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The latest example of Bush-style diplomacy–bullying and arm-twisting–was published in today’s Washington Post.

It seems that the Bush Administration had a problem with IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei’s reluctance to play ball and support the US by parroting their hardline stance regarding Iran’s recent interest in nuclear energy. (He also didn’t make any friends in Washington by exposing the grossly inflated nuclear “threat” fabricated by the Bush team and used as justification to attack and subjugate that country two years ago.)

So, what do you do with a UN official who doesn’t get with the program and follow orders from the West Wing? Why, tap his phone and look for dirt, that’s what. Which is just what Bush and Co. did.

Too bad for them they couldn’t find any, and so instead they went around to the rest of the Freedom Posse to drum up support for blocking his assumption of the post for another five-year term. Unfortunately it seems that the only people who have a problem with him are in the US. Japan, Canada, even Britain all think he’s doing a good job, and, well, refused. From the Post:

“It’s on hold right now,” said one U.S. policymaker who was involved in lobbying against ElBaradei. “Everyone turned us down, even the Brits.”

Some people think there’s no limit to the hubris of Bush and his goons, but you know what? We may have just seen it.

Finally finished work on this corporate site. ColdFusion and IIS with a SQL Server back-end, and SEO’d using a combination of dynamic pages and descriptive URLs. Includes a fully bi-lingual, custom-built CMS, style-sheet switcher (for accessibility), tracking redirects and other goodies.

[Recommended reading, reprinted in it’s entirety here or available elsewhere online.]

From Hitler To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden - Insider Connections and the Bush Family’s Partnership with Killers of Americans
Brown Brothers, Harriman - BNL- and the Carlyle Group

By
Michael C. Ruppert

[© Copyright 2001. All Rights Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. May be reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only.]

FTW, Oct. 9, 2001 - Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, major media powerhouses and the increasingly influential alternative media alike have begun to focus attention on Bush family connections and a long history of arming and financing America’s attackers in the months and years prior to the outbreak of war. Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 27 & 28, 2001), ABC News (Oct. 1, 2001), as well as a host of reports from so-called alternative news sources have begun to focus attention on the Bush family’s profit-making role in creating and arming our enemies.

The following is a more comprehensive look at the documented history of these relationships that will also open some new avenues of inquiry for the press, Congress and the American people.

In a world now filled with biowarfare agents, backpack nuclear devices, and chemical weapons like Sarin gas — where there are people in many countries with reasons to oppose the United States — the Bush Administration is following predictable strategies in a way that redefines the concept of brinksmanship. Human survival may depend upon the will and the ability of both the Congress and the press to focus on these relationships and to take appropriate action. Moreover - and I am not the first to say this - if a national security priority is to seize the financial assets of those who support terrorists, then perhaps we should start right here at home.

—

Adolph Hitler

Meticulous research, including U.S. government records from the era, along with contemporaneous news stories from the New York Times and other papers is presented in the 1992 book entitled, “George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography” by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, Published by The Executive Intelligence Review and located at http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm. The following is sourced entirely from Chapter II of this essential work. [Note: Although FTW does not always agree with conclusions reached by the Executive Intelligence Review, or its founder Lyndon La Rouche, we have never found a single flaw in any of their factual research. History is history, no matter who presents it. And this history is essential to understanding our era.]

George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was the Managing Director of the investment bank Brown Brothers, Harriman from the 1920s through the 1940s. It was Brown Brothers, in conjunction with Averell Harriman, the Rockefeller family, Standard Oil, the DuPonts, the Morgans and the Fords who served as the principal funding arm in helping to finance Adolph Hitler’s rise to power starting in 1923. This included direct funding for the SS and SA channeled through a variety of German firms. Prescott Bush, through associations with the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line, Nazi banker Fritz Thyssen (pronounced Tee-sen), Standard Oil of Germany, The German Steel Trust (founded by Dillon Read founder, Clarence Dillon), and I.G. Farben, used the Union Bank Corporation to funnel vast quantities of money to the Nazis and to manage their American interests. The profits from those investments came back to Bush allies on Wall Street. Thyssen is universally regarded as having been Hitler’s private banker and ultimate owner of the Union Bank Corporation.

Early support for Hitler came from Prescott Bush through the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line — also funded by Brown Bothers — that funneled large sums of money and weapons to Hitler’s storm troopers in the 1920s.

According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, “In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Company… was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.”

Furthermore, a 1942 U.S. government investigative report that surfaced during 1945 Senate hearings found that the Union Bank, with Prescott Bush on the board, was an “interlocking concern” with the German Steel Trust that had produced:

- 50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron

- 41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate

- 36% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate

- 38.5% of Nazi Germany’s galvanized sheet

- 45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes

- 22.1% of Nazi Germany’s wire

- 35% of Nazi Germany’s explosives

The business relationships established by Bush in 1923 continued even after the war started until they became so offensive and overt as to warrant seizure by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.

In 1942, “Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares…

“… all of which shares are held for the benefit of… members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals… of a designated enemy country.”

“On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.”

“Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father in law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942…” These seizures of Bush businesses were reported in a number of American papers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Prescott Bush went on to become an influential Republican Senator from Connecticut who went on to be a regular golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower. His attorneys were the lawyers John Foster and Allen Dulles, the later became the CIA Director under Eisenhower.

Saddam Hussein

After becoming President in January 1989, Prescott Bush’s son, George Herbert Walker Bush - father of our current President - authorized a series of programs that not only armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but also provided him with technology that assisted in his development of chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and biological weapons, which he still possesses. Apologists for Bush (the elder) say that, after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s left the region unstable, he was just trying to establish a new balance of power. Not so. Bush directives and policies, including relationships with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) were directly and deliberately responsible for creating the army the U.S. fought in 1991.

A story by Russ W. Baker, in the March/April issue the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), provided the most compelling overview of Iraqgate that I have seen.

“ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop ÔIt is becoming increasingly clear,’ said a grave Ted Koppel, Ôthat George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy…

“Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage?” Baker poignantly asks.

” The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam’s arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.

“Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-Contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don’t appear to be getting any better at telling them…

“Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology — ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We’ve learned that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

“And we’ve learned that the obscure Atlanta Branch of Italy’s largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partly on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.

“… In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh [appointed by George H.W. Bush] blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case…

“… As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, ÔIraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the Systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [The U.S., Britain, and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator.”

While Democrat Henry Gonzales, Chairman of the House Banking Committee during the period, stood as the lone voice from the wilderness in raising alarms about Bush’s obvious corruption, the rest of the Congress sheepishly ignored all the signs demanding immediate action. Gonzales’ voice reportedly fell silent after his empty car was machine-gunned in a Washington suburb in what passed for a drive-by shooting.

The CJR continues: “Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990 issue… “That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert decision to arm Iraq,’ Waas wrote, “is the most serious consequence of a U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the advice and consent of the American public…”

The L.A. Times, on Feb 23, 1992, dug deep enough to find secret National Security Decision Directives by the Bush Administration in 1989 ordering closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $1 billion in new aid. The Times’ series, co-authored with Waas, emphasized that, “buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece - that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loans guarantees to Iraq.”

Baker’s CJR report also noted, “On October 3, the [Wall Street] Journal reported [BNL official Christopher] Drogoul’s assertion that the director general of Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Production had told him, ÔWe are all in this together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government works very closely with the intelligence service of the Iraqi government.’ Three weeks later, the Journal reported that [Henry] Gonzales Ôproduced a phone-book-sized packet of documents’ showing the involvement of U.S. exporting firms… The documents mentioned one… which designed parts for Iraq’s howitzers and was financed through BNL…”

In the wake of highly suspicious anthrax outbreaks in Florida, just miles from where several of the WTC suicides pilots trained, we add one final note. In his 1998 book “Bringing the War Home” author William Thomas writes, ” Under that same [weapons transfer] program, 19 containers of Anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the US Army’s high security germ warfare labs.”

The Carlyle Group, the Bushes and bin Laden

The warnings about the Carlyle Group, the nation’s 11th largest defense contractor, and the Bushes came long before the World Trade Center attacks. The Carlyle Group is a closely held corporation, exempt, for that reason, from reporting its affairs to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little is known of what it actually does except that it buys and sells defense contractors. As of October 4, 2001, it has removed its corporate web site from the World Wide Web making further investigation through that channel impossible. Its Directors include Frank Carlucci, former Reagan Secretary of Defense; James Baker, former Bush Secretary of State; and Richard Darman, a former White House aide to Ronald Reagan and Republican Party operative.

On March 3, 2001, just weeks after George W Bush’s inauguration, the conservative Washington lobbying group Judicial Watch issued a press release. It said:

“(Washington, D.C.) Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government abuse and corruption, called on former President George Herbert Walker Bush to resign immediately from the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm, while his son President George W. Bush is in office. Today’s New York Times reported that the elder Bush is an “ambassador” for the $12 billion private investment firm and last year traveled to the Middle East on its behalf. The former president also helped the firm in South Korea.

“The New York Times reported that as compensation, the elder Bush is allowed to buy a stake in the Carlyle Group’s investments, which include ownership in at least 164 companies throughout the world (thereby by giving the current president an indirect benefit). James Baker, the former Secretary of State who served as President George W. Bush’s point man in Florida’s election dispute, is a partner in the firm. The firm also gave George W. Bush help in the early 1990’s when it placed him on one of its subsidiary’s board of directors.

“This is simply inappropriate. Former President Bush should immediately resign from the Carlyle Group because it is an obvious conflict of interest. Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm’s investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group’s interests with the interests of the United States government,” stated Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel.

“Questions are now bound to be raised if the recent Bush Administration change in policy towards Iraq has the fingerprints of the Carlyle Group, which is trying to gain investments from other Arab countries who [sic] would presumably benefit from the new policy,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.”

Judicial Watch noted that “even the Clinton Administration called on the Rodham brothers to stop their business dealings in [The former Soviet Republic of] Georgia because those dealings started to destabilize that country.”

Since the WTC attacks the Wall Street Journal has reported (Sept. 28, 2001) that, “George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm.” The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice in the last three years - 1998 and 2000 — as a representative of Carlyle, seeking to expand business dealings with one of the wealthiest Saudi families, which some experts argue, has never fully severed its ties with black sheep Osama in spite of current reports in a mainstream press that is afraid of offending the current administration.

The Nation, on March 27, 2000 - in a story co-authored by David Corn and Paul Lashmar - wrote, “In January former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major paid a social call on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah…” This story confirms at least one meeting between the elder Bush and Saudi leaders, including the bin Ladens. That the bin Ladens attended this meeting was confirmed in a subsequent September 27, 2001 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) story. The January 2000 meeting with the bin Ladens was also later confirmed by Bush (the elder’s) Chief of Staff Jean Becker, only after the WSJ presented her with a thank you note sent by Bush to the bin Ladens after that meeting.

James Baker visited the bin Ladens in 1998 and 1999 with Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci.

The WSJ story went on to note, “A Carlyle executive said that the bin Laden family committed $2 million through a London investment arm in 1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. The fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. So far, the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return, the Carlyle executive said.

“But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the family’s overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger…”

In other words, Osama bin Laden’s attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in the U.S. defense budget have just made his family a great big pile of money.

More Bush connections appear in relation to the bin Ladens. The WSJ story also notes that, “During the past several years, the [bin Laden] family’s close ties to the Saudi royal family prompted executives and staff from closely held New York publisher Forbes, Inc. to make two trips to the family headquarters, according to Forbes Chairman Caspar Weinberger, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. ÔWe would call on them to get their view of the country and what would be of interest to investors.’”

President G.H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger for his criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1989.

Our current President, George W. Bush has also had — at minimum — indirect dealings with Carlyle and the bin Ladens. In 1976 his firm Arbusto Energy was funded with $50,000 from Texas investment banker James R. Bath who was also the U.S. investment counselor for the bin Laden family. In his watershed 1992 book, “The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush,” award winning Texas investigative journalist Pete Brewton dug deeply into Bath’s background, revealing connections with the CIA and major fraudulent activities connected with the Savings & Loan scandal that took $500 billion out of the pockets of American taxpayers. A long-time friend of George W. Bush, Bath was connected to a number of covert financing operations in the Iran-Contra scandal, which also linked to bin Laden friend Adnan Khashoggi. One of the richest men in the world, Khashoggi was the arms merchant at the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi, whose connections to the bin Ladens is more than superficial, got his first business break by acting as middle-man for a large truck purchase by Osama bin Laden’s older brother, Salem.

Another key player in the Bush Administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, left his post as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration after a series of scandals connected to CIA operatives Ed Wilson, Ted Shackley, Richard Secord and Tom Clines placed him at the brink of criminal indictment and jail. Shackley and Secord are veterans of Vietnam operations and have long been linked to opium/heroin smuggling. The Armitage scandals all focused on the illegal provision of weapons and war materiel to potential or actual enemies of the U.S. and to the Contras in Central America.

Armitage, a former Navy SEAL, who reportedly enjoyed combat missions and killing during covert operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, has never been far from the Bush family’s side. Throughout his career, both in and out of government, he has been perpetually connected to CIA drug smuggling operations. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a 1995 Washington Post story, called Armitage, “my white son.” In 1990, then President Bush dispatched Armitage to Russia to aid in its “transition” to capitalism. Armitage’s Russian work for Bush has been frequently connected to the explosion of drug trafficking under the Russian Mafias, which became virtual rulers of the nation afterwards. In the early 1990s Armitage had extensive involvement in Albania at the same time that the Albanian ally, Kosovo Liberation Army was coming to power and consolidating its grip, according to The Christian Science Monitor, on 70% of the heroin entering western Europe. [See FTW Vol. II, No 2 - April 24, 1999]

Armitage and Carlucci are both Board Members of the influential Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council.

The connections continue with Vice President Dick Cheney. Amongst the multitude of oil pipeline construction running through the new war zone is one project - according to a Sept. 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal story - a joint venture in which the bin Laden family joined with the construction firm H.C. Price. A researcher named “Phoenix,” writing for the Internet news site Rumor Mills News Agency located at www.rumormillnews.com, reported that Price subsequently changed its name to Bredero Shaw, Inc. and is now owned by a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, Dresser Industries. It was Dresser industries that gave George H.W. Bush his first post war job in 1948. A check of the relevant corporate web sites has confirmed this.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm, directing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, was Halliburton’s CEO until last year’s election.

And, according to a 2000 story from Harper’s Magazine, in 1990 our current President, through a position as a corporate director of Caterair, owned by the Carlyle Group - at a time when the bin Laden’s were invested in Carlyle - had additional connections to the bin Laden family. In addition, on March 1, 1995, when George W. Bush was Texas governor and a senior Trustee of the university, the University of Texas Endowment voted to place $10 million in investments with the Carlyle Group. As to how much of that money went to the bin Ladens we can only guess. But we do know that there is a long tradition in the Bush family of giving money to those who kill Americans.

Now, as the people of America are beginning to awaken to what is really being unleashed upon them, as a few brave souls are asking who’s going to get all the money the Bush Administration is “borrowing” from government coffers and who’s going to pay for it - the above history is more than ominous.

Considering that during the 1980s, under the pretext of fighting a Sandinista regime in Nicaragua that never once launched an attack on the U.S., these same people oversaw an explosion in U.S. cocaine consumption that went from 80 metric tons in 1979 to 600 metric tons in 1989 - considering that the CIA trained and equipped death squads that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Panama - considering that these same people have brutalized Iraq, leaving portions of it radioactively contaminated by depleted uranium for the next 4 billion years and causing a fivefold increase in the number of childhood leukemia cases amidst a starving population, one can only wonder what they will produce for the world now given the context of the World Trade Center attacks.

The beginning of the year here is also marked by visits to local (or distant) shrines to pray for a prosperous and healthy new year. Also, because Rie is back in Kumamoto so infrequently we also paid a visit to a simple shrine that holds the ashes of some of her relatives.

Although I had expected something more akin to a stone alter like you might find in a Japanese graveyard, the site we visited was instead and smallish room filled with maybe a hundred or so lockers and dominated by a single, simple shrine near the back of the room.

We opened their locker to find a small butsudan, a Buddhist alter before which you pray for your ancestors. After praying at the main alter we approached the smaller one in turn. First we took a stick of incense and lit, then stood it up in a bowl of ashes near the front of the alter. Next to that is a small, ornate brass bowl which you strike lightly with a short piece of rounded, lacquered wood. Then you pray briefly, bow, and step back.

Over as quickly as it had begun, we were out the door and on our way to the next place. This time we drove for two hours (further) into the country to visit a shrine called 蛇石神社 and devoted to the spirit of a mythical white snake. Praying at this shrine is supposed to bring prosperity in business, and is visited each year by the Ogatas.

I picked up an お守り (protective charm) and a お札 for a prosperous year for the company, then we all made the rounds, praying at each of the shrines at the temple and also peeking in on the two albino snakes that lay curled in a glass cage installed on a small rise behind the shrine.

Afterwards we drove back to the city and visited another Shinto shrine, praying at the many alters in the same pre-defined fashion: two bows, shake the hanging rope to rattle a simple round bell affixed to the top, clap twice, pray, bow again. We also bought お御籤 (o-mikuji), little slips of paper that tell your prospects and fortune for the coming year. Mine, sadly, was only so-so, so I decided not to give it too much stock.

Throughout the day we all took turns holding Mia and worrying all the while that it was too cold for her to be outside like this and hurrying to get back to the warmth of the car. O-basan (Grandma) was no different, of course, except that when her came turn to hold Mia she was in no rush to go anywhere…

In Japan, the 1st of January is a quiet time to rise early and be with the family. Like Christmas morning in the US, but without all of the gift-giving and other fanfare, it’s the one time of year when all of the kids are back home, perhaps with kids of their own in tow, and everyone spends the day lolling around in the warmest room of the house, sipping can beer and eating o-sechi ryori.

Things around the Ogata household we’re no different today. We awoke late after the previous evenings debauchery, amazingly not hungover, and joined the folks downstairs, slipping under the warmth of the kotatsu and settling in for the traditional feast.

Rie’s mother had spent many hours preparing the various dishes laid out before us on the low table, and we would enjoy them over the next 2-3 days. Everything was delicious except for the crab, which was… not delicious. It was also nice to bite into a chilled, dark beer first thing in the morning, which is one of those things I can only bring myself to do on days like today, unless “today” is actually yesterday and you’re still out somewhere and… well, never mind.

Anyway, we spent the whole day laying around, watching 笑い番組 on television and generally being lazy. In the Ogata home the TV is kept on and at high volume throughout the day, leaving me with two options: stay in the only warm room in the house and watch TV, and escape to a cold room and read a book. The frigid weather played a heavy role in my decision-making, and let’s just say I’m now fully up-to-date on current events in the 芸能界 and Japanese advertising industry.

Whaddya gonna do. I guess the only I can say is: Welcome to the Year of the Rooster!

Last night we finally got out of the house at around nine-thirty. All the buses had stopped running by this point so we hopped a cab for the 30 minute drive into Kumamoto City proper. Getting Mia fed and calmed down and sleepy took about three hours, and she was still awake when we left her with the parents, who had agreed to look after her for the evening while we went out for some New Years festivities. We apologized and yoroshiku‘d all the way out the door, hoping for the best from our capricious 4-month-old.

We arrived downtown, jumped out, and made for our destination for the evening, Jeff’s Worldbar. While the website could use a major facelift (or better yet, reconstructive surgery), the bar has already had one, and now, in addition to being a much more interesting place to hang out, is also under the keen stewardship of Seattle homeboy Larry X, seen here enticing me to try one of the bar’s “off-menu” specials.

What was once an unremarkable little dive in Kumamoto’s entertainment district, the kind of place that practically had “Filipina hostess bar” written all over it–in lipstick–had been transformed into a small but hip nightspot with a groovy interior, good music and lots of regular customers, Japanese and otherwise.

While Tokyo has a fairly wide variety of gaijin–teachers, bankers, programmers, artists, writers, etc.–foreigners in Kumamoto all seem to fall into one large group: 25-35 year-old JETs and English teachers. Moreover, most of them are apparently blonde. 気のせい？ Anyway, I suppose it’s no coincidence that that’s what the population of Jeff’s WorldBar looks like as well. Everyone I met there was very friendly, and better still seemed unencumbered with the well-coiffed Attitude and delusions of VIPness that infect much of the local 外人 population here.

We got there late, and the evening was already in full swing. The single room wasn’t filled to capacity or anything, but finding a seat proved to be difficult. Larry welcomed us from behind the bar, and moments later we spied The Dan and Rupp back in one corner.

It’s strange that I have three friends from Seattle living here in Japan, and they ALL live in Kumamoto, not a small city, per se, but certainly off the beaten path. Apparently one of them, Rupp, has an enormously magnetic personality, and people just follow him around the world no matter how far away he goes.

This is him here, flashing his best catch-me-if-you-can smile and a glass of imo-jouchu.
そう言えば、この写真は宝山の広告で使ってもいいかもしれないね。

Mr. Bloom is also back in Kumamoto these days, doing his best straight-man impression with a legit teaching gig while saving money in hopes of one day realizing his long-held dream of teaching carp to sing.

Shortly some seats opened up along the far wall, an expanse of windows looking out onto the street below that had been completely covered before Larry renovated the place. We moved over there and joined Dan and Rupp. Larry kicked off yet another whirlwind tour of hand-picked, high-quality 焼酎 (shochu), a ride I happily enjoyed for the course of the evening there.

Rie was enjoying her first opportunity in months to have more than two drinks in a row now that Mia was being looked after by the grandparents for the night, and we both ended up loopy by the time midnight rolled around. When the hour came, Larry broke out a bottle of sparkling wine and champagne glasses for our small, ex-Seattle group at the end of the bar, and with that we rang in the new year.