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Positions - Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli - Pandora’s Box
August 29, 2018

Pandora’s Box

Matilde Cassani, Tutto, Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018. Photo: Francesco Bellina.

Nikolaus Hirsch You have a very expansive practice, ranging from design to curating, art directing, and editing. How do you understand the role of architecture and architects in this expanded field?

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli I feel like there has been a general shift from construction to media, but I don’t have a theory for it, and I believe my case is specific to my background. I'm a product of Italian schools, which until some years ago provided a very broad education. I'm also a product of the Italian market. Italy is the country with the highest ratio of architects to inhabitants in the world; there are very low chances to build anything and architects often turn into spatial practitioners, applying spatial thinking to different domains. This is not new or recent of course. The radicals, like Superstudio and Archizoom, focused on space, but not necessarily through building, and by doing that they were able to open new opportunities. Today, architects easily borrow from or contribute to other disciplines. The osmosis is so frequent and intense that a different definition for architecture might be needed. When you look at it as a system, or a network of fields of knowledge, you understand yourself, as an architect, only as one point in that network. You can contribute to multiple processes at the same time and be released from the burden of authorship.

NH How would you define your role then?

IPL Within our office I’m responsible for a department that works at the intersection between architecture and other practices. We almost never build in the strict sense of the word, but contribute to broadening the spectrum of what OMA can do and offer. It is difficult to say whether what we do is architecture, curatorship, editing, art directing, or something else. Our practice is very schizophrenic in that sense. This year I co-curated Manifesta, an art biennial, and I've curated in the past, but I’ve also worked on scenography, architecture, and editorial projects. In the end, there is nothing I can do very well, but I’m happy to try and navigate through different domains, without pretending to be an expert.

NH Is that the old model of the architect as a generalist?

IPL Maybe. I’m not against “generalist” as a definition. Architectural education and practice are progressively becoming very fragmented while, when you look at the market, or at the opportunities provided by new domains of research and what an architect can do in these contexts, I find it more exciting and productive to expand as opposed to specialize. I don't know whether that's a question of being a generalist or something else. Especially considering the degree of hybridization between disciplines that is currently informing our practice as well as many others…

NH Regarding Manifesta 12 in Palermo, I'd be quite interested to hear from you how would you define this year's edition, since half of the curatorial team is made up of architects. How has the presence of architects changed the curatorial idea, the format, the participants?

IPL This year’s Manifesta started as a reaction to Manifesta 11, where an artist-curator worked on a very specific exhibition that became almost a personal statement. The institution felt like it retracted from engaging with the city. So this year, given the complexity of Palermo, the institution wanted to approach the project with a sort of preparatory phase; a pre-investigation that would work to mediate between a foreign institution and the city, and that could act as a blueprint for Palermo even after Manifesta. The underlying idea was that through the initial research phase—which set the basis of the curatorial model—and the collection of works developed for this edition, Manifesta would serve as a testing ground with a long-term perspective for alternative urban practices. The city is the real project.

Nick Axel What did this preparatory phase entail?

IPL Palermo is not an easy place to penetrate or engage with. Our study, which is now called the Palermo Atlas, looked at Palermo not as a city but a geography of flows—of people, capital, data, species, seeds, germs—that extend far beyond the Mediterranean. The Atlas uses Palermo as a lens to explore some of the crucial transformations of our times that are common to the Mediterranean, Europe, or the world at large, such as migration and climate change, or illegal trafficking and warfare. It’s a multi-scalar study that doesn’t use traditional urban categories to scan the city, but instead mobilizes things like religion, literature, cinema, or personal memories to navigate its territory and controversial history. It’s not an urban analysis, but rather a holistic reading of the current status of the city. The Atlas was used as a tool by both the artists and the curatorial team. The interdisciplinary nature of the curatorial team—two architects, Andrés Jaque and myself, an investigative journalist, Bregtje van der Haak, and one art curator, Mirjam Varadinis—is reflected in the interdisciplinary group of participants, who range from writers to journalists, activists, anthropologists, architects, artists, geographers, and so on.

NA How did the Atlas influence the way you intervened within the city itself?

IPL The Atlas allowed us to explore the entire geography of Palermo in depth. We literally walked with dozens Palermitans across relevant sections of their city. These explorations and associated discoveries led to a certain attitude towards the city and helped identify locations of interest. This year’s Manifesta happens across twenty-two found spaces—from abandoned palazzos in the city center to remote gardens or modern ruins in the outskirts. We don’t use any institutional spaces. Due to its controversial post-war history, Palermo has hundreds of abandoned or under-utilized spaces just in the historical center, while several other areas are stuck in financial, political, or bureaucratic gridlock and can’t be used. There was a huge opportunity for us to open up the city, to use Manifesta as a device to show what was otherwise inaccessible and to unlock existing potentials. We also wanted to extend, or stretch across the geography of Palermo, to bring the biennial to contested, peripheral, neglected areas. By doing that, the idea was to try to engage a different audience, one that might not normally be exposed to such types of cultural events. More generally, I think it is important to stress that Manifesta is part of a political vision of the city of Palermo based on culture, multiculturalism, and integration. It’s a new narrative based on a shift in politics and culture away from the heavy heritage of crime and the mafia and towards public participation. The process of making the biennial—from Palermo Atlas to the implementation of each work—has been developed as a partnership between the city and Manifesta. By creating this network of collaborations, we have hopefully set the basis of Manifesta’s long term legacy.

NA It seems as if you're grappling with the finitude of the biennial itself, and are taking an almost infrastructural approach to try and overcome the ephemeral, temporary nature of such projects and events. The way that you talk about the city itself as the project makes me think about the institutional agency of such an event, one that acts in an independent way from the artists or art works. While I understand the scale is almost incomparable, when you mentioned opening abandoned buildings, I couldn’t help but think of how documenta 14 rehabilitated buildings and institutions throughout Athens.

IPL It’s hard to talk about the infrastructural approach of Manifesta, as the scale of its investment is really quite small, especially compared to documenta. We open abandoned buildings, but we didn’t rehabilitate them. We launched a number of urban interventions as prototypes to test methodologies, more than actual projects. In a way, as an institution temporarily based in a city, Manifesta can be seen as a catalyst for local energies.

Cooking Sections, What is Above is What is Below, Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018. Photo: Wolfgang Traeger.

NH Also with the not unimportant difference of where the money comes. The host city, Palermo in this case, pays for Manifesta to happen, whereas the state of Hessen and the German government will always pay for documenta in Kassel and sometimes even in other places.

IPL True. In the case of Manifesta, its model and mode of operation needs to be readapted—often reinvented—every two years. In Palermo, we were trying to inject public finances into the city through projects of public interest. What is crucial for us is the temporal dimension, especially for those projects which are considered more like interventions. They're based on a timeframe that extends beyond the exhibition. We’re not giving the city packaged projects, but rather initiating processes. Cooking Sections, for instance, is doing a project about dry irrigation techniques, a topic that is urgent for Sicily for two reasons: it’s a form of emancipation not just from climate change and progressive droughts, but also the criminal structures connected to the distribution of water. It is contextual while providing a possible response to urgent global needs. They discovered and researched a number of ancient dry irrigation techniques which were common before the modernization of agriculture, and are restaging some of these techniques across the city in three installations around existing trees. This is done in collaboration with the department of Agronomy of the University of Palermo, which will monitor and livestream data about those trees, making it accessible to whoever is interested. You could say that Cooking Sections’ work transforms a number of sites in Palermo into open air laboratories to test the city’s future environmental conditions. These types of projects will not end after four months. They are “structural,” conceived in such a way that their legacy—in the form of accumulated knowledge and methodology—will continue after Manifesta ends. It was a way to be relevant, or to have impact, without major architectural interventions.

NH There is a certain promise of site specificity in not just Manifesta, but most biennials; that it does something with the local. This usually leads to huge disappointment, if not a revolt among locals. I think this is based on a misunderstanding because the other force of these types of events is, of course, decontextualization. Local contextualization has limits. Otherwise we would just have regionalist architecture, if not regionalist art, all around us. So instead you invite practitioners who bring other contexts with them, other vocabularies and discourses. Ideally, this estrangement brings something, contributes to the host city. In the case of this Manifesta and Palermo, how do you balance between what has local roots and is part of local dynamics, and something that is brought in from elsewhere?

IPL It’s an interesting question, especially when talking about Palermo. This is a city where the local and global dimensions are reconciled, and where their dynamics are entangled and participate in common challenges, but often through different points of view. We encountered, and we keep encountering friction from citizens. That's inevitable, and that’s why we tried to establish partnerships between external practitioners and various local forces The Atlas and the work that followed helped set in motion the type of collaborations we wanted. When we invited artists or other practitioners to actually participate, collaborations and conditions for them to work were already in place. In some cases, they worked perfectly, and in others they were less productive, but no process was carried out in isolation. Laura Poitras, for instance, collaborated with the local Centro Sperimentale di Cinematorgrafia (Experimental Cinematography Center) to craft a narrative of the growing US military presence in Sicily, connecting to and expanding the voice of decades of protest. Or Matilde Cassani, who in dialogue with the local Tamil community updated Sicilian baroque traditions through a number of drapes and a spectacular daily fireworks show at the Quattro Canti, which acts as an ode to today’s religious and cultural diversity in the city.

NH Do you think this is what Palermo expected?

IPL Well, it's the city that actually pays for Manifesta, so their expectations are usually very high. Expectations are a question of the city’s political dynamics. The task is then to manage expectation in such a way that it becomes clear what you can and cannot do, considering the timeframe and resources that you have. Part of our work was dedicated to convincing people that Manifesta is not a sort of United Nations entity that comes in and is able to measurably change things on the ground, but rather that some choices were made due to the scale and the type of resources that were in place.

Rotor, Da quassù è tutta un'altra cosa (From up here it's a whole other story), Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018. Photo: Cave Studio.

NA Why would a city like Palermo go to Manifesta? Why wouldn't they just hire AMO to do a study and to implement some preservations projects? What does Manifesta allow the city to do, or what does it bring to the city, that the city can't do on its own?

IPL OMA or AMO are never enough, especially in complex realities like Palermo. I think your question relates to your previous point. An important force of these events is decontextualization. Palermo has extremely complicated problems that are often discussed in the same way, from within the city, its political systems, its policy makers, and so on. We approached the city as OMA with the intention of starting to talk about certain problems from a different point of view. For me, that’s one of the most interesting aspects of this Manifesta, which we tried to extend to other actors. Like us, some practitioners that we invited simply approached issues in a different way, with different narratives. In some cases it was not simply a fresh look, but a shift of perspective able to break through consolidated gridlocks. Rotor, for instance, worked on the outskirts of Palermo in an area that was originally a nature reserve called Pizzo Sella, but where forty years ago, 170 villas were illegally built, a large number of which are still unfinished. They stand as a huge scar on the Palermitan landscape, and Pizzo Sella is commonly known as the “hill of shame.” Rotor transformed an abandoned, unfinished building—a precarious concrete skeleton—into a refuge point and public belvedere from where you can look back at the impressive panorama of Palermo and its landscape. It’s an emblematic project for me that, through a radical shift of perspective, reconnects us to the landscape and transforms a place burdened by so much negative memory into something productive, acting almost as a salve. It could also be considered a prototype that is scalable and replicable.

NH Narration is an interesting notion here because it might not be visible as a text, or not literally, but it gives a certain tangibility to a site. In that sense, one could argue that your role is to construct visibility, to construct potentials. But it's also related to certain possibilities that modernism, or the history of modern architecture, clearly shows, as in the way how Le Corbusier talked about Paris in a completely new way in the 1920s. Media, be it a text, an exhibition, or an actual building, can be quite performative. What it leads to, we don't know, but this seems, to me at least, to have something to do with what architects do, willingly or not.

IPL Willingly, we hope! I agree, and it’s also about creating a context for dialogue, a “place” where different forms of politics can be discussed outside traditional governmental structures. We are, for example, giving space to a number of research-based projects which are actually exploring new possibilities for knowledge about the city or its geographic context, and that manifest in theatrical ways. The display of the archive of a forty-year exploration of the polluted and contested southern coast of Palermo by Roberto Collovà, a renowned local architect, is one example of this. We also involved actual writers, like Giorgio Vasta, who curated “City Scripts,” a series of five micro-narratives that span across space and time to explore less obvious and peripheral fragments of Palermo. These works don't necessarily produce instant change, but they contribute to mobilizing confrontation on urgent topics.

NA Where do you see Manifesta or the position of biennials, these types of events, twenty years from now?

IPL Manifesta is progressively trying to redefine the format of a biennial by questioning the scale, temporality, and degree of local intervention. In this sense, who knows? In twenty years it might turn into a nomadic intergovernmental agency—a UN body of sorts—one focused on local development through cultural production. But in any case, it’s a complicated question. In 2010 there were 216 biennials. Many of these biennials ask themselves the same questions: how we can be more relevant? How we can mobilize resources in a cyclical format? I think the examples that are working better are ones which are most emancipated from the market, and that involve practitioners who try to be immune, or at least renegotiate their position towards its logics.

NH There are more and more attempts to stretch biennials beyond their two-year timeframe, but maybe we should think a bit beyond that. As architects we are aware of other exhibitions that happen according to a different cyclical regimen. Who says an exhibition has to happen every two years, or documenta every five years, or Munster every ten years? Think of historic examples such as the Weissenhof exhibition. This is where building and exhibition-making becomes hybridized in the way that you mentioned in the beginning. Maybe it shouldn’t be clear what the temporal dimension is. Maybe it all these biennials are far too small. Maybe documenta is too small.

IPL Scale is definitely an interesting question. When you think of biennials, you often think about a large collection of artists, and a large collection of works. But why can’t they be very, very small, or very, very big, as you say? Originally we thought it could have been revolutionary to avoid to setting up actual exhibitions and limit Manifesta 12 to a small number of urban interventions. Part of that ambition has survived, but the format has not entirely been reinvented. Time is also interesting when it comes to the question of scale, as there are usually different phases in the execution of a biennial. What makes Manifesta an interesting case is that it starts working with the host city long in advance. There is a whole preparation phase that unlocks certain legal frameworks, sets collaborations in place, starts working with the invited practitioners, produces research, connects with local realities, etc. In a way, what the audience sees is just the tip of the iceberg. If this extended preparatory phase and any form of cultural production connected to it were equally exposed as much as the moments during and after the opening, the fact that biennials happen every two years would become irrelevant. Biennials have timespans that are much longer. We could abandon the definition of biennials in favor of an ongoing process of production and negotiation, with various moments that have different intensities.

NA I wonder if, at a certain point, biennials might abandon artist commission model altogether, and operate almost like a planning biennial, or a preservation biennial?

IPL That is possible, and in a way, it’s already happening. A biennial is like a form of meta-urbanism, or meta-design. Then, of course, this encompasses a number of other issues. One of our main criticisms that we are facing is that, in Palermo, we are the first step in the gentrification of certain areas. By opening up various abandoned places, which are already just waiting for an international investor to come in and invest, we're really part of that process. This is not bad per se, but it’s a dilemma to be addressed by both curators and institutions.

Positions is an initiative of e-flux Architecture. This interview took place during the e-flux conversation series Practice at Milano Arch Week 2018, held at the e-flux Teatrino pavilion designed by Matteo Ghidoni—Salottobuono, made with the help of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia (FVG) Region and by Filiera del Legno FVG (with the coordination of Regione FVG and Innova FVG).

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli is a partner at OMA, where his work has a focus on research, curation, scenography, and preservation. He co-curated Manifesta’s 12 in Palermo, and is the curator of the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
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Please remember to do your Covid test before you come to College. Take care and stay safe

Eastleigh College's 16-19 Tuition Fund Statement details our commitment to providing all learners on a full time study programme who haven't already achieved a grade 5 or above in English and maths by age 16 have the opportunity to access small group tuition to boost their opportunity for success on their chosen qualification.

16-19 Tuition Fund Statement - full document.

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Cheese and pepper star in this simple Italian dish. While the combo is traditionally tossed with pasta, we toss Parmesan cheese and freshly ground pepper with zucchini noodles instead for a lower-carb dish that helps you get in an extra serving of veggies. To simplify the recipe, look for prepackaged zucchini noodles in the produce section of your supermarket.

Carolyn Casner
Source:, December 2019

Read the full recipe after the video.

Recipe Summary

15 mins
30 mins

Nutrition Profile:

Ingredient Checklist

Instructions Checklist
  • Using a vegetable spiralizer, cut zucchini into long strips. Chop the long strands once or twice so they're not too long. Place the zucchini in a colander and sprinkle with salt. Let drain for at least 15 minutes. Wrap in a large clean kitchen towel and squeeze to remove excess moisture.

  • Heat oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the zucchini noodles and cook, stirring, until heated through, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and stir in Parmesan and pepper. Serve with more pepper, if desired.

Nutrition Facts

157 calories; protein 6.7g; carbohydrates 8.5g; dietary fiber 1.9g; sugars 4.4g; fat 11.6g; saturated fat 3.4g; cholesterol 12.9mg; vitamin a iu 540.5IU; vitamin c 35.1mg; folate 48mcg; calcium 161.3mg; iron 0.9mg; magnesium 41.1mg; potassium 544.4mg; sodium 322.8mg; thiamin 0.1mg.


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PLEASE NOTE: I have used silverbeet for this recipe. You can substitute the silverbeet with kale or english spinach

COOKBOOK: Woman’s Day recipe

Lasagna with smoked salmon….heaven! This recipe can get a little pricey if you don’t buy the salmon in bulk. Costco is great for this!

I make my own béchamel sauce (with cheese, which the turns into a mornay sauce)

You can buy it in a sachet if you need to cheat. It’s not the easiest sauce to make and you need to get it wrong a number of times before you perfect it. Continuous stirring is important to remove all lumps otherwise you can end up with a lumpy mess. Practice makes perfect guys! Make half of the sauce by sachet and give it a go in making the rest from scratch.

Serves 4-6

600g béchamel sauce required

1 handful grated cheese

Salt and pepper

1 cup fresh cream

500g ricotta cheese

4 tablespoons of fresh dill, chopped

1 lemon, grated zest

375g lasagna dry sheets

2 large bunch of silverbeet (you can use 3 x kale or 4 x english spinach)

500g smoked salmon

1 cup sun dried tomatoes, strips (or chopped)

1/2 cup of parmesan cheese

1/2 cup breadcrumbs

Silverbeet requires to remove the white stem which runs through the centre. Rinse under cold water and set them aside. Heat 1/2 cup water in pan. Add the silverbeet (note: silverbeet will shrink to half of it’s size when in boiling water). Season with salt and pepper. Keep turning until its third of its size. Remove pan from heat. Drain in a colander. Press down as hard as you can to remove all liquid. once it has cooled down, squeeze further liquid from batches with your hands. set aside.

Make béchamel sauce either by hand (instructions below) or satchel (instructions on packaging.

Add grated cheese , melt and set aside.

Pre heat oven at 180C

in a bowl mix ricotta cheese, fresh cream, lemon zest and dill. Mix well.

In a 10cup lasagna dish, spoon a third portion of the sauce on the base of the tray. Place a cover of lasagna sheets. Spoon half of the ricotta mixture, spread. spoon the semi dried tomatoes and the silverbeet, spread and cover the tray. Cover with the smoked salmon pieces.

Spoon the 2nd portion of the béchamel sauce, spread.

Cover with lasagna sheets, the rest of the ricotta cheese mixture and béchamel sauce.

Sprinkle the breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese.

Bake lasagna for 35-40mins or until golden.

Allow it to stand for 10mins before cutting and serving. ‘

BECHAMEL SAUCE (home made)

50g butter

50g plain flour

600ml milk

Salt and pepper

Grated cheese (a large handful)

Melt the butter in a pot. Add the flour and whisk until the mixture removes easily from the side of the pot. Begin addling milk in batches and whisk continuously. To make it mornay we add the grated cheese. Whisk until smooth in texture, not too runny but not too firm. If too runny, add a little more cheese. If too firm, add a little extra milk.

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A Heart-to-Heart with the Queen of Greens Chef Shenarri Freeman

Today we are honored to share the story of a near and dear friend of the brand, Chef Shenarri Freeman, also known as Shenarri Greens on IG. Saying that we walked away inspired after this conversation would be an understatement. Black women, and especially underrepresented black women in the culinary world, continue to raise the bar, transcend adversity, and somehow level-up even in the most trying times.

Shenarri is currently the Executive Chef + Manager of Cadence, a vegan Southern Soul Food inspired concept opening soon in East Village, New York. She shared that this experience has been nothing short of an interesting journey, as she started out working in various positions in the food/beverage industry heavily invested in the DC scene.

However, last year, she packed her bags and moved to New York to peruse a life long dream and attend Culinary School at the Institute of Culinary Education (#1 Culinary School in the US!). Over the course of this past year she spent a great deal of time networking, volunteering at the James Beard House, doing private supper clubs and eventually hosting her own supper club dinner, expanding her comfortability experimenting in multiple roles in the culinary space.

As we know, this industry took a huge hit due to the restrictions around dining imposed during the pandemic. What we know is although this time was hard on a diverse group of people, the shortest end of the stick was in fact dealt to women of color. During the height of COVID-19, Chef Shenarri spent a lot of time at home, finding ways to use the time as an opportunity to rebrand as a chef and build an invested audience on Social Media. Although an extremely trying time for Chef Shenarri, she admits that a lot of great and creative ideas were birthed during this time.

Create your own lane, make people come to you. Be authentic, be original, and most importantly, be your self. Everything else will naturally fall in to place. The universe is always on your side. - @shenarrigreens

We've heard it time and time again, "delayed is not denied" but this story is truly an embodiment of your passions making a way for you and things falling into place even during an uncertain season. Chef Shenarri's life took a shift when she applied to work for Overthrow Hospitality. she was initially hired as a manager for one of their concepts which eventually turned in to her being selected to open a new concept with the

restaurant group, Cadence. The pandemic and the shutdowns have unfortunately delayed their opening but they are aiming to host their Grand Opening some time in the new year!

Please give her a follow on IG:


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Muscle Testing

What is Muscle Testing and How to Use it

What is Muscle Testing and How to Use it

The basis of Emotional Complex Clearing (e.c.c.) is muscle testing or kinesiology. Muscle testing is a curious phenomenon that has been around for about sixty years. It is based on the premise that under certain conditions, a muscle (usually the deltoid) will hold strong or go weak, when tested (or pushed down) by someone else in order to respond to a question. This is not a function of strength, but of energy that is independent of conscious beliefs or defenses. This is not a trick, but a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be demonstrated with just about anyone.

It was developed by a chiropractor and is used these days mostly by chiropractors, acupuncturists, and nutritionists. Many health practitioners use either Applied Kinesiology or Touch For Health. Very few therapists do muscle testing, which is a shame, for it can be used to create a signaling system that is both reliable and valid to obtain yes or no answers from the client’s inner self. Recently, one controlled study demonstrated the effectiveness of using muscle testing to guide dream interpretation to curb the frequency of recurring dreams.

If you’ve never before experienced muscle testing, get a friend to help you and take the positions shown in the illustration below.

Using Muscle Testing with Mary, Image 1

Let’s say that your friend Mary is the one on the right and you are about to muscle test her.

  1. Tell her to “Hold,” (to resist your downward pressure) and then push down with the flat of your hand on her arm just above her wrist. Hold for about two seconds and then release. Two to three pounds of pressure should be sufficient. What you both should experience is a strong response. That means her arm may go down just a little, but then it will lock in place.
  2. Do this several times to get a sense of her general muscle strength or resistance. This is called “testing in the clear.” That means you are not using muscle testing at this point to assess or access any particular issue.
  3. Tell her to say, “My name is Mary.” After she makes that statement, tell her to “Hold,” and press down on her arm, just as before. The two of you should again experience a strong response. This indicates the statement she made was true. See illustration #2. (It looks a lot like illustration #1.)
    Using Muscle Testing with Mary, Image 2
  4. Now tell her to say a name that is not her name. For instance, “Say, ‘my name is Alexandra.'” After she repeats that statement, tell her to “Hold,” and again press down on her arm, just as before. But now her arm should go weak, indicating a false response. In other words, try as hard as she might, Mary will probably find that she cannot resist the same downward pressure you applied before, and her arm will sink “inexplicably” toward the floor. See illustration #3.
    Using Muscle Testing with Mary, Image 3
  5. You can repeat this procedure with obvious true-false statements, and the results of the testing will likely be the same. For instance, have Mary say, “I’m a woman,” vs. “I’m a man,” and then, “I’m standing up,” vs. “I’m sitting down.” Since the first statement in each pair is true, Mary’s response should again be strong to each. But since the second statement in each set is false, Mary will likely test weak to each of those. Be sure to make your test statements obviously true or false. This way you will get an unequivocally strong or weak response.

Muscle testing is a skill, not an art, nor yet a science. You are simply doing a natural form of biofeedback without a machine. With a little practice most people will soon be able to get results that are convincing, compelling, and quite exciting. Once this signalling system is set up, you are ready to ask more useful questions.

Advantages of Muscle Testing

Advantages of Muscle Testing

Let’s say your friend Mary is disturbed, troubled, or depressed. Let’s assume also that you know that she comes from a troubled background and, although she may have tried psychotherapy several times, didn’t gain much benefit.

By using muscle testing you can find out four crucial things:

  1. What the disturbance or trauma is.
  2. How much is there.
  3. What to do with it.
  4. When you’re done.

Moreover, muscle testing will cut through denial and allow you to check out your judgments, interpretations, and intuitions. Muscle testing will also minimize or eliminate resistance because the responses are so observable and unmistakable. This serves to bypass a lot of guesswork and disagreement.

By using muscle testing, Mary becomes more of a participant in the process. Instead of your interpreting or explaining her issues to her, the two of you together can embark on a journey of rapid discovery, locating exactly what is important and weeding out the irrelevant.

This saves a tremendous amount of time and energy. Mary can even “tune out” consciously and you will still get answers from a deeper level of her being.

When Muscle testing is first used, Mary’s arm “inexplicably” weakens, she may claim, “You just pushed harder!” It may be only when she has the opportunity to use muscle testing on someone else that she’ll realize that the pressure on their outstretched arm is roughly the same.

Because her muscle testing responses are involuntary, you are often not working on what Mary thinks she needs or what she says she needs. You are not even working on what you think she needs. Instead, you are working on what that deeper part of her says she needs, which is what she really and truly needs. The validation of this is that when you locate an issue with muscle testing and then move Mary through it, she will experience a sense of relief and release.

To produce real change, unconscious barriers must be accessed and released. Muscle testing is a safe, non-invasive, and even forgiving technique that will allow you to do this.


text:
Asia’s second-world-war ghosts
The unquiet past

Seven decades on from the defeat of Japan, memories of war still divide East Asia

EssayAug 15th 2015 edition

THERE can be no more pleasing spot in Tokyo on a July evening than the Yasukuni shrine. The cicadas murmur as you pass along the avenue of ginkgo trees framing the great shinmon gate, fashioned out of dark balks of cypress. The chrysanthemum drapes of the worship hall flutter alluringly; lanterns line the way, and the crowds are in a holiday mood and summer robes. Parties chant with gusto as they parade past with the palanquins housing their neighbourhood deities.

Yasukuni’s summer celebrations reach their climax on August 15th, the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the second world war. As the date draws closer the avenue expands into a Bartholomew Fair of stalls and revelry. Not everyone is jolly. Sombre groups that include some of Japan’s few surviving war veterans and their families remember fallen friends. There are chin-jutting Yakuza thugs in suits a size too small, and strutting military fantasists kitted out with officers’ swords or kamikaze flight suits. There are protesters—many of them middle-aged or older—and police to keep them in their place.

And there are ghosts. Without them Yasukuni would have no purpose. The shrine honours the souls of those who have died protecting the emperor; they are revered as kami, which can loosely though not wholly satisfactorily be translated as “divine spirits”. Consecrated in 1869, the year after the Meiji Restoration which launched Japan’s modernisation, the striking combination of solemn ritual and popular entertainment that can come as a surprise to people from other cultures was present from the beginning; the first rites of apotheosis were attended by fireworks, cannons and sumo.

The first kami so enshrined were those who had fought on the imperial side in the civil wars around the time of the Meiji Restoration. The number of their fellowship, and the size of the festivals, grew with the occupation of Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910), Manchuria (1931), China’s eastern seaboard (1937) and South-East Asia (1941). There are now 2,466,532 imperial protectors inscribed in Yasukuni’s “Book of Souls”. Collectively, they are viewed as a divine shield for the emperor.

By the tenets of the shrine, all these spirits are equal. To the world at large, they are not. No one objects to a nation honouring its war dead, even if the cause for which they fought was a bad one. But in 1978 the priests of Yasukuni surreptitiously enshrined 14 political and military leaders, including General Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister, who had been found guilty by the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of planning or prosecuting the military aggression of the 1930s and 1940s. All 14 had either been executed by Japan’s new American overlords or died in prison. For many—including many in Japan—granting divine honour to such men went beyond the pale. Emperor Hirohito, in whose name millions died, stopped visiting Yasukuni; the current emperor, Akihito, has upheld the boycott. Yet visits by conservative nationalist politicians, including the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have increased, drawing admonishment in much of the world and stoking anger in China and South Korea.

There are other spirits that stand out, too—less infamous, but more poignant. One is that of Lee Sa-hyon, who was a native of the city that today is Seoul but from 1910 to 1945 was Keijo, the capital of Japanese-occupied Korea. By the time Lee Sa-hyon was growing up in the 1930s, most of his hometown’s city walls and royal palaces had been razed; there was just enough left to make tour parties from Japan think that they were taking in something exotic (Korean brothels were on the tourist trail, too). The huge dome of the governor-general’s palace dominated the city centre. The Imperial Subject Oath Tower, built for the celebrations in 1940 of the (wholly fabricated) 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese imperial family, housed written vows of loyalty to the emperor from 1.4m Korean students.

“I’m not an activist or a scholar, just the daughter of a father whom I never met.”

Lee Hee-ja, Lee Sa-hyon’s daughter, was born in 1943, a time when Japan’s prospects were looking grave. The Americans were fighting their way up through the country’s Pacific-island possessions. The war against China that had begun in 1937, and which the Japanese had expected to be a relatively short affair, had developed into a long struggle on an epic scale thanks to the resistance of the ascetic Christian generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, and his Kuomintang (KMT). The demands of the war effort stripped Korea and occupied Manchuria to its north of both resources and people. Thousands of Korean women were tricked and abducted into military brothels; tens of thousands of men were forced into labour in mines and on industrial sites, mainly in Japan. And from 1944 many were conscripted into the army. Lee Sa-hyon became one of those conscripts. In June 1945, just a few weeks before the war’s end, he was killed in Guangdong, in southern China.

His daughter is now 72. Like all East Asian septuagenarians she has lived through times of startling disruption. Like China, Ms Lee’s country was wracked by civil war and divided into two; like Japan and Taiwan, and later China itself, it was also transformed by remarkable economic growth. Its population has tripled, its GDP risen by a factor of 50. It has become, for the first time in its history, a democracy. From the far end of a lifetime of such profound change the war might be expected to seem distant—as it does, for the most part, in America and Europe. But in ways both great and small, in the details of individual lives and in the relations between states, the war that ended 70 years ago still shapes East Asian worldviews, animating its politics—and its ghosts.

In 1959 the spirit of Lee Sa-hyon was quietly enshrined at Yasukuni; having died fighting for the emperor, he became one of his divine protectors. When his daughter found this out, in 1996, she became determined to have his name, and kami, removed from the shrine. “I’m not an activist or a scholar,” she says, “just the daughter of a father whom I never met. So I feel I have an obligation to him: to bring him back from Yasukuni.” His proper resting place, she has always maintained, should be at Cheonan, south of Seoul, where a memorial honours what is known as the March 1st movement: millions of Koreans who took to the streets in 1919 to protest against Japanese rule. Thousands were mown down; many more ended up in Keijo’s infamous Seodaemun prison.

Moving a soul in Japan proves to be not so easy. Yasukuni’s priests were polite but firm. Once a spirit has joined the kami there is no going back, whatever the circumstances. Ms Lee turned to the government. Officials told her that Lee Sa-hyon’s enshrinement was just evidence that all imperial soldiers had been treated equally. Ms Lee notes, though, that the government never made any attempt to find his remains, as it did those of Japanese soldiers.

Along with others eager to liberate relatives from Yasukuni—including some Japanese—Ms Lee has turned to the courts. They have offered no joy. In the latest set of cases, one of the names for removal is that of an elderly plaintiff, the reports of whose death have clearly been exaggerated—yet even being alive, it seems, does not get you struck from the list of the kami. It is rude even to ask, apparently. A recent Tokyo High Court ruling said that the plaintiffs should “show tolerance for others’ freedom of religion”.

Why, Ms Lee asks, does Japan’s establishment not understand the humiliation of families like hers, one it would be so easy to redress? Japanese prime ministers have apologised for their country’s aggression; its government has acknowledged its culpability in enslaving women in brothels. And the Japanese know what it is to have people taken from them. Mr Abe made his political reputation when, more than a decade ago, he stood up to North Korea over a number of Japanese citizens kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s to serve the brutal regime as translators and spies. Every day Mr Abe wears a blue ribbon in his lapel as a reminder of them. Can he not see, Ms Lee says, that her father was abducted too?

But no name has ever been removed from Yasukuni.

Rich country, strong army

The Meiji Restoration initiated a bout of modernisation the like of which the world has never seen elsewhere. Not even China’s transformation since 1978 compares to it. In less than two generations an insular feudal shogunate became a modern power—not just an economic power, but a military one. Japan’s leaders never forgot the indignity of American gunships forcing open what Herman Melville called their “double-bolted land”. Fukoku kyohei, went the rallying cry: “rich country, strong army”.

In the 70 years since 1945 Japan has fired not a bullet in anger. In the 70 years before that, war was central to its progress. Its expansionism began in 1874, when it launched a first punitive expedition to Formosa (now Taiwan). In 1879 it annexed the peaceful Ryukyu kingdom—modern-day Okinawa. A war against the Qing dynasty in 1894-95, fought largely on the Korean peninsula, ended in humiliating defeat for China; its centuries-old dominance of East Asia was usurped. In 1905, in the greatest naval victory since Nelson’s at Trafalgar 100 years before, Japan sent nearly the entire Russian fleet to the bottom in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, setting the scene for its subsequent uncontested annexation of Korea.

Given the condemnation Japanese militarism was later to receive, it is worth recalling the admiration Japan’s military modernisation inspired in these early decades. It dressed its imperial adventures abroad in a cloak of righteousness, legalism and brute force—just as Western imperial powers did. Impressed, those Western powers could hardly deny their pupil a place at the top table—even if the new member of the club was quick to detect racist slights.

Asian nationalists, too, admired this new Japan—among them Sun Yat-sen, the future founder of republican China. Radicals and intellectuals flocked to Tokyo to learn from an Asian power that could foster pride and prosperity at home while standing up to the West abroad. The admiration even extended to Yasukuni, embodying as it did the virtues of loyalty, self-sacrifice and patriotism. In the early 1890s Wang Tao, a Chinese intellectual and reformer, wrote approvingly that it was “easy to understand the intention behind the Japanese government’s enshrining of the war dead: the enthusiasm of the masses will flourish, and their loyalty will never be found wanting.” Imperial China’s defeat at Japanese hands followed shortly thereafter.

Like the imperialism of the European powers it sought to emulate, Japan’s colonialism was rooted in violence and, often, racism. But by the early 1930s it had also become oddly chaotic—the result not so much of a strategic aim to further national greatness as of a lack of control over adventurism. The last of the oligarchs who had wielded power after the Meiji Restoration, and who had a restraining influence on the armed forces, shuffled off the stage. In 1931 a clique of army officers presented their occupation of Manchuria to the government as a fait accompli. After the League of Nations condemned the move, Japan withdrew from the body and entered a pact with Nazi Germany in the name of fighting communism. In 1937 a flare-up between Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing precipitated a “war of annihilation”, as Japan’s prime minister, Fumimaro Konoe, called it, down the length of China’s eastern seaboard.

John Dower, a historian of Japan at MIT, underlines that modern societies are not mobilised for war in the name of committing aggression, and that Japan was no exception. Its aggression was painted at home as either a defence of legitimate interests or a selfless crusade against communism. Condemnation by Western colonial powers was dismissed as so much hypocrisy: Japan was the liberator and natural leader of Asian nations suffering under Western colonialism. Pan-Asianism was the philosophical, and at times spiritual, underpinning of Japanese expansionism. For Japan, as Mr Dower puts it, the years in which it fought to subjugate what developed into its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” were a period of “beautiful, modern war”.

Many conservative Japanese nationalists still see the beauty of that period. Mr Abe believes that Japan’s pursuit of fukoku kyohei was essentially right then and still is today, and that its resumption is the key to making Japan what some would call a “normal” nation again. It is what Mr Abe chooses to call “the post-war” which is the shameful historical exception, with its reliance on American tutelage and a constitution that clips Japan’s wings abroad.

To take such a position is not to deny that Japan did wrong. John Delury, a historian of East Asia at Yonsei University in Seoul, argues that, instead, it is to believe that imperial Japan behaved in war little differently from other countries. And other countries did grievous wrong. Witness the smouldering aftermath of the firebombing of Tokyo, in which 100,000 died; witness the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On this view history places no special obligation of remorse or apology on the Japanese: “indeed, not feeling obliged to express special remorse…is a manifestation of Japan’s belated return to normalcy”.

Back at Yasukuni, the shrine is bathed in beautiful lies. A visit to its associated museum, the Yushukan, finds the militarism that brought Japan to its knees still glorified. Grim engines of death have pride of place, including the Kaiten (“Return to Heaven”) torpedo, a 15-metre, matt-black projectile with a tiny seat inside and a small periscope—in effect, a submersible suicide vest. The atrocities of Nanjing (1937) and Manila (1945), in which Japanese troops massacred tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners-of-war in an orgy of murder and rape, are downplayed or denied. Always, war aims are painted as noble and pure: Japan standing as a bulwark against Western imperialism, communism or the anarchy of Chinese warlords.

The horcrux theory of history

When Mr Abe paid his respects at Yasukuni in late 2013 he fulfilled a campaign promise and generated a diplomatic storm. Around the world China’s diplomats took to op-ed pages with the aim of stoking anti-Japan sentiment. In Britain’s Daily Telegraph the Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, called Yasukuni a “kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of [Japan’s] soul”. He expected his readers to know that, in the world of Harry Potter, a horcrux stores a fragment of a sundered soul in hope of immortality, and can be created only by murder. He hoped they would infer that Mr Abe was the new Lord Voldemort.

It was a smart stroke of rhetoric. It was also more than a little disingenuous. China’s Communist Party has a horcrux of its own on which until not long ago it pinned all hopes of immortality—the corpse of Mao Zedong. His violent rule saw the murder in purge and famine of millions of his countrymen. Yet since his death in 1976 his remains have lodged under a huge and ugly mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic centre of Chinese power, embalmed but very slowly putrefying.

Mao is a necessary source of legitimacy for China’s rulers, but no longer a sufficient one. There is enough awareness of the violence and misrule that he oversaw that even the Communist Party has had to avow that his rule was only “70% good”. And as China’s economic and diplomatic clout grow, prestige matters to its rulers in ways that never really interested Mao, and which his legacy can do nothing to promote. So a reinvigorated nationalism has joined economic growth and military strength as part of the “Chinese Dream”—a nationalism defined above all in opposition to wartime Japanese aggression. President Xi Jinping clearly sees the memory of that struggle as a tool for shaping Chinese identity.

China’s leaders think memories of its role in the war should matter abroad, too. America’s claim to a Pacific presence rests on its defeat of Japan. China’s claim to leadership in its region rests on its role in that same defeat—a role for which, after all, it was at the time rewarded with one of the permanent seats on the UN Security Council reserved for the victors. In Mr Liu’s horcrux op-ed he referred to Chinese soldiers standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Allied troops. Last month he sent this correspondent an invitation to a 70th anniversary commemoration of August 15th that refers to “the Victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the Chinese People’s War against Japanese Aggression”.

China’s contribution to the second world war certainly deserves a reappraisal, as Rana Mitter of the University of Oxford argues in a recent book on the Sino-Japanese war, “Forgotten Ally”. From the outbreak of hostilities at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937 to December 7th 1941, when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor forced America into the war, China fought Japan alone. Mr Mitter argues that, had China surrendered in 1938, as seemed all too likely at the time, East Asia might have been a Japanese imperium for decades. Instead it fought on, at enormous cost. Perhaps 15m Chinese soldiers and civilians died in the war of 1937-45, with 100m made refugees; of the other nations at war only the Soviet Union suffered losses on a similar scale. True, China failed in the end to beat the Japanese. But its dogged resistance tied down hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops.

Chongqing, 1941

This is the legacy that Mr Xi insists be recognised. But there is an inconvenient truth. For decades the official Communist Party narrative had little space for the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek; if they were mentioned at all, it was as anti-communist forces too cowardly, corrupt or unpatriotic to take on the Japanese. China’s “liberation” came not in 1945 but in 1949—that is, with the Communists’ defeat of the nationalists in the civil war that followed Japan’s collapse. Communism’s victory over nationalism was thus framed as the end point of its victory over fascism.

Yet it was in fact the armies of the anti-imperialist, fiercely nationalist KMT that offered the chief resistance to Japan’s army, drawing it ever deeper into the mire. It was they who shared in the suffering, hardship and endurance on the part of hundreds of millions of Chinese civilians that marked the eight wartime years beyond the relatively small and secure Communist base areas. It is quite possible that, had the KMT not spent so much of its force in that struggle, Chiang would have won the subsequent civil war.

Viciously suppressed in the decades following the war, this part of the country’s history is now being cautiously and selectively rehabilitated as part of the new nationalism through which China is expressing its regional and global aspirations. Among other things, this serves the purpose of uniting the stories of Taiwan—to which Chiang and the KMT fled in 1949—and mainland China, stressing the common struggle of the Chinese against Japanese aggression rather than their division by civil war. Beyond reasons of state, though, it is also bubbling up from below, as regions of China previously marginalised manifest a new desire to tell their own war stories.

In a large apartment in a brand-new suburb of Chongqing, a city in China’s south-west, Wang Suzhen, a diminutive lady in floral pyjamas, disappears into a vast faux-leather sofa surrounded by three generations of her family. Opposite, a television covering the entire wall pumps out a reality programme devoted to parental indulgence: a father takes a girl in a tutu to a ballet lesson; a little emperor in sunglasses drives a scale model of a BMW. Outside, Chongqing is Dickensian in its smog and nearly hellish in its summer heat, the Yangzi river winding brown and swollen at the feet of its steep hillsides.

Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Chongqing with his government in 1938, the year after Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, fell to the Japanese amid great slaughter—an infamous victory which put the invaders in control of nearly all of China’s coast, including Shanghai. Millions of Chinese followed Chiang to Chongqing; it was the provisional capital until the end of the war.

They were seven hard years. Though geographical remoteness and mountain topography offered the city a degree of protection, the war was always present. Many civilians died in air raids; on June 5th 1941 some 1,500 civilians died from suffocation in a single shelter. Boatmen were paid half a kilo of rice per body to take the corpses out of the city.

The Wang family did better than most. Living outside Chongqing in a town called Shilong, they escaped the air raids. Just six days before the defeat of Japan, Ms Wang was born. Soon after the family moved to Chongqing proper where they made a living selling the silk embroidery they made in the city’s wholesale markets. But the Communist victory in the civil war changed the city. Chongqing’s sense of itself as a centre of resistance, and its price in its wartime experience, were suppressed. Its Monument to Victory in the Anti-Japanese War was renamed the Liberation Monument. People with a “bad” class background—that is, evil “landlords” and nationalists who had come to the region with Chiang Kai-shek—were stigmatised. Ms Wang’s family was forced out of the city and into the countryside.

One political campaign after another washed over the agricultural collective where Ms Wang’s mother struggled to feed eight children. Ms Wang remembers a cow being brought to the production team in winter, but having no hay with which to feed it. Then people started eating grass themselves, leading to bloating and sometimes starving all the same. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards dragged evil “landlords” outside and beat them. “We didn’t ask questions,” Ms Wang says. “We didn’t dare speak, or we’d get beaten too.”

In 1987 Ms Wang and her family left the commune and prospered growing their own crops for market. The government gave her daughter, a teacher, a flat, into which they all moved. In 1989 they got their first television, and a fridge. In 2005 they bought their first car. No one in the family imagined that things could change so fast. A few years ago Ms Wang found spiritual comfort, too. It happened when an elderly relative died, leaving behind her troubled ghost. A Taoist master was called in to appease the ghost but it did not work. “Then some Christian friends said that their kind of prayers could bring peace, and they did.” The ghost no longer troubles the family; Ms Wang goes to church each week.

In her spiritual development Ms Wang is somewhat unusual; in her family’s enrichment she is quite typical of her city. And as the south-west has grown richer, so it has started to tell the story of its wartime experience more openly. On August 15th Chongqing’s newspapers used to spout the same national narrative one might read in Beijing. Now they celebrate local wartime heroes. The air-raid shelter that suffered the disaster of 1941 has been designated as a memorial site. In Chiang Kai-shek’s hilltop hideout of Huangshan visitors are welcomed by a young actor decked out in the generalissimo’s scholarly gown and thin moustache.

If Chongqing is reclaiming its past—and China as a whole coming to acknowledge the role of nationalism, and not just communism, in fighting the forces of imperialism—what does that mean for relations with the Japanese? There are signs it may improve them; a more nuanced view of Chinese history permits a more nuanced view of its adversary.

On the face of it, Ms Wang still sees things the old way: the Japanese, she says, are cruel and she dislikes them. Has she ever met one? No, she admits, but—nodding at the television—she sees them all the time. Reminded that the Japanese in the war movies on television are Chinese actors in costume, she laughs. “It’s just propaganda, I know,” she says, before becoming absorbed along with the rest of the family in the girl in the pink tutu.

Mr Xi’s use of old antagonisms to buttress a modern nationalist identity is a worrying one. But there is a lot else shaping the ideas of a richer society than any China has known. As if to underline the point Ms Wang murmurs, as much to herself as to this correspondent, “Who would miss the past?”

The displaced

The spirits of Yasukuni are not the only ones with whom Mr Abe communes. After his election victory in 2012 he went straight to the tomb of his grandfather to make a promise. Like his grandson, Nobusuke Kishi rose to be prime minister, serving from 1957 to 1960. A fervent nationalist, he had nonetheless accepted, in the face of Japan’s surrender to the United States and its neutered post-war role as little brother, that the restoration of wealth had to come before the resumption of power. But—and Kishi was clear on this point—this was to be only a temporary expedient.

In 1965 Kishi argued that rearmament was necessary as “a means of eradicating completely the consequences of Japan’s defeat and the American occupation. It is necessary to enable Japan finally to move out of the post-war era and for the Japanese people to regain their self-confidence and pride as Japanese.” The words could have come from Mr Abe’s manifesto. The promise Mr Abe made by his grandfather’s grave was that he would “recover the true independence” of Japan.

This is not to say that Mr Abe is anti-American. Like his grandfather, he needs America to ensure his country’s security. He has strengthened the countries’ military alliance, agreeing to revised defence guidelines in April in the face of a rising China. But he feels deeply America’s role in “the history of Japan’s destruction”—by which he means not the physical devastation of the war, but the subsequent period of American-imposed order. He hates the war-crimes tribunal that sat in Tokyo: what hypocrisy to hang the Japanese leaders who conquered Asia at the same time as the Western powers were reasserting their rule in Asian colonies. He sees the constitution imposed on the country as constraining Japan’s legitimate ambitions. A left-wing conspiracy in education inculcates war guilt and an aversion to patriotism.

The role of that post-war order in the subsequent seven decades of peace, prosperity and democracy from which Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party has been a great beneficiary is passed over in such analysis. Yet America is in no position to call Japan’s nationalists out on the grounds of double standards. It was, after all, General Douglas MacArthur who chose not to prosecute Emperor Hirohito for the crimes that were committed in his name and by a political system to which he was central, on the unprovable but implausible grounds that a crushed people would be more biddable with their emperor still in place. That decision made it harder for Japan to examine its actions, and make a full accounting of them, both to its victims and to itself. The cold war, for which America needed experienced, conservative allies in Japan, removed any lingering chance of such a reckoning. Almost immediately after the Tokyo tribunal handed down its first batch of sentences, the other people indicted for Class A crimes were released from Tokyo’s Sugamo prison and put in positions of authority.

“I did what they said. And then they started hitting me.”

Notable among them was the mastermind of Japan’s Manchurian puppet state, known as Manchukuo, in north-east China. By harnessing private capital to a heavily state-directed economy, he had turned Manchukuo into the engine of Japan’s war machine. Mark Driscoll of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has written of the system’s “necropolitical” vision of dehumanised Chinese labour. Yet the brutal human cost of this experimental, hyper-modern state is now largely forgotten, while its marriage of private capital and heavy state direction was a direct inspiration not just for Japan’s post-war development, but also, subsequently, for that of South Korea—and China, too. And the mastermind behind this? Nobusuke Kishi himself.

Mr Abe’s uncritical belief that his country’s essence is inextricably bound into the institutions of the Meiji Restoration and all that they went on to spawn is wrongheaded. But it is equally wrong to decry all aspects of continuity between Japan’s pre-war and post-war. On all sides ghosts are kept locked away. Instead they should be allowed to speak and also to listen—to hear and voice the complex truths of war, responsibility and victimhood.

Xu Ming remembers the first time she found herself outside without her mother holding her hand. She asked a group of children if she could play. “‘No’, said one. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Because you’re a xiao riben guizi—a little Japanese devil.’ Then the tallest child intervened. ‘Okay’, he said, ‘You can play. But you have to be a dog. You must crawl between our legs and say bow-wow.’ So I did that. And then they started hitting me.”

Ms Xu was born in Heilongjiang province in north-east China, part of Manchuria, in 1944—three years after Kishi had been recalled from his position there to serve as industry minister in Tokyo. She was an only child brought up by loving and protective parents. And she was badly bullied. When she was seven her class were taken to see a war film that showed Communist troops in glorious battle against the murderous, evil Japanese. The children around her starting shouting “Down with the Japanese”. And then they were spitting at her. After the film the teacher held a roll call, but Xu Ming was missing. The teacher found her crouched under her chair, her eyes red with crying. She scolded the class: Xu Ming, she said, is only a child; and the film is only a film. That day, Xu Ming determined to be a teacher.

A year later an officer from the Public Security Bureau came to her house. Xu Ming was sent outside but craned to hear the conversation. The officer was shouting: “You had better admit it: the child is Japanese and you adopted her.” Her mother burst into tears. Xu Ming ran in to comfort her. Mother and daughter cried so much that the officer gave up any further questioning.

It was then that Xu Ming asked: “I’m Japanese, aren’t I?”

“Yes”, her mother replied, “you are.”

According to John Dower, there were over 6m Japanese stranded overseas when the war ended. Their story is strangely little told, even in Japan. Something over half of the stranded were servicemen, many wounded, malnourished or diseased. The rest were administrators, bank clerks, railwaymen, farmers, industrialists, prostitutes, spies, photographers, barbers, children. For them and for their families and friends back home, just as for conscripted and exiled Chinese and Koreans in similar situations, August 15th was far from a definitive end. A year after its defeat 2m Japanese had still not made it home. Many never did. A national radio programme, “Missing Persons”, was launched in 1946. It went off-air only in 1962.

The Allies took advantage of surrendered servicemen. The Americans used 70,000 as labourers on Pacific bases. The British, in a supreme irony, made use of over 100,000 Japanese to reassert colonial authority over parts of South-East Asia that had just been “liberated”. In China tens of thousands of Japanese fought on both sides of the civil war.

The worst fate was to be under Russian “protection”. The Soviet Union, which entered the war in its last week, accepted the surrender of Japanese forces in Manchuria and northern Korea. Perhaps 1.6m Japanese soldiers fell into its hands. About 625,000 were repatriated at the end of 1947, many having been sent to labour camps in Siberia and submitted to intense ideological indoctrination. Others were able to make their way south to the American-controlled sector of the Korean Peninsula. In early 1949 the Soviets claimed that only 95,000 Japanese remained to be repatriated—leaving, by Japanese and American calculations, over 300,000 unaccounted for.

In August 1945 there were also 1m Japanese civilians in Manchuria. Some 179,000 are thought to have died trying to get to Japan in the confusion and Soviet-perpetrated violence following surrender, or during the harsh winter of 1945-46. Children returned to Japan as orphans, the family’s ashes in a box hung around their neck. In Manchuria parents begged Chinese peasant families to take in their youngest children.

That is what Ms Xu’s natural mother had done. Her father, serving in the imperial army, had been dragged off to Siberia. Her mother thought Ming, the youngest of her daughters, would not survive the journey to Japan. She begged a couple to take the baby. When that couple later had more children of their own they sold Ming on to the Xu family.

In due course Ms Xu passed as a teacher. She qualified with flying colours that might have hinted at a stellar career. But the following years were spent teaching the children of loggers in dismal mobile camps deep in Heilongjiang’s forests. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” her professor had said: “You’re Japanese.” In the timber camps they ground up sweetcorn husks and tree bark for bread, but living in such remote places shielded Ms Xu from the worst madness of the Cultural Revolution. Back in her home town the ethnic-Japanese dentist, gentle and diligent, was dragged to the crossroad with a sign around her neck denouncing her as a Japanese spy. Every time she was asked whether she was a spy and denied it she was hit. Three days later she was dead.

In 1972 the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka, visited China, initiating a programme of billions of dollars of bilateral aid for its former foe. Japanese people started coming to Heilongjiang to look for family members. A visiting journalist promised Ms Xu he would place advertisements on her behalf in Japanese publications so that she might find her birth family. An old soldier in Hokkaido responded to one, certain she was his daughter. In 1981 a visa was secured for Ms Xu. She was intensely excited to go to Japan; her meeting with the old soldier was emotional. Then a DNA test showed they were not related. The old soldier would have no more to do with her.

Japanese bureaucrats threatened to deport Ms Xu: Chinese court documents affirming her Japanese blood counted for nothing. While fighting through the courts to stay, she volunteered her help at a local NGO dealing with the “Manchurian orphans”. One morning, in a nearby café, two Japanese women on the way to the NGO asked whether they could share her table. Of course, Xu Ming said, in her still accented Japanese. The women asked whether she was Chinese and if so from where? Heilongjiang, Xu Ming replied. That’s where our mother left our sister, the women said. The coincidences grew: the town, the name of the family, Li, that first adopted Ms Xu, the Li home being right by the railway track. The three sisters were together again for the first time since 1945. For Sumie Ikeda, as Ms Xu now knew herself to be, the elation was tempered only by her learning that their mother had died just months before. But now her ghost, at least, could rest.

The lives scarred in the second world war are nearing their ends. The Asian history they are part of continues to shape the worlds of those people’s children and grandchildren, though. In some places it is distorted, in others denied. Some victims and some victors are commemorated. Others are forgotten.

In the 1960s a head priest at Yasukuni more liberal than today’s put up a tiny shrine in a corner of the grounds to pacify the spirits of fallen enemies. It is now surrounded by a high metal fence, and out of bounds to visitors. On its annual feast day in July a young priest unceremoniously places a bowl of fruit outside the shrine as an offering and shambles off. As for the Japanese victims of aggression—the young soldiers, let down by their generals, who died of hunger and disease in New Guinea jungles, the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed as the war came to the Japanese home islands: they are nowhere to be seen. Yasukuni remembers only glorious deaths.

“Who would miss the past,” asks Ms Wang, from her sofa in Chongqing. Who indeed? But the past is not just there to be missed.

This article appeared in the Essay section of the print edition under the headline "The unquiet past"

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EDGEucation Hub

How To Buy a Home with EDGEhomes – Infographic

How to buy a home | EDGEhomes

Each day, people like you walk into our office wondering what buying an EDGEhomes experience includes. Let us take you through what a typical walkthrough looks like, what you can expect, and more. Follow our roadmap and get home-buying right every time.

  1. Check Your Credit

Having a higher credit score gets you a better interest rate on your mortgage. So, take an inventory of your credit score and start taking the steps to improve it. The loan process is not the time to acquire new debt, as it will alter your debt to income ratios and can disrupt or compromise your mortgage.

  1. Gather Your Down Payment

The amount you put down on your new home will determine several factors. If you have a 3% to 5% down payment there are good loan options for you, but you will also need mortgage insurance. If you have 20% down, that mortgage insurance payment isn’t necessary. There are even zero down loan options if you meet certain qualifications. Use our mortgage calculator to get a better idea of what you can afford.

  1. Get Pre-Approved

Once you have reviewed your finances and what you can afford, determine how much you can invest in a home and stick to that limit. Pre-qualifying for a mortgage demonstrates to you, your realtor, and sellers that you are qualified and can afford a house. In the case of multiple offers, sellers look for those who are pre-qualified rather than those who aren’t to close the deal. We recommend using First Colony Mortgage who offer the best in pre-qualification lending services and put homeowners first. Click here to read why using our preferred lender is best.

  1. Find the Right Agent

Look for an EDGEhomes Agent who has everything you’re looking for in a real estate agent. As the best agents in the state, we help you effortlessly navigate the entire home-buying process. After meeting with each of our agents, choose the person who best understands your needs and proves they’re determined to find your dream home.

  1. Starting Hunting for Places Within Your Price Range

Once you have the right EDGEhome agent, you can start looking at homes that fit your budget. You can also use our online tools that show you what’s available at specific locations, including quick move-ins. EDGEhomes builds homes in Utah, including Salt Lake and Utah County. Let the EDGEhomes smart guide help you find what you are looking for.

  1. Research Floorplans & Communities

Look at the floorplans included online as well as photos. Why? Because floorplans never lie. You’ll best determine the layout and physical space of the property using the exact measurements included on floorplans. Along with floorplans, take a look at each of our award-winning communities across the state. If a property’s floorplan and community fit your needs, make plans with your EDGEhome agent to view the property in-person. See our list of exclusive communities.

  1. Write a Purchase Agreement

Now that you’ve found the home you love it’s time to work with your agent to submit an offer. If you’ve found a place that hits all your marks, act quickly. Work with your agent to find the right number and then submit your offer.

Soon, you’ll have the keys to your very first—and, maybe even, last—EDGEhome.

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Selection of forums for :

A Whisperwind Raiding Guild

#sadistic, whisperwind, raiding, guild

Sadistic Kustomz Car Club

A place for the club to chat and put shows up/ meetings and any other info!

kustomz, #sadistic, club

Sadistic Killers Clan Forum

Welcome To SK'Clan Forum

#sadistic, killers, clan, forum, welcome, sk'clan

Free forum : Sadistic Assault Forum

Free forum : This Forum is to allow members from the Sadistic Assault Gaming team connect and announcements, it is also, to allow people to apply for the team.

free, forum, #sadistic, assualt, .forum, this, allow, members, from, assault, gaming, team, connect, announcements, also, people, apply

Sadistic Desires

#sadistic, desires, role-play

Search for a forum in the directory

Create a free forum

Create your sadistic forum


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

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Showing posts with label Tips to Prepare Interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tips to Prepare Interview. Show all posts
Tips to Prepare for Interview for Teaching Job

Tips to Prepare for Interview for Teaching Job

Tips to Prepare for Interview
Interviews include short communicative talks, in which the candidates are gauged. No matter whatever job you are applying for, an interview may be confusing for you, if it is your first time. The teaching interviews are the easiest ones, if well prepared. Nearly all the teaching jobs have the same maintained standard questions that are asked from the candidates by different dissertation writing services providers. If the interviews are primed ahead of time, then the interview for teaching is no difficult work. The best tip for the interview for teaching is that the applicant must be confident and audacious. The applicant must answer each question boldly.

The questions that are asked in an interview are that what you are. What have you done? Why are you choosing us? What is different in you from others? Moreover, other questions like this, are also asked. These are general questions but these questions are asked just to see the approach of the applicant, that either the applicant is optimistic or not. As the applicant will teach the students in near future and they must be positive in order to groom the youth.

Wear tidy and neat clothes, as the first impression is the last one too. Administers will be looking for a role model for the students and for that they need a person who is themselves groomed. Put a smile on your face, it seems pleasant. Smile when you enter the area of an interview. Bo bold and show full enthusiasm. When you sit, just sit straight along with your feet straight too. Put the hands in a resting position, this shows that the candidate is not nervous and clam. Also, have light joking talks. Talk less, but correctly, especially you are invited in an interview room. If a candidate talks much, it shows the candidate either is over confident or is nervous, as these tantrums are unusual. Start with the fanciful introduction. This sounds amazing to the interviewer.

The school, a candidate is applying for, go through their magazine or their website. Do all this just to have an idea that what principals they are following, as every of the organizations have different standards that they follow. The more one knows about the current strategies, it is more probable that the candidate strikes to give the correct answers. Already known about the situations amaze administers, and they get happy and content that the candidate believes and practices pre-work. This is a good sign, they believe.

Show the investigators the educational documents that, are asked for and a portfolio too, attached with the cover letter, identification copy, and references. These documents the panel asks for an assessment of the candidate and it is mandatory to bring a role of online education. Therefore, do not forget to bring these documents. Apart from this, the candidate must prepare themselves for the following things. They must have:
  1. Outstanding skills regarding communication, so, improve your own self in this context
  2. Must be patient and must possess decision-making skills
  3. Ability to learn and move forward
  4. Can maintain good peer relations in school
  5. Must have knowledge of the subject they are applying for.

These are the traits that the team of the school who are interviewing the candidate, look for. So these attributes a candidate must possess if they are looking forward to being hired.


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Master of Finance, Banking, Insurance – South East Asia,...

Master of Finance, Banking, Insurance – South East Asia, VNU-IS

Vietnam National University, Hanoi - International School, Ngụy Như Kon Tum, Str, Nhân Chính, Thanh Xuân, Hanoi, Vietnam

This program will help students firmly grasp economic and financial mechanisms, and have a broad view of the market as well as an in-depth understanding of variables and factors that can improve the organization’s economic efficiency. More importantly, the program provides students with up-to-date knowledge of finance and financial analyzing tools, revenue evaluating techniques, derivative markets, legal environments so that they can develop their abilities of decision-making, strategic planning for investment, strategic management of financial risk.

Upon finishing this program, students will be able to assume different positions such as financial development and management experts, bank marketing promotion experts, insurance and financial analyzing experts, bank and financial organization managers, researchers and lecturers of finance, banking and insurance.

  • Research Methodology
  • Market Economy and Finance
  • Business Strategy and Portfolio Management
  • International Regulations and Financial Institutions
  • Product Strategy and Financial Services
  • International Finance and Banking
  • Bank Marketing
  • Financial Analysis and Banking, Finance and Insurance Diagnostic
  • Profitability Analysis and Banking and Financial Management control
  • Market Risk management
  • Financial Markets
  • International Operations
  • Legal Framework for Banking and Insurance Activities in Vietnam
  • Marketing
  • Management and Organization Theories
  • Mathematics of Finance
  • Statistics and Decision Making in Finance, Banking and Insurance
  • Management and Cost Control
  • Credit Risk Management
  • Banking Information System
  • Financial Transaction Consignment and Internal Auditing
  • Insurance 1
  • Insurance 2
  • Internship report

Course :

Master of Finance, Banking, Insurance (South East Asia) from the University of Nantes.

MODE OF STUDY : Full time in VNU-IS

Please feel free to contact us with any queries or questions you may have.

Course Schedule

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George Lucas Educational FoundationCelebrating 30 years
New Teachers

Resources Toolkit for New Teachers

An array of articles, videos, and other resources that are chock-full of tips and advice for teachers just starting out.

May 10, 2013 Updated May 8, 2015
Photo of teacher at the front of the class

Before you dig in to the resources, consider advice from veteran educator Elena Aguilar in her post, "What I Wish I'd Known as a New Teacher." Also, listen to encouragement and insight from a variety of educators who describe what they would have said to themselves on their own first day of teaching, in the video "If I Knew Then: A Letter to Me on My First Day of Teaching."

Preparing, Planning, and Support: To set the stage for a successful first year of teaching, it’s important to do some advance planning and preparation. We’ve collected a variety of resources to help new teachers start the year off right. (20+ Resources)

Designing the Learning Environment: For new teachers, this resource compilation includes tips and guides on classroom design and layout to help maximize the possibilities of the learning environment. (15+ Resources)

Classroom-Management Fundamentals: Discover resources for new teachers on developing routines, fostering classroom community, managing disruptions, and building student relationships. (40+ Resources)

Lesson and Curriculum Planning: Explore a diverse collection of curriculum-planning tips, guidance, and other resources meant to help new teachers plan effective activities, lessons, and units. (15+ Resources)

A Primer on Assessment: In this guide for new teachers, learn about different types of assessment and how they can be used to provide feedback to learners and inform instruction. (30+ Resources)

Technology-Integration Basics: Find tips, strategies, tools, and other resources to help new teachers successfully integrate technology to facilitate educational objectives in the classroom. (25+ Resources)

Working With Parents: Engaging and building trust with parents and creating supportive home-to-school connections is critical to new-teacher success; find resources to get started here. (15+ Resources)

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Home Page

Remote Learning

During this period of limited opening of schools to pupils whose parents and carers are critical workers or who are vulnerable (see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-maintaining-educational-provision/guidance-for-schools-colleges-and-local-authorities-on-maintaining-educational-provision for guidance), all pupils will be able to access learning in line with those pupils attending school and following the school's long term curriculum plans (see Curriculum and Class Pages). This will be facilitated via J2e, an online platform, where teachers will give pupils access to video content and materials to support their understanding of the concepts being learned and tasks to secure the skills required to secure learning objectives from the National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage Framework. This links to the use of SOLO Taxonomy as the school's pedagogical approach. The materials cover the complete breadth of the statutory curriculum and, for Early Years, all strands of learning.

As we recognise that our pupils would benefit from being able to see each other and their teachers, as well as continuing to celebrate their achievements at this time, weekly live year group assemblies will be held via Microsoft Teams each Friday.  As well as pupils sharing WOW work each week, the class Star of the Week will be announced and the Sportsperson of the Week certificates for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 will also be awarded within the year group assembly for the recipients. A weekly recorded assembly will also be made available.

The school is in a position to support parents and carers with the loan of devices and additional data subject to criteria and availability. If you experience any difficulty with access to devices, the internet or using J2e, please contact the school via info@edwardpauling.hounslow.sch.uk or telephone and a member of staff will be able to support you and your child.

The school has set out details of its remote learning offer and you can view the policy and related letters sent to parents and carers below, as well as the guides to using J2e.

Please find below a number of general learning resources that you may find helpful at this time to use with your child at home.

BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach

Oxford Owl e-books: https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/library-page/#

Oxford Owl literacy: https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/school-closure-resources/

The National Literacy Trust: https://literacytrust.org.uk/family-zone/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwsYb0BRCOARIsAHbLPhGVmKvn9LujOnKTm9-XDHzNGOSThbtXPc3lEdbfR-Uf2jr-w8gYY1kaAlXOEALw_wcB

Collins: https://collins.co.uk/pages/support-learning-at-home

Plazoom’s free learning packs: https://www.plazoom.com/collections/home-learning

Twinkl parents’ hub: https://www.twinkl.co.uk/resources/parents Use the code CVDTWINKLHELPS to get free access

Hamilton Trust free learning packs on different topics: https://www.hamilton-trust.org.uk/about-hamilton/use-for-free/

Phonics Play are offering free access to activities: https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/#

Oak National Academy: https://www.thenational.academy/

Other sites:

Think U Know for keeping safe online: https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/

Keeping active:

The Body Coach PE lessons: https://www.youtube.com/user/thebodycoach1/videos

NHS Keep Active: https://www.nhs.uk/change4life/activities/sports-and-activities

Please also remember that you can complete more than one activity from the Easter holiday homework.

Finally, please see the attached information received from Hounslow with a wide range of resources including some to help you talk to your child about COVID-19 and to deal with anxiety.

Things to do

The BBC has begun to broadcast daily lessons in a range of subjects for all Key Stage 1 and Key Stage pupils. The home schooling lessons have been created with teachers and other educational experts. They feature a mix of videos, animations, practice activities, quizzes and games.

These can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/dailylessons

The Government has published a list of suggested providers of online learning. Please find this at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-online-education-resources/coronavirus-covid-19-list-of-online-education-resources-for-home-education

The Government has also updated its advice for parents and carers: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/supporting-your-childrens-education-during-coronavirus-covid-19

Libraries connected have activities that you can connect with, some book related and others more practical including some lego clubs. Please check the links: https://www.librariesconnected.org.uk/page/librariesfromhome

CEOPS have released new online safety home learning packs : https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/Support-tools/home-activity-worksheets/  (Lucy could this also be added next to their information on the online safety and Advice for Parents pages too please)

Hounslow Promise and HEP project to provide laptops to families in need - connectingkids@home

The Hounslow’s Promise local education charity is working with local schools and HEP to help provide computers or laptops to local school pupils who are needing to study at home but don’t have access to a computer or the internet.

If you have an old laptop at home and could donate this, then please take a look at the attached document which has details of who to contact and what to do with the laptop before handing it over. These will be very gratefully received!

London Fire Brigade Education Team Fire Safety Workshops 2020-21

During lockdown, London Fire Brigade have committed to working closely with the communities across London to ensure our fire safety message is still delivered whilst in this difficult period, so whilst our Education Officers are temporarily unable to visit your school in person, we have instead created three 'Home Fire Safety videos'.

Our virtual lessons focus on ‘Prevention, Detection & Escape’ from fire in the home, and cover the most common cause of domestic fires, how to prevent a fire, the importance of a working smoke alarm as an early warning device, and how to get out safely if a fire starts. The information children learn in these videos could potentially save lives one day.

Heathrow Airport Learning Support

Heathrow Airport have created a site full of learning support materials.

Please see the link below:

Health and Wellbeing

Our school caterer, Chartwells, has been working on a project - The Super Yummy Kitchen, which has launched on YouTube: Super Yummy, Simply Delicious snacks

They have created cook along videos aimed at school children to help entertain by enabling them to create yummy, healthy snacks made from store cupboard ingredients. Nutritional messages will feature throughout the videos and there will be a curriculum activity and a health and wellbeing challenge set everyday.

These videos will be launched on their social media pages Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10am.

You can find these videos on their YouTube channel, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Super Yummy, Simply Delicious Chartwells

Guidance for the public on supporting wellbeing:

Guidance for parents and carers on supporting wellbeing: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-on-supporting-children-and-young-peoples-mental-health-and-wellbeing/guidance-for-parents-and-carers-on-supporting-children-and-young-peoples-mental-health-and-wellbeing-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak

PHE has launched a WhatsApp chatbot tool to ensure that we all have trustworthy information about COVID-19 from GOV.UK and NHS.UK, including advice on prevention, symptoms and staying at home.  The new service has already attracted one million messages and you can add 07860 064422 into your phone contacts and then send a ‘Hi’ in a WhatsApp message to get started.

Online Safety

Where can I go to get support to help keep my child safe online?

We recognise that children may be spending longer online at present than they usually do. There is a lot of support available to keep your child safe online. Below are some useful links to help parents and carers:

Thinkyouknow (advice from the National Crime Agency to stay safe online):

Internet matters (support for parents and carers to keep their children safe online):

Parent info (support for parents and carers to keep their children safe online):

LGfL (support for parents and carers to keep their children safe online):

Net-aware (support for parents and careers from the NSPCC):


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Let’s bear a Christmas tree!

On December 6, I wrote about a snowman made of plastic cups, and a wreath made of plastic shopping bags. https://www.een-letsbear.com/2016/12/lets-bear-a-snowman/
These are “Let’s BEAR” products that my mom working in Liberia found in the lobby of a hotel in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Next to the snowman and wreath, you can see a Christmas tree. Can you guess what it is made of?

Look closely at the tree!

It is made of plastic spoons! Amazing! Disposable white plastic spoons colored in green are placed downwards to form a tree. It is also a good example of a “Let’s BEAR” product. For Christmas decorations, why don’t you BEAR a product like this with available resources at hand? Be Empowered with Available Resources! Let’s BEAR!


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The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission wishes to inform the general public that it has not issued any notice in the social media promising financial reward for anyone with information that could lead to the arrest of a Yahoo Boy.

This clarification became necessary following phone calls by citizens wanting to cash in on notices in the social media by fraudsters promising a reward of One Million Naira (N1, 000,000) for friends, family and relatives of yahoo boys who hand them over to the EFCC.

The promo with #Efcc and #beagoodcitizen states, “If you have a Yahoo Yahoo boy as Family, Friend or Relative, Kindly hand them over to us, and get a Massive reward of 1million naira.”

The Commission wishes to state that this message is alien to the EFCC, and members of the public are enjoined to disregard them.

Promoters of the hashtags are currently under surveillance and every efforts will be made to bring them to justice.

While the Commission welcomes information that could lead to the arrest of cybercrime suspects, it has no policy of financial reward for such informants. The fight against corruption and other forms of economic crime is a patriotic duty and Nigerians are encouraged to embrace it with altruism.

The whistle blower policy of the Federal Government which the Commission is among the agencies saddled with its implementation, is applicable only to public sector corruption.

The public is warned that, the Commission will not be responsible for anyone who falls for this obvious scam.

Media & Publicity

7 May, 2021