Hurry up and Wait

Saipan is the largest island of the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean. It lies just north of Guam, south of Japan, east of the Philippines and west of Hawaii. Our focus there was the importance Saipain played in ww2, with many of the battle's tanks and armory still scattered about the island and beneath the sea. The Battle of Saipan, from 15 June to 9 July 1944, was one of the major campaigns of World War II. The United States Marine Corps and United States Army landed on the beaches of the south-western side of the island and, after more than three weeks in heavy fighting, captured the island from the Japanese. The battle cost the Americans 3,426 killed and 10,364 wounded. Of the estimated 30,000 Japanese defenders, only 921 were taken prisoner. The weapons used, and the tactics of close quarter fighting, also resulted in high civilian casualties. Some 20,000 Japanese civilians perished during the battle, including over 1,00

The pandemic has hit Bali hard. According to John Hopkins University, there were 1.2 million cases in July 2021 alone, with more than 1000 dying each day. For Bali, the holiday destination for Australians and Kiwis, now locked in to their own countries, it is devastating on so many levels.  A Qantas repatriation flight left for Australia this week .  So much of the economy centres around tourism. I was there in the early 1980s, making a film about the impact of tourism on the local cultures. A lot of work was done at the time to ensure that the tourist $s did not all go to big overseas companies. And whilst many shows on holiday islands are, like everywhere, put on for visitors, the music and theatre here is as genuine as it gets, steeped in ancient Hindu tradition and folklore. Uniquely their own. You were as likely to stumble upon a local ceremony involving dozens of dancers & musicians pottering about the island as you were in the hotel and restaurant districts. Trance is a part

 Girl at a Kava Ceremony on the island of Truk. The beautiful, remote Pacific islands of  Micronesia  are  strung across the Pacific between Hawaii in the east, The Philippines in the west and Papua New Guinea in the south.  I was there for a series of films called The New Pacific , a political, historical and cultural look at the Pacific nations from the US West Coast to China as the centre of world economic focus changed from Europe to Asia.  Stone money, Yap. Nobody steals it because everybody on this tiny island knows who it belongs to. I wrote a short story based on my travels in Micronesia. The missionary station was actually based on a mission in Papua New Guinea, but the way of going about things, and the fish, is Micronesian: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/featured-fifty-fiction-the-long-pig_b_3293789 World War II shipwrecks, Truk Lagoon. World War II tank, Saipan Yap men with their Betel Nut bags. Betel Nut chewing was, and presumably still is, widespread. World War II tank

The next random pack of slides out of the box is a karaoke evening at the US army base in Okinawa. For the full story of this awkward situation, see  my earlier post   With the US Army in Okinawa .  Or just look at my expression here... This was January 1984. None of us in the UK had heard of karaoke, let alone a karaoke-singing taxi driver. The first karaoke bar outside Japan opened in LA in 1982. Karaoke taxi driver Karaoke scoreboard