Something Helmut Morsbach has been dreaming of for many years is about to become reality.
Nine years ago, he was appointed professor of intercultural communication in the Faculty of Economics, Shiga University. He and his wife, Kazue, moved there, to Hikone on Lake Biwa. Their daughter, Erika, was not yet born. "Now, at the age of 63, I am retiring from Shiga, and going to settle in my wife's hometown of Akishima, near Tachikawa. I am initiating 'Seminars for Intellectual Enjoyment,' that I have been dreaming of for a long time," he said.
Morsbach is a German who was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He was still a baby when his father, a doctor, decided to take his family to Germany, where he would acquire further specialization. "We were stuck in wartime Germany until 1947," Morsbach said. "Then we returned to Cape Town, and I went to the trilingual German School. The same teacher would give one class in German, the next in English and the next in Afrikaans." Completely fluent in these three languages, Morsbach was also proficient in Dutch.