The Vancouver Winter Olympics might end up being known as the "not enough games." Not enough snow. Not enough lighting. Not enough Canadiana.

Starts are important in the Olympics, and Olympic committees spend a lot of effort and money making sure that they present a coherent image of the host nation on screen. The Chinese governments involved in putting on last year's Summer Olympics spent close to half a billion dollars on imaging the nation in spectacular fashion. No one could doubt those Olympics were presenting a coherent "China" past, present and future. The Beijing Olympics were a nice snapshot of "China" that was recognizable to national and international audiences. It may be a big place, with blurry political, ethnic and cultural borders, but in the summer of 2008, China was made to look like it could fit in a stadium.

The opening ceremony of the Vancouver Games has received a lot of negative press. Some of the British and American media have dwelt on what seems like a mountain of glitches that dwarf the surrounding mountains in comparison. The Canadian press featured these flubs at length, too. But there, attention was given to how the ceremony did — or did not — illustrate the nation.

Initially, I thought that the performance of "Canada" in the opening ceremony went well. The formula for presenting the nation seemed to be in place. The organizers put the Mounties on stage. Check. Canadian officials were all there — including the politicians enjoying their extended holiday. Check. There was the jazzy performance of the Canadian national anthem. Umm, check. There were representatives of First Nations living in the landmass that is called "Canada." Check. There were young people, bodies beautiful standing at attention. Check. Bryan Adams was there.

There were tattooed punk fiddlers and slam poetry.

Tattooed punk fiddlers? Slam poetry? I think the Vancouver Olympic Committee lost half of the international audience there.

For someone who grew up in Canada, and who remembers people jigging at his dad's parties and went to university in Eastern Canada, I couldn't think of anything more appropriate than fiddling at a national celebration. But I am in the know.

With the exception of Bryan Adams, I have few problems with the opening ceremony.

But how do you simplify a large and complex country to the world when all of the constituent pieces that make up the country might not be known, not only to people outside of the country but also to the people living in the country?

But isn't this part of what you want in an opening ceremony? And isn't this what made the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics so wonderful, with its drag queens, Ned Kellys and at times controversial, apologetic performances by burned-out rock bands? I think it is. And I think that it is appropriate to be a tease in these opening ceremonies, occasionally revealing something the audience wasn't expecting out of the ceremony and out of the cartoon image that they have drawn of the nation.

Be thankful. It could have been more complicated. There are the politics of representation in Canada, which ratchets up to the highest levels at big budget events. Canadians could not have cared less that one of the four legs of the indoor caldron malfunctioned.

No, what most us — in the most complicated and plural sense of the word — are concerned about is that the presentation was not mosaic enough. The Canadian heritage minister worried that there wasn't French language present and not enough Canadian's of Asian ancestry. The only thing that there was too much of was whiteness — embodied in the figures and voices of Donald Sutherland and Bryan Adams.

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.