At ICU, at some point or another you have to do it. You have to take a class in English, write something in English, and talk to people in English. You have to make efforts to avoid it. In other places, with the possible exception of Sophia, if you don’t do anything, that’s what you have.

Paul: Do you think ICU students have greater skills in seeing opportunities and make efforts to reach them?

Prof. Tomioka: Well I think that’s selection right? They must have a reason to choose ICU. There might be some people, who have come to ICU not as their first choice, but most of the people who come want to come, and the reason they come to ICU is to take advantage of that particular environment. You would expect those kinds of people who are willing to do slightly more unusual things that are unusual still, in Japan.

Paul: Would you say ICU has affected your outlook on life?

Prof. Tomioka: Oh yes, I would say so, in many different ways. More than I realize, perhaps. I didn’t really feel the impact was that big, especially when I was young. But now, retrospectively now, I think the impact or the influence was far greater than I originally thought. I met lots of Japanese folks here, in my profession, coming from more traditional programs, and I don’t want to generalize, but I think they are different in some very important aspects. “This is the standard line, this is the kind of research that is going on, therefore I do it” kind of type. I think students trained particularly in Japanese schools and graduate schools tend to follow what their teachers do. In the sense that you can see genealogy of these academic personnel, “he is doing X, because his senior students are doing that, and that’s because his teacher is doing this.” It was eye-opening that that’s how it is, and that people still follow such traditions. For example my teacher was a specialist in low-income ghettos of Thailand, but he never imposed that sort of research onto his students. Yoshida-sensei’s students are all over the place in terms of expertise. They are much more adaptable, and much more open to new possibilities in terms of their career paths. Even with just a small window of these things, I actually saw a different attitude in ICU students from the others, such as Nanzan, or even Jouchi, or Todai.

Paul: Do you think people develop that kind of “think outside the box mentality” from being around so many different kinds of people.

Prof. Tomioka: Yes of course. I think another thing is that people come to ICU without knowing what they want to major in; it’s a liberal art school. It kind of made me smile and giggle when I was talking to the students, because they are really concerned “I need to choose what I have to do!” blah blah blah “is it good to choose linguistics?” I cannot give them the answers, I just met them! I cannot tell them that they are talented. It’s great that they have the opportunity to ask that question in college because many of the high school students have to ask that question when they take entrance exams in Japan. I think it’s great, partly because I kind of forgot that that’s kind of the norm in the States, people come and they decide what they want to major in, sometimes they have clear ideas, maybe engineering or teachers college, but they can change. I kind of got spoiled perhaps; I’ve lived in the States too long to realize that this is not the norm in Japan. The system still works that way at ICU; it’s nice to know that this is indeed the case. I had gone back previously and met one of the undergraduate students, Shigeto Kawahara. He went to UMass Amherst; he got a PHD, and went to Rutgers. It’s great to see someone I met at ICU as an undergraduate, as one of the most up-and-coming prominent scholars, already. Time passes fast.

Paul: Well that’s all for now, thank you again for the interview professor. It was great talking to you!

Prof. Tomioka: Enjoy your time there; it was nice talking to you too.