Attention Pittsburgh's Kenny Chesney fans:

A timely and appropriate one of "36 Iconic Tokyo Metro Subway Manner Posters" teaching riders about etiquette in public.

Taiwanese inventors win 70 medals at Pittsburgh's INPEX.

Via udn.com.

From FocusTaiwan on the annual invention trade show in Pittsburgh:

Taiwan bagged 37 gold medals, 33 silver medals and five special awards on Friday night at the 28th Invention and New Product Exposition (INPEX), held from June 19-21 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the United States.

Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou and Premier Jiang Yi-huah both sent congratulatory messages to the Taiwan delegation soon after learning of the Taiwanese inventors' brilliant performances.

Enka singer Jero given University of Pittsburgh Medallion Award.

Via the University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies Center and Jero's blog.

Pittsburgh native and 2003 University of Pittsburgh graduate Jero (Jerome White) is presented with a University of Pittsburgh Medallion Award, given to graduates who have "brought honor to the University and whose efforts have contributed to Pitt’s progress".

For more on Jero, try Google or this 2008 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature. It appears to be an unwritten rule that when covering Jero one must make numerous references to rap and hip-hop because he's black. The Youngstown Vindicator outshone all others with: "Part Public Enemy, part Sinatra, part schmaltz".

My The Style My & Fitch: 피츠버그영문티.

Korean tops arrange English words, phrases, and logos in nonsensical combinations---sometimes with great results---and this season Joamom offers something for fashion-forward ladies who enjoy both local shout-outs and Gibberlish allusions to fancy clothing retailers.

"Prejudices don't fall off like an old coat": more on Japanese-Americans relocated to Pittsburgh.

In March we looked at length at the history of Japanese-American forced relocation to Pittsburgh, where an old North Side orphanage was to house families brought from the west coast to western Pennsylvania to work. The proposal was protested by North Side residents, though ultimately only two families stayed there in mid-August, 1945. There were letters to the editor criticizing Pittsburghers' attitudes toward these relocated citizens, but the newspapers didn't devote space to the uprooted Japanese-Americans themselves. On August 11, 1945, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette talked with a few living in the area for the page three piece "Nisei Thrilled At Surrender Offer of Japs":

What do the Nisei (Japanese-Americans) who are living in the Pittsburgh district think of Japan's offer to surrender?

Well, at least two of them are thrilled at the news.

But they want to know if there will be any change in the attitude of the men and women of the Twenty-sixth ward, who at a recent mass meeting jeered down the War Relocation Authority's attempt to house the Nisei there.

A skeptical Nisei is Hana Eejima, who in high school was awarded the American Legion Medal for outstanding citizenship.

"Prejudices don't fall off like an old coat," said Hana yesterday. "People who were prejudiced against the Nisei are the kind of people who always have a petty hatred against something are other. But here are enough nicer, more liberal people in Pittsburgh who make up for those few who caused trouble about housing the Nisei here."

Hana is one of the many young Japanese-Americans who found refuge here. She is employed in a suburban home.

Edward and Mrs. Shinizu, janitors at the Beth Shalom Synagogue, expressed thankfulness that the war is "practically over." About anti-Nisei prejudice here, Mr. Shinizu said:

"I think that it will wear off eventually."

She was familiar to the paper and its readers through a June 26, 1945 Post-Gazette profile on her, "Young Nisei Girl Proud Of Her Medal".

Hana Eejima took the bronze medal lovingly out of its cotton-padded leather box. She smiled wistfully as she read its inscription.

On one side it said "For God and Country" and on the reverse side, "Awarded to Hana Eejima for outstanding character, personality, all-around scholarship and citizenship."

"The American Legion gave me this when I was in high school in California," said the pretty Japanese-American girl in her low cultured voice. "I had majored in American history and I thought America was the greatest place in the world. I still do, too!" she added with a defiant toss of her had.

She didn't add "In spite of some of my fellow countrymen."

Hana is one of the Japanese-Americans, all native born, who have been brought to Pittsburgh by the War Relocation Authority.

She is a daughter of a Japanese college-educated man who came to this country 57 years ago to continue his studies at Columbia University and liked America so well he never returned to his native land. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, she was uprooted from her own comfortable home (which boasted a three-car garage and was staffed with servants) and sent to the Santa Anita assembly center in California, along with other west coast people of Japanese descent.

"I was awfully shaken by it at the time, but now it all seems like a bad dream," she said yesterday.

The Eejima family was sent from California to Southern Colorado, where she, her parents and two brothers were housed in a one-room barracks equipped with army cots.

The worst experience of the internment was when her Japanese-American soldier friends returned on furlough to visit their parents in the camp.

Some of them had been wounded and they couldn't help feeling hurt when they had to come from their own army camps to another camp to see their parents," she revealed. "Most of them wouldn't talk about it, but several of them did say, 'What are we fighting for?'"

Brothers in Army

Hana's two brothers are teaching Japanese to American servicemen at the Naval Language School at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo. Her parents, now quite old, live with them.

Now 24, Hana, who never performed a household chore more strenuous than drying the dishes or helping her father rake his produce gardens, is working as a domestic in the country home of a Wexford family. She plans to enter the University of Pittsburgh in the fall and later will study to become a librarian.

She wouldn't comment on the cold reception she and her fellow Japanese-Americans have received in Pittsburgh. All she would say was "I like Pittsburgh. I like being free again. And I know it will all work out all right someway."

"Traditional Confucianism: The Core of Asian Civilization" lecture at Maridon Museum, June 20.

Dr. Betty Anderson will present "Traditional Confucianism: The Core of Asian Civilization" at the Maridon Museum (map) in Butler on June 20th at 6:30 pm. It's free, but reservations are required.

Pirates' "inferior drawing power" scuttles trip to Japan (in 1965).

On June 14, 1965, the St. Petersburg Times told us "Japanese Cancel Pirate Post-Season Ball Tour", a story from wire reports about the cancellation of a biannual fall exhibition between selected Japanese and Major League teams.

Japanese sponsors have canceled a scheduled postseason tour of the Pittsburgh Pirates to Japan this fall because of the fifth-place National League team's "inferior drawing power" here, an official of the Tokyo sponsoring organization said yesterday.

Sotaro Suzuki, an adviser on baseball affairs for the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri, also disclosed yesterday that Ford C. Frick, the American baseball commissioner, had rejected a Japanese proposal last fall that the series winners in both countries play in Japan for the first "world championship" this year.

Suzuki said that Frick called the plan "premature" when it was advanced by Japanese organized baseball.

To import the Pirates to play against Japan's best would be a "suicidal" business proposition, Suzuki declared.

Suzuki said Yomiuri and a rival Tokyo newspaper, Mainichi, have taken turns in paying the expenses of a visiting major league team every two years since 1956. Last year's tour, for which it was Yomiuri's turn to pick up the tab, was postponed because of the Olympic Games in Tokyo last October.

Suzuki indicated that the Tokyo organization would have preferred the Los Angeles Dodgers for the tour this fall, and had made overtures to Walter O'Malley, the Dodger president. Suzuki said he had suggested to O'Malley that he seek Frick's approval for the trip, but the proposal had apparently failed.

A different version of the story had the headline pictured above. (Some imperfect scanning means that there are two page 59s included in the June 14 edition, with two different titles).



An article found in the June 17 Lodi News-Sentinel says

The Pittsburgh Pirates will be invited by the Homiuri [sic] newspaper to play post season goodwill games next year in Japan only if they win the National League pennant in 1965.

The Pirates were 29-28 on June 14, 1965, and their roster that year had three Hall-of-Famers. Of four teams who toured Japan previously---1962 Detroit Tigers, 1960 San Francisco Giants, 1958 St. Louis Cardinals, 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers---only the Dodgers made the World Series in the current season or the year before.

Their "inferior drawing power" wasn't really why the series was cancelled. A month earlier, Commissioner Frick threatened, on his part, cancellation of the series over stalled contract negotiations for Masanori Murakami, a Japanese pitcher who was claimed by both the San Francisco Giants and the Nankai Hawks.

Live from UB Rough Cut Screening, June 25.

A rough-cut screening for Live from UB, a documentary by Pittsburgh-based Lauren Knapp about the rock scene in Mongolia, at the Melwood Screening Room in Oakland (map) on June 25.

Free advanced Korean class, Saturdays in Oakland.

An advanced Korean class will be held every Saturday this summer from 3:00 to 5:00 pm at the Carnegie Library in Oakland (map).

This class will focus on conversational Korean, utilizing the scripts of popular Korean television shows. Each class lasts two hours and will meet every Saturday in the Large Print Room on the First Floor.

Registration is required and can be done so on the class page.

As with all levels of these free library classes, advanced is an estimate and really belongs in quotation marks. Regardless of your level, though, you'll probably find a Korean class that fits among the three offered through the library. Korean for Beginners is basically instruction in hangeul (the Korean script), while Korean II is just a little beyond that.

New group for pungmul, samul nori in Pittsburgh.

A televised Pungmul performance from KBS.

Interested in practicing Korean drumming (풍물, 사물놀이) in Pittsburgh? There's a group for that.