Article on DU and Iraq (in English, from Russian source) – I got this link info via listserv of Tawara-san’s organization.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20070723/69509899.html

A thread with updates on the Korean hostage situation… apparently they’re going through a lot of the same social backlash that Nori experienced.

The Marmot’s Hole » Hostage Situation Update:

The Seoul Sinmun (Korean) reports that the hostages’ families have been hurt by all the nasty comments being made by netizens. In particular, with some rather ill-advised photos taken by one of the hostages floating around, the netizens onslaught has been pretty fierce, with the Bundang Saemmul Church homepage, the Korea Foundation for World Aid, and the Cyworld blog of one of the hostages being particularly targeted.

It is still more than a month early than Emi’s real birthday, but here are the messages from the U-Chicago people that I got when we met in Cobb Hall (our class location!) for the Celebrating Progest web project on Thurs, July 19. We are all in support of the “Let’s give waterproof ipod shuffle to Emi for her birthday” project! (based on her blog entry).

Happy Birthday Emi! I hope our paths continue to cross – I’ve already learned so much. Good luck in this coming year.
-Lauren Jr.

Happy birthday, Emi! We enjoyed your presence so much in class! Please come back sometime soon!
-Tiffany

Happy Birthday Emi-san!
I wish for you another wonderful year of opening the eyes and minds of others who value & respect your insights, not to mention…aspire to make a difference in the world like you have. Keep up the great work!!!
-Lauren Sr.

Hiiii! Happy Birthday! Look at for the website! Warm wishes from Chicago! Wish you were here! Write whenever you’d like…
-Patrick

Dear Emi-
I’m thrilled to share a birthday month with you! Swim away – I’m sure you’ll get new great ideas in the pool AND just enjoy-
-Norma

Emi-san,
Happy birthday!!! I hope you enjoy the ipod shuffle – it was a great fun to organize this fundraising (?) project for your birthday. Big thanks to Masaki-kun who came up with this idea!
-Tomomi

And those who are in social movements/pop culture classes and couldn’t come to the meeting – please feel free to congratulate Emi-san’s birthday using this blog space!

Finally, all podcasts are on-line!

Noriaki Imai (Student, Peace and Environmental Activist)
“Why I went to Iraq: Three Years Later”　

Tari Ito (Performance Artist) and MASA (Jazz Saxophonist)
“Rubber Tit”

Hitomi Kamanaka (Film Director)
　“Q&A with Director Hitomi Kamanaka”　
- panel discussion on Director Kamanaka’s film, “Rokkashomura Rhapsody,” with Kamanaka, Judy Hoffman (Film Director,Cinema and Media Studies), Michael Raine (Cinema and Media Studies/ EALC) and Norma Field (EALC)

Michiko Nakajima (Lawyer)
“The Fifteen-Woman Lawsuit against Self-Defense Forces in Iraq”
Discussant: John Comaroff (Anthropology), Translation: Norma Field (EALC)

Emi Koyama
“Colonialism, Militarism, and the Political Economy of Transracial Adoption”　

Emi Koyama (Director, Intersex Initiative)
“Intersex at the Intersection of Queer Theory and Disability Theory”　

Yoshifumi Tawara（Sec. General of Children and Texbooks Network 21)
“Japanese Education and Society in Crisis”　
Translation: Norma Field (EALC)

From Japan Times

A Bombings “Couldn’t be Helped”: Kyuma

Under LDP pressure, Kyuma retracts A-Bomb comments

Sorry for the late posting – but I met Nori at a Mass Communication Studies conference held in Kumamoto in June 9-10.
I was a discussant to a panel on backlash against feminism and the role of the mass media and the internet, and Nori joined the panel as a guest speaker!

Nori was doing great – and he was so energetic! He told me that he enjoyed his experiences in Chicago so much, and he felt refreshed since then.
On Saturday night, we had a dinner/drinking gathering at a local restaurant, with lots of horse meat dishes, which is known as a local cuisine of Kumamoto.

The main speaker, Chiki (blogger), talked about his analysis of backlashers on the internet, and posed thoughts about feminism’s failure to communicate its thoughts efffectively to the general public. Nori then told his story on the bashing against him, and his own analysis and thoughts of the situation. Akihiro Kitada, a prof at the University of Tokyo, reported his work in progress on the survey he took with the internet users, especially the users of 2 Channel – and argued that it is wrong to simply assume that 2 Channelers are “right-wing.” I told about my own experience in creating websites and blogs for feminist organizations and of my own. Masami Saito, a feminist based in Toyama, who acted as a moderator also added her perspective as a feminist activist/scholar based in a rural Toyama prefecture.

If you are interested in reading the reports in Japanese, the panel participants posted the following reports and thoughts onto their own blogs.

Chiki Ogiue’s “Ogiue-shiki”
Chiki’s presentation

Masami Saito’s “Gender and Media Blog”
Report and thoughts

Nori’s “Imai Noriaki no Kakera”
Academic Convention and Activism

Tomomi’s blog
Report

Nori and Tomomi in Kumamoto

local fish “sashimi” and raw horse meat

This article was published on the Washington Post on 6.14.07

Throughout this class, we have been exposed to a wide variety of activism: activism through the law (Nakajima Michiko); activism through the internet (Emi Koyama); and activism through film (Kamanaka Hitomi). What we have not come across–except perhaps in narratives of ANPO–is activism through violence. The issue of violence and its relation to protest is extraordinarily complex, and gives to rise to a number of conceptually difficult questions. What, for example, is the limit of protest? Is violence necessarily a part of dissent? Also, how should protesters distinguish between individual instantiations of structure and the structures themselves, or, put another way, between the MAN and a person in a business suit?

As a way to get at some of these issues, my presentation explored the rise of the Rote Armee Fraktion in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the following, I have provided a time line of the major events leading up to the wave of violence known as the German Autumn.

The RAF emerged out of the mid 1960s student movement in Germany, especially from the Extra Parliamentary Opposition and groups such as Kommune I.

The members of Kommune I lived in alternative lifestyle communities and staged “happenings” in West Berlin, in which they would do things like throw custard balloons at American officials.  Members of Kommune I made explicit connections between consumption and imperialism/capitalism.  In one pamphlet, they connected German consumption to Vietnam, writing: “the burning department store with burning people revealed for the first time in a European metropolis that crackling Vietnam feeling (being there and burning along), that we still have to do without in Berlin.”

The Red Army Faction also made this connection between consumption at home and imperialism abroad.  Perhaps motivated by the Kommune I pamphlets, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin set off bombs in a Frankfurt Department store in April of 1968.  Two days after the bombing the police arrested Baader and Ensslin.

Also in April, Rudi Dutschke, the head of the APO was shot by a Joseph Bachmann, a right wing activist.  This shooting intensified the dissolution of the united and largely peaceful student movements associated with the APO.

Ulrike Meinhof who had been a writer for the leftist journal konkret, began harboring Baader and Ensslin in 1970.
Baader was soon caught and returned to prison.

In May of 1970 Meinhof and Ensslin successfully freed Baader from prison.  It was at this point that the conservative press coined the term the Baader Meinhof gang.

On June 2 1970, the group published a communiqué claiming responsibility for Baader’s rescue.  This “Manifesto for Armed Action” called for immediate action: “Build Up the Red Army!  Let the Class Struggle unfold!  Let the Proletariat organize!  Let the Armed Resistance begin!”  It also argues that it was meant for those who might join the struggle rather than for the majority of society.  “There is no point to explain things to the wrong (falschen) people.  We’ve done that too long.  The action to free Baader was not meant for the intellectual chatterers, the pant shitters, the know it alls, but rather for the potentially revolutionary segment of the population.”

Shortly after they freed Baader, members of the Red Army faction traveled to a Palestinian training camp to learn guerrilla tactics.
Upon returning, they began to rob banks and steal cars to finance gun purchases.  They also set off bombs in places like the Springer Press and buildings related to the United States.

In Winter 1971, Ulrike Meinhof wrote the Baader Meinhof Gang’s manifesto: “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla.”

The group continued to gain members throughout this period. In early 1971, for example, the radical Socialists Patients Collective–a group of psychiatry patients who had, under the leadership of their doctor, broken from the institution to become a revolutionary group–started signing their documents RAF.

Police managed to catch the primary members of the RAF in the summer of 1972.  They were kept in different prisons throughout West Germany, but managed to communicate with one another through their lawyers.  While in prison, they went on various hunger strikes and called attention to what they believed to be the brutal tactics of the West German police. Rather than stymie the group’s development, the imprisonment of their leaders served as a catalyst for the RAF’s expansion. Indeed a whole new wave of RAF guerillas joined the battle, which increasingly was one waged to free the captured leaders.

The November 1974, death of Holger Meins from a hunger strike initiated a new wave of violence and state repression. One example of this state repression came from the January 1975  “Lex Baader-Meinhof” or  “Baader-Meinhof Laws,” which drastically curtailed civil rights and increased the powers of the police.

In May of 76 Meinhof was found hanging in her cell. Massive demonstrations against Meinhof’s “murder” were held throughout the Federal Republic, the largest being in Frankfurt and Berlin.

In June of 76, terrorists including RAF figures hijacked an Air France plane and demanded the release of the remaining RAF prisoners.  Before their demands were met however, Israeli commandos stormed the plane and freed the hostages.

In April 1977 in the midst of the case against Baader and Ensslin, Federal Prosecutor Buback was killed in Karlsruhe.

On April 28, the defendants—Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe—were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
In response members of the RAF shot Jürgen Ponto, chairman of the Dresdener Bank.

In September of 77, Hans Martin Schleyer, President of the Employers Association and the Federation of German Industry, was kidnapped by the RAF.  They demanded the release of the prisoners in Stammheim.  In October, RAF and Palestinian groups hijacked another plane, and again demanded the prisoner’s release.  Like the last hijacking, however, this one ended in failure.

On October 17, Baader, Ensslin and Raspe supposedly commited suicide in prison.  Days later Schleyer was killed in retaliation.

The violence continued sporadically into the 1980s, though it slowly lost momentum.

The question then, is what are we to make of this?  How do we connect activism to violence?  When and why do protests turn violent? Some scholars argue that the violence of the German left was driven by memories of the fascist past.  Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home, for example, argues “The RAF sought to punish Germany both for the sins of the that past and for what is saw as a their repetition in the present through such things as police repression and German support for American ‘genocide’ in Vietnam.” Varon also interprets the strong response of the state in terms of fascist continuities.  The state argued that the RAF was the true successor to the fascist past and that extreme measures were necessary to protect German democracy. These measures included: the Berufsverbot which permitted the dismissal of any civil servant deemed to be supportive of terrorism, increased censorship of leftist papers, and a general persecution of anyone thought to sympathize with the RAF.

According to this interpretation, the RAF’s violence stemmed from the peculiarities of the German past. This explanation, however, does not provide an explanation for why similar violence emerged throughout the world. Indeed, it seems that significantly more work needs to be done in order to understand the nature of postwar leftist violence. Does it occur when normal institutional channels are blocked as many sociologists would argue? Does it arise from regionally specific historical circumstances as historians would have it? Was it a result of the specific ideological formulations of the postwar Left? I do not have any grand answers to these questions, yet what does seem certain, is that to understand the international eruptions of protest in the 1960s and 70s, we need to grasp the complex connections between activism and violence.

Greetings from Tokyo! I arrived here yesterday, and today I am heading to Kumamoto.

This is an article from the June 6 issue of Asahi Shinbun on Tari Ito’s upcoming performance on “comfort women” issue in the Philipinnes.

Tari article

I just read through Emi’s “Whore Revolution” zine that I bought during her visit this weekend. I remember some of us in class were confused or challenged by Emi’s fliers that read “Sluts Against Rape!” After reading the zine, which includes an email exchange with an academic feminist about the agency of prostitutes, the concept of “When prostitutes are safe, all women are safe.” became really powerful for me.

I think most feminists and feminisms think that the exclusion of working-class women, women of color, prostitutes, and third world women has been overcome with a complex academic understanding of “intersectionality,” but Emi’s stuggles with institutionalized feminism points in a different direction. That’s one thing I’ll definitely remember from her visit.