Age Puts a New Spin on Learning
Over breakfast, Masamichi Kira and I had a long talk about the sad state of contemporary affairs.
It isn’t pretty out there, we concurred.
There’s no sense of responsibility anymore, Kira said.
You got that right, I grumbled.
And what about community? he asked.
And where are our values? I countered.
It was yet another session of middle-aged griping, but there was one big difference: Afterward, Kira strolled back to his dorm room at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks. He had a ton of studying to do.
At 55, Kira--known campuswide by his nickname of Michi--is a sophomore. Last year, he was a mere freshman. The year before that, he was just another businessman in Tokyo, drained by a job that had grown tedious and a city that had grown ugly and unruly.
Married and the father of three grown children, Kira was a success. The longtime family business--a company that supplies greenery to the offices of Tokyo--was thriving. Kira and his wife, Keiko, started a computer school 15 years ago, and that was booming too. Yet something was missing; life had to be more fulfilling than the rounds of daily drudgery required by Nisshoku Garden Ltd. and the Tokiwadai Office Automation School.
When Keiko suggested he go to school, Kira felt his midlife angst fall away. Three decades ago, he had to quit college after just a few months in order to save the family’s plant company. But now he could indulge his passion for English.
“Sometimes students will come up to me and say, ‘You’re always studying. How many hours do you study?’
“I’ll say, ‘I don’t know: Five hours a day. Maybe 10.’ ”
And they’ll say: “What?”
Two years ago, he had never heard of Cal Lutheran. But an educational consultant in Japan ran down the school’s strengths: Small classes, California sunshine, a peaceful setting in America’s safest large city.
The next thing Kira knew, he was majoring in political science and striding through the hills near campus at dawn each day, listening to tapes that sound like so much chipmunk chatter. It’s CNN news--which Kira plays at twice the normal speed to test his English comprehension.
“I’m comfortable with it,” he said. “It works as both physical and mental exercise.”
He’s not your typical sophomore. His hero isn’t an athlete or some 25-year-old software tycoon, but Eno Tadataka, a minor Japanese official of the early 19th century. For more than 20 years, Tadataka walked the empire, from Hokkaido to Kyushu, meticulously noting every geographical feature for the first detailed map of Japan.
He didn’t learn map making until he was 55.
Kira is just two years younger than political science professor Herb Gooch, who praises his freshness and thirst for knowledge.
“Having a student almost as old as you are can be disconcerting,” said Gooch. Kira vividly remembers world figures like John F. Kennedy, while most other students were born nearly 20 years after the demise of Camelot.
On campus pathways, students greet Kira enthusiastically: “Yo, Michi! How you doing, Michi!” He hails them back with equal vigor.
In the dorm, his walls are lined with college bulletins, a sticker that says, “How rad is your pad?” an ad for “cosmic bowling” and dozens of Post-It notes bearing telephone numbers and assignment reminders.
It’s not an unusual habitat, but as other students blast rock, Kira might be on the phone with his wife in Tokyo--a call he makes daily. Students occasionally ask him to their parties, but he politely declines: There’s studying to do.
Back home, he wants to join a research institute or think tank--any forum that will allow him to deliver what he calls his “message” of personal responsibility.
Kira is an ardent conservative. Society in Japan has veered off course, he says. Young people disrespect the flag. Criminals are being coddled.
“If I were a kamikaze pilot in the war and came back to Tokyo today, I might feel, ‘This is the society I gave my life for? Maybe I died in vain.’ ”
He returns to Tokyo over Christmas breaks and summers. Despite the clubs he joins and the occasional late-night bull sessions, a 55-year-old sophomore can get awfully lonely in Thousand Oaks.
What’s next? I asked. A doctorate?
Kira looked at me unbelievingly, as if I’d suggested a task infinitely more daunting than understanding foreign-language newscasts delivered at warp-speed.
“No doctorate,” he laughed. “Just a master’s.”
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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
