I glared at my teacher with tears, when his eyes also shimmered with tears.

Kazumi Takahashi

It is said that the exercises of the Chinese literature department of Kyoto University, especially Professor Koujiro Yoshikawa' exercises, were mostly on a one-on-one basis and "extremely severe." The scholar of Chinese literature and novelist who was one of his students said so to his friend, Hidetaro Sugimoto, who was a scholar of French literature, about the time when the professor's exercise was so severe that he glared back at him in spite of himself. I think it means that an experience of  "doing something thoroughly" is a core of scholarship and craftsmanship. From Sugimoto's "Inhabiting Kyoto."

2017.2.9

February 9  2017

from “Oriori no Kotoba” by Kiyokazu Washida, The Asahi Shimbun