English for Activists

Hi, everyone. This is an e-news letter for the last class on 30th March. I will briefly describe the activities in the class and make small notes of what appeared remarkable to me.

We did three things in the class.

Firstly, we did the correction of the last e-news letter written by Yasu-san. There, Yasu-san detailed the process of Monopoly we played in the class. I thought it amazing that he could represent the process so meticulously, none of which I could recall (perhaps I did not know what was going on, even when I was playing!).

Secondly, Joe made a presentation on the new trend in Japanese labor Movement, which was a longer version of the presentation he had made at the Left Forum held in New York about a week ago and a much compressed version of his paper, “Recent Japanese Labor Movements and Problem of Poverty
and Inequality.” The presentation / paper appeared to be basically targeted to English-speaking audience outside Japan, so if he could have re-arranged the argument a bit for audience living in Japan, discussion followed might have been more vibrant. Nonetheless, he did a great job and we all thank
him for that.

Thirdly, we watched some parts of “democracy now!” news show broadcasted several days earlier. The parts dealt with the huge wealth gap in the US and focused especially on the “extremely difficult” (the phrase employed by all the three women interviewed in the show to describe their situation) situation where many (most?) of the black single mothers found themselves in.

That is all for now. See you in the next class!

Seika Sato