​The days of Sekinan Library

 

​The days of Sekinan Library

TANAKA Akio

Sekinan Library was opened at Tachikawa, Tokyo in April 1986. Till March of that year I was a student of the post graduate course for cultural sciences and also worked at a night course of a high school for keeping daily life. At university I studied the history of Buddhism of ancient Japan mainly reading old Japanised Chinese writings while learning the history of European linguistics typically represented by The Linguistic Circle of Prague in 1920s. Buddhism was taught from Prof. KAWASAKI Tsuneyuki and linguistics was from Prof. CHINO Eiichi. In those days I had been concerned with the presentation of historical text by Chinese characters which was not any inflections in sentence, so usually called isolated language, which grammar only being controlled by word order.

I wondered that what is word order, how the grammar changes in the non-inflation words. All were in the utterly dark world because European linguistics had not made up the developed isolated language like classical Chinese. But in China especially in the era of Qing dynasty, many linguists were studied Chinese classics using vast methods historically formed since circa 500 B.C.

At March 1986, I determined that study theme was limited in the linguistic study of ideogram like Chinese character, for the study of which a new perspective would be appeared from our Oriental region still now using ideogram like China and Japan. From April I started my study while teaching modern and classical Chinese at Sekinan Library. At night frequently being called as the lecturer of Buddhism and Chinese of civic education. At that time the most interesting theme of the study was ancient Chinese characters inscribed on oracle bones and tortoise shells, which already showed the perfect system of ideogram and had been studied in the Qing dynasty's linguists, in which I was deeply fascinated by WANG Guowei's work Quantangjilin. 

Over decade after, in 2003 I could first written a paper on diagram focused on inherent time in Chinese characters. The title was " On Time Property Inherent in Characters" and its direct succession, "Quantum Theory for Language" which was presented at a conference opened at Nara in December 2003.

References
1.

1. On Time Property Inherent in Characters
2. Quantum Theory for Language

2.

1. Early Work. Sekinan Library
2. Chronicle. Sekinan Library

Tokyo
26 February 2015
SIL