It was recently announced that the Fukuoka’s Kawaii-ku (“Cute Ward”) project would come to a close:

http://fukuoka-now.com/news/fukuokas-kawaii-ku-cute-ward-to-be-discontinued/

I’ve followed this project from its inception so, when I first learned of its demise, I thought I would write an obituary of the project that built on what I had documented thus far. However, when I went back to check the record I found that part of it had been expunged. Here’s the URL of the post from which commentary has been purged:

https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/posts/10153927418840655

My original post remains in tact but Cute Ward Mayor Micaela Braithwaite’s comments and my responses to those comments are gone. Fortunately for me (but, perhaps, unfortunately for Mayor Micaela) I saved the text and screen shots of our interaction. I’m sharing those screenshots in this post to reconstitute the public record of what transpired. I’m also adding a screen shot of a private (until now, at least) message I sent to Mayor Micaela, hoping to come to an amicable resolution. The mayor never responded to any of my comments or to my message. Perhaps she never noticed the private message I sent. Since she and I are not “friends” on Facebook, my message would have been put in a box that she might not look at. But it seems pretty clear that she revisited her own comments to my post at some point, because I think that she is the only person (besides me and another editor of this page) who would have been able to remove them.

At the time the mayor first wrote her comments, I felt that they reflected badly on her. She seemed to be rushing to go on the offensive without taking the time to reread what I had written and check to make sure that her criticisms were really warranted. Perhaps Mayor Micaela came to her senses later and recognized that her petulant comments did more harm to her own position than mine. Perhaps that’s why she deleted her comments (and mine along with them). If she had approached me earlier as one human being to another (as I attempted to do with her), I would have let her off the hook and agreed to striking them from the record. At this point, though, I think I’ll opt for an accurate record of what transpired.

I’ll save my obituary of the Kawaii-ku project (that is, my discussion of the history of the project, including my interpretation of the switch from Mariko Shinoda to Micaela Braithwaite) for another post or two. I hope those of you who are interested in this issue will check it (or them) out.