車田 研一

In the last decade, I have always been absorbed in an everlasting question regarding how we can possibly grasp the meta-structure of what we are incessantly perceiving in our own everyday circumstances.

Although the first half of my research life has been fully engaged in studying authentic engineering sciences which are somehow oriented to processing various materials, I can never stop thing of struggling with an unanswerable question of how we can learn to lead everyday life coping with complex situations. For example, it is not self-evident that we see water from other maters at individual cases although they are never identical to each other. This complication for myself comes from studying fundamentals of mathematics used in chemical engineering that I have been involved in since I was a young student.

I feel as if I were ridiculous or even crazy when I cannot compromise with a peculiar idea that we dispense with perceiving invisibly minute difference of the spatial configuration of falling raindrops, which we can never see precisely reproduced. Why do we take the “continuously different scene” as identical or stable during a certain finite duration of time? Inversely, we can ubiquitously find examples in which we can perceive only the mutual difference although we cannot describe what the difference is.

Now, I wish to dedicate myself to such endless speculation to get in touch with engineering sciences that I have been involved in for almost a quarter of a century. Continuing to study fundamental engineering science always inspires me to challenge the abovementioned enormous challenge. Recently, I take it as a sort of the "fate" of myself.

Occasionally, I feel I cannot stop looking back why I have continued my studies although I have severely recognized that I am not gifted enough at all. Almost twenty years ago when I started academic studies without feeling confident of myself, I could never release myself from the obsession which incessantly told me to work out something “intriguing”, which eventually resulted in a “hollow” aim of showing something merely spectacular. In other words, my misrecognition at that time was that there were domains in the space of research topics, which we needed to sneeze for our own survivals. Nevertheless, this type of attitude toward studying was obviously very frustrating for me, although expressing what made me feel somewhat dismotivated is quite hard. I simply wished I could create radically considered “chemical engineering” which reminds ourselves of the involvement of our own body actions and perceptions in our everyday processing activities in the broadened perspectives.

From the viewpoint of our actual life, the above obsession in my perspective of study comes from the belief that knowledges which are indispensable for ourselves must be inevitably involved in the inescapable fact that we are “alive” everyday. As I get older, I am becoming less and less capable of finding the delusive and seemingly attractive way out from the above idea as the destiny.

It would not be a proper choice to be unable to detach myself from such an everlasting question if I should concentrate my development as an academic person. Yet, this problematic is already far beyond the regime of a controllable choice in my life. In a sense, I might have failed as a “studying person”. At present, however, in order to hold the “will” to go on with the research, I have no way except for continuing to think what I cannot help thinking.

As far as I declare that I have decided to continue my studies, I believe that I ought to leave myself at the mercy of what makes myself feel that I could never “live” my life without it at any moment.



Kenichi Kurumada