old women and economics

As promised.

The hook of this story is my presentation in "East Asian Societies and Economics". I started hating this class in the first lecture due to our professor. Well, this is going to be controversial, since she seemed to be a really nice, maybe 70-year old lady from mainland China with a strong accent, making it difficult to follow her lectures. She made the misunderstandings up to us with a smile that made her anyhow small eyes basically disappear. The girls loved her for it. "Isn't she just adorable?" Yes, in fact she was until last week. Wait, I messed it up already since I want you guys to understand why I dislike this class and not love the prof as well :D

The reason I started disliking this lecture was because she boldly changed the name from "Politics" to "Economics". Since I really am not interested in world economies at all (yes, I know that you need it to understand politics but I really only know the basics which in my opinion is by far enough) I started switching off during the lectures. Big mistake as I was about to find out. To be fair I must say that I did not prepare the presentation too well, since my topic was an extremely broad one: Japan - Case Studies. I thus started preparing a presentation through the macro filter on the Japanese economy since 1945. Reasonable, isn't it? Well, where to start...outline and research of course. The matter of research was that basically all books on the topic I needed them for were unavailable in the library. I hence started raiding the online e-sources. Since you do know that I am not a big fan of economy and by far more interested in history I started summing up political events and underlined them with a few (few) statistics. I thought "Ah well, I think everyone will understand, why Japan is the economic power it is today, why the economic bubble collapsed and how it will be in the future." After the presentation my fellow students agreed. But I will come to that later.

The presentation starts and I start talking. As soon as I mention the term "processing nation" she indignantly interrupts me. "Never in my whole career did I hear this term. I think what you really mean, if you did the readings (which I partly did but was disgusted by all the statistics and numbers) you should know that what you are trying to say is called "vertical integrated economic system"." OK, fair enough. This brought up the discussion in my head, which of the two would be easier to understand for my fellow students. (It's basically a country importing goods such a s steel, etc., processing them and re-selling them for more money -> btw the key to economic prosperity in Japan) What a start. From now on it only got worse. I stuttered, finished the presentation/ torture and was now ready for execution. Again I quote "Mortal Combat" : "FINISH HIM!" The Q&A session, only held by the professor this time. I held the fortress and some people tried to help me out by defending its ground columns. The axe stopped as it started splitting my beard hair. We had reached events that occurred after '95 and the apple market shares, a topic I indeed follow closely in recent weeks and its comparison with market shares of Japanese companies. She didn't know anything about recent events. After having proved herself being a bitch before, she now put up one of those smiles I mentioned earlier. Did not work on me. My picture of old ladies is now forever distorted. After the presentation I received a lot of claps that helped me to get on with my everyday life and thereby escaping the scaffold.

I really have to raise the question here whether academic education always has to be based on difficult facts and terms when it could be so much more trivial and easier. Well, I think it has to be a balance as in everything. Puh! and all that on my birthday... After that I just went home to enjoy a couple of well deserved beers. They just taste best after a survived battle.

"Madness? THIS-IS-HONG-KONG!"