GLOCAL Vol.18

9/20

2021 Vol.182021 Vol.187on Germany. But teaching work got really busy in the next few years. At the time courses at Chubu University extended to a full year. I had two new lectures on Sociology and on Japanese Culture and barely managed to get the lectures ready each time. For the next two years new lectures were added each year. Then came a major change of the curriculum with the introduction of the semester system in 1996 and I had adapt my old lectures to the new system, while lectures on comparative Japanese studies and comparative Sociology were added, and in 2012 I had to take over lectures on European Studies from the previous teacher of this topic. And while the preparation of new lectures took a lot of time, I also took my time to prepare good materials that allow the students to deepen their study of the topic.The lessons that I learned during my fifty years as a scholar are that you have to take a broad view on the fields of your research, that you have to be flexible to respond to new opportunities and to adapt to unforeseen changes, and that you have to regard teaching as an essential and important part of your life as a scholar.increased my job opportunities, and in July 1984 I was hired as a lecturer by the East Asian Institute of the Free University of West Berlin.In Berlin I was thrown into the discussions within a much larger and vibrant environment of social sciences and Japanese Studies than in the sleepy university town Marburg far from the big urban centers. The situation in West Berlin was sustained by two big universities and several national research institutes in which a considerable number of researchers were concerned with understanding the current appearance of Japan as an economic superpower. I also learned to speak Japanese, something that had been on a back-burner in Marburg where the number of Japanese visiting scholars had been small and all well versed in German. Now I had to be able to communicate with visiting Japanese social scientists who spoke only little English and no German. And while most of the discussions centered on Japanese industrial policies, I still continued working on the topic that I had inherited from the research for my master thesis, but the scope of my studies was broadened into the sociology of science and research on the images of Japanese society in the Nihonjinron. The Free University also gave me the chance to do research in Japan by dispatching me at the end of August 1987 for one year as a visiting researcher with a professional scholarship from the Japan Foundation to the Institute of Social Science of the University of Tokyo.Tokyo in 1987-1988 in the middle of the bubble economy was a very inspiring experience. I participated in the proceedings of several Japanese learned societies in the fields of research on the family and rural society, and in the study groups of Japanese Studies’ specialists from all over the world at the International House of Japan, the German East Asian Society, and the Japan Foundation. I was also recruited as a full-time researcher for the new German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, where I started work in May 1989 after I had returned for one semester to Berlin.During my work at the German Institute of Japanese Studies I was forced again to change the field of my research, this time to quantitative survey research on value change, data analysis, and questionnaire construction. This field stayed with me until 2010, but it was complemented by comparative research on the family and gender, and on immigrants and migration in Germany. Then I became more interested in comparative European Studies. In September 1993 I was hired by the College of International Studies of Chubu University, where I have now worked for the last twenty-seven years. It was a busy, but ingratiating time. It was focused more on teaching than research, a new task that I fortunately always gladly embraced since my time in West Berlin. I had had my first experiences in teaching as a student tutor at Marburg University teaching seminars that accompanied introductory lectures. At the Free University I had to teach seminars for all levels of the curriculum and introductory lectures on the history of Japan, so I knew how to deal with the stress to prepare a lecture while teaching it. My first teaching experiences in Japanese came in 1992 when I was asked by Tohoku Gakuin University to teach an intensive lecture on contemporary German society. My first semester at Chubu University was easy, I only had to teach one seminar and one lecture