Despite the continued pleas and warnings, even during the proceedings of the lawsuit, the CIA has continued to send operatives to attempt to disrupt my life and waste my time, attempting to cause me frustration in the process, with the aim of prevent me from prosecuting the lawsuit.
One such individual was Patricia Pringle, whom, like Swiss intelligence officer Christopher Schmidt, contacted me through the translator data base of the Japan Association of Translators (JAT), though she also happens to be a member and owns a translation company that is based in the U.S.
Ms. Pringle told me that she studied Noh with people affiliated with the International Noh Institute, though there is almost no indication of her affiliation online aside from comment on Facebook posts, such as this one.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/international.noh.institute/photos/?tab=album&album_id=586189524897363
She personally described her history with them and John McAteer, however, and some background on her stay in Kyoto is available online, including her JAT profile (https://jat.org/translators/profile/4053):
I am an American Translators Association (ATA) Certified Japanese to English translator with 15 years' experience as a full-time translator and interpreter. I have lived a total of seven years in Japan, both in Kyoto/Osaka and Tokyo. After graduating from university, I worked for Sony Corporation in Tokyo and New York City. Later, I attended graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in Japanese Theater from the University of Hawaii. After that, I taught Japanese language at Morehouse College and Oglethorpe University in Atlanta before accepting a job with Panasonic Corporation as group lead of their Japanese translation department. I started my own translation and interpreting business after moving to Louisville in 2005.as well as here (http://www.japanintercultural.com/en/about/NA_PatriciaPringle.aspx):
Patricia holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Theater from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an M.A. in Japanese Literature from the University of Toronto. For four years she was a Visiting Scholar at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She is fluent in spoken and written Japanese.She described teaching Japanese at a college, which I though was in Kentucky and was current, but apparently that is not the case, though she was an adjunct/assistant professor at two colleges in Atlanta in the past, as described in her self-introductions posted above and in her online resume: http://www.patriciapringle.com/Patricia_Pringle_resume.pdf. She also maintains a LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-pringle-japana41.
The Noh is a classical form of Japanese drama with similarities to that of Ancient Greece, incorporating a chorus and using masks, addressing historical figures and events, and encompassing a religious dimension (or two), etc. The Noh here represents yet another form of traditional culture that has been infiltrated in Kyoto, in this case as facilitated by an English speaking teacher.
https://internationalnohinstitute.wordpress.com/about-us/
https://internationalnohinstitute.wordpress.com/about-us/master-actor-udaka-michishige/
One of the first foreigners granted a teaching license by that teacher was John McAteer, whom is mentioned on both of those webpages described in the lawsuit as he had attempted to recruit me to perform in a performance of a Robert Frost poem he was staging ala Noh. The text of the Complaint puts it succinctly enough, and is posted below for convenience and context. Suffice it to say that he was one of the first idiot savant types I encountered, as though he didn’t even speak Japanese and he was trying to school me in relation to matters with respect to which I had a degree of formal training… He was a preposterous elderly man, somewhat overly persistent in a naïve elderly sort of manner, but not impolite.
Further information about McAteer can be seen on the second of the two pages posted below (the first page is provided for reference) from the KICA Newsletter No. 31 (2005), which is partially sponsored by the Japanese government and frequently used as a vehicle to promote foreign intelligence officers being infiltrated into civil society. Excerpts from two other issues of the KICA Newsletter were submitted to the Court with respect to Ted Taylor (ECF No. 208-46) and J.J. O’Donoghue, the latter being short enough (4 pages) to include here, so I’ve posted it at the very end of this entry. McAteer has also appeared at the event called The Flame for promoting intelligence operatives held at the café operated by CIA operative Charles Roche: https://www.facebook.com/KyotoFlame/posts/618703954835159.
John McAteer himself was, the hired hand...
Finally, there is a blog by a mysterious woman who declines to identify herself, but does indicate that she has "meaningful ties to Oregon, Germany, and Japan," and was living in Yokohama as a graduate student working on an MA. The excerpts below are from a post on her blog describing a performance with McAteer, etc., after she had been studying Noh for 3-months:
https://sleepingmountains.com/2006/06/05/kyoto-57th-annual-takigi-noh/. Alas, through a little elbow grease at the keyboard, I've been able to discovered the young lady's identity, Hanna McGaughey: http://archive.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/798/qa.asp. That article, published in yet another CIA et al. media front based in Tokyo, is from 2009, and includes a link to her blog after the text (though it had a different name at that point, and redirects to the current one: https://movingmountains.wordpress.com/ (that blog is archived and includes some posts in German)):
I was born in Tübingen, Germany, but grew up mostly in Oregon. My father is an American academic and my mother a German speech pathologist.
Apparently she is attending graduate school in Germany (https://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Japan&month=1402&week=c&msg=Z2jSXl2w8wCIT1jwv5X7Hg&user=&pw=):
The following are excerpts from the blog post at issue, including all of the references to McAteer as well as a couple to Rebecca Teale:
Last week, on the evenings of July 1st and 2nd were the 57th Annual Takigi Noh performances. Noh drama is performed on the grounds of Heian Shrine by the light of fires in raised metal braziers. Thanks to Rebecca Teale, an expert in Noh drama and fellow student of (or rather English publicist for) my Noh drama teacher, Udaka Masashige, I got to do odd jobs to help foreign, English-speaking guests and see the performances for free......
The first night I was even roped into doing the English announcements about cell phones, lavatories, English pamphlets, and bus stops. Sitting in the sound booth, I got to look over the heads of the chorus to see the performances right up close. But with everything going on and all the people around me in the sound booth, rushing out to mike the chorus, adjusting the sound levels as the wind rose, chatting right next to me, or sitting behind me eating their dinners, the simple elegance of the first few performances didn’t draw as much of my attention as I had hoped I could give them. So rather than bore you with the details from the program, let me point out the highlights in my evening.
During the second play, Nonomiya, about Lady Rokujo from The Tale of Genji, I wandered to the back of the audience. There at the information booth, John McAteer, another Noh scholar and fellow student of my teacher’s, was working – or rather enjoying the performances. He pointed out some of the symbolism of the actor’s movements, the moment Lady Rokujo was attempting to pass through the tori (shrine gate) to purify herself. In The Tale of Genji, Lady Rokujo is a tormented woman, jealous of Genji’s wife. The symbolism represented by her stepping through the gate was simultaneousely Shinto, since a tori gate can be found at almost any Shinto shrine, and Buddhist, since her attempts to step through the gate represented her reaching for enlightenment. Talking wtih John McAteer was a relief to me, as it was the first time I had ever been able to discuss a play with someone.
[...]
Afterwards, John McAteer and I waited outside the dressing room in one of the side buildings of the temple to catch a glimpse of our teacher. We were satisfied when he gave smile and a nod in our direction as he talked with his family.
As the shrine had grounds had almost cleared and it was late, John walked with me to the bus stop outside the shrine, and talked about the Robert Frost poem Death of the Hired Man, for which he had written a Noh score and a full Noh play using the original English text. It was performed once in the Oe Noh theater. Then, just before the bus arrived, John chanted “You’ll be surprised at him – how much he’s broken. His working days are done; I’m sure of it,” in a voice sad and mysterious with its sliding tones and irregular intervals so very different from Western music, but standard in Noh chant. If only I could always understand the words I hear the actors chant… if only, I thought.
[...]
The second night, I watched all the more intently than I had the first night. So many things I had read about came slowly fitting into their places. The plays began slow, then built up in speed at the ending. The first play was congratulatory, the second about a beautiful woman. In the middle, the kyogen piece gave a nice, gentle tug at the audience, a reminder that less serious, more common things exist than the exquisite beauty of a Noh performance.
[...]
During the final performance, Rebecca came to watch with me at the information booth. I asked her if she understood the words they chanted. No she couldn’t, she said, unless she had studied the same play herself before. How bleak the chances are for me now having studied Noh for only 3 months considering she has been studying this art for 35 years. Yet one must not give up before one has started. There is so much to learn, and I must begin somewhere.
I sent you the 45-page version of the Complaint, but the original was 227 pages, and I did discuss McAteer in that, because he was one of the early people who tried to recruit me. I had already started studying the shakuhachi, however, and the whole scenario was just bizarre and he didn't seem to register the messages I was putting out in response to his overtures. He was a nice guy, if a little persistent.
I noticed that he is listed as the first foreigner granted a teaching license, here:
https://internationalnohinstitute.wordpress.com/about-us/
When investigating Pellachia in April or so, I also noticed this materia:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140617083623/http://internationalnohinstitute.wordpress.com/blog/
http://web.archive.org/save/_embed/https://nohtheatre.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/noh-workshop-at-hub-kyoto/
That is a CIA et al. front that I also had described in the Complaint, as it is part of the neoliberal putsch and John Einarsen is on the management.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the Borgen book.
Suffice it to say that though I agreed to meet her, it was obvious that she was a CIA officer and that she wasn’t there for any purpose that would be productive to me in any way, shape or form, so I warned her that I was suing the CIA and was extremely tired of CIA officers wasting my time, etc. She didn’t request the initial follow-up meeting she’d suggested before I raised the topic of the lawsuit. She had mentioned that she was meeting with Diego Pellecchia after I described the lawsuit, McAteer, and the fact that I was aware of Pellecchia. As shown above, I subsequently sent her a number of links and introduced her to Robert Borgen’s book on Sugawara no Michizane. Pringle mentioned that she had specialized on Noh material related to Sugawara no Michizane, so I was very surprised that she was unfamiliar with Borgen’s book. Such is the state of academia infiltrated by the CIA. On the other hand, as a suspected CIA operative, it is possible that she was simply pretending not to be familiar with the book, though I asked her a couple of concrete questions about historical facts pertaining to Sugawara no Michizane to assess her knowledge before introducing Borgen's book, and her knowledge was lacking. She has published a book on Bunraku puppet theater (https://www.amazon.com/Interpretive-Guide-Bunraku-Patricia-Pringle/dp/B001HY5OSG/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483818251&sr=1-3), however, and is otherwise noted online in relation to her academic work, e.g.:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5400
I'll leave off the topic of Ms. Pringle with a couple of Facebook screenshots and links, and then cover
a point or two relevant to the lawsuit and to be examined in more detail in the not--too-distant future.
The reason I describe Bethe as a pseudo-culture figure is that she used to be promoted for work as a choreographer and performer of Noh in the 1990s, as per the excerpt shown below, but there is no record of any such activity since (and very little online). is the director of the Columbia University affiliated Medieval Japanese Studies Institute, which not only is near the apartment building I lived in for 10 years, but where she hosted defendant Houser in a Tea and Talk session during which he played a piece on the shakuhachi. The following links and screenshots are to archived pages related to the event, now deleted, only in Japanese. They are posted here as evidence, for the record, but I might translate the relevant portions at some point. It can’t be overemphasized that I have presented the Court with only an incomplete portion of the evidence related to the lawsuit thus far. Bethe has a significant number of publications, including translations of plays, etc., but there is scant (i.e., almost zero) biographical information about her available online, so I've retroactively added her name to the title of this post. The only detail I've been able to uncover is that she teaches (taught; retired) at the same university (Otani) as Houser: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/content/view/79/; "recently retired" (http://www.kcjs.jp/about/faculty_staff.html):
In fact, there are two separate websites for the same "Institute for Japanese Medieval Studies", one for the organization at Columbia University, in New York, and the other for "the" branch (in fact, there are more than one, as described below) in Kyoto. Bethe is listed as "Director" on the Japanese language page, but not at all on the English language page. The first archived page in English about the origins of the Institute is from 2011, whereas the following archived pages of the Japanese site are for an event in 2004. A little searching of the English language page eventually produced the fact that the (actually "a") Japan based "IMJS Kyoto Based Branch" was established in 2000: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/imjs-reports/2000-12/index.html. However, that "branch" is in Arashiyama (an area to the west of the central part of the city), and is not the main branch, which is located near my old apartment building and is where the Tea and Talk events were held, etc. I will have to sort through more of the data on this tangled web of branches of the Institute, but the overall picture is coming into relief. The location of the branch near my old apartment is shown on this page: http://www.chusei-nihon.net/index.php?%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%82%B9.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050207151013/http://www.chusei-nihon.net/tea%20&%20talk.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20050214013613/http://www.chusei-nihon.net/m&tprofile.htm
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Other suspected
intelligence operatives that have been infiltrated into Noh in order to
interfere in cultural affairs (the term used in the Church Report). They include
German(?) pseudo-scholar and pseudo-culture figure Monica Bethe (whom is
associated with defendant Preston Houser, as briefly described below), American
Michael Watson, etc. Pellecchia, Bethe, and Watson, along with a woman whom I
don’t know, are reportedly working on an English language encyclopedia of Noh
apparently through Hosei University (https://www.facebook.com/hosei.nohken/?fref=ts),
as shown in the following photo of them meeting.
In fact, there are two separate websites for the same "Institute for Japanese Medieval Studies", one for the organization at Columbia University, in New York, and the other for "the" branch (in fact, there are more than one, as described below) in Kyoto. Bethe is listed as "Director" on the Japanese language page, but not at all on the English language page. The first archived page in English about the origins of the Institute is from 2011, whereas the following archived pages of the Japanese site are for an event in 2004. A little searching of the English language page eventually produced the fact that the (actually "a") Japan based "IMJS Kyoto Based Branch" was established in 2000: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/imjs-reports/2000-12/index.html. However, that "branch" is in Arashiyama (an area to the west of the central part of the city), and is not the main branch, which is located near my old apartment building and is where the Tea and Talk events were held, etc. I will have to sort through more of the data on this tangled web of branches of the Institute, but the overall picture is coming into relief. The location of the branch near my old apartment is shown on this page: http://www.chusei-nihon.net/index.php?%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%82%B9.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050207151013/http://www.chusei-nihon.net/tea%20&%20talk.htm
From the book By
Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, by Richard Schechner,
1990, pp.191-2:
https://www.amazon.com/Means-Performance-Intercultural-Studies-Theatre/dp/0521339154/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483402819&sr=1-10,
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=K5ZuV_nn7KkC&pg=PA191&dq=monica+bethe,+noh&hl=ja&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4iayR16TRAhXCVZQKHYxkBpwQ6AEIYTAI#v=onepage&q=monica%20bethe&f=false
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=K5ZuV_nn7KkC&pg=PA191&dq=monica+bethe,+noh&hl=ja&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4iayR16TRAhXCVZQKHYxkBpwQ6AEIYTAI#v=onepage&q=monica%20bethe&f=false
Finally, there is a growing group of foreigners who live in Japan and are becoming increasingly proficient in traditional noh performance. For example, Monica Bethe, David Crandall, Richard Emmert, Willi Flindt, and Rebecca Teele have all received long years of training not only in acting but also in the instruments. Although no foreigner has yet been completely accepted as a noh performer, some of these people work regularly with professionals in various ways. They also perform traditional noh plays themselves and are involved in experiments with various aspects of noh practice. Richard Emmert wrote noh music which was played by professionals for an English language performance of At The Hawk’s Well in Tokyo in 1982. In 1983 David Crandall composed the words and music and Monica Bethe did the choreography for and performed in a modern play entitled Crazy Jane which was inspired by Yeat’s Crazy Jane poems and combined the aesthetic principles of noh with a Western musical idiom. In 1985 and again in 1986 a new noh play in English called Drifting Fires, written by noh scholar and translator Janine Beichman with music by Richard Emmer, was performed by the noh actor Umekwaka Naohiko.
Another individual associated with Pellecchia and the Institute is a young woman just out of college named Hana Lethen: https://internationalnohinstitute.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/ini-trainees-hana-lethen/. It seems that she has a Japanese mother, given the fact that she was a member of the Japanese students association at Princeton, according to her LinkedIn page https://www.linkedin.com/in/hana-lethen-8bba28128, and has a Germanic family name. She has lived in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Moreover, in Kyoto she studied at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS: http://www.kcjs.jp/about/faculty_staff.html), which is a program that is also affiliated with Columbia University, at which Bethe and other suspected CIA et al. operatives teach (e.g., Karin Swanson) (and/or taught; e.g. Philip Flavin: http://web.archive.org/web/20131006021159/http://www.kcjs.jp/about/faculty_staff.html) and about whom I will be blogging more in the not-too-distant future.
As mentioned above, Bethe is described in various places (e.g., the Japanese language page of the IMJS Kyoto Branch, all of her publications, etc.) as the head of the Kyoto branch of the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies. The main page of the website is Japanese only (http://www.chusei-nihon.net/), but there are a English language pages linked to from that website,
such as one related to textiles preservation (http://www.chusei-nihon.net/index.php?Textile%20Conservation%20Project). Many of the publications issued through Columbia University (http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/publications/other-publications.html) deal with feminist subject matter.
Meanwhile, as mentioned above, there is a parallel website in English: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/index.html. That website, however, is for the activities at Columbia University, in New York, USA. As per the report on this page (http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/imjs-reports/1997-12/index.html, which can be accessed from http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/imjs-reports/overview.html), the "Institute" as such was established in 1968, by the same woman, Barbara Ruch, listed as the current Director. The "Institute Staff" webpage of the English language (i.e., Columbia U. based) website for the Institute of Medieval Studies have been blocked from being archived (implemented "robots.txt"), which is rather unusual for such an institution: http://web.archive.org/web/20161220164129/http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/about-us/institute-staff.html. Here is the current page, which I've had to manually archive: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/about-us/institute-staff.html.
The "Institute" itself is an NPO:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041214090010/http://www.chusei-nihon.net/introduction.html
.....
As mentioned above, Bethe is described in various places (e.g., the Japanese language page of the IMJS Kyoto Branch, all of her publications, etc.) as the head of the Kyoto branch of the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies. The main page of the website is Japanese only (http://www.chusei-nihon.net/), but there are a English language pages linked to from that website,
such as one related to textiles preservation (http://www.chusei-nihon.net/index.php?Textile%20Conservation%20Project). Many of the publications issued through Columbia University (http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/publications/other-publications.html) deal with feminist subject matter.
Meanwhile, as mentioned above, there is a parallel website in English: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/index.html. That website, however, is for the activities at Columbia University, in New York, USA. As per the report on this page (http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/imjs-reports/1997-12/index.html, which can be accessed from http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/imjs-reports/overview.html), the "Institute" as such was established in 1968, by the same woman, Barbara Ruch, listed as the current Director. The "Institute Staff" webpage of the English language (i.e., Columbia U. based) website for the Institute of Medieval Studies have been blocked from being archived (implemented "robots.txt"), which is rather unusual for such an institution: http://web.archive.org/web/20161220164129/http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/about-us/institute-staff.html. Here is the current page, which I've had to manually archive: http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org/about-us/institute-staff.html.
The "Institute" itself is an NPO:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041214090010/http://www.chusei-nihon.net/introduction.html
.....
Meanwhile, suspected Italian intelligence operative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenzia_Informazioni_e_Sicurezza_Esterna) Pellecchia himself is a veritable exemplar of the idiot savant archetype portrayed by many of these intelligence operatives--in some cases, it seems to come natural--but don't take my word for, decide for yourself after reading this Kyoto Journal interview, which I will analyze in the forthcoming post on Pellecchia:
No comments:
Post a Comment