Hidetada Shimizu
Born in 1960 to parents from the so-called Greatest Generation, Hidetada Shimizu grew up surrounded by values that were shaped by both the before and the after of World War II.
Shimizu lived in the countryside of Takasaki, Japan, where his father, Noboru, a school principal, took him hiking in the mountains to collect plants suitable for eating.
His mother, Michiko, worked as a physician – “Very rare,” he says – and his middle-class home reflected attitudes toward education that were changing after 1945.
“The burgeoning middle-class people then would expect their children to go to university,” says Shimizu, who has taught in the NIU Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations since 1996 and retires this month.
Yet that wasn’t going to happen for his parents, at least not on their schedule.
Like so many of his peers, their teenage son had been bitten years earlier by something that made school seem irrelevant.
Life-changing: Hidetada Shimizu’s vinyl copy of the Bob Dylan Gold Disc album from 1973.
Rock ’n’ roll.
“Japan always had its own great things going on parallel to the West. It’s got its own version of baby boomer music,” he says. “I had an older brother, six years older than I am. My brother brought all this subculture, pop culture, counterculture to me.”
Included in that was Bob Dylan’s greatest hits.
“That really changed my life,” he says. “It came with pictures of him, and Japanese translations of the words. Oh, my goodness! ‘Blowing in the Wind.’ ‘The Times They Are A‐Changin’.’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ I was like, ‘Gosh, this guy is just out of this world.’ And I was like 13, you know?”
Gone suddenly was Shimizu’s interest in, and willingness to, remain the “good, obedient” student he’d always been. In their place: cigarettes, alcohol, guitars, his own garage band and stacks of vinyl records by the “golden” likes of Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones.
“Consciously, I wanted to do that rebelliousness,” he says, adding that his new lifestyle pretty much guaranteed he couldn’t pass university entrance exams – “and, subconsciously, I think didn’t want to because I wanted to get out of Japan.”
Shimizu plays guitar for his father, Noboru, in the 1970s.
During his high school years, and at an English conversation school in Tokyo afterward, he managed to learn the language of his musical heroes and to shake his Japanese accent as he sang along to their tunes.
A couple years later, in the late 1970s, he met a surfer dude with dyed blond hair who convinced him that he belonged neither in Tokyo nor his “Hicksville” hometown.
“This guy said, ‘Yeah, man, you gotta go to California,’ ” Shimizu says, “so I ended up in California.”
He enrolled at Citrus College in Glendora, where something amazing happened: “I did so well.”
Freed from the high school world of having to take classes in math, physics, English and history, he was able to choose his own curriculum.
Meanwhile, realizing that education was his ticket to “straightening myself up,” he stuck with it and eventually transferred to Cal State Fullerton.
Michiko Shimizu
“I was kind of going to have a doomed, alcoholic life,” he says, “so I worked very hard, and then I wanted to study psychology – I wanted to do what you may call ‘psychological investigations of the nature of consciousness.’ To that end, I was inspired by Bob Dylan, who was inspired by the Beat poets and authors – Ginsberg and Kerouac and all that – but that’s not what I got from the university. You were required to take statistics and animal psychology, and I said, ‘No, I don’t like this,’ and I rebelled.”
Shimizu toyed with the notion of returning home to Japan. His good command of English meant he probably could snag a prestigious gig as a tour guide.
But something else was about to blow his mind.
During his senior year, he took a sociology course that explored how different ethnic groups assimilated to the United States after immigration.
The textbook, “Ethnic America,” was by Thomas Sowell, now the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and a writer on topics such as economics, history, social policy, ethnicity and the history of ideas.
The professor, meanwhile, was Jerome Wright: “An African-American professor with a Harvard Ph.D. in anthropology whose fieldwork was with non-Western people,” Shimizu says.
“He was one of the only people who really understood where I was coming from,” Shimizu says. “Like, I would say, ‘I don’t think Western psychology is for everyone,’ and people would say, ‘Are you crazy?’ But I grew up in this place in Japan, and that’s not in the heart of the people.”
Without the encouragement of Wright, “I almost gave up. And he said, ‘No, no, no. Don’t. Don’t give up. You haven’t seen anything. You’ve only seen Orange County. Don’t think that that’s the United States.’ ”
“Go to Harvard,” Wright told him. “I’ll write the letter.”
Shimizu was skeptical.
“I said, ‘I don’t think that Harvard will accept me, but since you asked, I will apply.’ I think that’s the only grad school I applied to, and I did it for his sake. I thought, ‘I’ll just do it and go home,’ ” he says. “And then I ended up there.”
One year after his 1985 graduation from Cal State Fullerton with a B.A. in Psychology, Shimizu completed his Ed.M. in Counseling and Consulting Psychology.
His first semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education put Shimizu in the classroom of psychological anthropologist Robert A. LeVine, who taught a course in cultural psychology using his own “Culture, Behavior and Personality” as the main textbook.
Shimizu and his mentor, Robert A. LeVine, who holds a copy of the book they co-edited.
LeVine – “another Bob” – quickly became Shimizu’s mentor; the two eventually co-edited “Japanese Frames of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development.”
“I thought he was like an academic Jesus, and I said, ‘I’ve gotta stay here and work and study with him,’ so I applied for the doctoral program,” Shimizu says.
Cherry blossoms bloom in Shimizu’s hometown of Takasaki, Japan.
“Basically, I was a disciple of him,” he adds, “and he must have been impressed by me, too: ‘Yeah, this guy’s coming out of community college and state university from California, and he’s recently from Japan, and he’s saying that Western psychology is not a human psychology. I like this student.’ – because that was his mission, too.”
Shimizu completed that Ed.D. in Human Development and Psychology in 1993 and, after three years as a post-doctoral fellow, came to NIU, choosing the academic life over a job offer from the World Bank: “I would have been a rich person in 10 years,” he says, “but I just wanted to publish. I had just finished my dissertation, and I think that’s where my heart was.”
At NIU, where he was hired to teach adolescent psychology to pre-service teachers, he continued to explore relationships between culture, individual experience and behavior, and how these processes are acquired and manifested in both informal and formal educational settings.
Eventually, he transitioned to teaching the psychological anthropology that electrified him so in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Nearly three decades later, Shimizu is proud of “working very hard to put out quality teaching and publication” and remains amazed of his status as “a foreigner teaching in a second language to middle-of-America students, and being appreciated by them, which gives me confidence.”
“The last 27-and-a-half years have been both a tremendous challenge and a learning experience, because I always felt like I’m just swimming against the stream because I’m that kind of person: Rebellious. Do something extraordinary. Do something different from everyone else,” he says.
“But I applaud myself because I have a tendency to be very, very critical of myself. It’s a Japanese thing, you know? I wasn’t raised to be like many of my students in how to be self-advocating,” he adds. “Ultimately, my tenure at NIU helped me to grow. I am grateful to all the students who took my courses and helped me to overcome my immature self-doubt and limitations, and molded me into someone who could be of use to them and to others.”
And the guitar?
Yep. He’s still playing, teasing deliciously bluesy and classic rock riffs from his electric six-string during live gigs or at home for online consumption.
