Dinner last night

Towhata-sensei took us visitors out to dinner last night to a very small out-of-the way restaurant. I think he wanted to get us all together before we leave and while he was actually in Japan. He's probably one of the busiest people I've ever met, but also one of the nicest. He's one of the top earthquake engineers in Asia, if not the world, and he still manages to impress you with how down to earth he is. Topics at dinner last night ranged from the resignation of the Japanese prime minister to his favorite cartoons. He's apparently a big Flintstones and Looney Toons fan. Looney Toons was a good segue into classic music. He explained that he knew the entire William Tell overture by the age of five from watching Road Runner and Wylie Coyote. When I brought up Spike Jones, the composer, and began humming "The Merry Go Round Brokedown" he picked up humming right where I left off. Also interesting is that he teaches many classes in both Japanese and English, at the same time. He just translates everything as he goes.

Anyway, the point of this blog was to relate a story about his recent trip to Iran. Before going on this trip to Iran for a conference and for a bit of historic earthquake damage sight seeing, he convinced another professor (the one I met at Kyoto University) that he should grow a mustache, because in the Middle East men should have facial hair. This was actually a joke by Towhata-sensei, because these days in Iran there is not much difference if you have a mustache or not.

So on this trip to Iran, they visited Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran. They met with the civil engineering faculty and saw the faculty photos. Apparently Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a doctorate in civil engineering and was a professor at the university. His picture is hanging up and beneath it it says "Assistant Professor." So Towhata-sensei asked the department head why they didn't promote Ahmadinejad. After all, he had accomplished so much, he was governor and is now president. The department head's response was that he did not have enough publications.

I found this story really funny and I'm hoping other people will see the same humor in it that I see. Towhata-sensei went further to explain that in Iran many of the well-respected international civil engineering journals are not considered as being rigorous enough in their reviews of papers. Some of these journals are reviewed by people not in the specific field of the paper. No, in Iran they believe that the journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers are the best place to get a paper published, since reviews are done by people in the field of the paper's topic.

Towhata-sensei joked further that maybe ASCE should reject some of Ahmadinejad's papers and send them back as "provisionally accepted" as long as he promises to terminate the nuclear research in Iran.