This just dropped into the Psipook mailbox. I pass it on to you.
Tokyo Anti-War Graffiti youth(arrested for 44 days) is coming to Kyoto.
He was arrested after spraypainting an anti-war message on a public restroom in a Tokyo park.
He was charged with ‘severe damaging on the building’ and unlawfully arrested for 44 days!!!
Because the message was antiWar’,many local and international activists and artists have been supporting his efforts to defend himself in court.
His other message on the restroom was ‘spectacle society’, an idea developed in the 50’s; in which we are living in the ultimate capitalistic society, where people can only see things in a passive form.
We are casually going to talk about today’s society and how Japanese youth culture is unable to grow into it’s own movement.
The talk will be in Japanese and in English.
Please join us at the Bazaar cafe on 10/18 from 3pm to 4:30pm.
Afterwards, there will be a benefit concert to support the all volunteer-run Bazaar cafe.
For more information-contact-kei – kunderforest@hotmail.com
Sponsored by shitpop and the Philippines-Japan Forum.
Supplemental, 2023: I have included this odd email here in the 2023 refurbish/relaunch, bad typing and all, because it strikes me as a historical relic; an odd thing that was of and about 2003 while we watched a super power and its friends destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people half way across the world. At this same time, I was attending anti-war marches and demos outside the US consulate in Osaka and writing my outrage at the war in these pages.
It is made more curious still by the apparently arbitrary reference to the situationist concept of spectacle.
I didn’t get to attend the meeting advertised in this email, nor did I follow up on the story of the ‘illegally arrested’ youth, but I certainly wish I had.