Season's Greetings

The above photograph is of a Christmas tree in what was once the centre of Minamisanriku town, in Miyagi, northern Japan. It has been a pretty traumatic year in this part of the world and for many the merriness of the season will be impossible to come by.

All the more reason then to be grateful for what you have rather, as so many here in Japan must do, grieving for what you have lost.

So this Christmas, if I can make one request of you all, it is to spread some of that gratitude around - lots of hugs and kisses and smiles and laughter; uncork and uncask not just the wine and spirits, but the finer feelings and glad fellowship of our better selves.

Let the grace shine through.

Merry Christmas

メリークリスマス

Nollaig shona daoibhse

Fröhliche Weihnachten

S Rozhdestvom Kristovym

Selamat Hari Natal

Sugeng Riyạyạ Natal lan Warsạ Énggal

University Rankings

There is a rather engaging article in the current edition of The New Yorker on the compilation of university ranking scales (which you can read here). Such scales are the curse of the academic classes as, the article deftly explains, what they purportedly measure - university ‘quality’ - isn’t what they measure at all. Although the piece is specifically about American universities, the wider concerns and criticisms it raises are pretty much valid for wider global ranking scales too.
Here in Japan such rankings are becoming more insidious and all defining in assessing what goes on in a university. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when this year’s Times Educational Supplement world university rankings were announced and only two Japanese institutions featured in the top 100. Even here in my little academic backwater such rankings are making their effect felt. At a recent faculty meeting we were implored to do more research, or rather, publish more research.
Now, this raises the rather contentious point of what a university is actually for: teaching and/or research. Traditionally the two have sat side by side, but in this new, quantitative world we work in, research, being measurable (number of papers published, grants received, funds received, etc.) takes priority over teaching.
But does this make for a better university? Not, I would contend, if you are a student. Research (yes, I am aware of the irony) has consistently shown that the two most important variables on students’ academic performance are class size and the quality of the teacher. And note that’s quality rather than qualifications.
Class size tends to be an administrative rather than a pedagogical decision with the result that I end up teaching writing to a class of 60 students. Or rather trying to teach as in those circumstances all you can do is hope that the lowest common denominator, linguistically speaking, doesn’t end up that low (“Me like pley basketboll”, etc.).
The relationship between teaching quality and teaching qualifications is even more tenuous (if it exists at all). I am, Lord save me, in the midst of a drag-down, bare-knuckle brawl with a ragged beast of a PhD, and I can safely say with hand over stressed heart that it will in no way make me a better teacher. Given the extraordinary amount of time it consumes I suspect it will end up making me a worse one.
But, as a doctorate program, it is not supposed to make me a better teacher. Rather, it is intended to make me a professional academic researcher; somebody who, on successful completion of the program (should that blessed day ever come), has contributed a very incremental increase in the sum of our knowledge of my particular field of study. (It’s language policy, by the way. Still your thrilling hearts).
Yet, should you, in your desire to flee Ireland and all things Euro, end up perusing the academic job listings for English teaching positions in Japanese universities, you will quickly notice that most applicants are required to have a “PhD in Applied Linguistics or a related field”. Read on further though, and you find in the job description that you will be expected to teach something along the lines of English conversation, English writing, TOEIC test English, and the ever nebulous General English I. No mention of research despite the fact that in specifying a PhD holder the university is, de facto, intent on hiring a professional researcher rather than a professional teacher.
(Note: I am not saying that the two are mutually exclusive; there may well be some correlation but there sure as statistical heck won’t be any causation.)
Nor, chances are, will the successful applicant find any particular need for her specific area of academic specialization. No classes of wide-eyed, eager undergraduates impatiently waiting to be inducted into the mysteries of Bauldauf’s seven point language-in-planning model. Instead she will be asking students to make pairs and, rather unrealistically, tell each other in a foreign language what they did over the winter holidays.
So why this demand for PhDs? Because they are a quantifiable, easy to measure and thus used in ranking universities. Simple as that.
Ahhh, tis the season to be cynical. Coming up tomorrow: why Santa should be downsized and the elves outsourced to Vietnam.

Cold Shutdown

In a remarkable display of political hubris, the Japanese government announced on Friday that they had successfully achieved a cold shutdown of the three stricken reactors at Fukushima. In a narrow, technical sense that was correct: the temperature inside what remains of the reactor cores is now consistently below 100 degrees celsius. And that is about it.

The term 'shutdown', purposefully chosen, implies something that has essentially being ended or switched off, but Fukushima is a couple of decades, if not generations, from that. The list of problems that still have to be overcome is equally long and daunting: removing the nuclear fuel from the bottom of the containment vessels it melted through; the small lake sized worth of radioactive fuel that has accumulated in and under the plant (and which continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean); the safe removal of the fuel rods from the top of reactor number 4 (and which have been consistently leaking radioactivity into the atmosphere for the past nine months - the roof got blown off in a hydrogen explosion and they have been exposed to the elements ever since).

Then there are what Donald Rumsfeld so memorably described as the "unknown unknowns". The nature and severity of the crisis at Fukushima is unprecedented; reference has been made to both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but that is only because they are, or rather were, all nuclear power stations. There the comparisons end as what occurred at Fukushima - three reactors suffering simultaneous meltdowns, the complete failure of all back-up systems, a series of explosions, and the vast (and still not yet fully quantified) dispersal of radioactive air and water over a wide area; is the sort of cumulative accident nobody imagined, or rather, wanted to imagine. And we still don't know how bad the situation is within the actual containment units - they are too dangerous yet for any form of human observation.

Basically everyone from the Government down through the TEPCO officials to the day laborers working on site, are contending with various levels of ignorance as to what needs to be done and more pertinently, how it will be done. They are, essentially, making it up as they go along.

So, the term 'cold shutdown' is more PR than science. Nor are the Japanese public buying it. The evening NHK news on Friday carried interviews with a number of evacuees from around the nuclear plant and all of them expressed a mixture of cynicism at the government's announcement and anger at the continued uncertainty surrounding their future.

Despite repeated pronouncements that it will take upwards of 40 years to fully shutdown the plant, no politician has come forward and stated the glaring obvious - that it will be a similar length of time before many of the displaced people from the area can return to their homes. Or rather, their descendants can return to their parents/grandparents homes. And who, in their right, cesium-free mind, would want to do that?

Birthday Boy

Cian celebrated his 5th birthday last Monday, though I am not too sure if you really can ‘celebrate’ a birthday on a Monday (as the photo above suggests). Nor was he all too happy about only being 5. So after a couple of minutes of five-dom he added another balloon and unilaterally declared himself 6. This is a much better age to be. In Hokkaido when you are 6 you can vote, drive a car, get served alcohol in a bar, gamble at a casino, carry a concealed weapon and attend elementary school. You can also do all of these at the elementary school too.
Or so Sanae tells me.
Anyway, Cian was 5, sorry, 6 on Monday and we got him a big creamy sponge cake with lots of strawberries with a side dish of strawberries and some strawberry juice to wash it all down. He ate a slice then shot the rest of it up with his hitherto concealed 9mm Glock automatic. No he didn’t but yes, just one slice. Mammy has had to eat the rest of the cake, though Cian was kind enough to eat all the strawberries first. Mammy and her waistline are not happy about this, not happy at all.
That’s the problem with Monday birthdays.

The Promised Land

A sort of tangential addendum to the previous post: In his song 'The Promised Land', Bruce Springsteen sings of a 'rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert'. It's a wonderful line, pithily capturing the epic essence of the American West. That said, I would argue that even Bruce's brilliance as a lyricist would be hard pressed to bestow some sort of similar epic quality on the N7 through Offaly.
Anyway, all this is a very roundabout way of showcasing a rather good remix of the Boss's "I'm on Fire" which I recently heard on RnaG's 'An Taobh Tuathail' program. So for you, lucky readers, some sublime sounds. You can listen to it here.

Journeys

Way back in the day before I was the man (though in the process of becoming 'An Fear'), every so often we would all be packed in to my father's beige Ford Cortina and set off on the epic, 6-feckin-hours-across-bogger-country trip to our grandparents house in north Kerry. This journey through the rolling badlands of Laois and Offaly was only made made tolerable by lunch. We'd stop at the Tower restaurant at the Esso station on the outskirts of Roscrea and there eat our body weight in chips and chicken. Then we'd force feed ourselves jelly and ice cream. Stunned in to silence by all the carbohydrates, we'd spend the remainder of the journey slack-jawed and stupified in the back seat. Though beyond Limerick as the roads deteriorated, we'd come close to reintroducing some of that chicken back into the world as the Cortina bucked and bounced its way towards Foynes. I was put in mind of this on my recent trip back to Ireland with Cian. For him potholes have given way to air turbulence, Laois and Offaly have become Russia (though I'd swear you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart), and the longed for stopover is at the Starbucks in Amsterdam airport; or rather, the Starbucks at Amsterdam airport overlooking the main runway!!!!! No chicken and chips though. All muffins and chapatis and other foreign shite.