NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

While in Japan last month I didn't get to hear much Chamorro. When i nobia-hu Elizabeth Kelley Bowman visited we would speak Chamorro to each other and I did bring some Chamorro LPs with me that I would listen to in my apartment, but for my last week in Japan I got particularly homesick for the Chamorro language. Thankfully the group Famagu'on Tano' yan I Tasi was there to help me with my minahalang. They are a Japan based Chamorro dance group, comprised of primarily education majors at Teikyo University under the guidance of Dr. Kyoko Nakayama. I visited the group in Tokyo in my final days, conducted some interviews, gave a talk and was treated to a BBQ. On a crowded Sunday afternoon, in an ocean of people speaking Japanese, it was so nice to have a group singing and chanting in Chamorro. Given the occasion one song they sang over and over was "Nihi ta fanhanao ta fanpiknik." I've included the lyrics below. Nihi ta fanhånao ta fanpiknik, Guih

Yesterday I spent the day at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It was a very surreal experience. On the surface it appears like many other shrines or places or worship or reflection in Japan, but it was an incredibly militaristic space. It featured museums dedicated to a whitewashed military history of Japan, thousands of letters from soldiers writing home about how happy they were to die for Japan, and statues for the courage of war widows. The shrine is meant to serve the more than two million souls who have died as soldiers for Japan over the past century, so the militaristic and warmongering tone makes sense, but given what I know of Japanese history it was still shocking to see the way things were twisted in order to create a sense of sinlessness and honor in the midst of a very blatantly imperial period of their history. The shrine reminded me that if you win your wars, you can always explain and justify the deaths involved as heroic, as necessary, as part of a teleology of g

Since I can't speak Japanese, I have to rely on translators and interpreters to learn more about recent protests in the country. I'm grateful for a growing group of people who have been helping me understand more and more about continuing and recently developing protests. Videos on Youtube, some thankfully subtitled with English have also helped. I wanted to share some of them below, to help others understand more about life in Japan in terms of peace and protest.

I've been in Japan for two weeks now and things have been quite busy, I haven't had as much time as I would like for blogging or writing. I have been swimming in a sea of small and large differences from my life on Guam. The things each day which strike me slowly or suddenly and remind me that I am in a different part of the world, and that my level of knowledge about Japan, barely scratches the surface of the surface for existence here. Transitioning from Guam, which is very car-centered to life here in Kobe where my life, my cognitive and temporal geography is all dictated by public transportation is a massive shift. One thing caught my eye the other day while I was riding the train. Some trains would have cars with pink signs on them such as the one in the image above. These trains would only for female users of public transportation. When I asked my friend why they had these and were these common throughout Japan, she stated that they were created in response to the fre