サロペット: an axolotl in japan

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Kyoto ware incense box in shape of crouching rabbit.  Stoneware with enamels over clear glaze.  Nonomura Ninsei, active ca. 1646-77.  Kyoto, Kyoto prefecture, Japan. Gift of Charles Lang Freer . Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

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My old professor, Peipei Qiu, wrote a book about Chinese comfort women, Chinese women who were sexually enslaved by Japanese troops during World War II, who faced monstrous physical and sexual abuse and who in the years since have received very little in terms of recognition or compensation.

She did an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which the interviewer comes across as pretty gross. He is consistently suspicious of my professor's scholarship for reasons that seem to have more to do with her nationality than her work. It reminds me of that Fox interview with Reza Aslan. Her answers are elegant, possessed and straight-forward. This is my favorite:

"Q: Some people might question the independence of Chinese scholarship on a topic related to the Japanese invasion, which is so charged with nationalistic emotion. How do you address this?

A: Research on Japan’s wartime “comfort stations” started in China as a grassroots movement. My collaborating researchers told me that for a long period of time, they received no funding support and had to rely on their own savings to carry out the investigations. The Chinese and Japanese researchers and specialists whom I consulted with in writing the book have all devoted themselves to the topic out of deep concerns for the fundamentals of humanity and for the true reconciliation among the peoples.This is also how I address the issue. By writing the book I hope to help facilitate a transnational understanding of the sufferings of these women. To understand what happened to the “comfort women,” we must transcend the boundaries of the nation-states. I want to show that confronting the tragedy of “comfort women” is not about politics or national interests; it is about human life."

Buy her book!

[nevver]

Meanwhile, in Japan…

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Purikura horror movie

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Various transportation methods I've taken in Japan.

More to come!

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Former/fallen idols

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child-> adult-> collective ether

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Watercolor made by peach display at the grocery store

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I've been interested in tetrapods, these cool looking, geometric, concrete structures meant to protect against natural disaster that border huge swaths of Japan's coasts, since I read a "interview" with an animate one in Cabinet Magazine. But I saw them for the first time in real life on the Oki Islands in Shimane prefecture. They're chubby and kind of cute (like My Little Pony legs) and fit together in that soothing way and look natural for a second right before they look completely unnatural. 

Their practicality is highly disputed and many think they could be inflicting more ecological damage than benefit; their production has become a huge industry in Japan.  

Though the threats are different, creating an economy based on exploiting people's fears of destruction is a worldwide phenomenon, very familiar to anyone in New York whose had to show a security guard two kinds of ID and go through metal detectors to get into an office building.

Also pictured are some tetrapod erasers from the 100 Yen store. 

Articles about tetrapods:

https://freeassociationdesign.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/tetrapods-entropy-and-excess/

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/07/22/to-be-sorted/tetrapods/#.VNbb2mTLceE