A quick trip to Yeosu

I went to Yeosu last month for two days. I had heard many good things about the city, which is hosting Expo 2012 later this year. Yeosu, compared to other places by the sea, is not much of a tourist destination, but that might be one of the best reasons to visit. Of course, the Expo will change everything, creating what is sure to be a cluster of awkwardly-designed shiny, stainless steel buildings lying around the city.

Yeosu is something of a nightmare to get around due to its coastline and the mountains in the background, but that also makes it quite beautiful. Compared to other cities of the same size, there aren’t as many hotels, pensions or other Compared to other cities of the same size, there aren’t as many hotels or pensions in Yeosu, particularly not in the city centre. When you get a good view of the city from the sea, you get to see old, squat buildings rising in the distance, without many newer ones.

Change is coming, if you look the opposite way at Dolsan-do, the deceptively large island connected to Yeosu by the famously colourful Dolsan bridge, the calm nighttime view is shattered during the day by mounds of construction. Dolsan-do is excellent for two of my favourite hobbies, sashimi and hiking. You can take a bus from the downtown across the bridge to the Sashimi Town (돌산회타운, clumsily translated in a few places as “Dolsan Korean Sashimi Centre”) or set off on a hike across the island, which could take about 30 km.

Yeosu is a pretty good place to eat, though I suppose that it helps if you like seafood. I found the food fresher than in other places, particularly the kimchi, though the kimchi in Jeollanam-do seems to be something of an acquired taste. Grilled eel is very popular in Yeosu, which is great, because I love eel. There is a great cluster of restaurants in a planned restaurant district by the Yi Sunshin Square and, in a touch that would be welcome elsewhere, the names of the restaurants are not translated, but rather transliterated. So, instead of referring to that “red seafood place”, you would actually learn its name.

Compared to nearby Suncheon, Gwangju, Mokpo or even Boseong, I don’t think Yeosu has as much to do, but I would rank it with Boseong as being one of those great places in Jeollanam-do where you can go relax, do nothing and enjoy yourself. Boseong, of course, is far more rural and itself is something of a one-hit wonder with its green tea fields. Jeollanam-do itself is my second-favourite part of Korea to travel to after the mountains of Gangwon-do. If you just want to get as far from the Seoul area as possible, some part of Jeollanam-do is typically a better, quieter choice than somewhere in Gyeongsang.



When you travel, travel in class by Mugunghwa train.

This man spent about 30 minutes on the train shouting obscenities at politicians and people from Jeolla. Here he is engaging the poor ticket seller, shown trying to keep herself from laughing, in some asinine conversation, while somebody with an actual question comes forward impatiently.

A meal of grilled eel for breakfast.

Dolsan bridge at night.

Book #2: Arrival City

Arrival City is a book written by Doug Saunders, a writer for the Globe and Mail, by far the best newspaper in Canada. From what I knew about the book before I bought it, I imagined it to be a rather standard look into how cities around the world, particularly the developing world, are growing at a tremendous rate.

However, it turned out to be a very well-researched and written book about development, immigration, economics and cities. Calling it the best book about cities since Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as one review on the cover did, might be too much, but the book is certainly very insightful. As such, it is well worth the $15-18 it might cost you.

First, when Saunders uses the term 'arrival city', he is referring to a city or a neighbourhood within a city that is used by migrants to launch their lives in that city. The prototypical example would be the immigrant-heavy neighbourhoods of cities in northeastern North America from a century ago, but more salient examples today might be the Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where migrants from rural China come to gain a foothold in the city.

The characteristics of a successful arrival city are somewhat counter-intuitive. It is okay, Saunders writes, that an immigrant-heavy neighbourhood is poor, because it is likely that it is a revolving door, with immigrants who have established themselves moving out to other neighbourhoods, to be replaced by new migrants. A classic example might be the Toronto suburb of Malton, where I'm from. I regularly meet people who used to live there, or know someone who used to live there, but now live elsewhere, which is usually a more prosperous second-ring suburb. Malton continues to struggle, but as long as people don't live there permanently, it is fulfilling its function as an arrival city.

In many ways, though, Saunders would consider Malton to be a failure. The downtown immigrant slums of a century ago worked better as arrival cities because their density allowed for greater business and the development of networks and communities that led to establishment and success within mainstream Canadian society. Malton, by contrast, is more like the Parisian suburb of Les Pyramides in this sense. Les Pyramides, which played its role in the 2005 immigrant riots in France, is a low-density post-war suburb that stifles the sort of mingling and networking that arrival cities hopefully foster.

On the other hand, the exodus of chain stores from Malton has led to the establishment of independent South Asian businesses, the establishment of which is a typical hallmark of success. Stores selling Indian clothes, Pakistani kebabs and Chinese groceries are certainly a more hopeful sign than those same immigrants working for minimum wage in somebody else's business.

Toronto's immigrant-heavy suburbs are an anomaly not just for their low density, but also because most of those who live there come from cities. The typical immigrant, according to Arrival City, is actually somebody from a village, not a city. It is also true that countries rarely immigrate, but rather villages, regions and provinces. Consider that about 1% of Canada speaks Punjabi, but only about 2% of India, thanks to the large number of Sikhs who have come to Canada. Consider that Westerners constantly differentiate between Cantonese and Mandarin thanks to the heavy migration of Hong Kongers around the world, even though there are about 15-20 speakers of Mandarin for every speaker of Cantonese.

By far the most interesting and the most significnat argument Saunders makes is that the shift in the world's population from a mostly rural one to a mostly urban one is inevitable, dramatic and highly desirable. In 1950, 70% of the world lived in villages. A few years ago, this was reduced to 50%. By 2050, only about 30% of the world will be rural, meaning that an extra 2-3 billion people will live in the world's cities. While this presents images of horrendously polluted, over-crowded cities, the reality is that life in the city is better in just about every way.

Saunders is, of course, not talking about having great Thai restaurants and independent bookstores, but rather, things like poverty, food security, life expectancy and virtually every indicator of human wellness. While governments, academics and international organizations have spend decades romanticizing rural existence, it is a grinding, brutal, and dangerous existence to which sharing a tiny apartment with a dozen other people is preferable (and we know this because people vote with their feet).

The fact that China went from being about 25% urban to being 50% urban in the last 20 years probably has something to do with the fact that more than half a billion people have climbed out of poverty in that same period. The problems of life in Chinese cities are as immense as they are well-documented, even in English, but then, the 150 million rural migrants in China have clearly shown that it is a life worth living.

The lesson to be learned by the world is how to help urban migrants establish themselves in the city, China's crisis is due to its hukou system, not how to improve rural life or how to encourage people to stay there. As I learned from reading about why coffee farmers make so little even though coffee is expensive, there are simply too many people growing too much coffee; the answer is for far fewer people to farm and for the rest to do something else.

Book #1: The Grapes of Wrath

I'll be the first to admit that I thought this book was about grapes, if not literally, than in some indirect form. That the title has much of a relation to the novel as the name of this blog has to its contents was irrelevant and, after learning of the origin upon finishing the book, probably gave it some extra points in my heart. The Grapes of Wrath, for those who are as ignorant of twentieth-century literature as myself, is set in Depression-era America, tracking an Oklahoma family as they are forced off their land and drive across the country to California to search for work.

I learned a lot about America from reading this book, much as most of what I've learned about America comes not from the major cultural exports of America, but from what's in between them: the low-budget commercials that I saw on the nearest FOX and NBC affiliates to Ontario (WUTV-FOX and WRGZ-NBC). At some point before, say, World War II, I feel as though it was possible to talk about a distinct American culture and know what you were talking about, before even Korea had an ROTC, public prosecutors and multiple Starbucks on every corner. Then again, the Americanisms in this book are the ones we recognize easily even today, particularly in the manner of speaking and the love affair with the car.

Grapes of Wrath has a lot of sentence fragments that often seem overly dramatic and seem to have inspired countless teenagers to write drivel in the same style, but I liked them for the most part in the book for brevity. Often Steinbeck did wax philosophical in these short sentence fragments, but at least they were comprehensible compared to, say, the paragraphs-long descriptions and ruminations that Kafka served up.

It would be an omission to note that the book, set in the Dust Bowl era as the Great Depression stretched along, makes for a remarkable parallel with present-day America, itself finally starting to make a slow recovery from a horrendously deep recession. The prominence of banks as inhuman monsters in both the book and modern America is perhaps a coincidence, but what is not is the desperation that takes hold of those in the book, as well as many of those in American, seen in both how many people have been unemployed for over a year, as well as how many people apply for open positions. The Joad family is by no means skilled at anything other than farming, more or less analogous to today's unskilled manufacturing workers, who bore the brunt of an economic catastrophe.

The Joad family, once it makes it to California, compounds life for those already living there, functioning with other migrants from the Midwest and Southwest to drive down wages. This is, in effect, analogous to the backlash Mexican workers have seen in America during the recession. We would never think to use the word Okie as an epithet today, but it was a dirty word in contemporary California, even if you were from Kansas or Texas. While many of the state and county tactics for driving out internal migrants were callous and illegal, other policies which recognized the migrants could not be driven away and decided to improve the situation to the best of the government's ability mirrored the other side of today's immigration debate.

Running through the book is the latent fear of Communism, one that no longer has any relevance in America though it remains some currency in South Korea. Workers who demand a higher wage or any sort of decent treatment are branded reds, and much of Steinbeck's rage against corporate America would probably strike us as boilerplate socialist thought. But Steinbeck makes a relevant point, one that may have been lost as society became overly complex, that caring about people over corporations is not a sign of weakness or the absence of masculinity, but that it's only logical to care about people when thinking about how a society ought to be.

Winter hiking at Gwanaksan

I went to Gwanaksan for the third time this weekend. The first time I went was in the fall, which was probably the most excruciating single-day hike I've ever had since it was a long, never-ending route that came after climbing another mountain. That day was scarring enough to keep me away for three years. I went back last May and started hiking at 2 pm when it was about 32 degrees. This time, it was about -5 and I took the most popular route, which also happens to be the shortest.

What makes Gwanaksan great is that it's very rocky at the top with a lot of ups and downs, enough to add some small thrills to what is not really a very tough hike. It's certainly more interesting than the vertigo-inducing stairways you'll find at Dobongsan or Baekundae, the two biggest peaks at Bukhansan.





I didn't realize there was this much snow on the mountain, which in turn appears to have melted and then frozen. I don't ever remember there being this much water anywhere on Gwanaksan.



Approaching the top, this little rest stop selling liquor and noodles reminds you not to take yourself too seriously, not that anyone notices.



The peak of Gwanaksan, Yeonjudae, seen along with a temple that dates back to the seventh century.



Ridges like these are what make Gwanaksan such a challenge.



This was a really fun part. I'll admit to being absolutely petrified when I first came here.

There are many ways up and down Gwanaksan, but I'll summarize the three that I know.

1) From Gwacheon station on line 4, walk about 5 km and 2 hours to the top. This is a very moderate hike and though I've only been down this way, I'm pretty sure that there's no tough climbing at the top. Instead, you get to walk up stairs.

2) From Sadang station on lines 2 and 4, walk about 5 km and maybe three hours to the top. This is my favourite route, it's more of a military-style obstacle course, featuring a couple of rope climbs, lots of ups and downs, and a point where you squeeze through a narrow space between two cliffs with a boulder perched precariously above.

3) From Seoul National University station, take a bus or taxi to the Gwanaksan park entrance and hike about 6 km and two hours to the top. This is a good midway between the Gwacheon and Sadang courses.

Of course, you can combine these courses to avoid repetition or make things more interesting, such as starting at Sadang and crossing over the mountain to finish about 10 km away in Gwacheon. To make it a full day's hike, add in Samseongsan to the west or Cheonggyesan to the east. Naver Maps actually shows hiking routes along with estimated times and distances, which is really not a bad way to plan a hike. I personally use Korean Sanha.

Fourteen even better places to visit in Seoul (with pictures!)

Roboseyo recently wrote about five places to visit in Seoul that are not the typical touristy places. As I prepare to move out of Seoul and back into suburban Gyeonggi-do, here are some of the places I've loved visiting over and over during the two years I've lived in Seoul. I will no doubt keep on returning to these places.

The list is not in any particular order, though I've grouped them by neighbourhood to give a vague sense of itinerary.

1. Visit Deoksugung, especially at night, for the lit-up Daehanmun, the quiet and the crowds. Deoksugung is the dimunitive member of Seoul's five palaces, but it is where the Joseon dynasty lived out its final years. The Western buildings inside bear testament to a Korea that tried, without avail, to modernize. Get out at City Hall station, exit 2.


Daehanmun, the entrance to Deoksugung, at night.

While you're there, consider dinner at Deoksujeong around the corner from Deoksugung. They serve typical jjigae dishes, but also fish and galbi. For a very serious neighbourhood, it's an inexpensive, boisterous and tasty meal.

Another option is coffee at the Sogong-dong Starbucks, an exceptionally wide location that's mostly quiet and empty in the evenings. This location has Korean-style architecture, historical plaques on the inside and many soft leather couches.



2. Another favourite of mine is Oori Bunsik and the Good News Cafe at the bottom of Namsan, both quiet places with good food. Oori Bunsik, which seats about 16 people, is especially nice on cold days. It serves typical Korean food (rice, jjigae) but closes at 8 and will stop serving one of rice or noodle by 7:30. Have a cafe and a waffle at the Good News Cafe next door. The location is tricky if you've never been there, but you want to take the bus to the Yongsan Library, the top of which is on the main road, and get off at its ground floor, which is on the bottom of a side road.




3. The Gwanghwamun location of Kyobo Books is another favourite of mine, considering that you can eat, shop and read there for hours. They have a large selection of English-language books, though as is the case elsewhere, it's biased in favour of new releases and classics. Gwanghwamun is also a great place to relax at night, assuming that it's not lined by riot police. Get off at Gwanghwamun station on line 5 or Jonggak station on line 1.

3. If you've already been to Bukhansan or simply don't want to go to the top, try the dullegil, which is a 70-km route that circles the mountain. It's not a very strenuous hike and you'll see many hidden-away restaurants on the way, though your challenge might be covering enough distance to get back to civilization before dark. I personally recommend the Uiryeong-gil section that bisects the route, though if you're not a Korean nor with one, you'll need to make reservations about a week in advance.

4. If you're looking for a cafe that serves good, strong coffee but isn't a chain and is in fact nicer than a chian, check out Caffe Themselves (the misspelling is Italian, I'm told) by Jongno-3-ga. They have great coffee, great desserts and baristas who wear ties with their collars in the style of the early twentieth-century. I have chose Neville Chamberlain as my example, for some reason.



Nearby is Potala, a Tibetan restaurant that also has some Indian, Nepali and Chinese dishes. It's owned by a man from Tibet and functions as a meeting place for Korean Buddhists, activists and other people who are countercultural enough to grow facial hair.

5. In the ethnic food category, we have New Delhi with locations at Gangnam, Hyehwa and Kyung Hee University, Uzbek food at Samarkand (locations at Anam and Dongdaemun), and great Chinese food with Xinjiang-style skewers at Oedae Lamb Skewers (walk out of exit one of HUFS station, its above the Olive Young).



Gobble 'n' Go in Apgujeong is not ethnic, serving great burgers, fries and chili, but it's a nice, quiet place south of the river and everything I mentioned is north of the river.

I hate losing even more than I hate winning

I was wrong about this Super Bowl, but gladly so. I sank to 6-5 in this playoff season, making me slightly better than random chance, though considering that there are 11 playoff games, I don't know if 5.5 wins are possible. Many people, students included, asked me who I cheered for, but the truth, of course, is that I cheered against the Patriots. I like watching the Giants play, especially their defensive line, but I wouldn't necessarily say I always cheer for them. I am amused, however, that Eli Manning has now won two Super Bowls.

That's two wins by a total of seven points, which hardly inspires confidence, but that is what many people said (and still say) about Tom Brady's three Super Bowl wins, which were by a combined nine points. There are fewer people who challenge Brady's credentials because he has since gone on to put up the sort of irrelevant regular-season statistics that turn people like Peyton Manning and Dan Marino into such curiosities.

As untouchable as the Patriots were in those years, when they won ugly, with championship teams made up of spare parts (Tom Brady being one, initially) and receivers playing defense, they have become the sort of regular season paper tiger that the Colts have been for so long. Consider this run of playoff appearances after the last Patriots Super Bowl win seven years ago:

2005 playoffs - opened with a 28-3 win in the wild card round, lost 27-13 to the Broncos on the road
2006 playoffs - beat the Jets in the first round, squeaked by the Chargers thanks to Marty Schottenheimer's loss aversion, and then blew a 21-3 lead to the Colts in the AFC championship game
2007 playoffs - started off 18-0, then blew a 14-10 lead in the final minute of the Super Bowl
2008 playoffs - did not appear
2009 playoffs - routed 33-14 at home by the Ravens in the wild card round
2010 playoffs - got a bye, lost 28-21 at home to the loud-mouthed Jets in the second round
2011 playoffs - beat the hapless Broncos 45-10, squeaked by the Ravens on a dropped touchdown and inexplicably missed field goal, blew a 17-15 lead in the last minute of the Super Bowl

At some point, a pattern would start to emerge, as counter-intuitive as it is. Just like the Colts of the past decade, who could have won every regular season game by five touchdowns, but still lost 21-20 to the Chargers at home, the Patriots just can't seem to win when it counts. Or, more likely, someone just happens to be better. It's not the Patriots don't have talent, they have far more of it than they did when they won the Super Bowl, but it just hasn't been working out, no matter how explosive the offense gets.

Bill Belichick is acknowledged as the best coach in the league for thinking about the game in a way that makes other coaches fuzzy-headed. Not only does he play aggressive, but he's always playing, making adjustments when his competitors are content to let their teams play on using an existing strategy that's not working. He has played a significant role in normalizing the shotgun and multi-receiver sets on first and second downs, in any situation.

On the surface, just as he seems to get best at what he does, leading his teams to 16-0 and 14-2 seasons, he seems to get worst, losing both times in the Super Bowl. What's maybe more likely is that while the 16-0 team was a fantastic team, it simply met its match in the Giants that day. This time was probably not as good as it seemed, considering the way it played against teams with a winning record. Wins over the Broncos (9-8 when they met) and the Ravens were the only ones they recorded all year, but I wouldn't really count the Broncos as a winning team and the Ravens just barely lost.

How to fix the biggest problem we have in Canada and America

I've felt for a long time, though I'm not sure if I've said it here, that the biggest problem facing Canada, and especially America, is the increasing inability of people without professional degrees or even any sort of post-secondary education at all, to earn a middle-class living.

While it has become quite fashionable to declare that economies in the West are moribund, or that there are no more jobs, the reality is that those with university degrees, particularly those with degrees that are essentially vocational training, are living as well as ever. Those without, however, are living worse than they have in a long time. As Don Peck wrote when looking at America's middle class in September's Atlantic:

America’s classes are separating and changing. A tiny elite continues to float up and away from everyone else. Below it, suspended, sits what might be thought of as the professional middle class—unexceptional college graduates for whom the arrow of fortune points mostly sideways, and an upper tier of college graduates and postgraduates for whom it points progressively upward, but not spectacularly so. The professional middle class has grown anxious since the crash, and not without reason. Yet these anxieties should not distract us from a second, more important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and everyone else.

If you live and work in the professional communities of Boston or Seattle or Washington, D.C., it is easy to forget that nationwide, even among people ages 25 to 34, college graduates make up only about 30 percent of the population. And it is easy to forget that a family income of $113,000 in 2009 would have put you in the 80th income percentile nationally. The true center of American society has always been its nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn’t go on to get a bachelor’s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. And as manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of this vast, nonprofessional middle class is drifting downward.

In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente asks the question, "have we become a caste society?" Wente is somewhat out-of-touch, though it often appears to be intentional. This time, for example, she wrote that being part of the richest one percent "doesn’t take all that much money. A family income of $196,000 will do it."

However, Wente is spot on with the thrust of the article, which is that:

Today, the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent seldom cross paths (except at Tim Hortons). They raise their kids in different ways, send them to different schools, eat different kinds of food, choose different forms of exercise and recreation, take different kinds of vacations. The top 20 per cent include virtually all of the people who run our governments, manage our businesses and set our social policies. But fewer and fewer of them know anybody in the bottom 20 per cent, or have much idea of how they think and live.

She is also correct in saying that: "The trouble is, solutions are hard to come by. Raising taxes on the rich might be a good thing, but it won’t narrow the gap. So what will? Some people want massive investment in early childhood education for disadvantaged kids. Some want massive job-creation programs, or a massive increase in training for the unskilled. Such solutions would need vast amounts of public money, but maybe they’d be worth it."

The likely solution, which is really not a grand solution at all, but probably the only sensible one, comes from Adam Davidson in this month's Atlantic. Davidson looked at how a factory in South Carolina could manage to stay in business against the seemingly inevitable outflow of manufacturing jobs overseas, especially to China. He found that the jobs that stay are jobs in what is, essentially, skilled manufacturing. A great number of these skilled jobs can be found in Germany, Taiwan, and, yes, here in South Korea.

Davidson concludes that there really is no solution besides education and, more importantly, fixing all the other problems that cause people to be unemployed.

"It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these programs suffer from all the ills in our education system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support

...

To solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, a fractured political culture.."

Aristotle and the agony of defeat

The video below is cheesy and dramatic, of course, but I found it illuminating. The very act of letting your emotions rise and fall on the performances of a sports team is cheesy and dramatic to begin with, so let's check that part of our brain at the door.



TV only shows the winners: winning quarterback and coaches are interviewed, as are those who make plays for the winning team. After conference championships and the Super Bowl, we see the winning teams celebrating, but we never see the losing team sitting around dejected, filing into the locker room and going home. We almost never see dejected fans sitting in the stands, which makes this commercial a fresh image, to me at least.

This weekend, of course, was full of tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, though certainly not the way the term is conventionally used. Aristotle wrote that tragedy is about the reversal of fortunes, when a great person suffers a misfortune. Certainly, Billy Cundiff's field goal is one such reversal of fortune, made more acute by the fact that a 32-yard field goal has about a 90% chance of success.

Kyle Williams had a more dramatic reversal of fortune. It's one thing to miss a field goal, but it's another to fumble a punt, still another to do it twice in the same game, and it's even more crushing to do so in a playoff game. Williams, sadly, received death threats on Twitter, perplexing considering that these are people who willingly spent time watching him on TV and then, like an deranged puppy, turned on their master.

If you are a fan of the 49ers and Ravens, my high-minded appeal to Aristotle and literary philosophy might not do much to salve your wounds, but that's exactly the point. Defeat is every bit a part of sports as victory, but one that seldom gets attention, except perhaps in the cities and countries where it happens. Sports is obsessed with winning and winners, but dramatic, agonizing defeat is every bit the spectacle that is victory, in some ways moreso.

I split this week's games to move my record to 6-4. As much as I hate the Patriots, and as well as I think the Giants are wearing, I think the Patriots are simply more likely to win. I would not be surprised in any way if the Giants won, but this game is just as likely to be a three-touchdown victory for either team (okay, moreso for the Patriots) as it is a tense, close game.

Remember defense? It's back, in football form!

Just two weeks after Gregg Easterbrook pointed out that the two best teams in each conference had the two worst defense in the league (Packers 32nd, Patriots 31st), defense made a comeback in big way, reminding us that while defense might not necessarily win championships, it can certainly win games.

The Ravens and the 49ers are two of the best defenses in the league and while the Giants have had a so-so year, it's hard to miss that their defense played a huge role in defeating the Packers. The Ravens won with just 228 yards of offense and three points in the last three quarters, though they have long been the perfect example of why strong offenses with mediocre defenses go farther than strong defenses with mediocre offenses. In the last 13 seasons, the Ravens have ranked outside the top 10 in fewest yards allowed just once (2002), and have ranked third or better eight times.

In that time, however, they've watched as the rival Patriots and Steelers have won a combined five Super Bowls. This probably has something to do with the fact that the Ravens haven't ranked in the top 10 for yards gained since 1997, back when their high-flying ways led one football writer to teach me the term 'oxymoron', as in "Biggest oxymoron in fooball: Baltimore Ravens defense." Of course, if you look through the rankings for most yards gained, you'd be amazed at which offenses rank highly and which don't.

Nevertheless, this just might be the Ravens year, though this week's performance makes it hard to see how they'd get past the Patriots next week. The Broncos were a cream puff to be sure, with an emphasis on puff, but a team like the Ravens is usually good enough to lose to the Patriots by a touchdown. Their drubbing of the Patriots in the playoffs two years ago will give them confidence, but the game will probably be determined by whether the Ravens have the presence of mind, and the talent, to cover the Patriots' tight ends.

The Patriots are getting healthier and better on defense, though a lot of their supposed rejuvenation was the result of playing Tim Tebow, who clearly showed that he's not anyone's long-term answer at quarterback. Quarterbacks who are likely to be elite at the professional level don't look that bad, they look shaky like Cam Newton has seemed shaky. Of course, Tebow, like so many other quarterbacks (Vince Young is 30-19 as a starter) who made careers out of someone in the front office believing in them despite a lack of talent, will be back next year and will certainly play a few more years before a consensus finally develops that he was useless.

The Giants-49ers game, too, is the result of great defense, sort of. While the Giants' defensive performance was lauded for humbling the 15-1 Packers, let's not forget that they scored 37 points. That's one more than the 49ers, who have one of the best defenses in the league, but needed (and got) 36 points to beat the Saints. The Giants pose a lot of problems for any team when playing well, due to their strong front four and cornerbacks who can play man coverage, but when they're bad, they're atrocious. The 49ers have been more consistent on offense as well as on defense, and they're also playing at home.

I pick the 49ers and the Patriots to meet in the Super Bowl. I was 2-2 last week, giving me a playoff record of 5-3. That looks good, until you consider that picking home teams alone would get you to 7-1, which admittedly is as good as home teams have had it in 20 years.

If this is failure, more of us ought to fail

About a year ago, I wrote about how sources outside Japan describing a country in decline clash jarringly with the reality of life in the country. Writing about this myth is becoming more prevalent, in part because Americans are fearful of a "lost decade" of minimal economic growth of their own, and partly because people with knowledge of the situation are eager to tell the truth. I find the story interesting because it shows that it's possible for us to live well and prove it in ways that aren't growth in GDP.

The reason is very simple: what if life is just good? Expecting the good life and happiness to come from growth, and to refer to the absence of growth as decline or stagnation, is to hold that life isn't all that great right now. Naturally, we want the economy to grow since populations almost invariably grow, but if you were living well five years ago, you're probably living well right now if everything has stayed the same, and in Japan it has stayed the same at the very least.

Eamonn Fingleton moved to Tokyo a quarter century ago, but anyone who spends even an hour in central Tokyo or Osaka could figure out that Japan isn't exactly a country you need to pity. Fingleton in fact goes on to write: "In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story."

Life in Japan is not only great, but it has improved since before the stock market crash of the early '90s. However, Fingleton asks, "how do you express this in G.D.P. terms?" He gives countless examples, of which the most interesting are:

- From 1989 to 2009, despite a worsening diet, Japan's life expectancy improved by 4.2 years.

- Of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet, 38 are in Japan. The fastest Internet service in the world is apparently in Daegu.

- Tokyo has 16 fancy restaurants according to the Michelin Guide compared to 10 for Paris.

- Cell phones, infrastructure, and fashion also show Japan doing as well as anywhere else in the world.


- Even the idea of Japan's stagnant growth is not entirely true. Japan's GDP per capita grew at just 1 percent annually in the last two decades, but then, America grew at about 1.4%.

All this points to the limitations of GDP as an indicator of well-being. It's a good indicator, to be sure, as any American could have told you when the economy was shrinking, but there's a lot more to living well than just money. What that actually entails can often be nebulous, but thinking about the answer is a good start in and of itself.

Japan is not without its problems. It has a horrendously inefficient political system that in many ways does not deserve to be called a democracy, but then, we could say that about America, Korea and many if not most other democracies. It is something of a odd-man out when considering technology, with a great deal of triplicate paperwork and stamping going on. None of this, of course, even mentions the favourite by-the-numbers issue of outsiders, the low birth rate.

All in all, if you were going to choose to live in a developed country, you could do far worse than Japan. It's clean, the streets are safe, the landscape is beautiful, and the cities are exciting and vibrant. Going to Japan would certainly disabuse anyone from writing the sort of depressing article I see constantly in the press, so I wonder if many of the people who write about Japan in English have ever actually been there. For those who live there, well, anybody can sound depressed about the place where they live.