Diego Pellecchia, Part 3, paper in "Japanese Theatre Transcultural": INTRO

Before getting into the examination of the text of the chapter with which Pellecchia is credited in the book at issue, it is necessary to provide an introduction. That will include a couple of pages from his blog that bear quoting in relation to an academic conference in Germany at which he presented a paper on which the chapter was based, and an image of the first couple of pages of his paper as well. I will also introduce a paper by a scholar cited by Pellecchia, as it is reasonably easy to read and should be a useful reference to people not familiar with the subject matter.

Pellecchia provides an abstract of his paper in the first of the two entries quoted below, which I will refer back to in order to be as concise as possible in deconstructing the arguments he makes in the paper (i.e., chapter). The second entry entertains the notion of “theory for theory’s sake,” and mentions a few “postmodern” philosophers whose work I had the opportunity to engage with at UC Berkeley in my undergraduate pursuit of conceptual material related to “modernity and identity.” Advance warning is warranted here as Pellecchia makes a preemptive assault by claiming that such thinkers “theories are often inappropriately borrowed and abused,” before he proceeds to do exactly that, appropriating post-modernist terminology such as “alterity” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterity), for example.

Japanese Theatre Transcultural: German and Italian Perspectives
Diego / 20/11/2009 https://nohtheatre.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/japanese-theatre-transcultural-german-and-italian-perspectives/
Next week I will talk at the International Symposium Japanese Theatre Transcultural: German and Italian Perspectives 27 – 29 November 2009. Universität Trier, Germany. Here is the abstract of my paper, entitled ‘The International Noh Institute of Milan: Transmission of Ethics and Ethics of Transmission in the transnational Context’.
The paper explores the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in Noh practice. Noel Pinnington (2006) has discussed the primacy of the concept of michi as ‘path through life’ in the writings of Zeami and Konparu Zenchiku, where spiritual and ethical virtues are a necessary condition for aesthetic achievement. Today Noh is taught in various contexts outside Japan, reflecting different agendas of teachers and trainees. How are the ethical aspects of Noh considered in contemporary non-Japanese teaching environments? What are the implications of introducing the ethics embedded in Noh practice outside its original context? Taking on Levinas’s ‘ethics of responsibility’, the paper will use theories of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave & Wenger 1992) to explore the community of learners and the teaching methodology of the International Noh Institute.


Some reflections on the Symposium Japanese Theatre Transcultural
Diego / 01/12/2009 https://nohtheatre.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/some-reflections-on-the-symposium-japanese-theatre-transcultural/
I am back from the Symposium Japanese Theatre Transcultural: German and Italian Perspectives held in Trier University… Organisers Andreas Regelsberg and Stanca Scholz-Cionca did a great job, indeed.
Germany boasts a huge tradition both in Japanese studies and in theatre studies: it is very much interesting to attend conferences outside the anglo-saxon environment and notice so many differences in style and scholarly approach. Any international student working in the UK knows well how British research tends to be critical-theory oriented, sometimes to the extreme: PhD students are now sorted by ‘who they use’ (be it Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, etc.) rather then what they write about. It is almost impossible to write a paper without at least one or two references to post-modern philosophers, whose theories are often inappropriately borrowed and abused. Theory for theory’s sake. For people like me, coming from a different academic background, it is hard to cope with what over here sometimes seems as the only possible way of academic enquiry. I have heard similar comments from students from France, Hong Kong, Greece, Germany, Japan, etc.

In his paper Pellecchia repeatedly uses the term “alterity”, which is practically unheard of outside of so-called postmodernist discourse (e.g., http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/kylecupp/2012/01/what-is-alterity/). I don’t discount postmodern theory outright, of course, but am generally inclined to take modernity into consideration, as presumed by the term post-modernity, before approaching such theories. In fact, I have studied all of the thinkers referred to by Pellecchia in the above-posted text, and have generally found their texts relevant and intellectually stimulating. Pellecchia’s employment of the rhetorical diversionary tactic of denying, however, that about which he intended to proceed  thenceforth, is therefore questionable. It should also be noted that Pellecchia never declares his “academic background”, which he does however mention having.

At the same time, part of Pellecchia’s presentation involves displacing responsibility for his theoretical pronouncements onto others that have gone before him, paved his “way,” so to speak. Pellecchia cites the work of a Brit named Noel Pinnington who teaches at the University of Arizona: http://sainsbury-institute.org/ja/fellowships/robert-and-lisa-sainsbury-fellowship/noel-pinnington/. The subject matter is presented by Pellecchia as if esoteric, with him divining the meaning for his audience in post-modernist jargon. 

I have not read Mr. Pinnington’s book (https://www.amazon.co.jp/Traces-Way-Writings-Komparu-Zenchiku/dp/1933947322), but he has uploaded a paper that he published the same year as the book, and the paper is informative (readily apparent even though I haven't finished it yet). As an 'area specialist' in East Asia, I am familiar with the consistent usage in the texts related to Confucianism, Daoism and Zen (Chinese Chan) of the Chinese character for way (道), one reading of which in Japanese is “michi.” Not only have I read the basic works of Confucianism, Daoism and Zen, I have also read the treatise by Zeami referred to by Pinnington (though that was about 10 years ago and I recall little about the relatively short text).

At any rate, considering that the paper by Pinnington is well-researched, and as it is within my sphere of research, I’ve decided to purchase Pinnington’s book, but his paper will undoubtedly suffice for the purposes of this examination (in fact, even it is contains a fair amount of detail, so I will quote from it sparsely). The Chinese character for michi is often rendered as “Way” when translating Japanese to English, such as the “Way of Tea” (茶道, sado) and is the character for the Dao in Daosim. The Japanese term using that Chinese character which would be most familiar to a Western audience is judo (柔道), as in the Olympic sport and art of self-defense.

https://www.academia.edu/12380957/Models_of_the_Way_in_the_Theory_of_Noh

The first two pages of the 18-page paper by Pellecchia are posted below, in advance, as they include the passages framing his thesis, and offer a preliminary contrast to the Pinnington paper. Other passages will be excerpted, as necessary.

Who Is Diego Pellecchia? Part 2, Ezra Pound and the Noh

This entry examines a paper written by Pellecchia entitled, “Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film”: https://www.academia.edu/10252763/Ezra_Pound_and_the_Politics_of_Noh_Film.

On the About page of his blog (https://nohtheatre.wordpress.com/about/), 
Pellecchia states:

"I am recipient of the IFTR New Scholars’ Prize 2013 for my essay ‘Ezra Pound and the politics of Noh films’."

Meanwhile, the website of Royal Holloway also has a webpage announcing the prize, though they got the name of the Prize wrong: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/dramaandtheatre/news/newsarticles/2012-13/dramaalumnusdiegopellecchiawins2013iftrnewscholarsprize.aspx.

It bears noting that aside from the above-mentioned “prize,” Pellecchia had previously been awarded a grant by the Sasakawa Foundation (https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/dramaandtheatre/news/newsarticles/2010-11/phdstudentawardedsasakawafoundationgrant.aspx), 

which was founded by another WWII Class A war criminal (Ryoichi Sasakawa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dichi_Sasakawa) whom the CIA recruited out of his prison cell, along with the grandfather (Nobusuke Kishi) of the current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, as per the following documents disclosed by the CIA pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and submitted to the Court.

Sasakawa is known for having promoted himself as Japan’s most prominent fascist, and claiming, “I am the world’s richest fascist” (e.g., Wikipedia page), etc., and is acknowledged to have been recruited as an asset by the CIA. 

I also presented an academic paper to the Court that describes certain of Sasakawa’s activities in some detail, the first page of which is also posted below (it is available online: http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp83.html). 

Now, to Pellecchia’s prize-winning paper…

First, must be pointed out that Pound was one of the first Westerners to study the Noh, along with Ernest Fenollosa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Fenollosa), whose wife entrusted her husband’s manuscripts of Noh translations to Pound to finish for publication. An individual named Nicholas Teele that appears to be the brother (http://egakkai-dwcla.com/tie/) of Rebecca Teele Ogamo, whom Pellecchia describes as a teacher, etc., here (https://nohtheatre.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/repost-interview-with-ogamo-rebecca-teele/), appears to have co-authored a study of the Noh of Fenollosa and Pound (Akiko Miyake, Sanehide Kodama, and Nicholas Teele, eds., A Guide to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine; Ezra Pound Society of Japan, Shiga University, 1994)), as per footnote 8 of the paper examined in this blog post.

This examination will consist of posting passages and quotations from the paper and examining them in context. The paper starts at page number 499.


p.500

However, Pound received Noh not only as an aesthetic object, but also as an art form expressing strong ethical messages, leading him to develop a form of political commitment to the Japanese cause during the years preceding the Second World War. It is important to point out that, in addition to books, Pound had access to another important source of knowledge: during his stay in London between 1908 and 1920, he befriended a group of Japanese artists who greatly contributed to his reception of Noh. Among them were painter Kume Tamijūrō (Tami), dramaturge Kōri Torahiko, and poet Kitasono Katsue (1902–72), with whom Pound continued to correspond until the outbreak of the Second World War. Tami Kume (1893–1923), who, unlike Michio Ito, received proper Noh training from Fenollosa’s teacher, Umewaka Minoru, was crucial to providing Pound with an understanding of Noh that texts alone could not offer. While Yeats fell for Michio’s approximations of Japanese dances, Pound was attracted by the less polished, but perhaps more ‘authentic’ dances that Kume demonstrated in London and Paris,6 and admitted that Kume “knew something of Noh that no mere philologist can find out from a text book.”

Though another point from the above passage will be revisited in the next post, here, the main point of interest to note is that Pound interacted with a group of Japanese from whom he was first exposed to Noh performance with respect to dance, among whom one individual, Tami Kume, is said to have had formal training with the same teacher that taught Fenellosa.


p.501

However, Pound continued to be interested in Noh even after the publication of “Noh”, or, Accomplishment, and later turned his focus to the ethics of Noh, and their political value on the international stage…he looked at Noh both as cultural patrimony that could be employed in order to persuade the United States not to attack Japan and as a vehicle for the transmission of a high form of civilization to what he considered to be the decadent Western tradition.

Here, Pellecchia refers to a “high form of civilization” as opposed to “high culture”, and claims that the Western tradition was considered to be “decadent” by Pound.

p.503

The turning point in his engagement with Noh occurred in April 1939, when Pound travelled to America with the intention of convincing President Roosevelt not to embark on war with Japan for economic reasons, but he returned to Rapallo in June without having accomplished much of this plan. However, during his stay in Washington, D.C., Pound visited the Museum of Modern Art, where he attended the projection of the Noh film Aoi no ue (1935), now thought to be the first sound film documenting a Noh play.

The date, April 1939, is the main point of note here.


p.505

Until Aoi no ue, Pound’s only exposures to Noh performance were the short chant and dance excerpts that Kume and Kōri had demonstrated for him and Yeats, most probably shimai, or excerpts of longer Noh plays that well-educated Japanese often learned as part of their school education.

As described below, Pellecchia subsequently contradicts the above assertion regarding “Pound’s only exposure to Noh performance.”


p.507

Aoi no ue was not Pound’s first encounter with Noh on film: he had already realized that “seeing and hearing” was crucial to a positive reception of Noh abroad ahead of his trip to Washington, when he watched Atarashiki tsuchi (“A New Land,” 1937), a German-Japanese propaganda film supporting the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, co-directed by Itami Mansaku (1900–1946) and Arnold Fanck (1889–1974), famous for his “mountain films” starring Leni Riefensthal. Atarashiki tsuchi, released in Japan in February 1937 and shortly after in Italy, where Pound saw it, as Mitsucho la figlia del samurai.

Pellecchia here declares that Pound had seen a film clip of Noh performance in a movie in 1937, blatantly contradicting himself with respect to the chronology of Pounds acts in relation to the above-posted quotes. 

That is to say, Pellecchia’s first assertion related to Pound’s “only exposure to Noh performance” “[before seeing the film] Aoi no ue” (“April 1939”: p. 505) is contradicted on p. 507, where Pellecchia notes that Pound had seen a Japanese propaganda film including a clip of a Noh performance in 1937 in Italy, approximately 2 years prior.

Accordingly, the question arises as to why Pellecchia would assert that the “turning point” for Pound with respect to Noh April of 1939, when the letter from which Pellecchia subsequently quotes (shown below) to tie together his chronologically aberrant narrative was writing a month earlier, on the 3rd of March in 1939, as shown on p.508.

p.508

…After seeing the film, Pound wrote to Kitasono on 3 March 1939: “I have (had strong) nostalgia for Japan, induced by the fragment of Noh in Mitsuco. If you can continue such films nothing in the West can resist. We shall expect you AT LAST to deliver us from Hollywood and unbounded cheapness.
Arguably, Pound appreciated this heavily didactic propaganda film for two reasons: first, his fascination for Noh was tinged with fantasizing for something he had never really experienced firsthand; secondly, he realized the potential value of Noh as a means of marketing Japan as an aesthetically and ethically good country on the international level.

As Pellecchia’s treatment gives short shrift to the thrust of Pound’s letter--and omits an important point--it is posted below in its entirety as seen on the page of the book cited by Pellecchia. 

It is apparent that Pound’s focus on film was specifically related to what he assailed as the “boundless cheapness” of Hollywood. Here, in contrast to Pellecchia’s assertion that Pound felt that the Western tradition was somehow inherently “decadent,” it would be more accurate to describe Pound’s position as one in which the Western tradition had been degraded due to the cheapness from Hollywood he assailed.

It can be seen on the above-posted page at the top (note quoted by Pellecchia) that Pound was also responding to Kitasono’s mentioning the fact that his poet colleagues who had been sent to the front line nevertheless

“wished to read books in high class rather than amusing books.”

Kitasono and Pound shared a concern related to the degradation of literary culture by publications intended merely for amusement, etc. Pound can be seen as anticipating the widely heard present day concern with ‘dumbing down’, which has been prevalent in academic discourse examining mass media culture, etc., since the 1980s, unles you want to go back to Marshall McLuhan’s book, “The Medium is the Message” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message), but that has a more specific focus. Pound was certainly interested in audio and visual recordings as means for transmitting Noh to the West, having experienced the multidimensional aspects of the performance of the plays, in addition to his literary interest in them.

In fact, it can be seen that Pound specifically addresses the music of the Noh in the subsequent sentence of the text of the letter quoted by Pellecchia, who chose to omit that important passage, where Pound states:

ALL the Noh plays ought to be filmed! or at any rate ALL the music shd! (sic) be recorded on the sound track.

It must be 16 years since I heard a note of Noh (Kume [Tam]) and his friends sang to me in Paris) but the Instant the Noh (all too little of It in that film) sounded I knew it.

It IS like no other music

p.509

The 1930s were a period of intense didactic production for Pound: in a sort of self-appointed duty to educate the world, Pound published the ABC of Economics (1933), the ABC of Reading (1934), Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), and Guide to Kulchur (1938), pamphlets whose recurring topic is a pragmatic approach to cultural production and its interrelation with economics and morals…

p.510

In the light of Pound’s pedagogic approach, it is comprehensible how he enjoyed Atarashiki tsuchi’s didacticism as a form of moral hammering that the “uncivilized West” much needed.

Here, Pellecchia draws his readers’ attention to several books he published in the deteriorating period of international relations that preceded the outbreak of WWII. In short, he insinuates that Pound was a didactic pedagogue, neglecting the fact that the bulk of his work related to poetry, culture criticism, etc., as well as politics addressed through a perhaps somewhat recondite style of poetry he dubbed Cantos for which he is perhaps best known. 

Furthermore, Pellecchia inserts a number of quotes, including "uncivilized West," which appear to  be referenced to footnote 42 in his paper, which cites p. 150 of the same book, "Pound and Japan": 

As can be seen on that page, however, the phrase "uncivilized West" does not appear. In fact, Pound calls for the preservation of Japanese texts in the same manner as classical Western texts from Greece and Rome by using modern technology. Pound also refers to masterworks of music in the Western tradition in the final paragraph in repeating in a more clear and prosaic manner the gist of his earlier letter to Kitasono in relation to Noh music and his desire for the entire repertoire to be recorded and transmitted to the West as a different form of masterwork. That essay appeared as an article in the Japan Times, incidentally, on the 15th of May, 1939: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2010/03/28/general/tri-lingual-system-proposed-for-world-communications/#.WH8-ZhuLSUk. 

In short, like many of the other pseudo-scholars whose fraudulent writings have been examined on this blog, Pellecchia takes Pound’s statements out of context and misrepresents them for political purposes.

For Pound, it seems clear that the primary emphasis was not on film per se, but on the transmission of culture. The Noh theater is anything but didactic, and there is no evidence that Pound was interested in the propaganda film other than with respect to the Noh clip. 

In fact, from the passage omitted by Pellechia it appears that it was the music that had alerted Pound to the fact that the Japanese/German propaganda film contained a short clip recording a Noh performance, implying that Pound was not even paying attention to the film until he heard the music of the Noh.

Moreover, the date of the letter written by Pound to Kitasono is the 3rd of March 1939, a month or more before he saw the filmed version of the Noh play Aoi no Ue in Washington D.C. in April of 1939 that Pellecchia claims was the turning point for Pound, implying that said turning point was somehow retroactively related to the content of his letter to Kitasono. 

Meanwhile, despite all of the above-described obvious errors, not to mention those that are readily apparent that have not been examined here in pedantic detail, Pellecchia was awarded a “prize” for his inaccurate paper, which essentially constitutes a form of disinformation, by the International Federation for Theatre Research: https://www.iftr.org/prizes.

Who Is Diego Pellecchia? Part 1

Before getting started, I should note that the initial post on the suspected CIA et al. operatives that have infiltrated the Noh, including focuses on Monica Bethe, Patricia Pringle and an introduction to Pellecchia, has been revised. Each individual should probably have been treated in separate pieces prefaced with an introduction, etc., but expedience and circumstances resulting in my adopting the present approach, and Pellecchia is the newcomer whose activity is currently being promoted in various print and online media. At any rate, I have carried out the revision in a manner such as to provide a degree of narrative cohesiveness starting from my encounters with John McAteer, per the lawsuit.

As was the case with Adelstein, there is far too much flotsam and jetsam littering the Internet about this suspected intelligence operative fraud for me to clear it in one fell swoop. Taking a look at the blog Pellecchia writes, here, for example, it is readily apparent that the gentleman has nothing but time on his hands. Accordingly, there will be a series of posts examining the pretentions with which the CIA et al. have attempted to bestow on this so-called “spy.”

In this post, I will examine the previously linked to interview from the CIA’s “Kyoto Journal”. The next post will examine a paper that Mr. Pellecchia has produced called “Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film.” The third post will examine a chapter he contributed to a book, which I’ll describe later.

http://www.kyotojournal.org/online-special/step-inside-the-world-of-noh/

KJ: Did you already have an interest in Japan or did this develop alongside your interest in Noh?

DP: I suppose I was interested in the way that everyone probably is. I hadn’t been studying the language. I couldn’t even read furigana. Of course I can now, but back then, I would play a tape of Udaka-sensei reciting. By the time I met him, I already knew his voice very well because I’d been listening to it every day for a year and a half. Because I didn’t understand a word, I could let my mind fly along and imagine. I knew the story and I knew the translation, so I understood what I was saying, more or less. I studied with him for two months and then we had a recital. […] I liked it so much when I was here, and I wondered how I could continue. I didn’t know Japanese, I didn’t have a degree in Japanese studies, and I was twenty-seven. So I decided to apply for a Ph.D and I was lucky enough to get a scholarship from Royal Holloway, University of London…

Synopsis:

- Pellecchia hadn’t studied Japanese and couldn’t event read the phonetic characters (which one can learn in about 2 weeks by oneself), but he mimed the voice on a tape for a year-and-a-half.

- He had a background working at a studio as a ‘pop music’ producer.

- Despite the fact that he didn’t have any academic background or professional experience as a performer in any dramatic art, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London.

KJ: You said that you used to be a music producer. The environment of your former profession is so different to what you do now.

DP: I was working with pop music, in recording studios and with some important acts. Nowadays, in pop music, producers work with computers. You can basically do anything you want in the studio... You are lost in a myriad of possibilities... What Noh offered was the opposite: something apparently very defined and regulated. In a studio, you’re relaxed. You’re there to work, but you smoke cigarettes, eat pizza, and play. At some moment you get inspired and then create something. At some point, you have a deadline and you have to hand the work in. It could have been done in a thousand other ways. It’s very random and very creative. This randomness didn’t appeal to me anymore when I discovered Noh. When you’re too free, it’s not interesting...

Synopsis:

- Pellecchia had a background working at a studio as a ‘pop music’ producer, where he could be “randomly creative.”

- He found discipline in the traditional dramatic art of Noh, and found that appealing.

KJ: What was it about the early training sessions that interested you so much?

DP: At the beginning of Noh training, you rely entirely on your teacher. He or she would tell you what to do and you have to do it. Period. Unlike contemporary theatre there’s no intellectualization or psychoanalysis of the character. You take two steps, you go two steps back. You lift your right hand and then your left. You open your arms and then go back to the basic position. You just have to do it very well. I like the idea of polishing one simple action and taking it to perfection. It’s probably closer to what people like about martial arts rather than about artistic endeavors like painting. I think noh is very close to martial arts. You repeat a movement until it’s good. That’s all you have to do in the beginning. The only way I could understand noh in the beginning was through practice. This appealed to me. If I didn’t practice it didn’t exist…

Synopsis:

- He found the repetitive training exercises appealing in the same manner that he imagined a martial art might be.

- It seemed to him that if he didn’t practice Noh, it didn’t exist.

KJ: Why do you think that anybody can perform Noh?

I can’t think of a reason why not. You can learn many things through practicing. I hope that more and more people from other areas of existence will come to our group. For example, other Asians or Africans. I also hope people with disabilities will try it. I’ve seen some disabled Japanese people perform, mostly very elderly people and both professionals and amateurs with difficult issues. There are many studies and efforts to study theatre and disability, especially in England and North America, but I haven’t seen much with regards to Noh.

Synopsis:

- Pellecchia could not think of any reason why anyone can’t do Noh, and hopes that “more people” from “other areas of existence” will join his group. He specifically mentions “other Asians or Africans,” and “people with disabilities.” He laments that there aren’t more studies in Japan related to “theatre [Noh] and disability.”

KJ: In your upcoming performance of Kiyotsune, you’re providing explanations in English, French, Italian and German. It seems like you want to open Noh up to foreigners. There’s also an International Institute of Noh in Milan, so there’s this idea of trying to reach out to a Western audience. What values does Noh have that you think would appeal to this audience?

DP: What I’m hoping to do is to transmit the ethics of Noh. Respect for the space and discipline, work ethics, orderliness, cleanliness. The problem with teaching these aspects, at least in Italy, is that as soon as you start talking about discipline, rigor and respect, you sound like a nationalist. Unfortunately, tradition runs with facism in Italy now.

Synopsis:

- Pellecchia is hoping to “transmit the ethics of Noh.”

- For Pellecchia, those ethics consist of “[r]espect for the space and discipline, work ethics, orderliness, cleanliness.” He fears that he would be considered a right-wing nationalist in Italy if he espoused such “ethics” as “discipline, rigor and respect.”

KJ: Was there anything in your upbringing or in Italy that has helped you with Noh?

DP: Knowing nothing about Noh helped me learn about Noh. Complete ignorance of the language also helped a lot. If Noh comes up for some reason when I talk to some Japanese, they might say their great-grandfather used to practice it. The way Noh is presented on TV and commercial media here in Japan really is that way. They don’t show very young or cool actors, even though there are plenty of them. They have this image of Noh being a very boring, aesthetic art. I didn’t have any of these preconceptions. For me, Noh was really cool.

Synopsis:

- Pellecchia claims that the fact that he had no background knowledge about the Noh and had “[c]omplete ignorance of the language” helped him “learn about Noh.”

- He states that he found Noh to be “really cool,” and that there are a lot of “very young or cool actors” that the media refuses to show, which he presumes to be a reason why Japanese people think Noh is “a very boring, aesthetic art.”

In summary, from the above interview we see a number of contradictions, and a number of connections made where there seem inhere no rhyme or reason. For example, Pellecchia starts by asserting that he left his career as a pop music producer (“with some important acts”) to pursue training in the Noh, which he contrasted as being appealing because it represented a form of repetitive, disciplined activity that he compared to a ‘martial art’ and contrasted to the ‘random creativeness’ of producing pop music, but he then reverts to a pop culture mode of characterization to describe Noh as “really “cool,” with “cool actors.” In fact, he seems to be marketing his school, calling for “other Asians or Africans”, in particular. He denigrates the tradition of his friends great grandfathers and claims that anyone can do it, because it is a simple, mindless practice comprised of repetitive movements, but it’s “really cool.”

It bears noting that the Noh has been a male only dramatic art form for hundreds of years, and is the oldest and perhaps most sophisticated form of dramatic art to have been developed exclusively in Japan (as opposed to early forms of Court dance舞楽 (“bugaku”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugaku; and Shinto 神楽 (“kagura”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagura), upon which one origination story claims the origins of Noh, was a form of dramatic dance representation of myths from the Kojiki), and addresses historical subject matter as a prominent focus. In the lawsuit, I described a little about Japanese traditional culture with reference to the music that I study, which includes an chamber music repertoire that is in part derived from the Noh. The following document filed with the Court is posted as a convenient expedient. The relevant paragraphs are numbers 12, which spans pp.14-16 of the document (ECF No. 172).

The cultural significance of the Noh can hardly be overstated, but that will be set forth in more detail as I examine the published writings of the suspected clandestine intelligence officer engaged in anti-social culturally subversive activities with a religious bend. In the meantime, Pellecchia’s attempt at multicultural marketing of his teachers International Noh Institute in Kyoto bears a little scrutiny with respect to the contrast of the syncretic characteristic of Japanese religion from the 9th century through the 19th century, whereupon it was disrupted by the West and has been restored after WWII, with the homogeneous ethnic composition of Japanese society, which is examined by a scholar (Chris Burgess) in a study that was also submitted to the Court for context. The paper is available online (http://apjjf.org/-Chris-Burgess/2389/article.html), so I have only posted the first page below. It bears noting that multiculturalism and the anti-social activities of the intelligence agencies (including Japan’s own) here in Kyoto and in Japan at large have been a topic subjected to scrutiny elsewhere on this blog.

Who is Patricia Pringle (and Monica Bethe?, Diego Pellecchia?, Hanna McGaughey)??

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.

.....

Pringle also studied with the same teacher and then did graduate work in Noh theater before teaching English and then launching her career as an interpreter/translator. She currently resides in Kentucky, and I had given me the impression that she was still teaching at a college there. I will briefly examine a passage from the emails exchanged with Pringle—posted at the end of the main body of the entry in their entirety, before the O’Donoghue material—here.

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

http://aas2.asian-studies.org/absts/1999abst/japan/j-90.htm.

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. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/428388483995892/

Sunday, May 17, 2015

https://www.facebook.com/patricia.pringle.31/friends_all?lst=655779756%3A100000470533382%3A1483615565

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.

https://www.facebook.com/hosei.nohken/photos/a.1444986015726610.1073741826.1444974562394422/2053689121522960/?type=3&theater

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20041214172517/http://www.chusei-nihon.net/m&t1.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

     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

.....

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: 

http://www.kyotojournal.org/online-special/step-inside-the-world-of-noh/