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WELCOME, DR. MASUDA SITTING NONDESCRIPTLY AT a prata house enjoying his meal, one would deem him the average Joe simply from his appearance. Yet Dr. Masuda Hajimu (family name Masuda) exemplifies non-conformity: cycling through the Middle East at the age of 19, pursuing journalism in Aomori, and incurring public opposition in Wyoming are some of the many ways that he goes against the grain. Mnemozine’s Ngiam Xing Yi meets with the newest addition to the NUS History Teaching Staff, and finds out just how different he is. Could you tell us more about yourself, particularly the milestones in your life? I was born in Osaka and studied International Relations at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. The first major milestone in my life was my bicycle trip to the Middle East in 1995. The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Treaty had just been signed at the end of 1993, and I optimistically decided to find out personally about how peace would arrive in the Middle East. I cycled for two months in Syria, Jordan, and Israel, and what I learned was vastly different from what was reported in the media. I felt deep-seated distrust on both sides and realized that, despite the achievements of diplomacy at higher levels, feelings on the ground did not change so much. The assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister two months after I returned home was met with surprise by the Japanese media, but I was not
surprised because I had been already convinced of the difficulty with the peace process. This was a truly eye-opening experience that led me to focus on popular movements behind politics in societies. This led me to pursue journalism in Japan as a career. Is there any particular incident from this trip that you would like to recount for us? I was sleeping under a bridge in my tent when four Israeli soldiers woke me at 4 am. They held me at gunpoint and demanded to know what I was doing there. I later learned that they had suspected me of being a terrorist, and was surprised at the manner of distrust felt towards a tourist like me. This incident allowed me to witness for myself the lingering suspicions due to the perpetual war situation. Did journalism change your perspective of global affairs? I chose to work in Aomori despite having lived in Osaka and Kyoto, as I was interested in issues concerning unpopular institutions in such rural areas, specifically a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and its reprocessing plant, as well as the US Misawa Air Base. I explored how the state addressed these through promises of financial stability to local governments. Reporting on such local matters connected me to greater global issues, and this was when my interest in International Relations grew stronger. However, I began to be afraid of reporting on such a wide range of issues without proper knowledge of their historical contexts. This eventually led me to develop a keen interest in history, foreign languages, and photography. I decided to move to the United States, where I deliberately enrolled in a small community college in rural Wyoming in 2002. This was yet another milestone for me. Following the US war in Iraq in 2003, I attended several anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington DC, and eventually penned similar sentiments in my college’s publication. This met with great backlash from the local community, due to their conservative support of the war. Rumours