Conferences

The weekend before last found me down in Nagoya attending the annual conference of the Japanese Association of Language Teachers (JALT). This is probably the most important, or at least, well attended, conference for Japan based language teachers, though given the rather middle-aged fraternity feel of many of the participants, this tends to undermine the academic respectability it strives for. By this I mean the overpowering sense of American-led clubbiness that pervades the proceedings (Yanks make up by far the largest majority of members in JALT). Presentations are seen as a forum to interrupt the speakers with supposed 'witty' comments; the speakers often pander to their pals (or 'dudes') with in-jokes; there are constant interjections, often shouted, and questions invariably begin with "Well, in my case..." and end up as vanity proclamations on the inherent superiority of their way of doing things.
Now before this descends any further into an overly cynical exercise in Uncle Sam bashing, I should explain that such 'dudes' are in a minority, albeit, unfortunately, a painfully vocal minority. By assiduously choosing which presentations to attend, the worst excesses of this insidious back-slapping bonhomie can be easily avoided.
In fact, I attended a number of very good presentations, particularly in the area of bilingualism/biliteracy. For me the highlight of the conference was meeting Mary O'Sullivan from Ballinskelligs in Kerry, who turned out to be (a) a remarkably nice woman; and (b) Jack O'Connor's first cousin. So, no more ticket worries come All-Ireland Sunday.
Amongst some other observations of the conference were:
* The baffling popularity of black-white check fleck wool trousers. I know, I know, what the hell was I doing looking at the people's trousers, but the sheer, ubiquitous, monochrome awfulness of these trousers couldn't be avoided.
* The sweeping generalizations beloved of the plenary speakers, who take the same speech on a multi-country tour, in a one-size-fits-all approach to second language acquisition. Context is blithely ignored and pronouncements, carved from stone, are uttered with with an authority worthy of Moses. Any dissent is summarily dismissed with a condescending "The research clearly states..". Not in Japanese it doesn't. And yes, I'm talking about you, Marianne 'Moses' Nikolov.
* Nagoya is an unremarkably bland city. Bombed to bits back in World War II, it was subsequently entombed in concrete so that it now possesses all the distinctive charm of a large, FedEx distribution warehouse. At least Muroran has surf. Plus, it's the home of Toyota and as I drive a Mazda, I was never going to cut it much slack anyway.
* The Miso Katsu though, is sublime.
* Japanese presenters, or rather the four I saw, tend to like their statistical analyzes. A lot. So no presentation is complete without a baffling digression into their methods of analysis which invariably include correlation coefficients, r points, anova's, scatter regression and lots of numbers.
The results people, show me the results. I don't care how you got them, just tell me what they are and if they are in any way important.
* The breath taking brilliance of Japanese public transport. From our house here in Muroran to the conference venue in Nagoya city centre, I took public transport all the way. Bus, plane, train, no delays, everything smooth and efficient, arrivals and departures on time, to the minute, people, to the minute.

Stats

One of the nifty little features provided by those fine folk at blogger.com, home to this and countless other (equally unread) blogs, is the 'stats' function. This, as the name suggests, gives you statistical information on how many times your blog has been viewed (1209), what are the most popular entries (Festivals part 2), and, most entertainingly, who your audience are, or rather, what country they come from.

It makes for interesting and somewhat head-scratching reading.

From the statistics provided for the six month period from May to November of this year, Japan ranks first in audience numbers, as determined by the number of pageviews emanating from here, 464 in total. However, as most if not all of these can be accounted for by me either writing posts, editing posts, or satisfying my rampant ego by constantly checking to see if anybody has left any comments about my posts, it doesn't really count.

Next up is the United States with 213. Hello Ben, and perhaps Una too. There may be others, but like so many of their fellow country men and women, they are obviously the shy and retiring types.

In a somewhat embarrassing third place is Ireland, with 141 pageviews. Ostensibly home to my family and greatest number of friends, this relative indifference wounds. Or then again maybe I have hitherto not been aware of just how illiterate most of my Irish family and friends are. I'll try using less big words and maybe more pictures. Or get Cian to write the blog.

In fourth place is Germany with 54 views. I like Germany, the country, its people; I used to be able to speak the language passably and visited the country regularly during my formative years. But I am completely stumped as to who could possibly be reading this blog. I used to have some very good friends there, but I haven't, shamefully, been in touch with them for a long, long time, so I doubt it's them. Still, whoever you are, 'Wilkommen'.

In fifth place with 39 views is the UK. Obviously this is the Provost of Oxford University who is head hunting me for a Chair in Literature at All-Souls, albeit in a very leisurely and somewhat distracted manner, as befits an Oxford don.

Next up is, eh, Russia, with 30 pageviews. No doubt a considered geopolitical response to my insightful views on the 'Northern Territories Problem', an entry that has quickly become required reading for all post-graduate students as the prestigious Moscow Institute for Strategic Affairs.

Tied on 18 pageviews are, I kid you not, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. It would seem I am a bit of a blogging powerhouse in the Middle East.

Finally, again tied on 11 pageviews apiece, are Brazil and the Netherlands. Whilst I admire their legendary soccer teams of the 1970's, I have no idea why anybody from their should be reading this. Maybe it is the dream of some boy growing up in the cobblestoned streets of Amsterdam or the favelas of Rio de Jainero to play for Muroran Otani soccer team.

Or maybe, as with so many others, they just typed in the wrong address.

The Hokkaido Shimbun

You know things are getting extremely bad for Ireland when the Hokkaido Shimbun, or "De Paper", as it is known round these parts, starts running stories on just how awful our economy is. This morning I was told on page 8 that the country would soon have to be bailed out by the EU as fears grow that we are about to suffer the financial equivalent of base jumping sans parachute.

According to the hacks at 'De Paper', we will soon be going cloth cap in hand to the EU looking for close on 95 billion euro or resorting to putting the country up for sale on Yahoo auctions. The newspaper gamely attempted to translate that bail out figure into yen but ended up having to provide an advanced math tutorial just to convey the amount of zeros involved.

Reactions from people on the Hokkaido street canvassed by reporters from 'De Paper' showed equal dismay at how far, as a certain Aki 'Jumbo' Onigiri put it, "we'd fallen into the shite, like". For Mrs. Watanabe, it was the worst in a succession of cruel misfortunes to befall the country. "First that volcano, how you say, blew up in the country, and now this". When it was pointed her that was Iceland, she said "Good Buddha, not there too! And such a nice, whale-eating country as well".

When Mr. Teriyaki 'Call me Terry' Tsunamaiyo was asked about Ireland's misfortunes, he identified their problems as originating in the scrum, with their props not even being able to "push a fart out after an Indian curry". And, he added, "the lineout wasn't up to much either. Bunch of green clad faeries".

The Moment

In his book 'The Snow Leopard', Peter Matthiessen experiences a moment of Zen-like inspiration whilst high in the dusty plateau beyond the Himalayas in the Dolpo region of north-western Nepal.

He attempts to put this experience into words.

"My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce my heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret of true being. In this very breath that we now take lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openess and intelligence of the present". The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life."

Now, there's more than a faint whiff of cannabis spiced hippiness floating around this statement, and others like it in the book - elsewhere he has a number of digressions about his experiences with LSD. But such cynicism is deflated by Matthiessen's compelling honesty about both his search for this wisdom to constantly live in the 'now', and his equally constant weaknesses that prevent him from doing so.

But that's not my point.

It took Matthiessen more day thirty days of hard trekking beyond the Himalayas into the Tibetan plateau with only a fellow misanthrope and biologist, George Schaller, to attain this momentary insight. And this was back in 1973, when such insights, I reckon, were far easier to come by.

Try it today. In your office. Amidst your desk clutter and your email inbox or at home with nappies to be changed and the electrician coming around at 11 to fix the wiring on the toaster. The continual, irritating pressures of modern life don't allow for much communing with wolves and lammergeiers (a type of eagle, incidentally) and resplendent moments of piercing insight.

But you knew that already. And it's not my point either.

Farthest Dolpo in 1973 was, as Matthiessen puts it, 'like travelling back in time, a hundred years or more'. As their sojourn continued they were reduced to eating tsampas morning, noon and night, they couldn't get kerosene for love nor money, and had to cook using dried yak shite as fuel. They also used up all their candles which meant that when darkness fell, they had no light to read by, which, I suspect, for Matthiessen was probably the greatest hardship of all. The result is that he ended up thinking. And thinking a lot. About a lot of things. As there was feck all else to do. And, as I said, he had to trek thirty days in far flung Nepal in 1973, to achieve this.

So, at the end of this remarkable book, I came away, not enlightened, nor despairing of this life, but rather envious, envious of all that he experienced, and the knowledge that I never will.

And that is my point.

Imperial ambitions

Kunashir as seen from near Shibetsu. Before a month long fog came and obscured the view.

On Monday last, on his way home from some regional shindig in Hanoi, Dimitry Medvedev, President of Russia, decided to stop off at a small, isolated windswept island some 7000 kilometres from Moscow. He only spent a few hours on Kunashir, visiting a fish processing factory, a small housing development, and taking some photos of a tank. (There's not that many things to do on the island, and even less tourists come and do them). It rained the entire time he was there. Before night fell, he boarded the presidential jet and flew across six time zones back to Moscow. And by the time he settled down to his dinner that evening all diplomatic hell had broken loose.

Dimitry goes sightseeing.

Japan regards Kunashir and three other islands in the southern Kurils as their sovereign territory. They refer to the islands as the 'Northern Territories' and are included in all official geographical and political designations of Japan. Up until 1945 they were under Japanese control but then during the final dog days of World War II, the Soviets landed and, well, to the victors go the spoils.

The islands themselves aren't all that valuable, but the surrounding waters are home to some of the richest fisheries in the world.

(Click on the above image to enlarge it and stop straining your eyesight)

Anyway, when Dimitry dropped in to Kunashir he was stepping on all sorts of Japanese toes. Prior to his visit, no Soviet nor Russian leader had ever set foot on the islands (and probably for good reason too. Wikipedia describes their climate as "generally severe, with long, cold, stormy winters and notoriously foggy summers"); hitherto there had been ad hoc discussions on 'resolving' the islands' disputed status, and on going goodwill exchanges between the islands' Russian inhabitants and the city of Nemuro on the eastern tip of Hokkaido.

So Dimitry's jaunt was the diplomatic equivalent of two fingers to the Japanese, an unmistakable message of "feck off! these are our islands". This set off howls of protest here in Japan from all quarters. On the Monday of the visit, bus loads of somewhat startled city employees, fishermen, local activist groups and anybody else they could find, were driven from Nemuro out to Cape Nosappu, the closest point to the islands. There they gamely chanted their opposition to the visit, though their words were lost in the driving rain and howling wind that unmercifully lashed them, quickly rendering the protest into a battle against hypothermia (the pictures on that evening's news, the camera rain streaked and shuddering from the power of the wind, showed a number of sodden protestors dressed only in suits. Out there fervor gets beaten every time by the weather).

Down south in considerably warmer Tokyo, there was anxious nosies from the prime minister's office, the foreign minister expressed his displeasure and people on the streets around Shinjuku were canvassed for their opinions (though I am guessing a fair few needed reminding of just where Japan's Northern territories are). On Tuesday, the Japanese government recalled their ambassador from Moscow, which probably had Dimitry choking with laughter on his salmon roe (one of the several gifts he received from the fish processing factory).

What the whole episode has highlighted is:

(a) how lightweight Japan has become, diplomatically speaking. Prior to this Russian 'incident', there had been a similar flare up with China (and it's still smouldering) over the Senkaku islands, at the opposite, southern extreme of the Japanese archipelago, towards which the Chinese also adopted a noticeably bellicose approach, akin to "Ye startin, wha? Are ye? Ye lookin at me, are ye. Ye startin, yeah, ye startin. I'll feckin do you pal".

(b) how consistently, feckin shite the weather is in east Hokkaido. I lived (endured?) for three years in Shibetsu-cho, some 26km from Kunashir where Dimitry went walkabout, and I can personally testify to the 'long, cold, stormy winters and notoriously foggy summers' in the area. Indeed, so bad was the weather there, that my body rapidly evolved to adapt to the harsh climate, which is why I now have such a thick, lush growth of matted hair insulating my chest and weaving its way over my shoulders and down my back (and yes, I can write these graphic descriptions of out-of-control body hair because I am already married and thus don't have to worry about the consequences anymore).

Shibetsu, in August. At noon.