I have been exchanging emails

 occasionally with a couple of Japanese hams and they are pretty interesting people. Polite almost to a fault.

Some Japanese hams take their rigs with them when they go on vacation, many of them in the Pacific Islands.

For example it is a small group of Japanese hams that go on the air on Saipan or Tinian by getting an FCC callsign. Every so often a Japanese will go on the air down in the Solomon Islands.

 Hams can get reciprocal privlidges in many parts of the world with varying levels of difficulty. It varies with the rules of the governing state but it is fairly common.

Of course it is not only the Japanese that are the people that seem to be putting Pacfic islands on the air. I worked a German that was on American Samoa a while back. 

Still, it seems an inordinate number of Japanese are the ones that make it possible to get some of the islands in my logbook.

What seems odd, though is that they seem to set up shop in places that were heavily contested during WW2. There are often Japanese on the air on Tinian which is where Enola Gay took off from to flatten Hiroshima back in '45.

I was always taught that the Japanese were pretty sensitive about WW2 but I guess the young people are not anymore. I don't have a problem with this. None of these young people had anything to do with the war and as far as I see things people bear no responsibility that happened before they were even born.

Anyway, it's interesting being in touch with such polite people.





To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY