The Course
The Course
Episode 119 - Michael K. Bourdaughs: "Go study abroad!"
In this episode, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Chicago, discusses his life and professional paths. His interest in Japanese literature and culture began when, out of the blue, he was given the chance to study for a year in Sendai, and the rest is history. He worked in the corporate world in Tokyo, then returned to the States to continue his studies and professional path. A professor at U Chicago since 2007, he describes a life filled with teaching, academic writing, and making time for his own fiction.
Martha 00:01
Hello and welcome to The Course. I am your host today, Martha Marion, and I am here speaking with Professor Michael Bourdaghs from UChicago Center for East Asian Studies, where he studies on Japanese literature and cultural history by exploring the connection between literature and politics through the lens of critical theory.
He is an active translator, fiction writer and has published multiple books in his field, the most recent of which is Sound Alignments Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars. He is here to talk about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Welcome to The Course, Professor Michael Bourdaghs. Michael will you please introduce yourself.
Michael Bourdaghs 00:21
Sure, I'm Michael Bourdaghs, I'm the Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations here at UChicago.
Martha 00:28
Lovely. Well, so nice to meet you. Before we get into the professional path that you have been on and continue to be on, uh, let's go back in time a little bit. I'd love to just get a little bit of context about your own educational path.
Michael Bourdaghs 00:43
Well, I grew up in, in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. in middle school, I went to what was called the St. Paul Open School, which was an experimental school that had no walls, no grades. And then went to a very sort of conservative traditional prep school for my high school education, St.Paul Academy. So I had two very different educational experiences
Martha 01:07
Did either one or the other of those environments suit you better? Or did you sort of adapt to both?
Michael Bourdaghs 01:15
Kind of adapted to both. One of them provided different kinds of opportunities and different kinds of structures or lack of structures. And I did interesting things at both of them. At the open school, I was really interested in magic and I was really interested in writing. And so I started a magic magazine and we had subscribers around the world.
Went to national conventions of magicians associations, did magic shows all over the Twin Cities, and you were encouraged to just take your interests and run with them. On the other hand, I completely avoided math classes between fifth grade and eighth grade, and so I still can't, my children tease me because I still can't do long division.
Martha 01:50
You're like, this was not of my interest, so I just cannot do it…
Michael Bourdaghs 01:54
And then in in high school, it was much more structured, sort of more conventional education. And I think I responded well to that as well. I, there were different kinds of opportunities and rewards. I found that I really was interested in literature then. English classes were some of my favorite, and then history as well.
I really liked history classes a lot. My father was a frustrated history major. He had started out in college as a history major and then got married. And I came along and felt like he needed to do something that would be more practical or would immediately lead to an income. And so he changed his major.
But I think I was from the day I was born, he raised me to be a historian. And so, I was steered in that direction. And really, when I got to high school and started taking history classes found that I really loved them.
Martha 02:47
Yeah, and you know, at that time, at those ages, what about those particular subjects really drew you in?
Michael Bourdaghs 02:53
I really like stories. I really like narratives. I really enjoy learning about, reading, for instance, biographies of historical figures and learning about people who lived in the past. And when I was a, you know, I was a voracious reader, as a lot of people who become professors were. I always had a book in hand.
If I was eating breakfast, there was a book open on the table next to my bowl of cereal. And biographies were some of the, my favorite books that I read when I was you know, in my early teens. So I think those kinds of things were what really attracted me.
Martha 03:31
And so then when you, you're graduating from high school and now heading to Macalester, are you going as a history or an English major already? Are you still figuring that out? What were, what did things look like on the eve of that transition?
Michael Bourdaghs 03:44
I’m pretty sure I thought when I graduated from high school, I remember we took certain kinds of career aptitude tests to try to figure out what kinds of careers might be suited for us. And I took one and said, I intended to be a lawyer. And I remember I took a test and one of the results of the test came back.
They gave us a little blurb describing what sorts of careers we were suited for. And they said that being a lawyer might not be creative enough for me that I should think about doing more creative kinds of work. But I still, I, it was what I thought that I would be doing. And I went into college from day one, pretty sure I was going to be a history major.
And that's what happened. It was primarily American history that I was interested in at that point.
Martha 04:32
And did you have a sense of, so you're like lawyer, probably not. But did you have a sense of what you thought you might want to do with that degree? Okay.
Michael Bourdaghs 04:40
I think I still wanted to be a lawyer. I was also interested in writing. I had a strong interest in creative writing from the start, and so had interest in being a writer, even as I was aware that, you know, in terms of making a living, that probably wasn't practical, but I was very interested in writing from the beginning, and so wrote for the college literary magazine, and took creative writing classes, so that was another strong interest.
Martha 05:05
Yeah, and then so senior year, you have this sort of aha moment, serendipitous experience fall into your lap. I would love to know a lot about that.
Michael Bourdaghs 05:16
Yeah, so Macalester College then had a sister school relationship with the school in Sendai, Japan, Miyagi University of Education. And they had an agreement worked out with the Japanese government where every year the Japanese Ministry of Education would provide one fellowship for a student from the school in Sendai to come spend the year at Macalester.
And, one fellowship for a student from Macalester to come to Sendai and spend the year in Japan. And my senior year, nobody applied for this from Macalester, and they were in a panic. They needed, they just needed a warm body to go to Japan.
Martha 05:50
No one applied? That’s insane.
Michael Bourdaghs 05:51
No one applied, and they were, they were afraid that they would lose this fellowship deal, but if they couldn't come up with students for it. Maybe the Ministry of Education would withdraw its support. And so I got, the summer between my junior and senior year, I got a panicked phone call from a professor I'd known, not from taking Japanese history classes, but I'd taken Chinese history classes with him.
His name was Jerry Fisher. And, you know, he explained the situation and said that they, they needed someone to go to Japan the following year and that they would come, you know, with a stipend and I could do all of my coursework there and they asked me to apply and it sounded like, you know, I didn't have anything better to do my senior year and so I decided, well, sure, I'll try this out even though I'd never really I think I may have taken one class in Japanese history up to that point, but it had not been a focus of my interest.
I hadn't done any Japanese language study so it really was a complete unexpected opportunity that fell from a completely unexpected direction.
Martha 06:54
Yeah, so that so you get this opportunity you arrive in Japan, obviously this led to a lifelong passion and an entire career. So, how did all of that transpire or, you know, what were the seeds that were planted in that year in Japan?
Michael Bourdaghs 07:16
Yeah, so I found out in the December of 1983 that I will be going to Japan the following September. And so I started doing language study at that point. Did a quick brush up to cover first semester of Japanese with the tutor so that I could join in second semester Japanese in spring quarter of 1984 and then did a, an intensive language course at the University of Minnesota that summer.
So I had a little bit of language training before I went to Japan. But then got on the airplane in September of 1984 flew to Tokyo, took the train up to Sendai, and just kind of threw myself into this experience. I lived in the men's dormitory on the campus, I was the only foreign student there.
And I remember the first month or two were completely disorienting. I just didn't know what had hit me. I was really, I felt isolated. I felt unhappy.
Martha 08:11
Did you feel like you'd made a mistake or were you like, I have to push through?
Michael Bourdaghs 08:15
I was, I, well, I was, I was thinking, how am I, how do I get out of this?
And then about two months in, a couple of things started to click. One was that my ear started catching up, and I started to be able to hear what people were saying. It took a while for my ear to really. accustom itself to the sound of the Japanese language.
And so I finally, I crossed a certain kind of threshold where even if I didn't under, know the words that people were using, I could hear what those words were and, and look them up. And then I also came to a realization that people were, just as I was feeling isolated and scared, people were also really shy about coming up and talking with me because I think they were shy about having possibly having to use English.
And I realized that if I was going to make any relationships or having any contact with the people around me, I was going to have to be more outgoing. I was going to have to be the one that would start the conversations and get the ball rolling. And that all really changed the nature of the experience and so that by the time in the following year, I went back, I was there for 12 months. So by the time September rolled around again that it was time for me to go back to the United States. I didn't want to go back. I really I wanted to stay on in Japan and wanted started to look for opportunities to go back to Japan as soon as I could after graduation.
So that that immersion experience, I tell a lot of students that go study abroad. Don't be surprised if the first month or two is hard. It takes a while to get accustomed and but don't give up during that period because for most people as it did for me, I think things really kind of turn around after you get to that initial culture shock phase.
Martha 10:01
And were there particular either academic or social experiences of note that really turned you on to the both literature and culture or music cinema? Like, you know, what were, are there any specific experiences you remember as particularly notable?
Michael Bourdaghs 10:16
Yeah, it's the, I remember before I went to Japan, I had a strong interest in literature. And so knowing I was going to go to Japan, I went to the library in Macalester and borrowed all the modern Japanese novels I could find, of course, in English translation. And so I read them, you know, I read Nishima, and I read Tanizaki and I read Kawabata. And they were okay. But none of them really grabbed me.
And so when I got to Sendai, I, one of the teachers that I worked with was a literature professor and I said to him, so I've read Mishima, I've read Tanizaki, I've read Kawabata, none of them really grabbed me, but I would like to read more. What do you think I should read?
And he said, you should read this writer named Natsume Soseki, who I'd never heard of but I sort of duly went, there was an English language bookstore in downtown Sendai called Maruzen. I went down there, and they happened to have several of Soseki's novels available in English translation.
And so I picked them up, and taking the bus back to the campus, I started reading one, which was called, in English translation, The Three Cornered World. And by the time I... yeah, and by the time I got off the bus, I was completely hooked.
And I sort of sat and read that novel straight through, cover to cover that day, and as soon as I was done reading it, I started reading it again from the beginning, because I was so astonished with the novel and wanted to see how it had been put together, and it was really a case of love at first sight.
And that was really the first moment where I discovered this piece of Japanese writing that just completely spoke to me and that conveyed a way of looking at the world that really appealed to me. And I went on my most recent book that I published just a couple of years ago was on Natsume Soseki.
He became the figure that really opened the door to Japanese literature to me
Martha 12:12
Wow. Is that a person who is still living?
Michael Bourdaghs 12:14
No, he died. He lived in 1867 to 1916. So he's about 100 years ago. He died.
Martha 12:24
So modern in the expansive sense.
Michael Bourdaghs 12:27
Yeah. In many ways, he, a lot of people will say he's the first really modern Japanese writer.
Martha 12:33
Wow. Cool. So, all right. So you come back from this spectacular experience seems like right around the time of graduation. So what, yeah, what are the next steps and how do you start to carve out a professional path for yourself?
Michael Bourdaghs 12:48
So I was pretty sure at that point that I wanted to go into graduate school, probably doing something related to literature and, I was interested in American literature, but also Japanese literature.
And I knew I need to get my language skill up to a higher level. And so after I graduated from Macalester, I found a job that allowed me to go back and work in Tokyo for about two and a half years, and it was during that period that I really was living in a completely immersion experience in the Japanese language, working in the context of a Japanese corporation and reading and writing in Japanese every day and that really got my level, my proficiency in Japanese up to the point where I was ready to go to graduate school.
So I did that for about two and a half years, always knowing that I wasn't really meant for the corporate world, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do both to learn Japanese language, to spend some time living in Tokyo and learning that city.
But I also liked the thought that I could work in the corporate world for a little while just to see what, what that was like before I went into graduate school. And I'm always, I, I knew after two and a half years that that was not the world that I was meant for, but I've always been grateful for the opportunity to experience that different kind of lifestyle, that different kind of work experience.
Got to see what it was like to be inside a Japanese company and learned a little bit about what the kinds of lives that my colleagues, the people that I was working with in Tokyo were like. And so I've always been grateful for that experience and glad that I didn't go directly from undergraduate to graduate school.
I always encourage my students to go out and do something a little bit, even if they want to eventually go into graduate school in a field that they've been studying as an undergraduate. I think it's really good thing to go out and experience different things before you lock yourself into that track.
Martha 14:44
Yeah, yeah, especially because we've all been in some form of academia almost our entire lives up to that point.
Michael Bourdaghs 14:52
Yeah.
Martha 14:55
And I'm also thinking I know you are a writer in your own right, and just thinking about, you know, for writers, every life, every kind of life experience is absolutely crucial to enrich the kind of work that you could do.
Michael Bourdaghs 15:09
Absolutely. And learning, you know, what it's like to follow that kind of like, you know, sort of a nine to five going to the office every day, commuting on the trains, going back and forth, those kinds of experiences getting that living through those kinds of rhythms of daily life, allow you access to different ways of looking at the world and understanding how different people think about the world. And I think you're right. If you're interested in writing fiction or other kinds of things, having a wide range of experiences is really helpful.
Martha 15:40
Yes, so after that two and a half years do you go to graduate school after that? And is that in Japan or the US or somewhere else?
Michael Bourdaghs 15:47
I went back to Jerry Fisher, the professor at Macalester College, and told him I'm ready to go to graduate school. What do I do? And he told me the schools that I should apply to in the U.S. and I applied to a group of them and ended up, he also nominated me for a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, which I was lucky enough to receive, and I ended up at Cornell University, which was at the time, a kind of newly rising program in the field. It had a new take on area studies, a very critical take on the way, what we call area studies, the study of a place like Japan had been conducted up until then. And really exciting and in many ways, revolutionary new ideas about how we should pursue that kind of scholarship.
This was at the time when things like the critique of Orientalism were action and Cornell was really central to trying to rethink how we could study East Asia in new ways that wouldn't reproduce some of the really problematic tendencies of older models of area studies.
And this incidentally was closely connected to the University of Chicago. In many ways, the University of Chicago was the beginning of this new more critical approach to area studies. And many of the teachers that I had at Cornell were actually either directly or indirectly students of the University of Chicago. So it was sort of my first indirect connection with the University of Chicago came when I was a graduate student at Cornell.
Martha 17:21
Interesting and so, just to fast forward, just a little bit, when did professorship or the idea of, sort of professionally working in academia when did that start to develop.
Michael Bourdaghs 17:33
It was really after I graduated from Macalester and I knew at that point eventually I was going to go into grad school in some sort of literature related field or maybe a history related field, but my passion was more towards literature. And so I was pretty certain that that was the career path I was going to take, uh, when I started working in Tokyo after graduating from college.
So I knew that I was going to do that job for maybe two or three years and then apply to graduate schools. And there wasn't much point in applying to a graduate school in a literature program if you didn't want to be a professor of literature. That's kind of the…
Martha 18:11
Gotcha. That's the connection,
Michael Bourdaghs 18:13
Yeah, well, I always say that there's sort of with the PhD in literature, there's two things you can do.
You can be a professor of literature or you can open a used bookstore and sell up all the books. So those are the two career you can choose from
Martha 18:22
And honestly, those both, those both sound like pretty good.
Michael Bourdaghs 18:25
Oh yeah. No, I'd be happy with those. And of course there's actually, it turns out there's a lot more jobs as I've learned since then, but that was the way that I looked at the problem then.
Martha 18:33
Yeah. So when you're at Cornell, you're in this program where the paradigm is really shifting on how at least Westerners or Americans are thinking about studying non-western cultures or, you know, anybody but ourselves. So, I would love to know sort of what you, how you conceive of the field that you're in what you want it to accomplish? You know, sort of what you think, you mentioned a lot of intersectionality, right, in terms of literature, but also culture, music sort of a holistic approach. What does that mean to you? And sort of what's your mission statement, I would say, in the regard to what you, what you'd like your field to do.
Michael Bourdaghs 19:11
Yeah, that's a really great question. And I think one of the things that I was really trained to do at Cornell and that's always been central to how I think about the work that I do is, so I'm writing about Japanese history and Japanese culture, primarily for English speaking audience in North America.
And one of the things I think that's really crucial is to always stress that Japan is part of the world, and that we are connected to Japan. Japan is not just this isolated, static place, isolated from the world. And that in particular, over the last hundred years, what's happened in Japan has always been intimately entangled with what's happening in the United States and other places.
And so to study Japan is in many ways also to study the United States, as well as other places. And when I am critical of, as I usually am of questions of power, questions of racism, questions of imperialism, questions of economic unevenness in Japan, that criticism of Japan always has to be linked to critical reflection on what's going on in the United States.
And how the United States is part of what's happening in Japan, and so that the trying to open up a critical stance to understand what's going on in Japan also always involves looking at the world in which I'm operating here in the United States and in which the people that I'm teaching and the people that I'm writing for are operating in that kind of stance, the realization that to study Japan was also to study the place that I came from was, I think, one of the really fundamental lessons that I learned at Cornell.
Martha 21:02
Yeah, I think that's really beautiful. And not only that sort of the two way mirror between the United States and Japan, but also, as you said, to remember that Japan is part of the world and sometimes it ain't about us at all.
Like, you know, you mentioned studying Japan in the Cold War and like Japanese people's having a toe in the first world of capitalist liberal democracy, the second world of the socialist bloc, and the third world of the decolonization movement. Like it wasn't just, right, they're, you know, they're part of everything just as we consider ourselves part of everything,
Michael Bourdaghs 21:35
Yeah, that's, it's absolutely true. The, about 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Sayonara America, Sayonara Nippon: a geopolitical prehistory of J-pop, which is a history of popular music in Japan since 1945. And for really good reasons for that book, because I thought that the relationship between Japan and America is so much of this dialogue back and forth between American and Japanese dynamic popular music forms.
But I've realized that just focusing on the America-Japan relationship has the unintended impact of blocking out the rest of the world. And so I've, in my new project on the Cold War, I've been really trying to think about Japan connected not just to the United States, but as you said to the throughout the, the 1940s, fifties, sixties and seventies and eighties to the socialist bloc both in Europe and, and in East Asia.
And then also with the decolonizing, the, what's called the Bondo movement of Nations in East Asia and Africa that the links between Japan and these other places were crucially important for Japanese writers for Japanese musicians for Japanese artists, they really thought of Japan is participating in those worlds in those networks.
And so I'm trying to write a book now that really draws out how filmmakers, musicians, and writers in Japan were actively involved in all three of the worlds of the Cold War. This is, again, a way of trying to reimagine Japan as really being part of the world.
Martha 23:08
Yes, yes. So yes, with all of this interest and expert developing expertise, how does this eventually bring you to UChicago?
Michael Bourdaghs 23:19
Well, after finishing at Cornell in 1996, I was lucky to, my first job was at UCLA and I taught at UCLA from 1996 to 2007. They have a terrific program there. I had wonderful colleagues there. Had really good weather there too, as you may have heard.
Martha 23:37
Well, that is where I live, so
Michael Bourdaghs 23:39
No. Yes. Yeah. So, and then in 2007 there was an opening here at the University of Chicago.
And as I said, I'd always sort of felt part of the University of Chicago's orbit in that many of my own teachers at Cornell were people who directly or indirectly had come out of the University of Chicago's East Asia program. And so, in some ways it felt like coming home. There was a, I remember the campus for my interview in early 2007 walking around the campus and I remember this was the first time I'd been on the campus here in Hyde Park since 1988,which was when I had my honeymoon. I was living in Tokyo when I got married, and we did our honeymoon in Chicago and we had visited the University of Chicago
Martha 24:30
Oh! No way.
Michael Bourdaghs 24:31
And so there was this, I don't know, it felt like destiny or something like that. And so I, yeah, I made the move to Chicago in 2007. When I look back and realize it's been already 15, 16 years.
That seems unbelievable. It's been, I feel like I still feel like I just got here, but we've really enjoyed our time living in Hyde Park and becoming part of this really remarkable campus.
Martha 25:00
Yeah, well, I have some, as we start to wrap up, I have some sort of professional advice related questions. One, you know, you mentioned your work as a professor, you mentioned your academic writing, and also your fiction writing. What are, how do you balance, how do you balance those three, you know, probably plus, but at least those three endeavors professionally and personally.
Michael Bourdaghs 25:26
Yeah, it's a challenge. We've had some some terrific students here who have also been really wonderful writers of poetry and fiction in our program. And we've talked, we talked about this a lot. It's one of the things I tell my students, and this is sort of life advice. I stumbled on this.
I was sitting in my mother's house about 25 years ago, and there was this ancient paperback, a time management book from the 1950s that I pulled down and just started reading, and encountered this idea that has stuck with me, and I've been really passing it on to students ever since, which is that every day you should think about what the you 10 years from now wishes you did today. And you should make sure that you carve out a block of time today to do what it is that you 10 years from now will wish you had done today. In the quest of everyday life for both students and faculty, there's always more to do in a day than there's time for it. There's always more things due today, due tomorrow, pressing deadlines that are, that are always overwhelming and no one else is gonna think about what the you 10 years from now wishes you had done today.
And putting that in that framework or in that perspective, was really helpful for me to think about how you use your time during the day and to make sure that you are setting aside time to do things that are in the long term, what you really want to be spending your life doing.
And for me, that's fiction writing. And so I'd make sure that I set aside a block of time every day to work on that. Even though, you know, I can't afford the time. Nobody can afford the time for these sorts of projects that don't have deadlines and don't have any obvious rewards attached to them, but they're the way of making sure that you're spending your life moving in the direction that you want it to be in.
And that way of thinking about how to provide your time has been really, really helpful for me. And it's useful. I'm the sort of person that it's my brain works better if I'm moving back and forth between very different kinds of activities.
Yeah, and so it's useful for me to have things like that where you use different parts of my brain and different parts of my personality, I think it helps make me by going away from academic work and scholarship, to do something very different for an hour when I come back to the academic work. I think I actually do the academic work better as a result.
Martha 28:13
Well, that is a beautiful way to end, but I think it this may also be the answer to that question, but it does feel a particularly apt wrap up question to ask, what does the you from 10 years from now hope you do today?
Michael Bourdaghs 28:29
Well, I hope that I write and that's really good to ask. I hadn't asked myself that question yet today. I'm at a new phase in my life, which I'm getting used to, which is the me from 10 years from now will be retired. And what exactly does that man…
Martha 28:50
What does that guy want?
Michael Bourdaghs 28:51
Yeah, what does that guy want? What does that guy want to be doing? And what do I need to do to make sure that that person 10 years from now, who's probably no longer teaching here at the University of Chicago, but hopefully is still involved in scholarship and in writing. So I'm at another transition point in my life. My life, which arrived as I think it always does for everyone much faster than I thought it would.
And I'm wrestling with that. I'm looking around my office here in Hyde Park now looking at thousands and thousands of books wondering what in the world am I going to do with these thousands and thousands of books. So, I think for certain one thing
Martha 29:30
Use, use bookstore seller, I'm just saying.
Michael Bourdaghs 29:33
Yes, maybe it's time to do that. But the man ten years from now certainly hopes that I do not acquire any more new books today. That's definitely true.
Martha 30:10
Thank you, Professor Bourdaghs, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your friends and family. You can learn more about the University of Chicago at uchicago.edu or the University’s campus in Hong Kong at uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.