"Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" performed by Alicia Bay Laurel • Upcoming concerts in Tokyo on Aug. 4 & Hiroshima on Aug. 8

Via our friend—artist, writer, and musician Alicia Bay Laurel—who has 2 more concerts upcoming (in Tokyo and Hiroshima) in this year's tour of Okinawa and Japan:

What it looks and sounds like when we all sing the great peace visionary song, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," together in English and Nihongo. Thank you Hikaru Hamada for making this video last July 11th at Art Cafe Nafsha in Awajishima! Akiko Itagaki is translating for me.

Alicia on video:

This song was written at the end of World War II by an American peace activist. His name was Ed McCurty. He wrote this song as he was reacting in horror to the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even though I was very active against the war in Vietnam, I only became aware this year that there was  a huge antiwar movement in the US during World War II. The people who were for peace had a hard time getting heard because the government and corporations were all wanting the war.

So they started a whole group of radio stations across the United States: Peace Radio. All of those radio stations are still broadcasting now...They're called Pacifica Radio...When I was growing up in the 1950s, that was the radio being played by my parents. That's where I heard this song the first time...

When I came to Japan, I realized I needed to sing this song, not just play it. I needed to sing it in Nihon-go and I needed to sing it in Nihon-go at Hiroshima because Hiroshima's tragedy is what inspired this song...Please join us in HIroshima if you can."

"Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" by Ed McCurty

Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again
And when the papers all were signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands end bowed their heeds
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing round and round
And guns and swords and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground
Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

This coming Sunday, August 8,  Alicia will perform at a Peace Concert that begins at 2:30 p.m. at Hiroshima Nagaregawa Church. (Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, an alumni of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and a central figure in John Hersey's book, Hiroshima, led the rebuilding of this historic church after it was completely destroyed by the August 6, 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.)

(Directions and details at Alicia's website: http://www.aliciabaylaurel.com/2015JapanTour)

"Peace Girl" by Alicia Bay Laurel

May 23, 2015 - Kodansha release of I am Catherine Jane: "50 years ago, a US serviceman raped me too...I want to live my life again from today...With tears in her eyes & in mine, we embraced each other. I did not know her name. But to me, her name was Okinawa."

On May 23, Kodansha released the Japanese translation of "I am Catherine Jane" 

Fifty years ago, a US serviceman raped me too. For 50 years, I have lived in sorrow.

I am now over 70-years-old...I want to live my life again from today...

With tears in her eyes and tears in mine, we embraced each other. I did not know her name. But to me, her name was Okinawa.

This passage from I am Catherine Jane describes a meeting between a woman sharing her story of rape for the first time after hearing Fisher's shared story of rape and her quest for survival, healing and justice in the face of U.S. and Japanese government indifference to the assault.

Earlier this month, after giving speeches outside Camp Schwab, rape survivor Catherine Jane Fisher and over 30 supporters tied 100 meters of white ribbon in remembrance of the survivors raped by United States servicemen stationed in Okinawa since 1945, to promote awareness of violence against women.  The day before, 35,000-50,000 protestors attended the mass rally for Henoko in Naha.

A longtime supporter of Okinawa, Fisher clearly sees the interconnections between the 70-year history of US military rapes of Okinawan women and US military rape of the land and sea to build military bases. While the media is covering the ongoing Okinawan governent effort to save the coral reef and dugong habitat at Henoko from landfill and military base construction by the US and Japanese governments, background history starts in 1996 or 2006 or 1996, the dates of recent agreements between the two governments.

Australian rape survivor begins White Ribbon Violence Against Women" campaign 

outside U.S. military training base Camp Schwab

(Photo: courtesy of Catherine Jane Fisher)

This framing omits earlier history crucial for understanding the depth of the Okinawan movement: the  US military forcibly seized and demolished a vibrant farming and fishing community to build Camp Schwab during the 1950's period of "Bayonets and Bulldozers. This followed earlier seizures of Okinawan private property during and immediately after the Battle of Okinawa, when 400,000 Okinawans were detained in POW camps.

Fisher explains that many elder women protesters at Henoko and in those crowds are survivors of US military rape during this period.

The 1950s seizures throughout the prefecture were brutal, accompanied by assaults, including sexual assaults, against resisters. US military crimes against Okinawans, especially rapes, took place on a daily basis at this time, according to scholar Miyumi Tanji, in her 2006 book, Myth, protest, and struggle in Okinawa:

Victimization of Okinawan farmers and forceful acquisition of their land was combined with the physical violence inflicted on the locals personally...Violence directed towards the local populace by US military staff, especially rape, revealed the crudest and most brutal aspect of the power relations between the occupiers and the occupied...

'US land acquisition in Isahama and Ie-jima and the rape [and murder of 6-year-old Yumiko Nagayama] resulted the humiliation of all Okinawans, leading to what Arasaki calls the first wave of the "Okinawa Struggle.' ...These rallies became models for mass demonstrations in the community of protest of the future.

 Okinawan women protesting the forced US military seizures 

 of their homes and farms in July 1955.

On May 23, Kodansha released the Japanese translation of I am Catherine Jane in which Fisher relates the story of her uphill climb for justice after being raped by a U.S. sailor in Japan.  Vivid published the English-language version last year.

Damon Coulter's review at The Japan Times details Fisher's suffering and challenge to the indifference of the US and Japanese governments:

Fisher was physically raped in 2002 by Bloke Deans, a U.S. serviceman stationed at Yokosuka. Immediately afterward, she faced a psychological ordeal at the hands of the Kanagawa police force, who subjected her to 12 hours of questioning without food, drink or medical attention when she reported the crime. Finally, the United States government violated Fisher twice — first by giving Dean an honorable discharge, allowing him to leave Japan and flee charges, and then by later disdaining their own “zero tolerance” rape policy by refusing to acknowledge or take responsibility for their own corruption...

David McNeill's tells the even fuller story of Fisher's indomitable struggle in "From Yokosuka rape to U.S. court victory, ‘Jane’ commits her 12-year ordeal to print":

"I could have returned to Australia and closed my eyes, but somebody had to stand up.”

...Fisher won a civil suit against him in a Tokyo court in 2004 but the ruling had no jurisdictional authority in the U.S. Last year, after tracking Deans in America for several years, Fisher finally persuaded a circuit court in the U.S. to enforce that judgment for rape against him.

Fisher’s insistence that the U.S. military had helped Deans evade justice and that the Japanese government did little to help her pursue him was strengthened in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court by a statement submitted by Deans in which he claims a U.S. Navy lawyer told him to leave the country. The U.S. court’s decision was a victory for Fisher, but one that left her physically, mentally and financially exhausted, she says.

Fisher is now an advocate for rape survivors, campaigning for 24-hour rape crisis centers, and for making rape kits mandatory in police stations and hospitals. (The US government might consider funding these much-needed centers, as a matter of restitution and atonementl.)

Fisher is an esteemed member of the Okinawan movement for democracy, human rights, justice and healing which is characterized by intermutual respect and support, hallmarks of authentic community.  A visual artist and and author, Fisher created a FB page, Save Henoko, which focuses on inspirational images and thoughts to support the supporters of Henoko.

Born in Australia, Fisher has lived in Japan since the 1980s and has three sons.

Japanese American History: NOT for sale — Call for cancellation of online auction of crafts & art created during WWII incarceration

4.15.15 UPDATE: JAPANESE AMERICAN OBJECTS IN LOTS 1232-1255, made in WW2 concentration camps, will be removed from the Rago auction on Friday, a company spokesman said in Lambertville, NJ, tonight. George Takei will act as an intermediary between the Rago auction house and Japanese American community institutions. The auction house agreed to a respectful sale of the artifacts after the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation sent a notice of intent to file a lawsuit against the consignor. 

Survivors and descendants of wartime Japanese-American relocation and incarceration are calling for the cancellation of a April 17 online auction of personal objects, crafts, and prisoner artwork created by Americans of Japanese descent while incarcerated by the U.S. government during the Second World War.

Rago, an online auction house based in Lambertville, New Jersey, wants to auction  hundreds of artworks and crafts that Japanese American detainees gave to art historian Allen Hendershott Eaton during his research for Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps, a book published in 1952. After Eaton, a humanitarian, champion of American folk art and opponent of the mass incarceration, died in 1962, his estate fell into private hands.

The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation asked  the consignors to consider a private, negotiated sale with community-supported non-profit institutions.  After the consignor refused this suggestion, the HWMF secured pledges from board members and friends to make a substantial cash offer—one that exceeded the estimated auction value. However, this offer was refused, for inexplicable reasons.

Japanese Americans have started an online Facebook page: Japanese American History: Not for Sale to call for a cancellation of the online auction.  They are asking for Rago to allow them reasonable period of time to arrange a respectful and mutually acceptable sale of the collection to an institution.

Today the group released a community letter:

April 13, 2015

Dear David Rago, Suzanne Perrault and Miriam Tucker:

We have learned that Rago Arts and  Auction will put up for sale 450 prisoner craft objects, personal items, artworks and heritage artifacts from the Japanese American concentration camps of WW II in Lots 1232-1255 on April 17. These items were given -- not sold -- to the original collector, Allen H. Eaton, under the assumption that they would be shown in an exhibition to tell the story of the mass, illegal incarceration.

“They offered to give me things to the point of embarrassment, but not to sell them,” Eaton wrote in his 1952 book, “Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese In Our War Relocation Camps.” Eaton was opposed to the mass incarceration and devoted himself to gathering examples of the creations that emerged from the camps, planning for a future exhibition and photographic display. He received official support toward what was meant to be a public project, not the creation of a private collection. Selling these treasures of Japanese American heritage would contravene Eaton’s original intent.

The auctioning of our cultural property -- handmade and donated by men, women and children whom their own government held against their will -- is wrong. There is no time before the auction to properly examine issues including provenance, ethics, and the propriety of disposing of our cultural patrimony by selling it off to the highest bidder.

We request that you pull these lots from the auction and delay the sale until a proper examination can be undertaken.

Auctioning these cultural products of the forced removal and incarceration is akin to auctioning Holocaust property, slave shackles, and Native American spiritual artifacts. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act and the Locke, California, “right of first refusal,” enacted against California’s alien land laws, sought to rectify similar abuses.

Placing this historical heritage on the auction block sullies the reputations of both Eaton’s descendants and Rago Arts. The pending sale of these donated objects has caused anguish and outrage in our community, which is being expressed in letters, petitions, news coverage and a Facebook page, "Japanese American History: NOT for Sale”: www.facebook.com/japaneseamericanhistorynotforsale.

Our community’s goal is to educate and correct, not to vilify or cast blame. We urge you to pause the rush to auction, in the spirit of making this right for everyone.

Ad Hoc Committee to Oppose the Sale of Japanese American Historical Artifacts

Yoko Ono's Christmas Message since the Vietnam War...

Via Yoko Ono at Imagine Peace

Laura Kina's Blue Hawai'i & Wesley Uenten's "Okinawan Diasporan Blues"

"Graves By the Sea" by Laura Kina

In this excerpt from "Okinawan Disaporan Blues," included in Laura Kina's Blue Hawaii exhibition catalogue, Wesley Uenten describes the Japanese colonial rule's erasure of traditional Okinawan culture and ongoing resistance by a group of grandmothers and grandfathers, child survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, to the US plan to turn the habitat of the Okinawan dugong, a sacred cultural icon, into another military base:

...At least on the level of cultural genocide, what happened to Okinawans was similar to what happened to Native Americans. It seems so familiar when I read about the...philosophy of the “Indian Schools” that prohibited Native American school children from speaking their own language or practicing their culture.... By the time that my grandmother was born in 1893, most Okinawan children were in schools, where they would be punished for speaking the Okinawan language and expected to worship the Japanese emperor. A large wooden tag with the words 方言札 (hōgen fuda), or “dialect tag,” was place around the neck of school children who spoke in the Okinawan “dialect.” The tag symbolically relegated the Okinawan language to the inferior status as a backward “dialect” of Japanese, while corporeally ingraining a sense of shame and fear in generations of Okinawans for speaking their own language and being their own selves...

Physical genocide did take place on Okinawa. Japan’s leaders knowingly caused about a fourth to a third of Okinawa’s population to perish in less than 3 months during the Battle of Okinawa when they used Okinawa as a buffer to hold off American troops heading toward Naichi (mainland Japan)...in 1945...

I stare at "Graves by the Sea." ...Departed souls encased in concrete tombs pushed up against each other. They are testament of the reverence for ancestors and tradition in Okinawa that contradicts the reality of the lack of space on Okinawa...There is a strong and powerful message that the ancestors and land is telling us through Laura’s work.

I end this essay at a time when I have just returned from a trip to Washington D.C. with an Okinawan delegation that was making a direct appeal against plans by the U.S. and Japanese governments to push ahead with construction of a new U.S. Marine Air Station on the clear blue waters of Henoko...At this time, both the Jp and U.S. governments are stepping up their attempts to push past unyielding local Okinawan opposition... Henoko is the site of a large thriving coral reef, turtle spawning grounds, seaweed beds, and an already endangered species of dugong. The blue ocean of Henoko will be no more if this plan goes through.

Most of the officials, politicians, and researchers we met in Washington D.C. [during the Jan. 2014 Okinawan Delegation] had made up their mind about new base construction at Henoko saying that it is the best plan... However, what the delegation was trying to get across to deaf ears was that Okinawans have stopped the construction for 18 years by placing their bodies in front of ships and equipment coming to start construction. Old people, as old and tiny as my Baban in my memories of her, have come to sit on the beach everyday in quiet but unrelenting resistance to American Manifest Destiny and Japanese fatalistic dependency on that destiny...

Wesley Ueunten is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. A third generation Okinawan, he was born and raised in Hawaiʻi and received his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.

Stories from the spirit world and heart of Ainumosir @ Sakaimachi Garow, Kyoto - February 22, 2014

Ainu Art Project founder, artist and storyteller Yuki Koji will be in Kyoto for the first time in years to share his new hanga (woodblock prints) and stories from the world of the spirits. Nagane Aki will also be performing on the mukkuri and tonkori and tea and snacks will come with entry. **English translation not available.

Stories from the spirit world and heart of Ainumosir (note the play on words in the Japanese title!)

2/22 (Saturday) 15:00 doors open 15:30 event starts
Location: Sakaimachi Garow (http://sakaimachi-garow.com/blog/?page_id=110)
Nearest station: Karasuma Oike
Entrance fee: 2800円（with reservation 2500円）

For more information contact: information@sakaimachi-garow.com

"Who hopes for closing the sea of HENOKO?"

"Who hopes for closing the sea of HENOKO？20140113"

(Courtesy of Yoshio Akamine, StudioＯ Akamine Zoukeishitsu, Naha, Okinawa)

"War is Over! (If You Want It): Yoko Ono" • Sydney MCA • Nov. 15, 2013 - Feb. 23, 2014

"WAR IS OVER! (IF YOU WANT IT)" opened Nov. 15, 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.  This is the first major survey in Australia of legendary artist, musician and peace activist Yoko Ono. "The exhibition encompasses five decades of practice in diverse media including eight participatory works. Themes include loss, conflict, humanity and the desire for world peace."  Ono designed the interactive parts of the exhibition to encourage collaboration, linked to a central theme of world peace.

Curated by MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent, the title comes from a text by Ono and her late husband John Lennon that first appeared in 1969—in the middle of the Vietnam War—across public billboards in twelve cities worldwide, including Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, Berlin, Paris, New York, and London.

While other visual artists have also engaged in peace art and activism, Ono is perhaps the most renowned peace artist of our time.  How did the impetus for her highly focused creative work originate?

Ono has explained that a childhood experience of the firebombing of Tokyo awakened her understanding of the human costs of military violence, fueling her peace art and activism for five decades.

Her father was an international banker and moved his family between the United States and Japan, so, as a child, Ono developed positive attachments to both countries. When the Pacific War broke out, she was eight-years-old, living in Tokyo.  She and her family survived (by taking shelter in a basement in their Azabu home) the firebombings of Tokyo, including the massive March 9-10, 1945 raid—the most destructive bombing raid in world history. At minimum, the napalm-fueled bombings destroyed 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city and killed 100,000 people.

In a 2007 interview with Amy Goodman:

I remember, when I was a little girl, a young — you know, when I was very young, one day I had high fever because of just a cold. You know, I had a cold.

And so, my family all went down into the basement to make sure that, you know, they’re alright. It’s a kind of shelter that they created in the garden actually. But I couldn’t go.

And I was just sort of in my bed, and I saw that all the houses next to us and all the places around me were just all fire. I go, "Oh." But, you know, when you’re young, and that’s the only reality you’re working through, you don’t really get totally scared or anything. You know, you’re just looking at it like an objective film or something like that. "Oh, this is what’s happening," you know?

And because of that memory of what I went through in the Second World War, I think that I really — it embedded in me how terrible it is to go through war.

To those who charge that she is "optimistic" or "naive," Ono points out that she is a simply a resilient pragmatist who cares about life and our planet—and does what she can do—which includes encouraging others to do what they can do to support peace building at multiple levels:

Well, you know, most people say, "Oh, you’re so optimistic. I mean, what’s wrong with you?" I’m not really that optimistic.

I am trying to make us survive. And in the course of survival, we don’t have the luxury to be negative. That’s a luxury that we can’t afford.

 And we just have to do what we can do. And I think that instead of getting so upset with some people, you know, or some countries which are doing this, doing that — "How dare they," whatever — I think we should just do what we can do.

 In a Reuters article about this current exhibition, she compares 1969 with 2013:

When John and I stood up, very few people were activists. Now I think 90 percent of the world is activists. If you're not an activist, you'd be considered a nerd maybe.

 (Image: Colin Davidson, The Guardian)

"Pieces of Sky"—WW II German helmets with blue jigsaw pieces inside.
Visitors are told, "Take a piece of sky. Know that we are all part of each other."

"Play It By Trust"/"White Chess Set"
(Photo: Iain MacMillan,© 1966 YOKO ONO)

Shinya Watanabe:"Through her simple alteration of the chessboard
 (a war strategy game), the artist made it extremely hard for the chess players to 
 fight each other, and this creates new relationships between the opponents."

Mayumi Oda: On Energy of Change, Feminization, and New Birth of Japan

"Earth Ship" by Mayumi Oda  (Image: Safe Energy Handbook) 

Longtime nuclear-free activist and visual artist Mayumi Oda shared her wisdom in "On Energy of Change, Feminization, and New Birth of Japan," a 2012 interview with Alice Miyagawa published at Kyoto Journal.  A few excerpts: 

You were interviewed previously for Kyoto Journal following the Tokaimura nuclear accident in the summer of 1999, when you lived in California. You said that you had come to Japan to help empower people, especially women, in response to the government’s negligence in handling the issue. Then, at the turn of the millennium, you moved from California to Hawai’i. That seems to have marked a turning point in your life...

Until 1999 I had really tried to focus my work to let people know the dangers of having nuclear [power plants] on earthquake faults. I couldn’t convince them. I already saw the possibilities of disaster. I thought it would be in Tokai, or Hamaoka, near Tokyo. I was terribly, terribly worried. I had worked nearly nine years in the antinuclear movement. I was very discouraged that Japan was not really responding to the danger.

 I was just very tired, and I felt like I had to rebuild a new life. So I chose Hawai’i to do sustainable living, making a farm, to show people that there’s another way to live. I felt like somebody had to be doing this — not just thinking about the possibility, but practicing it. Hawai’i taught me to live with aloha, within an island. In 2000 I bought the farm [Ginger Hill Farm and Retreat, in Kealakekua, meaning the Path of God], and for eleven years I have worked on it. I have probably educated about two hundred young people, just to live hopefully sustainably through farming, through eating the right things, making medicines, cleansing, healing oneself with herbs and the things that we grow.

I just finished painting a six-panel screen of mostly women marching towards Amaterasu the Sun Goddess — I painted about forty women, with a few men. They are all practitioners of my Goddess Academy, marching from the life they lived, to a more nature-based life, symbolized by Amaterasu — marching from an oil-based economy towards a solar-based economy...

...I painted a Sotatsu screen of the Gods of Wind and Thunder turned into females to bring more of the feminine into culture, especially Japanese culture, which really needs more feminine. Traditional culture has it, but somehow this modern culture in Japan became so Westernized that we gave up a lot of that stuff.

... I felt almost like the women in Fukushima all feel, and so it’s a lot of force and a strength — I felt that these Goddesses can somehow break through something that we are so up against. That’s how I painted those two Goddesses, to bring an energy of change that our country needs at this moment...

These are all yamato-e style paintings, the tradition is extremely old-fashioned. It’s been going on 1,300 years in Nara so I kept that tradition...So I decided that I will focus on this old beautiful tradition that our ancestors used, and with that how can I express who we are now in this time.

In 1993 I did some hand-scrolls called Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty [for] a story that was written by Anne Herbert and Margaret Pavel, right after I became an anti-nuclear activist, so my message was very anti-nuclear, anti-war and anti-violence, and how to live with the peace of others in the land. That was the story behind it. Now it’s a nine-meter scroll.

...So I did this work for the younger generations that we just deprived because of our own luxury, our own wantings, our own electricity, our rich food, we really just left such a legacy to these young people. It feels to me this is an apology — I’m sorry that we did so badly. I’m dedicating this to the younger generations. When I think about it, it just makes me so sad. Our generation was so bad, especially men in my generation, [they] could not think about anybody — they were so caught up in the Japanese becoming so wealthy, so luxurious, they were just awful, awful, so wrong...

...The people who can really make a choice will win, get out and start a new life somewhere in the country, or in other cities. Especially if they have parents in the countryside, they should go back, and start a new life...

Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate - A transcendent journey in poems and photographs to Japan's ancient capital

A few years ago, when I received the chapbook incarnation of Edith Schiffert's and John Einarsen's Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate, I felt like I had been surprised by a dream of the ancient capital in the mail.  A new incarnation of this luminous book has been launched; with an IndieGoGo campaign to finance publishing costs. They are asking Kyoto lovers to help support and be a part of this beautiful project (JD):

                                                  Resting on the earth

                                                  who needs satori or faith?

                                                  Embrace what holds you!


Imagine a book enfolding some of the best expat poetry and photography of the 1200-year-old city of Kyoto, cultural and spiritual heart of Japan. For five decades Edith Shiffert, now age 97, has written haiku and poems inspired by the ancient capital. John Einarsen has been making striking yet serene photographs of Kyoto for more than three decades.

Now Edith and John share their vision and love of this magical city with the book Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate (144 pp, more than 100 duotone photographs and 30 poems). In addition, three renowned writers on Japanese culture, Marc P. Keane, Diane Durston and Takeda Yoshifumi, have contributed illuminating essays. Rona Conti's calligraphy is yet another treat for the eyes.

We plan to publish an edition of this singular book. Its design is complete to the last detail, but for this first edition to go to print we need your help.

Take this transcendent journey to Kyoto by contributing today. All donations are warmly appreciated. Those giving $60 or more will receive a signed edition of this remarkable book.

Keiji Nakazawa in Barefoot Gen's Hiroshima: "I decided to use manga to confront the Bomb."

Trailer from director Yuko Ishida's Barefoot Gen''s Hiroshima (Hadashi no Gen ga Mita Hiroshima) a documentary film in which the camera man (Koshiro Otsu) follows "Barefoot Gen" creator Keiji Nakazawa as he visits neighborhoods throughout Hiroshima and recalls living through the nuclear explosion when he was six-years-old.

The film opened in Tokyo on August 6, 2011, and Nakazawa died of lung cancer a year later, on December 19, 2012.

Roger Pulvers' wonderful  film review at  the JT connects the nuclear radioactive dots between Hiroshima in 1945 and Fukushima in 2011:

When the bomb dropped in 1945, Nakazawa was a 6-year-old, first-year pupil at Kanzaki National Elementary School, which was a mere 1.2 km from ground zero. Luckily, on his way into school, he lingered by the wall adjacent to the front gate to speak with someone, and that wall saved his life...

Nakazawa’s father, sister and brother...were all crushed by pillars and beams, and killed. His father had been a vocal opponent of Japan’s war of aggression, and he had spent more than a year in prison as a result. The family had been ostracized by the community. This is a bitter irony of all indiscriminate bombing, since it murders many who are not only blameless non-combatants but also proponents of peace.

Nakazawa never forgot what he saw. He turned his personal experience and that of the people of Hiroshima into a series of manga that was carried in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump for 12 years from 1973. The story of Barefoot Gen kept the plight of the victims of the bomb and its radiation in the minds of citizens of the nation that had become the most intimate ally of the country that caused that holocaust, the United States.

This fact led the Japanese government to isolate the issue as something local — to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the other city atom-bombed by the U.S. three days after Hiroshima — as opposed to national. In addition, the vigorous pursuit of “atoms for peace,” an American initiative to promote nuclear power spearheaded in the early 1950s by President Dwight Eisenhower further divorced the radiation spread by the bombs from its possible spread by reactors generating electricity all around Japan.

It is thanks to Nakazawa, and eminent authors such as Kenzaburo Oe, Hisashi Inoue and, most recently, Haruki Murakami — all of whom have taken up the nuclear tragedies of 1945 — that the dangers of radiation lingering in our bodies, our soil, our water, and in the air, are now finally being understood by the Japanese people.

However, a truly remarkable aspect of the story of Barefoot Gen...is its message of optimism and hope. The hero, little Gen, stunned by the devastation and death surrounding him, says, “I’m going to live, to live! I’m going to live through this, you’ll see!”

In those pages...the stench of destruction are everywhere, just as in the prefectures of Tohoku most badly affected by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. Yet Gen does not give up hope...

He goes on to point out that the gen in the name is the same character as that in the word genki, which means full of vitality and strong of mettle...

In his message to children, Nakazawa states, “If you come to feel that you wish for a world without war and without atomic bombs, for a world where peace is priceless...then the subject of this film, namely Keiji Nakazawa, will be content.”

Motofumi Asai's in-depth interview, "Barefoot Gen, the Atomic Bomb and I: The Hiroshima Legacy Nakazawa Keiji"i, translated by Richard H. Minear at APJ: Japan Focus explores the anti-war beliefs of Nakazawa's father as well as those of the writer himself who counsels us to be resilient and persistent in the support of respect of life, human dignity, and an ethos of peace:

In order to effect change, each person has to work away at it. I’m a cartoonist, so cartoons are my only weapon. I think everyone has to appeal in whatever position they’re in.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we gradually enlarged our imaginations! We have to believe in that possibility. Doubt is extremely strong, but we have to feel that change is possible. Inspire ourselves. And like Auschwitz, Hiroshima too must sing out more and more about human dignity.

Barefoot Gen anime film online in Japan through Aug. 31; debate continues over ban of anti-war manga series in Matsue

The energetic public debate over the decision by Matsue (Shimane Prefecture) Board of Education to ban the manga series "Barefoot Gen reflects the vibrancy of anti-war attitudes in Japan, a widespread desire of the majority of Japanese citizens to admit and atone for Japanese Imperial wartime atrocities, and to witness for the abolition of uranium and nuclear weapons.

The series depicts realistic images of the entire Pacific War, including Japanese Imperial beheadings and rapes of Chinese people, as well as the US nuclear bombings of Japanese civilians and other wartime suffering.

The controversy has generated an outpouring of support and renewed interest in "Barefoot Gen" whose author passed away in December of last year. Our friends at New York Peace Film Festival report that the anime film adaptation of the manga series, Barefoot Gen,  is available to watch online in Japan until Aug. 31.

Link: http://gyao.yahoo.co.jp/player/00592/v12021/v1000000000000000721/

Synopsis: Barefoot Gen a 1983 war drama based on Keiji Nakazawa's manga series. Director Mori Masaki depicts the final days of the Pacific War and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima from the point of view of a child, Gen Nakaoka, who is caught in the explosion's aftermath.  The film begins and ends with boat symbolism reminiscent of Toro Nagasahi (ceremony during which lit paper lanterns are released on a river to remember the dead).

The story is set during the final days of the Second World War.  Gen's malnourished family struggle survive in Hiroshima. The family wonders why their city has been spared from US napalm (jellied gasoline) firebombings that have destroyed most of Japan's other cities. They sense something is wrong even though they could never imagine that  Hiroshima  had been chosen as a "pristine" target to test one of the two new American nuclear bombs.

On the morning of August 6, Gen, after promising his brother he will take him to the river to play with a toy boat, makes his way to school. Overhead, he notices a single B-29 bomber.  At home, his family watch as a large number of ants ominously enter their home.  Gen drops a pebble he is playing with, and, as he bends to pick it up, a flash of white light erupts in the sky. The eyes of people around him begin to melt. At home, Gen's house collapses, burying his family alive. Gen escaped injury from the flash because he was bent downward in front of a  stone wall, but he is also buried under rubble.

The nuclear blast vaporizes people and destroys most of the buildings throughout Hiroshima. Burned and mutilated people wander through streets looking for water and help. After digging out of the rubble, Gen returns home to find his mother has survived, but his father, sister and little brother are trapped under the ruins of their house. As a firestorm approaches, Gen's father tells Gen they must leave to protect his mother and her unborn child. As they obey Gen's father and leave, they hear their family's screams as they burn to death.

His mother gives birth to a baby girl they name Tomoko; Gen searches for food and help but finds neither in a city filled only with the dead and injured. He finds a mother with a dead baby who shares her breast milk with Gen's infant sister.  People start to show signs of radiation illness: defecating and vomiting blood; losing hair.

After days of searching for food, Gen finds some rice and vegetables in a storehouse.  On August 16, they dig up the skulls of their dead family at their burned home. They're told Tokyo has finally surrendered.  But peace has come too late for them (and many millions of other people throughout the Asia-Pacific, as well as Okinawa and the rest of mainland Japan).  They take in an orphaned child, Ryuta, whom they meet when he tries to steal their food.

To earn money to buy milk for Tomoko, Gen and Ryuta take a job, caring for a dying, embittered man who, in the end, expresses gratitude for their care.  But, of course, Gen's infant sister dies anyway: the odds are stacked against survival in Hiroshima.

As grass and plants start to recover, so does Gen; his hair grows back.  Gen recalls his father's advice: no matter how beaten down, never give up. He decides to fulfill his promise to his brother and builds another boat. Two weeks after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Gen, his mother, and Ryuta go to the river, where they light a candle on top of the boat and release it in the water. They pray as the boat sails away.

-----

"‘Barefoot Gen’ pulled as anti-war images strike too close to home?" (Jun Hongo, JT, Aug. 21, 2013)

"Board’s request to restrict ‘Barefoot Gen’ assailed" (Aug. 22, 2013, Kyodo, JT)

Resurrecting Hiroshima: Things Left Behind

"Things Left Behind" is the title of an exhibition by photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and a documentary about the exhibition by Japan-born filmmaker Linda Hoaglund.  They leave one with the sense of two women wrestling with not only history and time, but also death itself, in their attempts to pierce through to the other side of 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945.

Their search is about facing trauma; the anguish of loss, the striving to resurrect the past; the invocation of spirits — if only for a while.  These photographs and this film are an invitation for us to meet and lay to rest the dead of Hiroshima by meditating upon the things they left behind.

Things Left Behind is playing with English subtitles every day at 4:30 p.m. at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo, until August 16, the day after the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 11:30 a.m. screening time in Japanese only.  Steven Okazaki's White Light, Black Rain is also showing at 2 p.m. and 6:50 p.m.

Portrait of a Weapon Inventor as a Young Man: Hayao Miyazaki's Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)

Trailer for Hayo Miyazaki's Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises).  Based on the manga of the same name; in turn based on a short story by Tatsuo Hori, a prewar proletarian writer, poet and translator who died in 1953. Kaze Tachinu is a fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi, chief designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a long-range warplane used in bombing raids and kamikaze attacks during the Pacific War.

Interesting timing on the release of this film. Miyazaki's films invoke nostalgia for traditional Japanese community, family, and rural life; and contain anti-war and environmentalist themes.  In May of this year, Toshio Suzuki,  producer at Ghibli, the studio which produces Miyazaki's films, unequivocally pronounced his support for the Japanese Peace Constitution in an interview with Tokyo Shimbun (English translation at Anime News Network):

Suzuki spoke his support for the clause, saying, ”We should be proclaiming Article 9, which has brought peace to Japan, to the rest of the world.” He added, “I doubt most people outside of Japan even know that we have Article 9. After all, we have a self-defense force. They probably know about that. That's why we have to spread the word about the clause to the world. This peace that Japan has wouldn't have been possible without it."

Suzuki came to know the future Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki after Suzuki co-founded the magazine Animage for the publisher Tokuma Shoten. Miyazaki serialized his Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga in Animage, and Suzuki participated in the production of Miyazaki's film version in 1984. When Ghibli separated from Tokuma Shoten in 2005, Suzuki was appointed to head the studio. Suzuki stepped down as the head of Ghibli in 2008, but he has remained an active producer on all of its films.

(July 21 update: Detailed analysis by Matthew Penney just published at The Asia-Pacific Journal on Hayao Miyazaki, war, peace, and Article 9; cites the filmmaker's belief that Article 9 should remain the cornerstone of Japanese foreign policy; and cites Studio Ghibli director (and Miyazaki collaborator Isao Takahata: “We sacrificed the people of Okinawa and became collaborators in [America’s wars].” )

(July 24 update: More background at Mainichi with a link to a Ghibli pamphlet outlining both the studio's and Miyazaki's support of Article 9.)

Kyoto Journal is Back, with New Digital Issue

Via our friends and colleagues at KJ:

Kyoto Journal is Back, with New Digital Issue

With release of our 77th issue, the long-established all-volunteer-based Kyoto Journal is back in production!

Our transition from print to digital publication (and a total rebuild of our website) has been a challenging and time-consuming process. This issue puts KJ finally back on track as a quarterly melding of wide-ranging “insights from Asia,” noted for long-shelf-life content and distinctive design (now iPad-friendly too!)

Based in Kyoto, KJ’s network of contributors extends far afield: the 22 articles in this issue of over 200 pages take readers beyond the ancient capital to Hiroshima, Tokyo and Fukushima, to Korea, China, Nepal, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, delving into film and fiction, poetry, “off-the-beaten-track” travels, craft and calligraphy, architectural and archaeological investigations, yoga, post-disaster initiatives, and an informative reviews section.

Featured articles include:

• “Strong Children,” on a post-quake Tohoku support project, by Geoff Read

• “Engineering the Japanese Islands,” an interview with environmental historian Brett Walker, by Winifred Bird

• “Contested Terrain: Development, Identity and the Destruction of an Ancient City in Afghanistan,” a first-hand report by Isaac Blacksin

• “Between Darkness and Light: Reflections on Hindu India,” by Vinayak Bharne

• “Okamoto Taro; Nuclear Proliferation, and the “Myth of Tomorrow,” by Donald C. Wood and Akiko Takahashi“

• Tsa’lam: the Nomadic Route of Salt,” a yak-trail traced by expeditioner Jeff Fuchs

• Illuminating profiles of contemporary filmmakers Amar Kanwar, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Asoka Handagama

KJ was highly fortunate to have been supported by Heian Bunka Center from 1986 – 2010. The magazine is now a fully independent non-profit. Our next concern is to expand our subscriber base. Bandwidth and monthly charges for digital publication webtools aren’t cheap; we need to cover ongoing production expenses, hoping also to produce occasional specially-themed publications in print. Without a sponsor, we now depend on our readers — the KJ community — for vital support.

KJ is not a business. Neither staff nor contributors receive any payment.  We believe that KJ fulfils an important role as a place for non-mainstream material that digs deeper into the fertile soil of Asian experience. With the new potential of our website and digital format, we are eager to see KJ’s ongoing evolution, and to welcome new readers and subscribers.

Downloads of individual issues cost 1,200 yen (US$12.50). A full year’s subscription (4 issues) is an affordable 4,000 yen (about US$42). Check out our sampler of 77, and please sign up (or take out a gift subscription!), to help us keep on producing KJ.

We also have a newsletter – please sign up on our homepage and receive a full-length download of a classic issue, KJ 73, for free.



Visit the KJ website for more: http://kyotojournal.org/

Noh Workshop @ HUB Kyoto, where things appear and disappear

"Is it comfortable? Good, it shouldn't be!"

Noh means skill, noh means talent.humorous Dr. Diego Pellecchia reminded us of an often overlooked definition- possibility! Last Sunday, Diego led a workshop at  Kyohakuin, the venue for the HUB Kyoto initiative to bring change makers together in one place. Indeed, in a gorgeous venue with such a rich history, the possibilites truely are endless.

Originally the residence of a Nanga (Chinese literati style) painter in the Meiji era, HUB founding member Lucinda Cowing explained that following the Second World War, Kyohakuin became a finishing school for girls. Here, they were trained in the traditional arts, including tea ceremony and calligraphy, but also Noh theatre. Hence it is believed that the recently-restored Noh stage was built during this period.

Diego started the session by describing how he first began exploring his possibilities with Noh when he met Monique Arnaud in his home of Italy in 2006. After taking Noh classes from her there, he decided to pursue a PhD focusing on the reception of Noh theatre in Europe at the Royal Holloway University of London,  Drama, and Theatre Department.

Currently he is a student of Kongo school of Noh at the International Noh Institute in Kyoto. He also is a researcher at Ritsumeikan University and gives Noh workshops internationally. This workshop was his first in Japan.

For some of the participants, it was their first experience with Noh.  Others like former dancer Julien de Vries, used to watch Noh every Sunday at midnight on NHK. Another participant/observer was photographer Stéphane Barbery who took some stunning photos of the workshop that are available here.

Before moving on to Noh chanting and Noh movements, Diego explained how Noh represents the potential for things to happen. Noh starts with an empty stage. Things appear- the music, the masks, the costumes, the dances, the chants. When the performance is over- they disappear. Diego reminded the workshop participants to keep this in mind as they tested themselves at becoming one with the Noh chanting and movements.

"Noh is like a mirror- it is honest, it reflects."

The workshop focused on a shimai, a self-contained unit of a full Noh performance, entitled Oi Matsu, the Ancient Pine.  Oimatsu is the first shimai that Diego ever learned. It depicts how the protagonist Sugawara Michizane, after being expelled to Chikuzen, Kyushu from Kyoto, would long for days of old.  He reminisces on the plum and ancient pine trees that used to adorn his courtyard in the capital when the next day they appear to him in his Kyushu residence.  Click here for a synopsis of the entire play.

According to the Samurai Archives:

Oimatsu, literally "old pine tree," is an auspicious Noh play depicting, symbolically, an old pine tree. In this play, as throughout Noh and other theatrical and artistic traditions, the pine represents longevity and strength, especially through difficulties, as the pine is evergreen through the winter.

The participants would become the traveling ancient pine tree.

After leading the participants through the chants for the shimai, Diego explained how the performers, no matter what their size, would form a strong skeleton for the large and heavy Noh costumes that they would wear should they perform. The masks would block a large part of their vision— it's normal to be restricted to one eyehole, and not be able to see one's toes —they  so Noh performers must know the stage like the back of their hand. This also is why Noh performers seem to move as if they are sliding across the stage. Diego guided the workshop participants through the movements in their new skeletons.

"Focus on reproducing a beautiful shaper. You are now an old pine visiting from Tokyo to Kyushu."

All of the participants, experiencing Noh as performers for the first time, took a while to feel comfortable with the movements and chanting, which although steming back from 650 years ago, were very new to them.  It is no wonder that Noh performances take years of dedicated training to perfect the simple yet very technical movements.

Diego ended the workshop saying, " When you see a Noh performance, I am sure that you will think of it differently."
  
For those who missed this workshop, there will be more to come and Diego will be appearing for the first time as the shite lead role in a full production of a Noh play at the bi-annual International Noh Institute performance on June 29th, 2013. 

-Posted by Jen Teeter

Exhibition of Ainu woodwork and more at Yokohama Takashimaya

 From April 17th to the 20th, the 5th annual "Wood work, Wooden shapes" exhibition is being held on the 8th floor of Takashimaya in Yokohama. 

Nibutani-born Ainu artist Maki Sekine, whose carved wooden obon (tray) is seen in the poster above will have her woodwork and atush (elm bark carvings) on display. Maki Sekine just returned from Aotearoa (New Zealand) where she took place in the Aotearoa Ainumosir Exchange Program and some of her pieces on display are inspired by her interactions with Maori people she met there.

- Posted by Jen Teeter

IMAGINE PEACE

Via Yoko Ono:

New York Times - 1 Jan 2013

IMAGINE PEACE

love, yoko

Keiji Nakazawa: "For humanity, the greatest treasure is peace."

Keiji Nakazawa, the author of "Barefoot Gen," had died (1939-2012). 
The drawing in the photograph reads "For humanity, the greatest treasure is peace." 

(Keiji Nakazawa (March 14, 1939 – December 19, 2012) was a Japanese manga artist and writer. He was born in Hiroshima, where he lived during the Pacific War.  The cartoonist survived the US nuclear bombing of the city in 1945. All of his family, who had not been evacuated, died from the bombing.

 In 1961, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo to become a full-time cartoonist for manga anthologies.

 Following the death of his mother in 1966, Nakazawa began to memorialize the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima  in his stories.  Nakazawa's major work, "Hadashi no Gen" (Barefoot Gen) (a ten-volume series) explored the nuclear bombing and its aftermath, and examined the Japanese government's militarization of Japanese society during World War II.  "Barefoot Gen was adapted into two animated films and a live action TV drama.

Nakazawa was diagnosed with lung cancer and in July 2011.

"They Don't Want You to Know What is Going On": Performance Artists Noora Baker and Yoshiko Chuma Bring Pain of Palestinian Reality onto Tokyo Stage

Japan-born, New-York based performance artist Yoshiko Chuma, founder of the School of Hard Knocks, and Noora Baker, a dancer with the El Funoun company in Ramallah, Palestinian territories, teamed up this week to bring a powerful message to a Tokyo audience in a small theater in Sangenjaya. 

Titled "Love Story, Palestine", the multi-media show featured Chuma and Baker performing to the backdrop of imagery from 6 Seconds in Ramallah, the show performed during Chuma's recent visit to Palestine with a team of other Japanese musicians and artists, including genre-bending violinist Aska Kaneko and singer Sizzle Ohtaka. Interspersing the performance were hauntingly gorgeous vocals from Ohtaka, who was live in the house, as well as a frank conversation between Chuma and Baker about a reality that few outsiders know.

Baker recounted stories of relatives and friends arrested on a constant basis by Israeli occupation officers--often with little or no justification. "In addition to the regular checkpoints that we all must pass through, they suddenly also sometimes erect barriers so that you cannot pass,"Baker recounted. "They do not care even if they are separating families." She relayed a story of being detained at age seven with a group of other children and having tear gas thrown at her by authorities simply because she happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

In response to Chuma's question whether her troupe could possibly face arrest if their visits to Palestine continued, Baker responded, "Yes, the action of simply visiting Palestine on multiple occasions is enough to draw yourself into the spotlight and possibly face detention by Israeli authorities. They don't want you to know what is going on."

Chuma then went on to point out the similarities existing between Palestine and Fukushima following last year's nuclear accident, wherein people truly have no idea what is actually going on. "Both places appear normal from the outside, but in reality, they are not."

                                    Yoshiko Chuma (center) with audience members in Tokyo

The latest news about Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks may be read on her blog.

An interesting review of "Love Story, Palestine" may also be read in Dance Magazine here.

--Kimberly Hughes

Related posts on this blog:

Speakers contemplate Palestinian human rights, urge action at Tokyo event

Live theater performers from Iraq and Tunisia bring deep emotion, human connection to Tokyo stage

"War Makes People Insane": Dramatic work by performance artist Tari Ito lays bare the realities of military sexual violence