Turin Winter Olympics

Japan has had a surprisingly poor show at the Turin winter Olympics and I think a lot of my students are in shock. Thank god the young woman won a gold in figure skating the other day. The whole nation breathed a sigh of relief. I don't care so much about medal counts (of course I'm happy if people from my country win some though) but it is a good opportunity to get the pulse of a nation. Hmm, i just reread this blog and noticed a lot of cliches, oh well, i usually write these between lunch and taking a leak before lessons, what do you expect?

Until now, my students and friends have been uncharacteristically silent about the Olympics. usually they beam and brag about how great, masterful and cool the winner was or how terrible and biased the foreign judge was who ruled against a participant. A few are impressed by the US results, surprisingly surprised. Huh? What does that mean? A lot of them say "Wow the US is doing great" and seem surprised. American sports pundits say it's actually a subpar games for the US but I think because of the dearth of medals and anything to talk about on the Japan side, my students have finally noticed that other countries win medals too.

One person I know had a revealing attitude. She was let down, not at the contestants who despite the lack of medals everybody thinks are doing a great job, but they feel kind of lied to by "the media." Watching the mass media here is an exercise in group hypnosis. Every channel overwhelmes you with the same narrowly focused hype. So my japanese friends feel kind of lied to by the powers that be that kept telling them how great the japaese teams were, how they were gonna clean up and come home with a dozen medals (instead of 1.) So my Japanese friends have the same stunned silence of a people lied to by thier leaders that told them their troops were infallible and we were winning the war and we have the highest standard of living etc. Same kind of feeling, though fortunately not nearly as tragic as my bad example.

The aforementioned student pointed out how before the games the US sports magazine Sports Illustrated estimated the various medal counts of the various nations by actually looking at contestants from other lands... Quite a concept. By thier reckoning, they expected japan to win a couple of medals, maybe one each of gold silver & bronze. The japanese reaction was one of indignation: how dare this foreign news magazine insult our athletes, what could they possibly know, they are not Japanese and so on. It turns out they, SI, were on the mark.

The student went on to say that Japan is "like a frog hding in the grass" that is, it has a case of tunnel vision.