Nationality: From local pride to the slippery slope...

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Senechal
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Re: Nationality: From local pride to the slippery slope...

Post by Senechal » Thu Sep 11, 2014 7:00 pm

MortenA wrote:When it comes to Canada I don't know but you don't really mention requirements to join the "Canada Mahjong Association". The reason they only promote MCR might just be that they only have MCR players and if anyone was willing to join and promote riichi that would be fine. Of course that may not be the case but then I would encourage you to create a national Canadian riichi association.
I would cynically ask you to look up their forums (because they did mention it long ago, but their forums are infested with unholy amounts of spam) here at http://www.mahjong-ca.org/bbs/forum.php but the gist of it was that they were debating what to charge people and clubs, and it was something like "free for members and 588$ per club", "88$ per member and 388$ per club" or some other option with a lot of 8s in the costs. I do not know what was finally decided. (88$ = about 60 EUR, all this yearly)

Here's a representative sample of their ethnic composition: http://www.mahjong-ca.org/score/round4.html

Note the lack of people who are not Chinese. Some names sound Western in origin but then again, that stuff happens in Hong Kong. Did I mention that very little of their communication is even in English, with French not even registering on their radar. If they are national in scope, the nation they "represent" is not Canada. Are they welcome here to do what they please? Sure, not debating that in the slightest, they contribute to the cultural mosaic like anyone else. But Mahjong Danmark with no Danish language or the DMJL with no German sounds inconceivable. Likewise, an organization that can't even provide 5% of its services in French cannot be a national organization in Canada by definition.

These people at the CMA cannot be convinced to open up, and paying in to have "speaking rights" will return zero dividends and a negative balance. As for a riichi-specific national organization, we bought the http://riichi.ca domain but actually founding such an organization has been discussed by our members to be illogical if we are still the only club to operate publicly in the country. (We heard of one high school club in southern Ontario, and a seniors club in Calgary, but by definition, they cannot open membership to all people of all ages and all ethnicities. We would be willing to listen to any proposals they may have but they have yet to even contact us.)


Short and skinny: we know what the CMA are, they are not us, the European unitary national organization model (both its ideal and what it turns out to be in practice) would never work here. Mahjong has a cultural background attached to it. Going around and promoting Japanese Mahjong to a Chinese ethnic club is as insulting, actually even moreso than having an MCR club (*cough*Réunion*cough*) send a riichi club a MCR rule book to "educate the savages on how to play real Mahjong".

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