Ask Professor Hosea Hirata about his current position as chair of the department of German, Russian and Asian languages and literatures, and he'll tell you he's never been happier.
"I love this department," he said. "This department is a collection of very talented and creative people from all over the world. If you just talk to other people, in our field, they would say Tufts is the best in the country."
But while his enthusiasm is hard to doubt, Hirata's initial answer doesn't tell the whole story. Though he's now nestled comfortably in a job he loves, getting there hasn't been easy. Instead, he has come to his position from a very distinct and colorful personal history - one filled with hardship, contradiction and significant obstacles to overcome.
Hirata's childhood was colored by his Japanese heritage, but was unique even by Japanese standards. His father, who was from an Island very close to Hiroshima, was a Christian minister who lived in Northern California when World War II broke out. He was relocated to an internment camp along with his entire village.
In spite of the challenge, Hirata's father successfully applied to Princeton's school of theology from the camp, and was permitted to attend before returning to a devastated Japanese homeland when the war concluded.
His father's missionary work represents what he called his family's "long history of Christianity," which he said is unique, since less than one percent of Japanese consider themselves Christians, according to Hirata. Most Japanese follow Buddhism or Shintoism instead.
But while his position was unique as a Christian in a non-Christian culture, Hirata said he never felt isolated.
"I did not know better," he said. "I attended a tiny, tiny missionary school, so I didn't know anything else."
Hirata said that when he would play with other neighborhood kids, he would go into their homes, smell incense burning, and know he was in "a different place." He said his father prohibited him from attending town festivals and things of that nature because they related to a different religion.
"I felt a little bit different," he said.
It was in high school where Hirata, in the tumultuous atmosphere of the late 1960s, cultivated many of the academic interests he would later pursue. Hirata said he never planned on becoming an academic.
"My life is a real mess," he said. "I never planned to be a professor of any kind."
In fact, though he now holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature, Hirata admitted that he wasn't always the best student. He said the rigorous exam- and placement-oriented Japanese educational system was not appealing to him, and that he almost flunked out of high school as a result. He graduated only "miraculously, by their mercy," he said.
But if school was boring to Hirata during this time, life was certainly not. He said Japan had become a crossroads during his high school days, at a time of historical and cultural importance when extraordinary events and ideas were permeating his culture. The Vietnam War and the anti-war movement in America, the growth of existentialism and Marxism among his Japanese contemporaries, and Japan's own radical left college movement transfixed him.
"Those were the days ... amazing," he said. He recalled that in Japan during this era there were massive student demonstrations, with college campuses being seized by students and professors forced to repent their "capitalistic ways of thinking."
"We wanted to study what was going on," he said. Hirata and his fellow high school students formed study groups to read Marx and Hegel.
"Young high school kids were really interested in what was going on," he said. According to Hirata, he became part of a pocket of "cool" intellectuals who carried around large, heavy books.
"At that time [what was cool] was to be intellectual, even if you didn't understand a word of what they were saying," he said.
And in spite of America's internment of his father, the use of the atomic bomb on Japan at the conclusion of World War II, and America's involvement in Vietnam - which he vehemently opposed - Hirata saw something in America.
He says one of the most profound moments in his life was when he and a group of friends saw the movie "Woodstock."
"It was like, 'what are we doing here?'" he said.
Hirata became enamored with American culture; with rock n' roll and musicians like Bob Dylan.
"I used buy every album," he said. "I didn't understand what he was talking about but it didn't really matter."
According to Hirata, he did not judge the United States by its involvement in the war, which many Americans were opposing at the time.
"I did not think the Vietnam war represented what America symbolizes," he said. "I felt if the regime changes, if the antiwar movement was successful, America would change. I had no resentment of America per se; American culture was very important to me."
When his father suggested a trip to America after graduating high school, Hirata jumped at the opportunity. He came to the United States and settled in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, where he learned English. He later moved to Seattle and began working in a Japanese restaurant and attended a junior college for two years before deciding he wanted to go to a university.
Unable to afford an American university, he applied to school in Canada and attended McGill University, where he studied English literature. He said studying literature in his second language was difficult.
"My English was very, very poor, but I was isolated from Japanese-speaking people for whole year, so picking up the language was a matter of survival," he said. "At McGill I really had to study hard, twice and three times as more than the other kids, but I loved reading. It was fascinating to learn a foreign language, exciting to feel confidence in reading and writing a foreign language."
After receiving a degree from McGill, Hirata went on to receive his master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. After finishing his education, he decided to pursue a teaching position.
Before coming to Tufts, Hirata taught at Pomona College and later at Princeton. He said accepting his current job at Tufts was a great decision for him.
"Tufts is an exciting place; really over the past 10 years it has transformed itself," he said. "Its students are getting better and better every year."
Hirata also feels that he has been afforded a level of freedom at Tufts that he did not have at Princeton.
"If you work in a very established university, like Harvard, Princeton and so on; the departments are very set; the curriculum is very set because there is a long tradition of how a certain field should be taught," he said. "The canon is set, but here it is very different; there is much more freedom in how you want to shape your own discipline, and that's what I find very exciting."
