Abstract
Popoki is a cat, and is the main figure in the Popoki Peace Project. Among Popoki’s human friends is one named Betty Reardon. She knew him as a live cat, but perhaps grew closer to him in his work with the Popoki Peace Project, a grass roots group begun by this author in 2006. The Project uses creative and critical skills to work for peace.
Ronni Alexander, Professor in the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan; Email: alexroni@kobe-u.ac.jp.
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Notes
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- 2.
Today, not only is peace education in school less widespread in Japan than it was in the eighties when this incident occurred, but the content is increasingly skewed toward promoting nationalistic emotions and denying/erasing anything that puts Japan in a poor light. For example, references to the so-called Comfort Women and Japanese war atrocities are being taken out of history books. This trend is leaving students poorly educated, e.g. unaware of and misinformed about many important and controversial issues.
- 3.
Popoki’s friends are encouraged to not only to think about stories, but also to think with them. Thinking with stories requires thinking relationally, a process that exceeds the boundaries of the way stories are generally used in Western approaches that focus on thinking about stories (Clandinin 2016, pp. 29–30).
- 4.
While educators and activists emphasize ‘raising our voices,’ sometimes that is not possible or desirable. Silence can be a form of resistance or communication, as in the case of some forms of empathy and active listening. (See Parpart/Parashar 2019).
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Feminist scholars provide multiple understandings of bodies as, for example, discursively reproduced (Butler 1993), as inscribing (Vaittinen 2017), and as gendered and tied to a two-gender binary (Repo 2016) and differentially grievable (Butler 2004). Significant to this is that “the human body can be simultaneously all this, and much more” (Vaittinen 2019, p. 246, italics in the original).
- 6.
Both emotion and affect are difficult terms to define. Åhäll (2015) and Ahmed (2014) discuss emotion in terms of the extent to which it can be understood as socially and culturally constructed; a place where bodily sensation, emotion and thought interact. Affect, on the other hand, is often used to denote what happens inside and therefore is very much related to embodiment, and seen as something that happens before emotion (Åhäll 2015, p. 5).
- 7.
Guåhan is the indigenous Chamoru name for the island generally known as “Guam”. American citizens on Guam are not allowed to vote for president and have a non-voting representative in Congress.
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Alexander, R. (2019). Some Questions from Popoki to Betty Reardon About Human Security, Gender and Teaching/Learning/Creating Peace. In: Snauwaert, D. (eds) Exploring Betty A. Reardon’s Perspective on Peace Education. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18387-5_11
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