Sumo Wot?

Generally an emotionally contained society where public visages of neutral serenity obtain, the Japanese nonetheless have a love of pricking pomposity. They enjoy breaking free of social constraints and restraints, and do so in that most public of arenas, as contestants on wacky, whoop-it-up television game shows where no costume, no behaviour is sufficiently excessive or extreme to display, with appropriate gusto.

Sometimes with the slightest hint of embarrassment. Which, nonetheless, holds no one back from participation.

That tight-knit group of three islands in the Pacific with its paucity of land and crowded cities, along with the formula of understated Zen Buddhism ensures that people are orderly, compliant and publicly low-key. But the Japanese have a zesty love for life, for nature and for things natural, and what is more natural than enjoying life and taking every opportunity to express one's appreciation for it?

They thrive on the absurd, while still maintaining a public demeanor that upsets no applecarts. Drawing attention to oneself through rowdy or demeaning behaviour is not looked kindly upon, in public. But turn on a television set anywhere within Japan and entertainment of the zaniest kind is right there up front and popular.

Karaoke was born in Japan and offered the most strait-laced, publicly-uptight the opportunity to unwind.

Those game-show contestants gamely allow themselves to be dressed in the most outlandish, clumsy costumes in the name of good-humour and hearty laughs. Sumo wrestling is watched on television too, as an art form more than the art of wrestling; weight, agility, crafty weighing of one's opponent's moves grasps the attention of sumo aficionados. Its practitioners are respected as much as are master craftsmen.

And it is more than likely that "Sumo suits", plastic novelties worn for their comic effect also originated in Japan before importation abroad. That the student government of Queen's University has nudged itself guiltily into the realization that these 'suits' represent an "appropriat[ion] of Japanese culture", are "disrespectfully racist and dehumanizing instruments of oppression" is quite simply beyond the pale of credulity.

The Alma Mater Society, dear me - prissy little hearts throbbing with profound sorrow in publishing a two-page apology, cancelling a food-bank fundraiser the while which intended to feature as the comic quotient two Sumo suits - has presented themselves as the quintessentially-collective horses' ass - or perhaps more appropriately a herd of horses' asses, deserving of one another's company.

What the Japanese themselves would consider to be rollicking good fun, the AMS humbly grovels over. The Japanese sense of humour borders at time on a comic adoration of the absurd, and should they ever get wind of the turgid prose of self-righteousness posing as a collective apology, they will have received the wonderful gift of uproarious laughter at the expense of the heavy-hearted, sensitive idiots of the PC world.

And where else than on campus, and what other campus, come to think of it than the very one mentioned in the recently-released report by the Canadian Federation of Students as having the distinction of "white privilege" permeating the very physical structures, the essence of the institution; "walls, books, classrooms and everything that makes Queen's what it is."

One cannot apologize too abjectly for being Canadian, young, white, intellectual and manifestly stupid.