speach tree

Had dinner tonight with a few people in Chinatown. A few things KB said made us kind of nod in recognition: You're not organizing if at the end of it, you're burnt out. If you don't have education, if you don't have a right hand, you can find people who do. They can fill that role. If you're too smart, it shuts everyone out. There are two models: one is to "empower" people you think are stupid or incapable, play god. Give them "power." The other is to "unleash" people's true power. To organize the undocumented, women, un-educated. The ones everyone looks down on. Which is organizing? Things to think about...

I'm not sure exactly what went down, but a couple of days before I was supposed to leave Tokyo for DC, I got an email from CSWA folks about some Chinese women who had been hired through a subcontracting firm to work for a medical laundry in Japan. They eventually came out in mid-September against their company, technoclean, for stealing their wages and for exposing them to long hours of hard labor with no protection against the toxic waste resulting from the laundry. My mission was to go out and meet the women, but all I had was a Chinese article and the name of the journalist who wrote it up. For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigr...

After a long hiatus during which deadlines, anti-gentrification campaigns, and a trip to Japan made blogging seem like a post-retirement activity, I am happy to say that I have caught the blug (blog-bug) again and have something new to write about. Please choose from the following (in no particular order): - my mission from cswa - meeting one of my cousins for the first time since 1985 - salsa dancing in Roppongi with J-chan until 6am - my grandma's pre-war house getting flooded - getting kicked out of AR's house the night before my flight - singing Bob Marley "One Love" to a room full of middle aged semi-professional enka singers in Shikoku