Author Archives: H. Byron Earhart

Recently, while sorting through some of my papers, I ran across a poem I wrote about seventy years ago. I want to go to college,I know not where to go,Whether individualisticOr large and comprehensive,Are numbers my chief interestOr education glorified?No, learning is profoundestAnd learning over all. A rather crude poem, its redeeming feature is thatContinue reading “University Politics: From Distinguished Professor to Extinguished Professor”

One of the best “perks” of being a professor is the opportunity to occasionally go on sabbatical. For most of us academics, that means returning to graduate school days and spending all your time focusing on a research project. Free from the distraction of teaching classes and grading papers, relieved from the tedium of committeeContinue reading “In the Shadow of Mount Fuji”

My third year at Tohoku University in Sendai was devoted to writing up a lengthy dissertation on Shugendo. Knowing that the academic graveyard is full of grad students who never took their doctoral exams, or failed them, or did not complete a dissertation, I felt relieved. However, this sense of satisfaction was offset by twoContinue reading “Culture Shock in America”

The previous post described living conditions in our house in northern Japan; this post looks into my work completing a doctoral dissertation on Japanese religion. My first year at Tohoku University in Sendai in some ways resembled my first year at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. In both cases I was unpreparedContinue reading “Haguro, Red Hot Pepper, and Cool Enlightenment in a Mountain Temple”

Our welcome to Japan by Fulbright staff proved to be so helpful and kind that we could not foresee it would be outdone by our reception at Sendai. Professor Ichiro Hori, who had been a visiting professor at the Divinity School in Chicago, repaid us many times over for the hospitality he had enjoyed inContinue reading “Living in Japan: From A to Z (From Attanburo to Zuzuben)”

After my wife and son spent part of summer, 1962 in Boston, while I was in New York studying Japanese, we reunited in our hometown of Havana, Illinois. It is always good to “go home,” but that visit proved to be bittersweet. In quick succession we lost my maternal grandmother and grandfather. (During World WarContinue reading “From an Oldsmobile Convertible to a Boeing 707 Jet Plane”

Lucky breaks often mean being in the right place at the right time. I found out that it also helps to study the right language at the right time. In the 1950s, because the U. S. government realized that too few Americans were learning critical languages, they created the National Defense Foreign Language program toContinue reading “Manhattan Prison and Palisades Raspberries”

After several years of study at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I made a commitment to the field known as History of Religions, specializing in the religions of Japan. I began the study of Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and Japanese. In high school I had taken four years of Latin;Continue reading “Das Heilige und das Profane and Foret Interdit”

In an earlier post, “Pole Vaulting Over College Into Graduate School,” I identified my occupation as “graduate student,” a kind of non-working black sheep in both my own and my wife’s family. Of our four parents, only my mother had a high school diploma. Where my wife and I grew up, to be an adultContinue reading “What Does a Grad Student Do?”

The university dominated our life in Chicago. My heavy reading and studying schedule kept me very busy; then we went to special lectures, and we even spent our limited free time socializing with grad students. But I never missed an opportunity to make a little extra money for our meager budget. In 1956, during myContinue reading “Carrying the Mail”