Tag Archives: Finland

Not Fasth Enough

Posted by on May 16, 2011 6 comments

This spring has been a good spring for Finland, and me, when it comes to ice hockey. Naturally, I’ve also experienced the frustration of being on the other side of the world when all the good things have happened. Last night, the Finnish ice hockey team won the IIHF World Championship for only the second time ever, after losing finals in six different championship tournaments (Olympics and World Cup included) between 1995, year of the last championship, and 2011. In late April, HIFK, the only group of burly men I’ve ever called myself a fan of, won the Finnish championship after a 12-year drought. You had to be there. I fucking wasn’t. And as an additional bonus that only I give two shits about, we will get at least one Finn as a Stanley Cup champion in June. Sounds like a moderately good hockey year for Finland. But let’s get back to the IIHF World Championship.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dll9THt4Vgs

After a very satisfying win over the Swedes in the final, the country erupted. A score of 6-1 helped right all wrongs that our Western neighbor had inflicted upon us in the rink during the years, and people partied all over Finland until dawn. This shows how much unparalleled joy was drawn from winning, and serves as a premise to the following rant.

Äbäwäbä näin kolmelta aamuyöstä

What really grinds my gears is that some people feel an obligation to criticize the significance of the game, of the tournament, and of the victory. They somehow feel it is important to analyze ice hockey from an international perspective, and point out how this actually means nothing and everybody should calm down and go to sleep.

It’s true that ice hockey is a relatively insignificant sport internationally. Less than a dozen countries realistically compete for the championship, which, to trivialize it even further, is held every single year. In addition to this, the best players in the world have often little interest or possibility to join the tournament. The NHL playoffs are still ongoing, with arguably the best teams and players still competing in North America. Even players whose teams never made the playoff phase are either injured or find it very difficult to find motivation to play in a yearly tournament after playing a season just short of 100 games (pre-season included). Even Teemu Selänne has stated that the reasons given when opting out of national team duty are often just excuses. These are the facts. I don’t argue against facts. I argue against idiots.

Some besserwissers, often Finnish football fans, feel the need to point out how, objectively, we should not give a fuck about the IIHF World Championship. “Why do Finns get so excited about a sport that only a few countries play?” “Stop the hype, the tournament is worthless!” “There are so many sports that we neglect and instead concentrate on stuff that nobody else in the world cares about, like ice hockey, ski jumping and javelin throw!” I remember my basketball coach 15 years ago telling me that there are more registered ballers in Spain than there are hockey players in the world. He made the statement to prove a point about basketball being meaningful, whereas hockey supposedly wasn’t. I disagree.

What's not to like? © Mika Ranta / Helsingin Sanomat

Choo choo, here comes the clue train, last stop is you

Sports are not something that people can forcibly try to enjoy just because they’re internationally popular. Might as well tell a Finn not to enjoy salmiakki (or even better, Salmiakkikossu) because nobody else in the world does either. Countries and cultures have their own traditions, games they’ve played for decades or centuries and that the locals happen to be interested in, no matter how much they are bashed on the head with ridiculous slogans to the contrary.

Should all countries strive to only play and follow the internationally important activities, like football? And how do you measure importance, anyway? By prominence per country times amount of countries? By the amount of money circulating in the major leagues? By the amount of registered players worldwide? I bet cricket and ping pong would score pretty high on the latter. I haven’t really heard anyone complain how Finns don’t concentrate more on cricket.

And let’s suppose all governments made an effort to promote sports directly relative to their worldwide notoriety. Smallish, nationally and culturally relevant but internationally obscure sports (sumo anyone?) would slowly fade, and in the end we would be left with football & pals. How exactly would this achieve anything positive?

In general, I hate the widespread football vs. ice hockey mentality going on in Finland. Unlike some, I fail to see it as a zero-sum game. Why would enjoying ice hockey somehow be detrimental to football? Football is big, but we suck at it. Ice hockey is small, but we’re good at it. Personally, I like both games. Promoting football in Finland is certainly something I’d like to see increase. However, the key to that certainly is not to cry a river over everything ice hockey.

History will be made. © Yle

I know the world is global and international, but ignoring all locality in a field such as sports is beyond ludicrous. Finns are often internally accused of trying to suck up to other, larger countries and constantly wondering how others see us. Isn’t downplaying the importance of ice hockey, to us a nation, just an extension of this sycophancy? “Let’s play what everybody else plays, then people will respect us!” How about we just keep on playing a game that others don’t care about and be proud of it. Never mind the tournament, never mind the players, in 2011 our team won!

People get emotionally involved in sports even though they’re not actually responsible for any of the events that unfold on the field. The first purpose when following sports is to draw enjoyment from something that other people achieve. Rational thinking is thrown out of the window anyway. Why should we, as a nation, feel guilty about getting excited over a world fucking championship? Oh, wrong sport. And wrong championship. And too excited. Who the fuck decides these things? Despite all its shortcomings as a sports event, winning the IIHF World Championship Tournament is not entirely without merit, and even if it were, the only thing that matters is that people care about it. Watching sports, getting excited by sports and celebrating when your team wins is not a novel concept. If you can’t accept that, just pull a hood over your head and flee to the mountains.

-Antti

The author is a dead sea monkey and ice hockey enthusiast

Japan and Finland, Worlds Apart

Posted by on April 15, 2011 3 comments

The title is not a reference to the British boyband of the 90s, just to be clear.

I had long wanted to rant a bit about language education in Japan, and the Japan Blog Matsuri provided me with a great excuse to do that. I’m not a native English speaker myself, and although I’ve been bombarded by foreign languages from a very young age, I can still somewhat relate to the difficulties the Japanese encounter when learning English, currently their most important foreign language.



There is a pretty stark contrast to language education and learning between Japan and Finland. Although Japan employs a variety of native English speakers as teachers, some of which operate on very different bases, the system as a whole, from what I’ve seen, is still in a lamentable state. I spent one academic year at the Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka studying Japanese. That’s not the point here, though. One local I befriended at the time told me that Kansai Gaidai was a great school for foreigners, much less so for the Japanese. Judging from the results, this statement proved very true.

A large amount of the Japanese graduating from Gaidai work hard for the purpose of becoming English teachers for Japanese kids. The university also boasts the highest amount of foreign student throughout Japan, somewhere around 500 people during an academic year, whilst also encouraging intercultural and interlinguistic interaction very vividly. Most of the students keen on becoming teachers had spent at least a year abroad in an English speaking country and had been studying the language since primary school.

Open Campus Day at Gaidai, Finnish Booth

Despite all this, the Japanese students graduating from Gaidai with a level of English sufficient for speaking properly, let alone teaching it, were about as numerous as my posts which omit the word fuck. Written grammar was flawed, spoken output stuttering and lacked in confidence. I won’t even go into the puronanshieeshon part. Clearly the problem is deep, and very topical; some international firms such as Rakuten are already moving towards making English the company’s official language by the end of 2012.

In Europe, language education, at least in schools I have frequented, has been performed by extremely competent people. This not only means that they don’t make shameful grammatical mistakes, but also that they possess a natural native English accent (often Oxford or General American English). It would seem logical that hearing the right sounds would make it easier for kids to reproduce the right sounds. Furthermore, speaking up and having conversations are both encouraged in Finnish schools from a young age.

In Japan, the standard persists that homeroom teachers are responsible for teaching English at the primary school level. Arguably, this would be the most important time for Japanese children to develop an affinity for speaking a foreign language correctly. The homeroom teachers themselves have admitted to not being confident in their English teaching and feeling burdened by the task to an extent where they would rather see someone specialized take care of it.

Suddenly, Engrish! (Okinawa, March 2009)

Considering Japan has an incredible amount of private English schools and English conversation schools aimed at all ages populated by native speakers as teachers, I find it weird that standard schools are not able to recruit that kind of specific talent. There is a huge supply of inexperienced native English teachers willing to come to Japan to perform the tasks that homeroom teachers would prefer to avoid, as shown by the pool of people that get cut from the JET programme every year. Due to current teachers being incompetent, they do not have the necessary tools to engage the children in interactive learning, and the revolutionary system of “repeat after me with the same horrendous accent” is a common and favored approach.

Naturally, the completely differing writing system adds a handicap that is not possible for me to entirely fathom. Yet, I do see the need to diminish or completely remove katakana-based phonetics from the English teaching system at a relatively early phase. One highly learned Gaidai student whom I talked to a few years ago admitted to reading the katakana versions of songs when singing English karaoke. Et tu, Brute? A 20-year-old English major? I fell into a coma at that moment. How are students ever supposed to learn proper pronunciation if they keep on using a writing system that is suited for English output about as much as a gaijin is suited to become a Shinto priest.

Japan faces a great challenge in trying to upgrade the general English proficiency of the workforce at the rate that international markets and local companies require. One thing is certain, though. Adult education and English conversation cafes are not the answer in the long run. Something has to be done about the way children are educated.

-Antti

P.S. Thanks for hosting the April 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri go to NihongoUp

A Night at the Embassy

Posted by on April 9, 2011 No comments

The Finnish Embassy in Tokyo organized a small event on the 9th of April to allow for Finnish citizens to get together and discuss the sphere of confusion in which Japan has been engulfed during the past month. By being in attendance, I was reminded of quite a few details I had managed to forget as well as able to get access to some novel data.

The event can be divided into three subjects and speakers:

-Finnish Ambassador Jari Gustafsson talked about general risks, communication, traveling, living in Tokyo and explained some of the mechanisms behind the decisions that the embassy had taken in the most hectic weeks after the main quake of March 11.

-Heikki Mäkipää, Head of the Finnish Institute in Tokyo, tapped into his knowledge in geology to give us in-depth information on the current situation concerning possible aftershocks, geological causes for the earthquake and where to turn to for further information.

-The Head of Tekes Japan, Reijo Munther, an engineer with a strong background in nuclear reactors (and cooling systems thereof), shared his views on the Fukushima plant, the imminent dangers it represents as well as put general radiation levels in a Finnish context.

Concerning the media

The ambassador was quick to point out that which has been repeated over and over on the internet for weeks, yet it was still nice to hear it from an official source:  the Japanese are more used to handling earthquake situations and have reacted to the situation very calmly, as opposed to foreign countries who… well… haven’t. In Finland in particular, where earthquakes never reach a magnitude a human being could perceive, merely the mention of an earthquake throws news outlets into scandal-seeking mode. A couple of questions directed at the ambassador today concerned the farce of Finns hoarding iodine pills and the notion that small local newspapers in Viitasaari supposedly knew more about the embassy’s crisis plans than the embassy itself.

Mr. Gustafsson had been in Finland when the quake first struck, and spent the whole day answering different media about the event. He had firsthand experience on how every medium that day was striving to discover the one word that would allow them to publish the most fear mongering story available. On the same morning, one expert source had inadvertently blurted out the term China Syndrome, which had soon been taken out of context and diffused everywhere by overly zealous news outlets who should be washed down the sink and shit-listed.

Concerning communications and traveling

The Finnish Embassy is still discouraging non-essential travel to the Tokyo area, but these limitations are likely to loosen within the following weeks or months.

When all else fails, obsolete technology is here to the rescue.

In the context of mobile phone networks, March 11 indicated that the loss of a mere 10% of network capacity renders mobile phone calls useless in the case of a disaster. If a strong aftershock were to strike Tokyo, this would certainly happen. As experienced during the main earthquake, however, mobile data was still widely available and for example Skype calls via mobile phones worked normally. Similarly, although normal home phone lines experienced issues and were sometimes cut, public phones were devoid of complications, leading to a suggestion for everyone to arm themselves with phone cards.

Finnair remains one of the very few European airlines offering direct flights to Narita airport without the need for crew changes. This means that 3 daily flights from Japan (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka) to Helsinki are constantly rolling, so were the living conditions in Japan to take a turn for the worst, a way out would most likely remain available.

Concerning aftershocks (Kuaket pois!)

The danger and risks evoked by aftershocks were something I hadn’t properly grasped until now. The area affected by the shocks has been constantly reviewed as the epicenters of new aftershocks spread and now covers an area 600kms long practically covering all of Honshu. This means that devastating aftershocks are a possibility anywhere from Tokyo to Hokkaido. A possibility, not an eventuality.

Can you hear the cry of the planet?

Mr. Mäkipää introduced two scenarios prepared by international seismology experts; these scenarios were labeled the hopeful scenario and the negative scenario. In the first scenario, strong aftershocks come to a relatively quick end (obviously this scenario took a huge blow with the 7,1 magnitude aftershock on the 7th of April) and the situation soon calms down as the accumulated pressure in the lithosphere subsides.

The negative scenario concerned the possibility of a significant aftershock with a magnitude above 7, which in the worst-case scenario could hit directly south of the Tokyo area, causing massive damage. Regardless of location, a strong aftershock would definitely cause new problems to the already damaged infrastructure and dangerously stretched rescue and sheltering resources of Eastern Japan. Although there is a possibility for an occurrence of this nature, the probability was not discussed beyond the perspective that it will diminish with time. General guidelines urged us to keep this in mind until summer, asking for increased awareness and vigilance in the near future. While there is no imminent danger, the situation is by no means over.

Concerning radiation

Mr. Munther had a very relaxed approach towards all of the radiation concerns that have been presented up until now. He maintained that the major radiation risk still only concerns a very limited area near the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors while also admitting that no real breakthrough in cooling the reactors had been reached during the past 3 weeks. At the same time, the personnel working on repairing the plant is growing tired, which causes some concern.

He also admitted that until the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake he had been under the belief that the 7 meter-high anti-tsunami wall as well as having the emergency cooling pumps 20 meters above sea level would combine to be an adequate level of precaution at the Fukushima plant. History proved otherwise. The plant is now essentially future scrap metal, but precarious cooling and repairing efforts will need to go on for months, if not years.

Looks pretty good right now

Concerning the tap water scare in Tokyo at the moment, he made a couple of interesting comparisons. First of all, the limits for water radiation levels in Japan are really low compared to European standards. The limit for drinking water is 300 becquerels/kg in Japan while it is set far higher in Finland at 500 becquerels/kg. He demonstrated the disparity by stating that water from drill wells in Finland often reaches as high as 460 becquerels/kg. According to this analysis, when tap water in Tokyo exceeded 100 becquerels/kg (Japanese limit judged safe for children to drink) a couple of weeks back, it would have remained “very good drinking water.”

There is still good reason to keep a reasonable amount of water reserves at home, not due to radiation, but potential aftershocks. Mr. Mäkipää emphasized that in the event of a strong aftershock, it is crucial to stop drinking tap water immediately until a damage assessment has been made. This is due to the possibility of pipes breaking and sewage mixing with drinking water.

As an interesting anecdote, the scarcity of bottled water in Eastern Japan is reportedly not only related to the lack of water itself. One important bottle cap factory in Sendai was destroyed in the original quake, leading to a 30% loss of capacity in the entire Japanese bottle cap industry.

All of the statements in the post (with the exception of my media bashing) are direct translations of comments provided by Finnish government officials, although in a more relaxed, informal environment. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of any of the above.

-Antti

Shangri La

Posted by on March 18, 2011 2 comments

The situation seems to have calmed down a bit, which is a very welcome change considering I’m exiled in a city that hardly even acknowledges that there is something abnormal happening elsewhere in Japan.

It is quite difficult to write about a general area of Osaka as well as a hotel that I have covered at least twice before during my adventures in the Far East. Besides, the past few days have been incredibly calm and dull, and I have lately come to realize by following different media that readers actually crave for catastrophes and tragedy, which unfortunately I am currently not able to provide from my safe haven.

One of the first things to came to mind after arriving in Osaka was that it beats Tokyo on many levels. The objective reasons I was able to identify were that Osaka is far less westernized, less crowded and just more likable in general. Having spent one of the best years of my life in the area can also affect the sentiment. Particularly the Shin-Imamiya-Namba-Nipponbashi area is a place that is more reminiscent of Finland than anything I’ve found in Tokyo so far: a relatively quiet downtown area mainly constituted of alcoholics.

On Wednesday I attempted to apply for a re-entry permit, the receipt of which would have made my life a hell of a lot easier if I had had to leave the country in haste. Unfortunately, to get a re-entry permit one needs to know the exact departure date, rendering it impossible to really get one just in case. In addition, I would need an alien permit first, something I need to apply for in my area of residence, i.e. at the Nerima Ward Office in Tokyo. Bref, le plan est  à l’eau.

I extended my stay here for two more days on Thursday morning, but had to initially check out and check in to a different type of room on that very day because the original one was not available anymore. Considering I had been skyping home to soothe my parents until 5:30 in the morning, the checking out at 10 was not my favorite moment of the week. Not as bad as some other checkouts, though. I then proceeded to wander outside for several hours enjoying the marvelous supplies of Den Den Town before returning to the hotel, this time to a Japanese type room instead of the previous Western type.

Attempting to adhere to several requests to retrieve some potassium iodide pills, also just in case, I studied the indispensable Japanese nomenclature and gathered enough courage to go inquire about said preventive medicine in a nearby drusgstore. Pros: they understood what I was looking for on the first try. Cons: They laughed at me. It turns out that the government possesses the whole supply of said pills, and the drugstore obaa-san emphasized that I should definitely be okay if I stay around these parts.

As this post is incredibly mundane already, let’s cover some other boring topics. I’ve been enjoying the furo at the hotel daily and also come to realize that this place, at a price equivalent to about 20 euros a night, provides me with a level of comfort that is perfectly acceptable. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone on their honeymoon, but for the sake of sleeping and using a computer it’s more than fine. The beer vending machine downstairs might add to this warm and fuzzy feeling as well. Let me put it this way; if Hotel Chuo feels inadequate, then you’re spending too much time in your room instead of experiencing Japan.

Extended weekend coming up because my birthday on Monday is a public holiday in Japan. This traces back to the late 70’s when I saved Emperor Showa from crocodiles during a rafting trip in northeastern Australia. True story.

-Antti