Letter to M. On publication of my teacher 2023. Translated by Google 2023

 Tuesday, 1 August 2023

Letter to M. On publication of my teacher. Translated by Google

  

Letter to M. On publication of my teacher

Dear M,

Thank you for your kind reply.
It's raining today, but I'm relieved that I finished pruning the garden trees by yesterday .

In 1982, I thought that 3,000 copies were the norm for academic publications.

The actual number of copies seems to have been presented or donated, and I remember printing about 100 to 200 more copies.

I naturally became close to the publishers at that time.

You put a lot of effort into publication, and I think it's probably the first time I've known publishing's details
At the publication meeting, they also arranged a publication celebration party, but the teacher refused and the editorial department was disappointed, saying that it would be nice if he could hold it .

When I talked about this at teacher's house, he told me
that he had accepted only the Literature Department meeting at the university and a small meeting held by a former students at a women's university .

One of them was Mrs. M, who later became Mr. Amino Yoshihiko's wife.

There were some talks about relationship meetings, and actually later, some of the old friends came to the teacher's house for celebration of his publication.

It is now a distant fine memory for my youth days.

At these days, he had been writing a comprehensive history of Japanese Buddhism for a long time.

I still remember two anecdotes clearly. 

“Only Shotoku Taishi is left to write (because it is difficult).”

and the other one is,  "(Shinran) is a very difficult old man to writing down." smiling to me.

When I talked to the chairman of the publisher, he told me that when the manuscript was completed, I would come and pick it up .

The chairman passed away last year.  I'm now so lonely to lose my youth days event.

The main works of savant scholars sometimes stop in the middle, and the teacher was one of them.

The events of my thirties, when I was young, really remain intact.

I'm closer in age than I was when I was a teacher, but it's been a long time since I've been able to thank you for a lot of school.

Chinese philosophy Junzo Nishi, Chinese literature Shinobu Ono, Linguistics,Czech and Russian Eiichi Chino, Korean Hideki Kajimura, Korean Shokichi Cho.

The number of take-lecture students was relatively small, so I attended lectures with Professor Ono in the dean's office, Professor Kajimura sent me a postcard when I took a break due to personal matters, and Professor Cho said that the pronunciation of "imnida" was different, no matter how many times I read it. When I went to the hot springs with Professor Nishi and had a chat with him after dinner , he said, " it is not possible to read such a difficult book " when I asked him on "Shuowenjiezu chu" written by Duan Yucai, one of the greatest Chinese Linguistics in Ching dynasty.

But the person I was closest to was Professor Eiichi Chino. When I first met him in the late 1960s, he was in his 30s and had just returned from studying in the Czech Republic for eight years, and I was in my early 20s. The Russian language test was to orally answer changes such as verbs . This was followed by the Linguistic Circle of Prague, which was a big turning point for me. The quest for meaning generation, which had been shunned in LCP, and only once  I really seriously scolded. When I was asked what I was doing now, I was thinking about generating the meaning of numbers from 1 to 9 in the direction of Gödel and Gaishi Takeuchi . He told me in a harsh tone that it was something that Wittgenstein and others would do, not something that we, mediocre people, would do.

But in the end, I am still in the extension of that direction. It wasn't until many years later, when I encountered von Neumann algebra, that I was convinced about the generation of the meaning of number. What Chino said me was probably correct. But it was indeed the eternal saying that "because the mountains are there."

Attached below is a little paper that reminds me of a nostalgia that starts with just one empty set, goes through set theory, and then into von Neumann algebra .

I think it is a bit far from your world.

Generation Theorem

A light rain made it redundant.

Yours sincerely,

11 June 2023

TANAKA Akio
Hills West

Tokyo