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. ************* 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 Universit

Every year I do a couple episodes for the local public radio program Beyond the Fence for KPRG. Here is one of mine from earlier this year which focused on the history of the Wusstig family on Guam, who I met through my work at the Guam Museum. The family is donating the headstone that was created for their ancestor while he was a POW in Japan during World War II. To download podcast of this episode and others head to this link.  *********************** Ep. 237 “Sailor, Musician and Forgotten POW: Remembering George Wusstig” (hosted by Dr. Michael Lujan Bevacqua and produced by Tom Maxedon with assistance from Alan Grossman and Robert Wang) aired on 3/11/16. During the Japanese occupation of Guam in World War II, a number of U.S. active duty and retired military men were taken as prisoners of war to Japan. One of those was George Ernest Wusstig who was born in Germany in the 19th century, migrated to the United States where he became a U.S. citizen, and settled

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

I'm in Japan for one month and the issue of peace, pas, minagem is all over the place. Part of the reason is because my guide while I'm here is Professor Ronni Alexander who teaches International Relations/Peace Studies at Kobe University and is the head of the Popoki Peace Project. The main thrust of her work is helping communities, a diverse range of communities across Asia and the Pacific, young and old, to imagine peace in new and interesting ways. To get to see what in their life creates peace and what limits peace. As a result of my connection to Ronni, my mindset here is actively been shaped by peace and non-peace. For example: I'm teaching a course on US militarization in the Asia-Pacific region and various peace movement, antiwar and demilitarization movements are all over the curriculum. I'm in Japan at a time when protest movements are evolving around the Prime Minister's attempts to pass new security laws that would fundamentally change Japan's

I've been lost in Power Point presentations for the past few days. I'll be teaching for the next month at Kobe University in Japan. My course is an accelerated one and so I'm teaching a month-long course in just a week. I don't normally prepare Power Points for any of my lectures in Guam, but since my students here in Japan will be primarily those who did not learn English as a first language, the visuals and potential outline skeleton it provides will help keep them engaged. My course focuses on US militarization in the Asia-Pacific Region, and it will link together US strategic interests from Okinawa, to the Philippines, to Guam, to the Marshall Islands and Hawai'i, while also linking together the popular movements for demilitarization or decolonization against those bases. For me, este kalang un guinife-hu mumagahet. I am been working on this issue as an activist and an academic for many years. In 2011 I published my article "The Gift of Imagination: Sol