Japan E-mails: August 28, 2001

 (retrospection)

Things are okay over here. Monday night I drove over to the neighboring town to hang out with Aaron, whose a JET from Wales. Since I don't have a phone, I'm forced to just kind of drop in on people and see if they're free. (Hopefully I'll be getting a phone later today though.) I caught Aaron just as he was about to leave his house to go to a drum circle, so I went with him. It was an interesting experience. A bunch of Japanese people sitting in a circle playing on the drums. It reminded me of that drum circle we went to once or twice in Grand Rapids, only this was at someone's house, and I think all the drums might have been traditional Japanese instruments.

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Dear Media Mouse,
As we talked about with the radical history web page, and my contributions from Japan:
What would be ideal for me, if it's not too much trouble for you guys, is I could do a sort of survey-type write up about the Japanese left (with sources of course) and that could be posted on the website, and then as I'm able to get more into it, I can send an expanded version later on in the year.
As for your question about other areas of radical history, I think there are several fascinating subjects we could explore on the Media Mouse website. The Paris Commune perhaps (when the communists, anarchists, and radical Jacobins took control of Paris in 1871). Or Rosa Luxembourg and the Sparticist Revolution, or the Haymarket Martyrs, etc. And maybe we could even adda book review section of radical literature.

I'll start sending stuff as soon as I have a chance to write it up. Sorry about the low attendance lately, although it has always been up and down for Media Mouse, hasn't it? Attendance was always really good right after we did a big event, and then it would drop down again between projects. I think right before I left Grand Rapids, there were a couple people who we had picked up on the momentum of our July 4th demonstration. Are they still attending, or have they dropped off as well.