Interests - Konrad Mitchell Lawson

The diversity of my interests and my chronic inability to focus on one or a few things have led me to become something of a jack-of-all-trades. I don't like it much, since I think this is a big obstacle to my being taken seriously in any field I exert myself in. However, I also admit, while being my biggest weakness, my versatility is also my greatest strength, and I hope that I can find a place in society where my variety of skills and interests can be put into play. Below are a list and discussion of some of my interests.

History

History is the only major in college that I had decided on in early high school. It is also the strongest "academic" interest I had since my earliest teenage years. My interest in history actually grew out of role-playing and reading fantasy and science fiction novels. A fascination with all things medieval European and medieval Japanese grew very naturally into an interest of those two historical periods. I read every history book in those two areas that I could find in the library at the International School of Stavanger and the American School in Aberdeen.

In college, I majored in history and took most of my courses in pre-modern European history. Medieval europe, Roman and Byzantine empires, Chinese and Japanese history were all fields that I found great pleasure in studying, but perhaps most interesting of all was the study of religious conflicts. The crusades in particular are a favorite period of mine, as well as the Reformation, and studying the history of various religious orders. I read a lot about the Jesuits in China and Japan and I am looking for more to read about other Catholic orders who did missionary work in pre-modern China and Japan (Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans, etc.).

As far as Japanese history is concerned, my fascination in medieval Japan changed to an interest in Meiji Japan and time leading up to the end of the Pacific war. This change probably came from my reading of Natsume Sôseki's novels when I was in Japan in 1995.

Chinese history is a huge ocean of interesting periods, but my greatest interest is in one that is not commonly studied. I like reading about the Republican period, 1911-1949. However, I'm not so much interested in Nationalist-Communist conflicts as I am in the complicated warlord politics of the period.

I didn't really think I was going to major in Philosophy when I got to college. I took a logic course as a requirement for graduation and was hooked. The temptation to take more and more philosophy classes grew as I abandoned Biology and Computer Science after my first chemistry class and computer science class, respectively. Chemistry bored the hell out of me, and I got the impression that I didn't quite have the patience or the natural ability to write good compact code. I also feared spending the rest of my life staring at a computer screen.

While I had long been interested in ethics and religion, I didn't think I would ever need to formally study philosophy. I mean after all, I have my truth and you have yours. My ethics is right for me or my society and your ethical beliefs are right for you and your society! Wrong. I'm embarrased to admit I was a naive moral relativist when I got to college and while a major in philosophy did not give me all the answers to the "Why"s of life, I certainly shed myself of many seriously flawed beliefs. I also learned to defend many of my other beliefs as well as learn more about their weaknesses. I learnt that denying moral relativism does not mean one has abandoned tolerance and political liberalism.

Studying philosophy is not a waste of time, and it should not be looked down upon as a serious academic endeavor. I don't regret at all the many hours I spent reading, thinking, debating, or writing about philosophy. Studying philosophy has a kind of sponge-squeezing effect on your head. A lot of junk comes pouring out and it is a lot easier to see the pores in the sponge when you let go. Being taught to think analytically, and look carefully at what others and yourself say are vital skills and I think they will always be of use to me.

Within philosophy I am most interested in ethics and the philosophy of religion. I have become very sympethic to a kind of ethical skepticism which, not without its weaknesses, seems like a very reasonable response to the difficulties posed by modern non-cognitivists regarding the fundamental question of the existence of objective moral laws. I discovered that my ethical views end up proposing a very important social role for justice, and importance of the rule of law in general. This led me directly to an interest in law and the desire to eventually attend law school. If you want to know more about my brand of ethical skepticism, ask me about it. I am not ready to post a formal description of it as it is still a "work in progress."

Students of Japanese language come in many flavors. You have your business majors who want to get in on the (now all but gone) Japanese economic miracle. You have those types that want to marry an Asian woman and figure learning the language would help them catch fish. You have your Japanese comic and cartoon loving addicts who want to be able to read/watch their favorite Manga in Japanese. You have your Karate chop nuts who want to do more than just count to ten in Japanese and yell, "Kiai." And don't forget your Zen-loving cracks who want to be "one" with nature or spend their days meditating under waterfalls and being hit on the shoulders by a short bald monk.

I guess when I started, I was a combination of the last two. My interest in the martial arts (see below) and my reading during high school about Zen and Taoism led me to choose a college which offered Japanese language courses. I think my interest in Japanese might also have originally been inspired from watching that old mini-series version of James Clavell's novel "Shogun". Heck, if old bearded Anjin-san could learn Japanese, why couldn't I!

At any rate, it didn't take long before my interest in Japan matured into a deep love for Japan and all its little idiosyncrasies. My first summer in Japan teaching in a country kindergarten sealed this connection as I toured the countryside by bicycle and began to read translated Japanese literature. Whatever I do in the future, Japan must be a part of it.

One of my majors at Western Washington University was East Asian Studies and I took many China related courses during my 5.5 years of undergraduate study. However, my Chinese language studies started very late and almost by coincidence. My sister, Carleen Lawson, studied at Western for a year and when she voiced an interest in Chinese, I decided to study with her. I fell in love with the language and after one year of study, later attended a summer intensive program through Princeton, and then a year at Qinghua University through the Inter-University Program (the sister program to IUC in Japan where I studied a year earlier).

China's importance in Asia, its rich and fascinating history and culture, as well as its diverse geography all contribute to my ever deepening interest in the country. I am perhaps a little more familiar with Japan where I have spent more time travelling through the countryside and where I have made more friends but I believe China will most likely be an important part of my future. Finally, while at IUP I studied two quarters of classical Chinese and loved it. I hope some day I can continue it. It is certainly very difficult and I'm still a beginner, but the world of great literature and philosophy that it opens are tempting indeed.

I first found an interest in Sino-Japanese relations when I was studying at IUC in Yokohama. There I did my final project on the relations between the Japanese government and military with Zhang Zuolin, a northern warlord during the Republican period of China who was eventually assasinated by the Japanese in 1928. The summer following IUC, when I studied at Princeton in Beijing, I experienced for the first time the deep animosity that many Chinese felt towards the Japanese. Contrary to my expecations, this animosity was not limited to the older generation that had lived through Japanese occupation. It permeated the very young and the highly educated, even my own instructors, as well as most of the college students in China that I spoke with.

This disturbed me, especially since their hatred of the Japanese and Japan today is based on accusations directed at previous generations. My love for both countries has me extremely frustrated by tensions between the two. I had no idea that the "War Responsibility" issue loomed so large over Sino-Japanese relations and resolved to study more about it. Since then, I have spent a lot of time gathering sources in Japanese, Chinese, and English on Sino-Japanese relations and especially the very sensitive war-related issues. There are unfortunately a lot of complexities and emotions run high on both sides. Many Chinese have told me to give up this "hopeless" pursuit, while some Japanese friends are made uneasy by my strange attraction to this subject. I am searching for ways that I can play some tiny part in easing tensions either through research, a career that promotes interaction between these two nations, or perhaps in some other as yet undetermined way.

My first taste of programming, if I dare call it programming, was in junior high school with a program called HyperCard. HyperCard is a fantastic creation that came out in the late 80s by Apple which is difficult to describe. I believe it is one of the first attempts to bring programming to the "layperson". You create "stacks" with "cards" and "buttons" which you attatch little "scripts" to. These scripts are the programming part of HyperCard. HyperCard stacks can be as simple as a few cards and buttons that flip between them, or as complicated as a good many normal programs out on the web.

I was fascinated by HyperCard, because it allowed me to make the computer do things I wanted it do when I pushed on buttons I had created. Isn't that the real joy of any programming? Or any engineering for that matter? I later began using SuperCard which is a more powerful and more flexible full-scale authoring environment. I have never really graduated beyond SuperCard although I have studied some Pascal, JavaScript, Perl, and C++. I have never really made anything useful in these other languages, and certainly not a full-scale standalone application. I sincerely hope to improve my programming skills and have been focusing much of my reading lately to programming (at the expense of history and philosophy). I also want to devote more time to mastering the Windows and Linux operating systems, two areas that I'm still very weak in, being a long time Mac fan. It is difficult to stoop to these inferior operating systems but alas they have a strong hold on the world. :-)

Some of my recent programming projects include a Kanji study program for the Kanji in Context program at the Inter-University Center in Yokohama, a flashcard study program using unique "interval study" features called Flashcard Wizard, a free "Pinyin Font Converter" and a Chinese and Japanese dictionary client. All of these programs were written with Supercard and until I get a better understanding of C++ and get used to using it in a PC development application such as C++ Builder, I will continue to make Mac-only applications. I have, however, been learning PHP, a server scripting language with which I have been designing a few small web based projects for Chinese language learning.

I first used the internet in 1993 when I moved to Bellingham to attend Western Washington University. A friend introduced me to this thing called "email" and then something called "MUD" (Multi User Dungeon). I had long been a fan of role-playing games and MUDs were basically a combination of role-playing with a computer game. People from all over the world play together in a (then) text based world. It was very addictive, and my first quarter of university I was addicted to this form of entertainment. I knew some people who spent almost all day, every day playing the game. When I asked one of my friends on the MUD whether it was common for MUDers to lose touch with the real world and become completely obsessed with the game, he replied, "Dude, rl is for losers." (rl = real life) I soon decided that I was not going to become an entraped netizen. However, since MUDing was truly popular in the world of geeks, I met many very knowledgeable people and through it I got my first glimpse of C++ programming, of the UNIX operating system, of networks, and of internet jargon and abbreviations.

I quit MUDing after a few months but my interest in the internet grew. I discovered the "WWW" when my best friend Glenn Henriksen showed me this thing called NCSA Mosaic at his college in Stavanger when I was in Norway on vacation. He showed me the Legoland homepage and some pictures from space that NASA had put on a "web page" These things were all strange and mysterious back then but we were both fascinated by this new technology. I don't think either of us knew how the web would take off.

I decided to learn HTML and after a few books and lots of looking at the source of pages on the net, I designed a family of web pages for the exchange program where I worked. Since then I have done several web page projects for friends, family, and as freelance projects for various companies. These days, I have given up coding raw HTML and use WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) applications such as Adobe GoLive, Frontpage, and Dreamweaver so I guess I don't qualify as a real web geek anymore. Most of the CGI scripts, and Javascript I use are free scripts I find on the web or that I modify slightly for my use.

I have recently established a more permanent presence on the net. I registered the domains foolsworkshop.com and chinajapan.org. The first has become the distribution site for my various little programming projects and the second I hope someday to become a much bigger and more ambitious sino-Japanese information site.

One of the biggest reasons that I'm spending such an incredibly long time getting my education is that I really hope that whatever career I settle on will offer me opportunities to travel as a part of my work. I know this sounds like a very material and shallow ambition but change of setting is something that is very important to me. If I stay too long in one place, I tend to get depressed more often, get very "homesick" for some of the other places I have been, and get very restless. The site of trains and planes will make me even more restless and increasingly dissatisfied with my current location and conditions, no matter how fantastic they might be. I used to think that I just loved travelling in general. While that is certainly true, I now know that more important than being able to travel two weeks here and two weeks there, I prefer to spend a few months or a year or more in a place. Spending medium periods of time in one place has a kind of "tease" effect on me, and I often feel let down when I return.

The few days before, during, and after travelling, I get into a kind of "travel mode" where I look at everything around me in a completely different way. Familiar things look unfamiliar and the "new" look that everything has is refreshing. Most of all, I like it when every day is a travel day, such as the month I spent Inter-railing in Europe with my sister and friends, or when I'm travelling the countryside of Japan by bicycle.

Travelling the countryside, usually along the coast, of a country has become one of my favorite ways to spend a vacation. Ireland and Japan are the only two places where I have done this to any great extent, but I have also enjoyed exploring by bicycle in the US, Norway, and China. I haven't made any really long trips in these countries yet though.

Another form of travel I really like is hiking, or backpacking. The trips my uncle has taken me on or which I have been on in the Cascades and in Japan have been some of the most memorable I have ever had. The forested mountain slopes and fjords of southwestern are dearest to me though and it is a dream of mine to have a small cottage there where I might retreat from my adventures elsewhere.

My interest in the martial arts comes undoubtedly from my inspiring uncle, Thomas Nilsen. From very early on, I had a deep respect for my uncle. He has competed for years on Norway's Karate team, and has won countless championships at home and internationally in Kata (forms, sets of arranged movements performed to help teach techniques and improve mental concentration). He is also an officer in Norway's anti-terrorist task force, and involved in countless other projects. I wanted to be just like Thomas when I grew up and started Karate at the age of 12, training until I left for college in 1993. After I got to Western, I continued to train only sporadically as I found less and less time to practice.

When I travelled to Yokohama to study Japanese in 1997, I much of my spare time in the first few weeks looking for a place to train Kyûdô, which is the traditional Japanase martial art of archery. I finally found a great little Zen temple in northern Yokohama with a small group of mostly older archers that took me in and taught me during the year.

Traditional Japanese archery is very different from western archery and like many of the martial arts, is much more than just shooting arrows to hit a target. I loved Kyûdô and trained three times a week for the year I was in Japan, some weeks as much as 10 hours a week. I also competed in one archery tournament and although I performed very badly, it was an interesting experience. Perhaps the best thing about triaining Kyûdô while studying in Japan was the fact that it was an amazing stress-relieving activity and gave me a great opportunity to learn more about traditional Japan from some fascinating people at our dôjô. If I ever live in Japan again, as I hope to do, I would love to continue Kyûdô or some other form of traditional Japanese martial arts.

I do have other interests of course, and as I think of something to write about them I'll add them here. My other interests include physical and not-so-physical interests.

Besides martial arts I also enjoy other sports such as baseball, basketball, skiing, volleyball, and sepak takrow. I played baseball and basketball in high school and also played on the Japanese baseball team for Qinghua University in Beijing. Sepak takrow is a Malaysian sport which is a combination of hacky-sack, volleyball, badminton, and karate which I came across in Japan. It is a fast and fascinating sport which I admittedly don't know too much about but have enjoyed playing it when the opportunity arises.

I have had an interest in role-playing games ever since my parents bought me my first role-playing game "Dungeons & Dragons" when I was 6 years old. The game, reviled by some, ridiculed by others, in fact can be an incredibly fun and stimulating game which stimulates creativity and interests in subjects such as history and philosophy in my case. It is also a great way to get to know a group of people and learn about communication and group cooperation. It is unfortunate that it has been classified as a "geek" activity and is often played by social outcasts.

Recently I have gotten an interest in Korea and the Korean language, something I can thank Kim Su Hee for, who I met in Beijing while studying there. I hope that if I have time in the future, I will find the opportunity to study the language and learn more about the country's history and culture.

I am something of a movie junky. My idea of a fun evening is getting together with a bunch of friends and watching movies together with lots of yummy snacks. I especially enjoy Japanese and Chinese movies. Oddly enough, both the highly artistic and political movies as well as the mindless violence of Hong Kong action movies fascinate me equally and I'm a great fan of Jacky Chan who is lots of fun to watch. Japanese TV dramas are another thing I seem to enjoy watching, a weird addiction given to me by my friends the "Walnuts" in Yokohama when we watched them to help our Japanese listening skills (The Walnuts are Rodney Wallace and Aundrea Almond). I think the reason I like them is primarily because it is very nostalgic of my days in Japan.