午夜剧场

I graduated from Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) in 1999, and while I am in my mid-40s, I have recently been asked to write essays reflecting on my life quite often. The other day, I was even interviewed for a book and looked back on my apprenticeship years from my late 20s to early 30s, but now I am being asked to write about my student days for a magazine. Since this might be a premonition that my life will end early next year due to illness or an accident, I will record the dark history of my youth at Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) here. My fellow alumni walking illustrious career paths probably won't empathize, but it should at least serve as evidence that there was a human being with blood and tears in that artificial campus.

Having no other universities I passed the entrance exams for, I entered Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) in its fourth year of establishment. At that time, it lacked everything necessary for student life; it was a place with nothing but classrooms, computers, and professors. In class, we learned about the coming information society and C language. I formed an academic literary circle called the "Union Society" with friends (including later philosopher Asaki Nishikawa, economist Tomohiro Inoue, life scientist Koichi Takahashi, and dance critic Yukihiko Yoshida), spending our days printing fanzines and stapling them by hand. To become an official organization, we needed a full-time faculty member as an advisor, and Hisanaga Makino, who lost at rock-paper-scissors, went to get an approval stamp from the literary critic Professor Jun Eto. He was a fearsome conservative polemicist, and rumor had it that when the alcohol started flowing at graduation parties, he would agitate students by saying, "Let's go raid the Asahi Shimbun together." When I joined the Eto Seminar, which involved a close reading of Natsume Soseki's "Kokoro" in English translation, the professor appeared in the Iota classroom wearing a sharp suit and tie. I had a slouch and poor posture, but after he warned me, "Are you having trouble with your stomach?", I began to pay attention to how I sat in the seminar.

My father, a former member of the Zenkyoto (All-Campus Joint Struggle League), would make snide remarks every time he paid my tuition, saying, "Your school is full of nothing but right-wing professors." After Professor Eto retired, I joined the seminar of critic Professor Kazuya Fukuda and attended the drinking party on the first day. Having drunk too much, I passionately argued about the war crimes of Emperor Showa in front of Professor Fukuda, which left the other students frozen. True to his reputation as a neo-conservative polemicist, the professor countered with arguments about the fallacy of post-war democracy, and I went home crying after being completely demolished. After that, I attended the Fukuda Seminar diligently and became absorbed in the works of "I-novel" writers such as Zenzo Kasai, Isota Kamura, and Shukei Chikamatsu.

In the seminar of poet Professor Teruo Inoue, any research presentation or report was permitted, making it an asylum (refuge) for students who wanted to engage in artistic expression. Whether a student performed Butoh dance, recited their own poetry, or I screened an experimental film, the professor would smile and provide insightful commentary while smoking Caster Milds inside the classroom.

The Media Center in the mid-90s had Betacam editing desks and Macs capable of video editing, but they were useless as rendering took days. Since there was no film circle, I formed a film research club and worked part-time to buy my own 16mm film equipment. Intending to shoot an experimental film, I built a set out of plywood in the basement studio of the Media Center. I filmed a short titled "My Burial," in which I appeared naked and vomited, while pig entrails moved around the set via stop-motion animation. After the shoot, the rotten smell of the entrails clung to the studio, and I was promptly banned from the premises. I tried to rent the studio using a friend's name, but an "AV Consultant" student reported me to the staff. That short film was later screened at European film festivals, giving me the confidence to pursue a career in the world of moving images, so I suppose the mess was worth it.

Years later, when I was invited to be a lecturer in video expression at SFC, I found it mysterious that they reached out to someone like me who had repeated two years and walked the backroads of life. I realized that, unlike politicians, university personnel decisions don't seem to involve a screening process. Returning to the campus after over a decade, the efforts I had made to survive in the outside world felt like a lie; the campus had become a place where honest and serious students grew up healthily. I tried to convey the joy of filmmaking using art films and documentaries as materials, but I wonder if I succeeded with the YouTube generation. I did my best to at least advise them not to become "creators" who enter TV stations or advertising agencies to make programs and commercials.

Having attended SFC for six years as a student and eight years as a lecturer—a total of 14 years—I can only call it an inseparable bond. I have never had a relationship last that long with any person I felt compatible with. The campus I walked with a racing heart in my youth and the concrete buildings that have reached their 30th anniversary have grown old and weathered, and the artificial Gulliver Pond (Kamoike) and the lawn still don't look quite natural. Students speak cleverly using loanwords, and those in the humanities are struggling to get credits. I only hope that for the next 30 years, this place remains as peaceful as it is.