20 University
Tadokoro-san sometimes thinks back to university. He attended university twice. The first time was in his early twenties, as a regular university student. The second time was in his thirties, this time as an audit student. The reason for this is that he didn't study very much at the first university. However, when asked, people don't believe him. It is surprisingly difficult to convey the truth. That is the simple answer, but more accurately, it is not that Tadokoro-san didn't study at all at university. He didn't know what he should study at university. For Tadokoro-san, it was not easy to choose what he should study most seriously in his life at the beginning of his twenties. He finished university while wandering, but since the economy was booming at the time, he was able to get a job at an electrical parts company. His job was to manage the inventory of electrical parts that were divided into small parts according to their uses. It was a time when electrical-related businesses were expanding not only in Japan but also worldwide, so this time every day was a study. Moreover, he knew his goal very well. What is the appropriate inventory? Isn't there a way to deliver faster with less inventory? In the background of his work, there were trends in the world economy, rapid progress and improvements in industrial technology, and changes in working conditions, and he certainly felt that he was participating in the progress of the modern world. However, this feeling gradually changed as he began to see the whole picture of his work.
Inventory management is done by humans, but the inventory itself is of course a material thing. Here, Tadokoro-san was suddenly faced with a very simple question: what is it about humans who deal with materials that are in huge circulation every day?
For the first time, Tadokoro-san was forced to learn on his own. This was the trigger that led him to go to university again. However, he first needed to maintain his current lifestyle, so he became an auditor at night classes.
The university was on a small hill. Therefore, the university was small. The university had no gates or walls, so you could go up and down the hill from anywhere. The university was clearly underfunded, and when it rained, some of the roofs would leak and run off, and the tables and chairs in the cafeteria were so wobbly that Tadokoro nearly spilled his ramen soup on several occasions, but strangely enough, he felt an attachment to these things. Everything was new to him after a long time back at university. Among them, there was one scene that he still remembers clearly. It was early April, and when he took a day off to deliver some documents and went up the hill at the university during the day, he heard a crowd of people and a commotion. When he got closer, he saw a huge hot air balloon about to rise into the air in the athletic field below. The balloon was brightly colored, and the sound of its burners roared all around. However, the scene was somehow silent, even amid the excitement of the students. With the passage of a short time, the hustle and bustle of the past had disappeared, and the university had changed, and times had changed. Stepping back from sentimentality for a moment, Tadokoro recalled that a woman who lived in America during this time had calmly remarked that we may have exchanged large sums of money for loose change, or small change. All Tadokoro had learned at university was a basic level of some foreign language. And that was simply reading textbooks and answering practice questions. She was not belittling language learning; on the contrary, it was the only thing that gave her a sense of steady progress. If we take into account the qualitative meaning, that period, which was a vast amount of time, may indeed have been a time of loose change.
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