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I interviewed an Egyptian Professor of the Department of Sociology at Cairo University who graduated from the department in 1976, the same year that Koike claims to have graduated. He says that in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts at Cairo University there are about 150 students in one year and every student has to write a graduation thesis. The whole year in the fourth year is spent planning projects, gathering materials, and conducting interviews to write the thesis. The theme of his thesis was "Monkey trainers as an occupational group" and it was 80-90 pages long in Arabic. Other students chose topics such as education, social control, the slums of Cairo, criminology, etc for their thesis. The fourth year is a tough year because, besides writing the graduation thesis, you have to conduct fieldworks, and take about a dozen lectures and exams.
According to the professor, it takes a year during the fourth year to write up the thesis. The academic year at Egyptian state universities begins in October and ends in June the following year, which means that students practically have nine months to collect materials and write 80-90 pages in Arabic on top of regularly attending classes for 12 or so subjects. Writing the thesis is a pretty hard work and there is no way one could forget about writing it. The fact that Koike publicly mentions that she did not write a thesis is remarkable as it indicates that she did not graduate (or did not get her graduation documents through regular route) from Cairo University. There is no mention about Koike conducting a field work or writing her graduation thesis in the statments from the flatmate in "Fake CV".
Koike has also given no clear explanation about what she studied at Cairo University. On the other hand, the aforementioned Egyptian professor candidly said "I am interested in sociology and anthropology, so I studied social change, health, disease and culture, social anthropology, urban, rural and Bedouin family systems near the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and how to name children".
Was she really attending lectures?
I have a fundamental question whether Koike was regularly attending lectures at Cairo University.
In Koike’s book "Furisode Climbing the Pyramid" she dedicates 49 pages (from page 10 to page 58) to describe about her first year at Cairo University. However, there is no mention of what happened from the second year and suddenly on page 59 Koike states that she passed the final exam in her fourth year and was able to graduate.
As mentioned before, in the fourth year, there are thesis and exams that need to be passed for a student to be awarded a degree. So it must be quite a challenge for students and there should be all sorts of memories that are hard to forget.
But there is no such mention at all in Koike’s book. Instead it describes that during her third summer in Cairo, she visited Lebanon where she "had a nice holiday". She also mentions that during that summer, she made four visits to the northern Egyptian port city of Alexandria to pick up a second-hand Fiat she bought in Lebanon. She goes on to describe how she negotiated with customs officials "using tears as her weapon". You do not get the impression that she attended lectures properly from her second year in Cairo. Still, Koike somehow claims to have graduated in four years despite failing the first grade.
Cairo University (AP Photo/AFLO)In fact, when I spoke to people who were at Cairo University at the same time as Koike, they all said they had barely seen her at university.
