NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I traveled to Japan last month with Ed Alvarez the Executive Director for Guam's Commission on Decolonization. We were in Japan for just a few days but we were able to give a number of talks at two universities in the Kansai area thanks to our friends Ronni Alexander (Kobe University) and Yasukatsu Matsushima (Ryukkoku University), who arranged our visits to their institutions of higher education. Our visit also got us some coverage in the newspapers Tokyo Shinbun and Chunichi Shinbun. I have no idea what they are saying in the articles or in this article below taken from the website for Ryukkoku Uniersity, but I am hoping they are either speaking positively about the message we had about decolonization in Guam or about the illustrious nature of my beard.

Si Yu'us Ma'åse ta'lo nu si Ronni yan si Yasukatsu para i ayudon-ñiha gi este na hinanao! Gof ti apmam, lao gof gaibåli sinembatgo.

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グアム政府事務局長、グアム大学教授による特別講義を開催（地域経済論ほか） 12/26/16
Ryukkoku University
Jap…

Two of Japan's pacifist voices go silent by Phillip Brasor Special To The Japan Times September 3, 2016
Rokusuke Ei — writer, broadcaster, raconteur — died on July 7 at the age of 83, roughly two decades after publishing a best-seller called “Daiojo,” which means “Dying Peacefully.” Several media outlets reported that Ei passed peacefully. He’d had Parkinson’s disease for a number of years before he died and yet continued to present his long-running show on TBS Radio until this spring — though he often did so over the phone. He also had to rely more on his female announcing partner, which in a way was the saddest aspect of his decline. Ei was, more than anything, a man of words, someone who understood the power of simple, clear language. His gift was instinctual — he didn’t need to choose his words carefully.

In a series of memorial interviews in the Asahi Shimbun with some of Ei’s professional acquaintances, veteran comedian Kinichi Hagimoto said of his friend, “It w…

The issue of Okinawa can provide us an important example in terms of the power of media.

The coverage of Okinawa, Guam, Diego Garica, Hawai'i and so many other places where the US has bases within the United States plays a significant role in whether or not the network of bases the US has is accepted or challenged. The media is not objective and not neutral, but always proposes certain accepted frames of reference which make the news easier to digest and create. In most countries in the world there is not an accepted assumption that the nation should have bases in every corner of the globe, but in the US there is. The media's coverage of that base as an accepted fact and acceptable part of American reality legitimizes it and also helps prevent people from understanding the legitimate protest movements build around those bases.

In the case of Okinawa, we also see how the media will take on certain angles in order to protect the alleged greater interests of the country. Chomsky…

At first I was going to put "revisionist history news" as the title for this post, but the more I thought about it, Japan and Germany, those villains of World War II, are cited the most frequently as being the most forgetful and the nations most likely to erase or whitewash their histories. This is a very seductive discursive proposition, because by focusing on the way other nations wish to hide their shameful violent and inhuman past, it can easily make you righteously oblivious to your own nation's terrifying past. The United States certainly shouldn't treat Japan as some terrible white-washer of history, especially when the United States itself is built on genocide and has several national holidays that perpetuate pathetic myths about the origin of the US, rather than acknowledging that genocidal genesis.
******************** Japanese crown prince says country must not rewrite history of WW2
Naruhito makes rare statement on importance of ‘correctly’ rememberi…

Lately I have been so busy that I don't have as much time as I would like to write up my thoughts on this blog. I spent an entire week in Taiwan and did not write a single post. I was too busy with meetings and traveling and found that by the time I would return to my room, I would immediately collapse onto my bed without typing a single word.

The month of July is one of the strangest for Guam. It is the month where the most talking about remembering takes place, but the commemoration is naturally very selective and very uninformative about Guam's history or contemporary state. I was trying to write up my thoughts before Liberation Day, but life intervened and so I'm not finished yet. I was at least happy to see that the Liberation Day coverage was not uniformly taihinasso. The usual stories were trotted out and the usual narratives were stuck onto poles and waved about for everything to salute. But amidst it all an unexpected article from Japan emerged to p…

When I was in Okinawa last month for a symposium on Okinawan sovereignty and decolonization, there was significant interest amongst the local media in the island. I was interviewed extensively by a reporter from one newspaper. The other newspaper also provided coverage and even organized a large televised panel on the issue. A local media station filmed the symposium I spoke at and is planning to make a documentary about it. The one thing missing however was the mainland Japanese media. They didn't cover much of the sovereignty/decolonization related events. It seemed almost like a blackout, or perhaps a temporary refusal to acknowledge. I can understand why the Japanese media might want to not cover this issue.  Media operates by frames, by easy ways of understanding a story. A story is presented in such a way that all you do is provide some details and the audience can already assume everything else. This is part of the limitations of the media but also the way in w…