Alicia Bay Laurel and Takuji - "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" at Hiroshima Nagarekawa Church, which stands on what was ground zero

Our friends, Alicia Bay Laurel and Takuji, performing "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" in Hiroshima 08/08/2015. Author/artist/vocalist/songwriter Alicia Bay Laurel and jazz multi-instrumentalist Takuji perform John Lennon's anti-war classics "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" at a peace concert that was part of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 8, 2015, at Hiroshima Nagarekawa Church, which stands on what was ground zero in Hiroshima.

Kenzaburo Oe: "Hiroshima must be engraved in our memories: It’s a catastrophe even more dramatic than natural disasters, because it’s man-made. To repeat it, by showing the same disregard for human life in nuclear power stations, is the worst betrayal of the memory of the victims..."

"Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe on the 70th Anniversary of US Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," via Democracy Now!:

...KENZABURO OE: [translated] So, three years ago, the day after the disaster, the weeks after the disaster, I believe that all Japanese people were feeling a great regret. And the atmosphere in Japan here was almost the same as following the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the war. And at that time, because of this atmosphere, the government at the time, which is the Democratic Party of Japan, with the agreement of the Japanese people, pledged to totally get rid of or decommission the more than 50 nuclear power plants here in Japan. However, the situation following the disaster, particularly in Fukushima, where so many people are suffering from this, has not changed at all.

And the current atmosphere or attitude of the government now in Japan has totally changed...the Liberal Democratic Party...led by Prime Minister Abe, is...completely having no regret and no looking back on ...what happened to Japan, and is instead actually actively pushing this forward. And I’m very fearful now that actually all throughout Japan and through the Japanese people, the atmosphere which is now growing and increasing is a spreading of this Prime Minister Abe’s ideology and worldview.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet he was elected as prime minister.

KENZABURO OE: [translated] Yes, he has won in two elections until now. But, however, now, because he has the majority in both of the houses of the Japanese Parliament, it means he is, in essence, able to do anything, go forward anything. And the first thing he is also trying to do now is to revise the constitution, which was created democratically by the Japanese people following the loss in World War II and Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience....

And now, under the current Prime Minister Abe administration, Japan is moving toward actively participating in United States wars. And what I am now most fearful about is the unfortunately likely possibility under Prime Minister Abe that this second pillar of Article 9 will be in danger, but not only this, that even the first pillar, that Japan may actually, within the next year or two or three or four years, actually directly participate in war...

Voices from Survivors of Hiroshima & Nagasaki: "I had dreamt the night before exactly as it happened in Nagasaki."

Hiroshima in Flames (Photo: City of Hiroshima)

Voices From Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (linked at the Gensuikyo (The Japan council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs site) is a profound collection of survivor testimonies describing the hours before, during, and after the atomic bombings.

The lists of titles of the testimonies read like lines of poetry, painting the terrible tapestry of individual human experiences as Hiroshima and Nagasaki passed through the chasm dividing reality before and after the bombings:

Witnesses to Hiroshima from the night of August 5 through the early afternoon of August 6, 1945

I left the place and escaped death.

It was 15 minutes after 8. It was as silent as a graveyard.

Rays shimmered like heat haze on the ground..

I thought Hiroshima was moaning...

I thought I was dead.

The water of the river blown off the ground just like a tornado.

Leaves were burning on the pine trees.

It seemed as if the sun covered half of the sky over Hiroshima.

Na-mu-a-mi-da-butsu, they chanted in their Buddhist prayers...

Witnesses to Hiroshima around noon through the evening, August 6, 1945

The dead sat up abruptly.

The burning bridge fell down.

Flames shot up into the sky like the Niagara Falls inverted.

Angels.

Now is the time to throw away our pens...

Everybody cried out loud.

My little brother died. I should not have yelled at him.

Maybe it was my mother's soul that visited me.

Witnesses to Hiroshima from August 7 through August 14, 1945

Daybreak, August 7th, 1945 Hiroshima

We dug the riverbank and buried her two daughters

The enemy used a new type of bomb

I was more afraid of the Living than the Dead.

Would this case possibly be caused by radioactivity?

The atomic bomb mushroom cloud over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

(Photograph by Hiromichi Matsuda, via Nagasaki City - Peace and Atomic Bomb Records)

Witnesses to Nagasaki from the evening of August 8 through through the evening, August 9, 1945

The farewell meal was rice balls.

I had dreamt the night before exactly as it happened in Nagasaki.

I still cannot forget my seven-year-old-son's back.

Three B-29s are heading toward the west.

My shoes were burning

The cloud like a demon was looking down.

People were dead with their eyes open

Cicadas shrieked, "Water, water!"

Don't cry, she was lulling her baby.  The baby was headless.

Even my soul was blown off.

Nagasaki will never recover.

The sun looked bloody red.

Your face looks like a monster.

This must be the end of the world.

It was dreadful to hear the groaning of thousands of people.

I said the prayer of Job.

I have forgotten the prayer.

I walked home crying for Nagasaki on fire.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 15, 16 in August to The first ten days of September, 1945 

War made us suffer so much.  It didn't matter whether we won or lost.

Radiation injury was the great majority.

Medical science had no chance against it.

I'd like to go where Saint Mary is, with my hair tied in three-pieces.

Pious and calm struggle against disease.

I have been to the "next world."

My younger brother appeared in my dream and told me the place he died.

"If we could die wet with rain, we were willing to do so."

I have to expose my fox-like face to the public and live.

I'm happy.  Buddha has come to meet me to Heaven.

Evening primroses had been in bloom over a burial mound where we buried the dead people.

Hiroshima Nagasaki, A-bomb victim's opinion.

Opposing to atomic bombs are the voices of A-bomb victims themselves.

We really went to stupid war.

I would want to be pilgrim and go to look for my daughter.

We have to revenge by achievement of peace...

A-bomb survivors must not escape from the fact of being bombed.

Parents, children and grandchildren -- three generations continue to carry on movement against atomic and hydrogen bombs.

Please make use of my story.

-JD

Peace Marchers arrive in Hiroshima: Call for a world free of nuclear & uranium weapons; Hiroshima Commemoration & Prayers for World Peace...

A very rare rainy August 6. Anniversary of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. 

Every year, many people from all over the world gather 

to commemmorate that tragic day and vow for a world free from nuclear weapons. 

(Photo: Peace March Journals)

August 4, 2014.  Peace Marchers on the stage of the Opening Plenary of 

2014 World Conference Against A and H Bombs!

(Photo: Peace March Journals on FB) 

Congratulations to our friends at Peace March (sponsored by Gensuikyo, the Japan Council against A and H-Bombs), who have arrived in Hiroshima.

We join all in Hiroshima and  Nagasaki in remembering the people who died and suffered from the nuclear bombings. We also remember all victims of nuclear test bombings (Marshall Islands, US, China, Russia (Kazakhstan), India (Rajasthan), Polynesia...), and uranium weapons since Aug 6 and  Aug 9, 1945. And join their united call for a world free of nuclear weapons, and for peace.

More about Peace March:

The National Peace March is a campaign for a world free from nuclear weapons while walking across Japan literally while calling ‘No more Hiroshima! No more Nagasaki! No more nuclear weapons!’ It starts on May 6 from different prefectures in Japan and converging in Hiroshima on August 4.

The Peace March started on June of 1958 when a Buddhist monk walked from the atomic bomb site in the Hiroshima Peace Park all the way to the World Conference in Tokyo covering a distance of 1000 kilometers. As he passed through several prefectures, many people joined him each day and the delegation became very big when they reached Tokyo.

For more than half a century already, the Peace March has been done every year without a break. Rain or shine more than 1000,000 marchers pass through more than 70% of municipalities in all of Japan’s prefectures each year. Anyone with the wish for the abolition of nuclear weapons is very much welcome to join.

Konnichiwa! Heiwa koushin desu! Hello, this is the Peace March!

See the great photos and read the inspiring entries about everyday Okinawan and Japanese people working for peace and a world without nuclear weapons at Peace March Journals.

August 5, 2015. Hiroshima. 

(Photo: Peace March Journals on FB) 

Japan as Number One in Radiation Education: Lessons for the World

"Children taught radiation studies: Nuke education now compulsory subject in schools in Fukushima" 

(Story and Photo: Mizuho Aoki, JT, March 24, 2012)

Today Martin Frid at Kurashi reminds us that Japan is now number one in the world in radiation education.

The Japanese educational system should have been number one in radiation education starting in 1946, when Japan's grassroots nuclear-free movement began, amidst US Occupation censorship of news about the consequences of radiation fallout from the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When the US Occupation ended in 1952, the Japanese nuclear-free movement gathered more steam, especially after the March 1954 irradiation of the fishing boat, "The Lucky Dragon #5," by fallout from the US hydrogen test bombing of the island of Bikini in the Marshall Islands.  Outrage increased after people learned irradiated tuna was sold and eaten in Japan.  The explosion provided the initial scenes of the film quasi-sci-fi film Godzilla which premiered eight months after the bombing.

With the raw hindsight of 3/11, it's astonishing to realize that Washington was able to explode 105 nuclear test bombs in the Pacific from 1946 to 1962, vaporizing entire islands, irradiating the Asia-Pacific region, and, simultaneously, in partnership with the Japanese postwar political establishment, was able to overcome the nascent Japanese nuclear-free protest movement, and successfully promote the idea of nuclear energy production as "safe." How did nuclear industry promoters subdue awareness and concern in Japan about the dangers of nuclear radiation?

Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick detail how Washington's "Atoms for Peace" program worked to counter the widespread perception of the dangers of nuclear radiation in Japan.  This program was especially calculated to obscure the memory of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray and a US congressman even proposed that Japan's first nuclear energy plant be built in Hiroshima to push the images of radioactive carnage out of the Japanese public mind.  The Washington Post seconded their idea:

Many Americans are now aware … that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. … How better to make a contribution to amends than by offering Japan the means for the peaceful utilization of atomic energy. How better, indeed, to dispel the impression in Asia that the United States regards Orientals merely as nuclear cannon fodder!"

Japan's first nuclear power plant was not built in Hiroshima, of course, but The Daily Yomiuri's traveling exhibition "The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy” did make a stop in the atom-bombed city in 1958, incredibly with the support of the Hiroshima establishment:

Although in other cities the exhibition was sponsored exclusively by the Yomiuri with the assistance of the U.S. Information Service, in Hiroshima co-sponsors also included the Hiroshima City Council, Hiroshima Prefectural Government, Hiroshima University, and the Chugoku Newspaper... All praised the promotion and application of this new powerful energy.  By contrast, many A-bomb survivors were skeptical and cautious about this non-military application of nuclear power, claiming that there was still no solution to the problem of managing radioactive materials produced by operating nuclear power reactors.

The newly completed A-bomb Museum building in Hiroshima was even used as the pavilion for the  exhibition:

Thus, in the same building, exhibits related to the devastation caused by the atomic bombing were displayed together with various dream-like applications of nuclear energy.  Such things as nuclear powered planes, ships and trains, as well as medical, agricultural and industrial uses of radioactive materials were displayed.

Hundreds of thousands of people throughout Japan, including 155,000 in Kyoto, visited the exhibition when it stopped in their cities. However, nuclear-free activists, including many Hibakusha, and some media, notably The Mainichi, countered:

First, baptism with radioactive rain, then a surge of shrewd commercialism in the guise of 'atoms for peace' from abroad. 

Nuclear power propaganda efforts continued, and the nuclear industry made inroads by the 1960's. In 1966, Tokai, Japan's first nuclear power plant began operating, and in the 1970's, nuclear plants were constructed throughout the archipelago.  The nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are from this era.

Even throughout the heyday of nuclear boosterism, the Japanese nuclear-free movement stayed strong, with notable local successes. The movement strengthened after the Chernobyl meltdown and during the 1990's, a period of numerous nuclear accidents in Japan.

Local communities, Japanese civil society and nuclear-free activists stopped the construction of nuclear power plants, notably in Iwaishima, where the Chugoku Electric Power Company has attempted to build a nuclear power plant in the Inland Sea National Park. In 2006, musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and  Greenpeace launched an international awareness project protesting the Rokkasho [plutonium] Reprocessing Plant under a campaign called "Wings of Peace – No more Hiroshima Nagasaki."  Japanese nuclear-free activists warned of the risks at Fukushima Daiichi long before 3/11.

Gavan McCormack says it's no longer possible to kick Japan's radioactive cans down the road in "Japan as a Plutonium Superpower."  He suggests a way forward for Japan (and the world) in "Hubris Punished: Japan as Nuclear State."  It's the same choice that Japanese nuclear-free,  carbon-free, renewable energy, energy conservation, organic, and Slow Life advocates have been calling for and working towards: turning the ongoing disaster into a time of change towards a sustainable future.

Successive generations of Japan’s bureaucratic, political, corporate, and media elite have insisted that Japan pursue the nuclear power path at all costs. In retrospect, they drove the country forward, as the elite of the Kwantung Army drove it in the pre-war era, towards disaster, ignoring, coopting, or crushing all opposition. Only now, facing the costs—human, environmental and economic—the long-postponed debate opens...

What is called for, in short, is the reversal of a half century of core national policies and the switch to a renewable energy system beyond carbon and uranium.  Such a strategic decision, turning the present disaster into the opportunity to confront the key challenge of contemporary civilization, amounts to a revolutionary agenda, one only possible under the pressure of a mobilized and determined national citizenry.

At this crucial juncture, how Japan goes, the world is likely follow. The challenge is fundamentally political: can Japan’s civil society accomplish the sovereignty guaranteed it under the constitution and wrest control over the levers of state from the irresponsible bureaucratic and political forces that have driven it into the present crisis?

---

Background:

"Children taught radiation studies: Nuke education now compulsory subject in schools in Fukushima" (Mizuho Aoki, JT, March 24, 2012)

Anti-Nuke Who's Who (Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, Tokyo)

"The Kaminoseki Nuclear Power Plant: Community Conflicts and the Future of Japan’s Rural Periphery" (Tomomi Yamaguchi, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Oct. 10, 2011)

"Japan, the Atomic Bomb, and the “Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Power” (Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick, The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 2, 2011)

"Hubris Punished: Japan as Nuclear State 驕れる者は久しからず−−核国家としての日本" (Gavan McCormack, The Asia-Pacific Journal, April 18, 2011)

Japan's Once-Powerful Nuclear Industry is Under Siege" (Caroline Fraser, Environment 360, March 17, 2011)

Japan as a Plutonium Superpower" (Gavan McCormack, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Dec. 9, 2007)

"The Power of Protest: The campaign against nuclear weapons was not simply an ideological movement; it was a potent political force"  (Lawrence Wittner,  Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July-August 2004)

Keiji Nakazawa in Barefoot Gen's Hiroshima: "I decided to use manga to confront the Bomb."

Trailer from director Yuko Ishida's Barefoot Gen''s Hiroshima (Hadashi no Gen ga Mita Hiroshima) a documentary film in which the camera man (Koshiro Otsu) follows "Barefoot Gen" creator Keiji Nakazawa as he visits neighborhoods throughout Hiroshima and recalls living through the nuclear explosion when he was six-years-old.

The film opened in Tokyo on August 6, 2011, and Nakazawa died of lung cancer a year later, on December 19, 2012.

Roger Pulvers' wonderful  film review at  the JT connects the nuclear radioactive dots between Hiroshima in 1945 and Fukushima in 2011:

When the bomb dropped in 1945, Nakazawa was a 6-year-old, first-year pupil at Kanzaki National Elementary School, which was a mere 1.2 km from ground zero. Luckily, on his way into school, he lingered by the wall adjacent to the front gate to speak with someone, and that wall saved his life...

Nakazawa’s father, sister and brother...were all crushed by pillars and beams, and killed. His father had been a vocal opponent of Japan’s war of aggression, and he had spent more than a year in prison as a result. The family had been ostracized by the community. This is a bitter irony of all indiscriminate bombing, since it murders many who are not only blameless non-combatants but also proponents of peace.

Nakazawa never forgot what he saw. He turned his personal experience and that of the people of Hiroshima into a series of manga that was carried in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump for 12 years from 1973. The story of Barefoot Gen kept the plight of the victims of the bomb and its radiation in the minds of citizens of the nation that had become the most intimate ally of the country that caused that holocaust, the United States.

This fact led the Japanese government to isolate the issue as something local — to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the other city atom-bombed by the U.S. three days after Hiroshima — as opposed to national. In addition, the vigorous pursuit of “atoms for peace,” an American initiative to promote nuclear power spearheaded in the early 1950s by President Dwight Eisenhower further divorced the radiation spread by the bombs from its possible spread by reactors generating electricity all around Japan.

It is thanks to Nakazawa, and eminent authors such as Kenzaburo Oe, Hisashi Inoue and, most recently, Haruki Murakami — all of whom have taken up the nuclear tragedies of 1945 — that the dangers of radiation lingering in our bodies, our soil, our water, and in the air, are now finally being understood by the Japanese people.

However, a truly remarkable aspect of the story of Barefoot Gen...is its message of optimism and hope. The hero, little Gen, stunned by the devastation and death surrounding him, says, “I’m going to live, to live! I’m going to live through this, you’ll see!”

In those pages...the stench of destruction are everywhere, just as in the prefectures of Tohoku most badly affected by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. Yet Gen does not give up hope...

He goes on to point out that the gen in the name is the same character as that in the word genki, which means full of vitality and strong of mettle...

In his message to children, Nakazawa states, “If you come to feel that you wish for a world without war and without atomic bombs, for a world where peace is priceless...then the subject of this film, namely Keiji Nakazawa, will be content.”

Motofumi Asai's in-depth interview, "Barefoot Gen, the Atomic Bomb and I: The Hiroshima Legacy Nakazawa Keiji"i, translated by Richard H. Minear at APJ: Japan Focus explores the anti-war beliefs of Nakazawa's father as well as those of the writer himself who counsels us to be resilient and persistent in the support of respect of life, human dignity, and an ethos of peace:

In order to effect change, each person has to work away at it. I’m a cartoonist, so cartoons are my only weapon. I think everyone has to appeal in whatever position they’re in.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we gradually enlarged our imaginations! We have to believe in that possibility. Doubt is extremely strong, but we have to feel that change is possible. Inspire ourselves. And like Auschwitz, Hiroshima too must sing out more and more about human dignity.

Barefoot Gen anime film online in Japan through Aug. 31; debate continues over ban of anti-war manga series in Matsue

The energetic public debate over the decision by Matsue (Shimane Prefecture) Board of Education to ban the manga series "Barefoot Gen reflects the vibrancy of anti-war attitudes in Japan, a widespread desire of the majority of Japanese citizens to admit and atone for Japanese Imperial wartime atrocities, and to witness for the abolition of uranium and nuclear weapons.

The series depicts realistic images of the entire Pacific War, including Japanese Imperial beheadings and rapes of Chinese people, as well as the US nuclear bombings of Japanese civilians and other wartime suffering.

The controversy has generated an outpouring of support and renewed interest in "Barefoot Gen" whose author passed away in December of last year. Our friends at New York Peace Film Festival report that the anime film adaptation of the manga series, Barefoot Gen,  is available to watch online in Japan until Aug. 31.

Link: http://gyao.yahoo.co.jp/player/00592/v12021/v1000000000000000721/

Synopsis: Barefoot Gen a 1983 war drama based on Keiji Nakazawa's manga series. Director Mori Masaki depicts the final days of the Pacific War and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima from the point of view of a child, Gen Nakaoka, who is caught in the explosion's aftermath.  The film begins and ends with boat symbolism reminiscent of Toro Nagasahi (ceremony during which lit paper lanterns are released on a river to remember the dead).

The story is set during the final days of the Second World War.  Gen's malnourished family struggle survive in Hiroshima. The family wonders why their city has been spared from US napalm (jellied gasoline) firebombings that have destroyed most of Japan's other cities. They sense something is wrong even though they could never imagine that  Hiroshima  had been chosen as a "pristine" target to test one of the two new American nuclear bombs.

On the morning of August 6, Gen, after promising his brother he will take him to the river to play with a toy boat, makes his way to school. Overhead, he notices a single B-29 bomber.  At home, his family watch as a large number of ants ominously enter their home.  Gen drops a pebble he is playing with, and, as he bends to pick it up, a flash of white light erupts in the sky. The eyes of people around him begin to melt. At home, Gen's house collapses, burying his family alive. Gen escaped injury from the flash because he was bent downward in front of a  stone wall, but he is also buried under rubble.

The nuclear blast vaporizes people and destroys most of the buildings throughout Hiroshima. Burned and mutilated people wander through streets looking for water and help. After digging out of the rubble, Gen returns home to find his mother has survived, but his father, sister and little brother are trapped under the ruins of their house. As a firestorm approaches, Gen's father tells Gen they must leave to protect his mother and her unborn child. As they obey Gen's father and leave, they hear their family's screams as they burn to death.

His mother gives birth to a baby girl they name Tomoko; Gen searches for food and help but finds neither in a city filled only with the dead and injured. He finds a mother with a dead baby who shares her breast milk with Gen's infant sister.  People start to show signs of radiation illness: defecating and vomiting blood; losing hair.

After days of searching for food, Gen finds some rice and vegetables in a storehouse.  On August 16, they dig up the skulls of their dead family at their burned home. They're told Tokyo has finally surrendered.  But peace has come too late for them (and many millions of other people throughout the Asia-Pacific, as well as Okinawa and the rest of mainland Japan).  They take in an orphaned child, Ryuta, whom they meet when he tries to steal their food.

To earn money to buy milk for Tomoko, Gen and Ryuta take a job, caring for a dying, embittered man who, in the end, expresses gratitude for their care.  But, of course, Gen's infant sister dies anyway: the odds are stacked against survival in Hiroshima.

As grass and plants start to recover, so does Gen; his hair grows back.  Gen recalls his father's advice: no matter how beaten down, never give up. He decides to fulfill his promise to his brother and builds another boat. Two weeks after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Gen, his mother, and Ryuta go to the river, where they light a candle on top of the boat and release it in the water. They pray as the boat sails away.

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"‘Barefoot Gen’ pulled as anti-war images strike too close to home?" (Jun Hongo, JT, Aug. 21, 2013)

"Board’s request to restrict ‘Barefoot Gen’ assailed" (Aug. 22, 2013, Kyodo, JT)

Steve Nguyen: Hiroshima Revisited

In public imagery, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been fixated in time, at the respective moments the two cities were nuclear bombed.

Linda Hoaglund's recent film, Things Left Behind. a cinematic exploration of  photographer Miyako Ishiuchi's exhibition of the same title,  pierces through to the other side of 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945, to explore (and humanize) the lives of the people who died on that day.

In Hiroshima Revisited Steve Nguyen breaks through to the other side of that moment: the ongoing process of rebuilding and healing in the resurrected city.  This beautiful, sensitive short film might be considered a personal sequel to  HIBAKUSHA, an animated documentary/drama featuring his friend, Kaz Suyeishi, now an 84-year-old woman, who "recalls her most vivid and horrific experiences as an 18-year-old Japanese American student during the morning of August 6, 1945 when the atomic bomb dropped on her hometown."

This look at Hiroshima today brings home not only the striving of Hiroshima survivors and their descendants to rebuild their city and lives, but also the struggle of survivors of manmade annihilation throughout our world (Guernica, Chonqing, Warsaw, and many hundreds of cities, regions...)  who have similarly sought to restore what has been destroyed and broken by war.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone in Hiroshima: "The specter of war has returned to Asia....The spirit of World War II is being revived..."

Video of part of American filmmaker Oliver Stone's speech in Hiroshima (he's traveling with Peter Kuznick, nuclear historian at American University and Satoko Norimatsu, co-author of Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the US.)

Two years before she helped found the Network for Okinawa in 2010 (US-based network of environmentalist, faith-based NGOs and diverse think tanks, including the Institute for Policy Studies),  Satoko said she wanted to include Okinawa in the annual American University Hiroshima-Nagasaki summer study tour.  This year they're doing that.

In this clip at IWJ (Independent Web Journal), Stone challenges Tokyo's lip service to "nuclear abolition" and "peace" with his sobering observations about the ongoing Washington-Tokyo-Asia-Pacific military build-up:

...Obama's resupplied Japan with stealth fighters. Japan has the 4th largest military in the world. No one admits that. You call yourself a Self Defense Force...You're the 4th largest military in the world, after Great Britain and China. The US is your full accomplice in this. You are some of our best buyers. We make you not only pay for the weapons we sell you, but we make you pay for the wars we fight. We made you pay for Kuwait...Iraq...

We are bullies. You're facing a dragon of great size and the dragon is not China, it's the U.S.  Four days ago, I was in Jeju, Korea, where South Korea...is destroying a UNESCO World Heritage site, destroying the land and inhabitants...they're going to build the harbor so deep so the George Washington, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, carrying all kinds of nuclear missiles, is going to sail to Jeju. South Korea - armed to the teeth. Japan - armed to the teeth...Philippines...we're back in Subic Bay...

We are looking for arrangements in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and I heard India...India was always non-aligned...This is very dangerous...This is like NATO. It began as a defense arrangement and became an offense arrangement...

This year, the specter of war has returned to Asia...The spirit of World War II is being revived...So you can talk all you want about peace and nuclear abolition but the poker game is run by the U.S.

Resurrecting Hiroshima: Things Left Behind

"Things Left Behind" is the title of an exhibition by photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and a documentary about the exhibition by Japan-born filmmaker Linda Hoaglund.  They leave one with the sense of two women wrestling with not only history and time, but also death itself, in their attempts to pierce through to the other side of 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945.

Their search is about facing trauma; the anguish of loss, the striving to resurrect the past; the invocation of spirits — if only for a while.  These photographs and this film are an invitation for us to meet and lay to rest the dead of Hiroshima by meditating upon the things they left behind.

Things Left Behind is playing with English subtitles every day at 4:30 p.m. at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo, until August 16, the day after the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 11:30 a.m. screening time in Japanese only.  Steven Okazaki's White Light, Black Rain is also showing at 2 p.m. and 6:50 p.m.

Keiji Nakazawa: "For humanity, the greatest treasure is peace."

Keiji Nakazawa, the author of "Barefoot Gen," had died (1939-2012). 
The drawing in the photograph reads "For humanity, the greatest treasure is peace." 

(Keiji Nakazawa (March 14, 1939 – December 19, 2012) was a Japanese manga artist and writer. He was born in Hiroshima, where he lived during the Pacific War.  The cartoonist survived the US nuclear bombing of the city in 1945. All of his family, who had not been evacuated, died from the bombing.

 In 1961, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo to become a full-time cartoonist for manga anthologies.

 Following the death of his mother in 1966, Nakazawa began to memorialize the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima  in his stories.  Nakazawa's major work, "Hadashi no Gen" (Barefoot Gen) (a ten-volume series) explored the nuclear bombing and its aftermath, and examined the Japanese government's militarization of Japanese society during World War II.  "Barefoot Gen was adapted into two animated films and a live action TV drama.

Nakazawa was diagnosed with lung cancer and in July 2011.

Peace Boat's 63rd Voyage: Atomic bombing survivors (Hibakusha) dialogue with Agent Orange victims

(Agent Orange victim Phuong folding paper cranes with Toshiko Tanaka,

atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima. Photo courtesy of Lee, Jung Yong)

(Little Van, an Agent Orange victim from Vietnam, sailed with Peace Boat for a week, and got a lot of love from Peace Boat participants, here with Marianna Aoki. Photo courtesy of Lee, Jung Yong)

(In Da Nang with a group of nuclear bombing survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

and Agent Orange victims. Photo courtesy of Lee, Jung Yong)

Via Rose Welsch, some remarkable photos from Peace Boat's 63rd voyage "for a Nuclear-Free World" that took place from September 2008 to January 2009. During the voyage, 102 Hibakusha visited 22 ports in 20 countries over three months to share their testimonies with people from around the world and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

At their first stop in Da Nang, Vietnam, the Hibakusha met and exchanged testimony with Agent Orange survivors and 2nd- and 3rd-generation victims.

Starting on August 10, 1961, the US military began spraying Agent Orange, a chemical weapon, throughout Vietnam to destroy forest canopy and farmland. The result: an ecological and public health catastrophe. According to the Vietnamese government, up to four million people in Vietnam suffer from diseases related to Agent Orange. Similarlly to nuclear radiation, Agent Orange damages DNA, and causes birth deformities. Just as the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiation impacted later generations in Japan, so has Agent Orange in Vietnam (and as is depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Da Nang was particularly affected because the US military stored and loaded Agent Orange onto planes at a coastal air base there. Phuong & Little Van, in the above photographs, are from Da Nang, and joined the Peace Boat Hibakusha Project for a week of sharing, mutual support, and love.

Velcrow Ripper: "Lanterns of Memory"

Via fillmaker Velcrow Ripper:

"Each of us faces circumstances in life which compel us to carry heavy burdens of sorrow...Adversity assails us with hurricane force...Glowing sunrises are transformed into darkest nights...Our highest hopes are blasted...Our noblest dreams are shattered...

August 6, 2000. A Hiroshima atomic bombing survivor describes what she saw ("There was no place to hide...") and expresses her wish that this never happen again.

Woven throughout, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. ask us: why should we love our enemies?

Children's Peace Monument - Hiroshima

Hiroshima Day- ICAN booklet on catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons

Nagasaki bomb victim Sumiteru Taniguchi looks at a photo of himself taken in 1945.
(Source: ICAN Hiroshima Day booklet)

"As a 16-year-old boy, I was riding my bicycle down the street when the atomic bomb exploded 1.8 km away, scorching my back and leaving the skin on my right arm hanging down from the shoulder to the fingertips."

After 17 excruciating operations and a lifetime of struggle, Sumiteru Taniguchi, 67 year since the bombing of Hiroshima, still fights pro-actively to make sure no one has to suffer what he experienced in Hiroshima ever again.

In remembrance of Hiroshima Day and all of the past and potential future victims of the nuclear industry, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has launched a booklet for free digital distribution on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. Download here: http://www.icanw.org/files/ICAN-CHH.pdf

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a movement of non-government organizations in 60 countries advocating such a treaty, believes that discussions about nuclear weapons must focus not on narrow concepts of national security, but on the effects of these weapons on human beings – our health, our societies, and the environment on which we all depend.

ICAN notes that the same humanitarian discourse was used successfully in banning landmines and cluster munitions. While sharing the stories of anti-nuclear advocates and the survivors of nuclear bombing, testing, and mining the booklet provides pertinent information on:

• the known existing nuclear arsenals in the world
• immediate- and long- term effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• the devastation that would arise should regional nuclear war break out
• the consequences of nuclear testing
• the impact of mining on marginalized communities
• the massive diversion of public resources for the production of nuclear materials and technology
• currently standing international bans on weapons of mass destruction
• ICAN recommendations on how WE CAN act

With nuclear weapons and nuclear-based technology (including nuclear reactors) still proliferating no one is safe should disaster arise. Just recently, Japan's former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba's statement about the use of Japan's nuclear reactors as a deterrent was made public: "Having nuclear plants shows to other nations that Japan can make nuclear weapons."

In Nov. 22, 2011 Ishiba stressed that Japan isn’t about to make nuclear weapons. But, he said, with nearby North Korea suspected of working on them, Japan needs to assert itself and say it can also make them - but is choosing not to.

(AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

Unless we have a paradigm shift now, we will continue to be used by governments and industry as test mice of this obsolete nuclear deterrent ideology, living in a house of cards on a slanted table.

This booklet serves as a heart-wrenching reminder of the tragedies of the nuclear industry and the political stranglehold the industry maintains despite the enormous destruction it causes. It is a useful resource for anyone just learning about the consequences of nuclear weapons or fighting to make the shift to a nuclear-free world a reality.

Learn more about how you can abolish nuclear weapons:

ICAN homepage: http://www.icanw.org/
ICAN Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icanw.org
- posted by Jen Teeter

From Hiroshima & Nagasaki to Fukushima: Dr. Shuntaro Hida describes censorship of information about the effects of low-dose nuclear radiation

"How many times do we have to be exposed to nuclear radiation?" This video footage is of Dr. Shuntaro Hida speaking in front of Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima city at the "One Million Action Hoping to Live a Life without Nuclear Power" held April 26, 2011. Dr. Hida treated Hiroshima survivors exposed to the high dose of radiation from the Hiroshima atomic bombing. He also treated patients exposed to low doses of nuclear radiation; found them suffering from a disease called "Bura Bura Syndrome" caused by low-dose internal exposure. Dr. Hida describes the US military occupation's censorship of information about the health effects of nuclear radiation. (Original footage: Sunameri (Finless Porpoise) YouTube channel. This clip with English subtitles: via Canale di Koikzuka77. Dr. Hida is also featured in Hitomi Kamanaka's "Radiation: A Slow Death, A new Generation of Hibakusha".)

In "A-bomb doctor warns of further Fukushima woes"  (JT via Kyodo), Dr. Shuntaro Hida, a Hiroshima survivor & physician, links lack of public awareness about the effects of radiation with US military occupation censorship of information about the effects of radiation after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The amount of research into and public knowledge about internal exposure to radiation is still limited because the United States "concealed" information about the problem for a long time after it dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Hida says. "It is a fight to change the mindset of each and every person," Hida says, recalling his decades-long struggles to make people aware of the danger of internal exposure to radiation amid a lack of scientific data.

"Under the Occupation until the early 1950s, people were forbidden from "speaking, recording or doing research into symptoms of atomic-bomb survivors," he says. "I was stalked by the military police when I was talking about what I witnessed in Hiroshima," and arrested several times by the Occupation forces for "not abiding by their Occupation policy."

Hida, as a representative of a group of medical professionals called the Japan Federation of Democratic Medical Institutions, urged U.N. Secretary General U Thant in 1975 to hold an international conference on the effects of radiation on hibakusha, which was realized two years later.

"It's anger that has kept me speaking to this day. How could I remain silent even 67 years after the bombings?" Hida says.

Dr. Hida's 2006 memoir, Under the Mushroom-Shaped Cloud in Hiroshima, is available online at this link.

Nuclear-Free Activist & Artist Mayumi Oda speaking at the 2011 Moana Nui Conference

Longtime nuclear-free activist and artist Mayumi Oda reveals dark, obscured interconnections between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima in this moving talk given at the 2011 Moana Nui conference in Hawai'i.

Known to many as the “Matisse of Japan,” Mayumi Oda has done extensive work with female goddess imagery. Born to a Buddhist family in Japan in 1941, Mayumi studied fine art and traditional Japanese fabric dying. In 1966 she graduatied from Tokyo University of Fine Arts. Mayumi’s unique apprenticeship dying fabric for kimonos influences the color and composition of all of her work.

Mayumi has spent many years of her life as a “global activist” participating in anti-nuclear campaigns worldwide. She founded Plutonium Free Future in 1992. On behalf of her organization, Oda lectured and held workshops on Nuclear Patriarchy to Solar Communities at the United Nations NGO Forum and the Women of Vision Conference in Washington DC.

Notes from her speech:

I'm 70-years-old now. I was born the year right before Pearl Harbor. For 70 years, I've been struggling with nuclearism. I was 4-years-old when my country was detonated with atomic bombs...

The shadow image of people without any body left stuck in concrete walls...just absolutely scared me as a child.

When my sister country, Korea, had a war, and people crossing over in the cold, it just made me so anxious, I grew up with this kind of fear of....As a child, I thought it was a kind of stupidity, how could people get involved with this.

Now with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima, I feel like Japanese were born to deal with this incredible legacy of nuclear development...

A Nuclear Power Free World is Possible- Conference Jan 14-15 Yokohama

A nuclear power free Japan and a nuclear power free world are possible. This weekend over 8000 people will gather in Yokohama Japan to share information on how to make this attainable goal a reality. Growing out of a coalition of Japan-based NGOs including the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre (CNIC), FoE Japan, Green Action, Greenpeace Japan, the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP), and Peace Boat, the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World will:

• bring together the voices of people who suffer from radiation exposure all around the world, whether by nuclear power or nuclear weapons - “Global Hibakusha”.
• facilitate the sharing of information with one another. Participants will learn from each other's experiences to illustrate the human and environmental consequences of the nuclear chain.
• aim to demonstrate that it is realistically possible to create a society that is not dependent on nuclear power.
• create a road map for the safe removal of existing nuclear power plants.
• present alternative policies based on renewable energy and propose action plans that can be implemented by Japan and other countries.

Mémé Madoka Watanabe, a Peace Boat staffer coordinating publicity within the Japanesecommunity shared some insight on Peace Boat's involvement in organizing the conference:

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, have both had a dramatic impact around the world. In response to this massive disaster and its tragic consequences to people's lives and environment, the people of Japan are trying to take steps towards recovery. Meanwhile, the nuclear power plant is still unstable and workers are forced to continue working in life-threatening conditions. As the radioactive contamination spreads, many people including children are forced to suffer from prolonged radiation exposure, unable to evacuate due to lack of support from the government.

It is vital that we do not continue to make the same mistakes. It is now time for humanity to put an end to the nuclear age that started with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Japan, well over half the population now supports the goal of breaking away from nuclear power. However, many people question whether it is practically possible to bring nuclear power to an end.

For these reasons and more, a coalition of Japan-based Peace Boat is acting as the secretariat for the conference on behalf of the coalition of Japan based NGO's.

Watanabe stressed how the event is a positive step for the world to move towards eliminating nuclear power as an option:

This event will be an important and positive step for Japan and other countries towards taking action for a nuclear power free world. The presence of both organizations and independent citizens will show that efforts since the disaster to learn from Fukushima have not gone unnoticed. We aim to learn from Fukushima, exchange lessons about nuclear power from around the world and make clear the need to break away from nuclear power. It is also a chance for us to show the people of Fukushima, many of whom feel despondent about the future, that positive action is being taken.The conference will bring together ideas from around the globe to propose action plans that can be carried out by Japan and other countries all over the world.

She also noted how the conference is an outgrowth of other related Peace Boat activities:

Activities such as the Global Voyage for a Nuclear Free World - Peace Boat Hibakusha Project, bringing survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings around the world to give testimony and advocate for nuclear abolition, while meeting with people affected by the nuclear chain around the world, have contributed to public education about the need to move towards a nuclear free world. Peace Boat also carries out other activities promoting nuclear weapon free zones, disarmament for development, and more.

Since March 17, 2011 in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, Peace Boat has been active in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, one of the hardest hit cities on the coast of northeast Japan. Peace Boat is acting in a coordination role between Ishinomaki’s local government and the many NGOs, institutions and individuals offering help in the area and dispatching volunteers each week. With 10,000 volunteers to date. Some of the relief and recovery activities include preparing and serving hot meals, delivering relief goods, cleaning mud out of homes and businesses and salvaging fishing equipment.More recently volunteers have been supporting the communities in the Temporary Houses by distributing a newsletter and becoming part of the community as well as helping to identify and serve their needs. Their presence not only supports the physical recovery of the towns but also gives the local community the encouragement to rebuild.

- Posted by Jen Teeter

Cities are Not Targets: A Petition for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

Cities Are Not Targets (CANT) project Petition Drive

Please tell the nuclear powers that Cities Are Not Targets!

Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation

Mayors for Peace calls cities together to build a nuclear-weapon-free world.

Since our experience of the atomic bombing 62 years ago, Hiroshima has continually called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of lasting world peace. Despite our efforts, many areas around the world remain trapped in chains of hatred, violence and retaliation, our planet still bristles with vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, and the probability that such weapons will be used is increasing.

In response to this crisis, Mayors for Peace, an NGO over which we preside that now has 1,578 member cities in 120 countries and regions, is conducting an emergency campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2020 globally. This is our 2020 Vision Campaign.

The year 2006 was the 10th anniversary of the International Court of Justice advisory opinion that, “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.” Mayors for Peace marked this landmark finding by launching Phase II of our 2020 Vision Campaign.

The centerpiece of this phase is the Good Faith Challenge, a program for demanding that all governments abide by the other ICJ finding that, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” As a further contribution by cities, we have also initiated a Cities Are Not Targets (CANT) project to demand assurances from nuclear weapon states that no cities are targeted for nuclear attack.

Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral devices designed to obliterate entire cities. Despite the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear weapons remains virtually unchanged. We still have thousands of nuclear warheads deployed and ready to fire on warning. At the push of a button, nuclear-tipped missiles can be on their way to a target city. If such an event were to take place, some city, home to children and hundreds of thousands of innocent noncombatants, would suffer utter devastation.

The Mayors for Peace project is designed to lift the voices of cities and citizens to say, “No! You may not target cities. You may not target children.” Through these activities, we intend to bring to the attention of mayors, citizens and national leaders the fact that cities are, in fact, still being targeted for annihilation and the International Court of Justice has found this threat itself to be a war crime. Furthermore, we hope this project will intensify our demand that the nuclear-weapon states fulfill their promise to “negotiate in good faith” to abolish all nuclear weapons.

The goal of this project is not a shifting of nuclear weapons away from cities but their total elimination. And, when we speak here of “cities,” we refer not to a municipal entity of a certain size but to any area in which children and non-combatants are living routine daily lives.

Please participate in the petition drive associated with this project. Mayors for Peace will deliver your message to the nuclear-weapon states and to the United Nations. Let all peoples around the world come together and bequeath to our children a genuinely peaceful world free from nuclear weapons! Link to petition here.

Hiroshima Ground Zero 1945 @ Int. Center of Photography, NYC, May 20-Aug. 28, 2011

(Photo: Hiroshima Ground Zero 1945 I International Center of Photography, May 20-Aug. 28, 2011)

Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 Public Panel Discussion

ICP, 1133 Avenue of the Americas
Wednesday, August 17, 7:00pm
General Admission: $5. Free for ICP Members and Students
RSVP online.

Panelists: Erin Barnett, Adam Harrison Levy, Greg Mitchell

What can a suitcase, found in a pile of trash, tell us about Hiroshima and its legacy?

The suitcase was found eleven years ago by a man out walking his dog in Watertown, Massachusetts. Inside were 700 photographs of post-bomb Hiroshima. The images depict an annihilated city: twisted girders, imploded buildings, miles of rubble. This was the original Ground Zero, a term first used in 1946 to describe the epicenter of the blast.

Since then, accounts by survivors of the bombing have been published, documentaries have been produced, and historians have fiercely debated the decision to drop the bomb.

And yet, the photographic record of what took place in Hiroshima has long been absent. A U.S. military film crew, which shot the only color footage in the city (and focused on the human effects of the bomb), found that their images would be suppressed for decades. Our lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb's effect has helped us to deny its devastating impact. Think of photographs of Auschwitz after it was liberated and a series of powerful images come to mind: haunting pictures of war's destructive impact. But think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Terrifying in its way, with its bulbous head and towering stem, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed of human agency and human consequence.

Join us for a discussion on how the ground-breaking images that make up the Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 exhibition at ICP were discovered and how the moving footage shot in post-bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was censored by the U.S. government. Panelists include Greg Mitchell, the author of Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made (2011) and co-author (with Robert Jay Lifton) of Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (1995), Assistant Curator of Collections Erin Barrett, and writer and freelance documentary film producer and director Adam Harrison Levy.