Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate - A transcendent journey in poems and photographs to Japan's ancient capital

A few years ago, when I received the chapbook incarnation of Edith Schiffert's and John Einarsen's Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate, I felt like I had been surprised by a dream of the ancient capital in the mail.  A new incarnation of this luminous book has been launched; with an IndieGoGo campaign to finance publishing costs. They are asking Kyoto lovers to help support and be a part of this beautiful project (JD):

                                                  Resting on the earth

                                                  who needs satori or faith?

                                                  Embrace what holds you!


Imagine a book enfolding some of the best expat poetry and photography of the 1200-year-old city of Kyoto, cultural and spiritual heart of Japan. For five decades Edith Shiffert, now age 97, has written haiku and poems inspired by the ancient capital. John Einarsen has been making striking yet serene photographs of Kyoto for more than three decades.

Now Edith and John share their vision and love of this magical city with the book Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate (144 pp, more than 100 duotone photographs and 30 poems). In addition, three renowned writers on Japanese culture, Marc P. Keane, Diane Durston and Takeda Yoshifumi, have contributed illuminating essays. Rona Conti's calligraphy is yet another treat for the eyes.

We plan to publish an edition of this singular book. Its design is complete to the last detail, but for this first edition to go to print we need your help.

Take this transcendent journey to Kyoto by contributing today. All donations are warmly appreciated. Those giving $60 or more will receive a signed edition of this remarkable book.

Gavan McCormack: "This is no longer an opposition movement but a prefecture in resistance, saying “No.”

A must-read for anyone who follows Okinawa and Japan...Published on Sept. 9, at the Ryukyu Shimpo, (one of Okinawa's two major newspapers): Gavan McCormack's "This is no longer an opposition movement but a prefecture in resistance, saying 'No.'”

Great issues are at stake in the Osprey contest and the 5 August Meeting. After four decades of lying to, discriminating against, and betraying Okinawa, time and again, decade after decade, the governments of Japan and the United States now seem to have provoked it to an intolerable degree. By determining to impose on it something that the people of Okinawa say they will not accept, they substitute authoritarianism for democracy...

Two decades after the end of the Cold War, the relationship between Tokyo (backed by Washington) and Okinawa resembles nothing so much as that between Moscow and Budapest or Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. Okinawan views are as much respected and listened to in Tokyo and Washington today as once Hungarian and Polish sentiments were respected in Moscow.

After decades of struggle, however, on these issues there is no longer an Okinawan “government” and “opposition.” Local government heads and assemblies, social and citizen groups are one, and it is the conservative Governor who suggests that if the Osprey are so safe they could be deployed to Hibiya Park or Shinjuku Gyoen. This is no longer an opposition movement but a prefecture in resistance, saying “No.” Japanese history has no precedent for this.

There is of course much more at stake than the Osprey. The Okinawan movement that says “No” to the Osprey says “No” also to the Futenma substitution project at Nago and “No” to the Osprey Helipad construction project at Takae. It also is deeply sensitive to other signs of intention to militarize the Southwestern islands in general and turn it into a front-line of confrontation with China: to construct a new (Self-Defence Force) base on Yonaguni, to have US and Japanese forces gradually merge and share the existing bases (in the name of “bilateral cooperation”), and to turn Shimojishima airport on Miyako Island and Mageshima in Kagoshima Prefecture into bases.

When the DPJ abandoned one by one its 2009 electoral pledges and began to morph into a clone LDP, mainland Japan sank into a stupor of political disillusion, but Okinawa returned to struggle with renewed energy...

Today’s Okinawa struggle is a root a struggle over how Japan is governed and how it should be governed. In a rapidly changing world in which the US is losing both its economic and its moral authority, how can it be in the national interest for Japan to cling to its client state dependence on the United States and to steadily militarize? The anti-militarist Okinawan struggle constitutes a precious resource, pricking the national conscience and spurring mainland Japan to greater civic courage...

Gavan McCormack is a scholar specializing in East Asia and a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. His recent books include Client State: Japan in the American Embrace and Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (excerpted today at APJ.

Satoko Oka Norimatsu and Gavan McCormack: Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States

Via Satoko Oka Norimatsu:

Please allow me to announce the publication of my book with Gavan McCormack: Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, by Rowman and Littlefield, July 30, 2012.

I hope this book will be useful for our cause of bringing justice to Okinawa.

Description:

Resistant Islands offers a comprehensive overview of Okinawan history over half a millennium from the Ryukyu Kingdom to the present, focusing especially on the colonization by Japan, the islands' disastrous fate during World War II, and their subsequent and continuing subordination to US military purpose.

Adopting a people-centered, view of Japan’s post Cold War history and the US-Japan relationship, the authors focus on the fifteen-year Okinawan struggle to secure the return of Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, situated in the middle of a bustling residential area, from US to Okinawan control. They also highlight the Okinawan resistance to the US and Japanese governments’ plan to build a substitute new base at Henoko, on the environmentally sensitive northeastern shore of Okinawa. Forty years after Okinawa's belated "return" to Japan from direct US rule, its people reject the ongoing military role assigned their islands, under which they are required to continue to attach priority to US strategy.

In a persistent and deepening resistance without precedent in Japan's modern history, a peripheral and oppressed region stands up against the central government and its global superpower ally. One recent prime minister who tried to meet key Okinawan demands was brought down by bureaucratic and political pressure from Tokyo and Washington. His successors struggle in vain to find a formula that will allow them to meet US demands but also assuage Okinawan anger. Okinawa becomes a beacon of citizen democracy as its struggles raise key issues about popular sovereignty, democracy and human rights, and the future of Japan and the Asia-Pacific."

Okinawa becomes a beacon of citizen democracy as its struggles raise key issues about popular sovereignty, democracy and human rights, and the future of Japan and the Asia-Pacific.

Endorsed by Noam Chomsky, John Dower, Norma Field, Sun Ge, Glenn Hook and Ron Dore:

Resistant Islands is a tour de force—not only a stunning introduction to the resilience and vision of the people of Okinawa but also a devastating critique of official Tokyo’s obsequiousness to dictates emanating from Washington.

— John Dower, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Marilynne Robinson: "The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century."

While on sabbatical in Canterbury in the 1980's, American novelist and essayist Marilynn Robinson was shocked to learn that, during that period, the largest known source of radioactive contamination of the world's environment was Great Britain. For decades, the UK has been discharging nuclear waste from Sellafield, a nuclear weapons and nuclear waste reprocessing complex, into the Irish Sea. The complex, located in a national park (which includes the Lake District) on the northwest coast of England, just south of Scotland, has been storing tons of nuclear waste in an open pit which Robinson calls "the world's nuclear dustbin."

The writer explored her findings in a long essay, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution. Robinson maps out historical threads between the abuse of state authority and power, predatory capitalism, and exploitative, throwaway attitudes that prioritize profit before human lives and the natural environment. Robinson specifically charts the movement from the pre-Elizabethan Poor Laws to state-sponsored industry in the UK.

This revelatory book, published in 1989, was essential reading before the Fukushima era: to enlighten us to the realization that many nations have been nuking themselves and the entire world via radioactive nuclear waste emissions on a daily basis for decades (as well as via the 2,083 "test explosions" conducted in their own backyards or "colonies").

Long before the the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq on the basis of nonexistent WMD and the preoccupation with possible issues with Iran and North Korea, Robinson questioned the rationality of fears over potential nuclear weapons capabilities and deployment, in light of widespread inattention regarding ongoing nuclear hazards, including the continuous dumping of radioactive nuclear wastes into the Irish Sea at Sellafield.

She concludes, "It is a very comfortable thing to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made—that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century."

Sellafield Nuclear Plant is visible from much of England''s Lake District National Park. 

(Photo: "National park groups welcome decision to ditch nuke plants"(Oct. 18, 2010, Grough.co.uk)

In the first part of her prescient and essential book, Robinson describes the layers of history that resulted in the creation of the radioactive nightmare known as Sellafield, located in an otherwise idyllic backwater of England:

:...the largest commercial producer of plutonium in the world and the largest source, by far of radioactive contamination of the world's environment, is Great Britain...The primary producer of plutonium and pollution is a complex called Sellafield, on the Irish Sea in Cumbria, not far from William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage. The variety of sheep raised in that picturesque region still reflects the preference of Beatrix Potter, miniaturist of a sweetly domesticated rural landscape.

The lambs born in Cumbria are radioactive. This fact is ascribed to the effects of the Russian nuclear accident at Chernobyl, but Sellafield is so productive of contamination that there is no reason to look elsewhere for a source. Testing of lamb and mutton was only undertaken some months after Chernobyl, though the plant at Sellafield routinely releases plutonium, ruthenium, americium, cesium 137, radioactive iodine, and other toxins into the environment as part of its daily functioning. The fact that food had not been tested systematically in an area whose economy is based on the production of food as well as the production of plutonium is characteristic of British policy, wherever there is a potential impact of industrial practice on public health.

It should be noted that the plant at Sellafield was built by the British government. It was developed and operated by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, and then given over to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, a company wholly owned by the British government. It should be borne in mind that the plant receives waste and reprocesses plutonium for profit, to earn foreign money...

The plant is expanding. Wastes from European countries, notably West Germany, and from Japan are accumulating there, while the British develop means of accommodating the pressing world need for nuclear waste disposal. Their solution to the problem amounts to extracting as much usable plutonium and uranium from the waste as they find practicable and flushing the rest into the sea or venting it through smokestacks into the air. There are waste silos, some of which leak uncontrollably. In an area called Driggs, near Sellafield, wastes are buried in shallow earth trenches. Until the practice was supposedly ended in 1983 by the refusal of the National Union of seamen to man the ships, barrels of nuclear waste were dropped into the Atlantic. In other words, Britian has not solved the problem of nuclear waste, but has in fact greatly compounded it, in the course of producing plutonium in undivulged quantities...

And then the British are not especially fortunate. Sellafield has had about three hundred accidents, including a core fire in 1957, which was, before Chernobyl, the most serious accident to occur in a nuclear reactor. Sellafield was called Windscale originally, until so much notoriety attached itself to that name that it had to be jettisoned. That an accident-prone complex like this one should be the storage site for plutonium in quantity is blankly alarming...

Robinson questions appearance and realities of "democracy" in the UK and other parts of the world in which a tiny minority makes decisions affecting entire populations, largely without their knowledge or input. These decisions made on the basis of exorbitant taxpayer-enabled profit; the nuclear industry would not survive without government subsidies and protections

For thirty years a pool of plutonium has been forming off the English coast. The tide is highly radioactive and will become more so. The government inspects and plant and approves the emissions from it. The government considers the plant poorly maintained and managed, and is bringing pressure to lower emissions. The government is expanding the plant and developing another one in Scotland. Foreign wastes enter the country at Dover and are transported by rail through London..Whose judgment and what reasoning lie behind these practices and arrangements? The question is never broached...

No hearing will ever convene to assess the wisdom of shipping radioactive wastes through a populous capital, or dumping them into the sea, or extracting weapons materials from them to be shipped by air into Europe, and through North America to Japan...

This book is essentially an effort to break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us...

I am so angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured...This book is written in a state of mind and spirit I could not have imagined before Sellafield presented itself to me, so grossly anomalous that I had to jettison almost every assumption I had before I could begin to make sense of it...I must ask the reader to pardon and assist me, by always keeping Sellafield in mind—Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world's natural environment, and bomb-grade plutonium into the world's political environment. For money.

...For decades, the British government has presided over the release of deadly toxins into its own environment, for money, using secrecy, scientism, and public trust or passivity to preclude resistance or criticism and to quiet fears...

If Americans have heard about Sellafield nuclear waste dump and plutonium factory, they have heard the name Windscale, which appears from time to time with little or no elaboration in lists of nuclear accidents. The Windscale fire of 1957, which for our purposes is the history of the public-relations strategies surrounding the event, bears an uncanny, not to say unnerving, similarity to the recent accident in the Ukraine. Windscale was the most serious accident in a nuclear reactor before Chernobyl. It occured in a graphite-moderated reactor with the sole function of producing plutonium for British bombs...

The clientele of Sellafield is a Who's Who of technologically advanced countries: Japan, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, and Sweden. France has its own pipeline into the sea at Cap de la Hague on the English Channel...

According to the New Scientist, in 1986 the Central Policy Planning Unit of the Ministry of the Environment suggested that "it would be prudent to place restrictions on any development along and off the coast near Sellafield which could disturb the concentrations of radioactivity building up in mud and silts."

In her concluding words, Robinson links Sellafield with parallel nuclear history affecting other backwaters throughout the globe. It took more than Chernobyl, it has taken Fukushima, to awaken a majority of citizens in Japan to understanding and action. Fukushima families follow Cumbrian families who raised money to purchase their own Geiger counters because they cannot rely on the UK government's radiation monitoring. At intervals over thirty years, they protest and strike. Yet, most people worldwide know nothing about the suffering of the residents who live daily with plutonium and other nuclear radiation from a nuclear complex in one of England's tourist destinations.

Maybe the beaches at Sellafield had begun to glow in the dark. Islands in the Pacific that were used for atomic testing glowed for years, and contamination levels at Sellafield are like those at testing sites.

...the world's public arrives at this parlous moment with a grinding history behind it, badly educated, starved of information, full of sad old fears and desperate loyalties, injured in its self-regard, acculturated to docility and stoicism...There is no agora, where issues are really sorted out on their merits and decisions are made which, at best and worst, give permission to political leaders to carry our policies the public has approved. This model assumes information of a quality that is by no means readily available to us. It assumes a reasonableness and objectivity which allow information to be taken in and assimilated to our understanding, and in this we are also thoroughly deficient...

My greatest hope, which is a very slender one, is that we will at last find the courage to make ourselves rational and morally autonomous adults, secure enough in the faith that life is good and to be preserved, to recognize the grosser forms of evil and name them and confront them...We have to...consult with our souls, and find the courage, in ourselves, to see, and perceive, and hear, and understand.

-JD

Terry Tempest Williams on living with radiation from the 1,000+ nuclear bomb explosions in North America

(Image: Richard Miller, “Areas crossed by two or more radioactive clouds during the era of nuclear testing in the American Southwest, 1951-62” in Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (Two-Sixty Press, 1999))

When Terry Tempest Williams began her soul-searching chronicle that explores how her family, friends, and community members lived with the environmental, psychological and health consequences of the thousand nuclear test explosions in the American Southwest (most Southerners don't even know this, but Mississippi was also nuked twice), she felt unheard and unseen. Then she visited Hiroshima, and upon meeting other survivors of nuclear radiation, no longer felt alone.

Her 20-year-old memoir, Refuge, is more relevant than ever, after Fukushima. An excerpt from her last chapter, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women":

Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine, I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert—that this image had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

"You did see it," he said.

"See what?"

"The bomb. The cloud...

I stared at my father.

"I thought you knew that," he said. "It was a common occurence in the fifties."

It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother—members, years later, of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.

It is a well-known story in the Desert West. "The Day We Bombed Utah," or more accurately, the years we bombed Utah: above ground atomic testing in Nevada took place from January 27, 1951 to July 11, 1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering "low-use segments of the population" with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks, but the climate was right...

Much has been written about this "American nuclear tragedy." Public health was secondary to national security...

Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in spite of burns, blisters, and nausea, "It ihas been found that the tests may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions prevailing at the bombing reservations." Assuaging public fears was simply a matter of public relations. "Your best action," an Atomic Energy Commission booklet read, "is not to be worried about fallout."

...The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons is the same fear I saw in my mother's body...

My father's memory was correct. The September blast we drove through in 1957 was part of Operation Plumbbob, one of the most intensive series of bomb tests to be initiated. The flash of light in the night in the desert, which I had always thought was a dream, developed into a family nightmare. It took fourteen years, from 1957 to 1971, for cancer to manifest in my mother—the same time, Howard L. Andrews, an authority in radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation cancer requires to become evident...

One night I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert. They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its phases. They mocked presumption of even-tempered beings...

- Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, 1991

Hirose Takashi: Fukushima Meltdown: The World's First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster available on Kindle

Fukushima Meltdown: The World's First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster

After the Great Tohoku Earthquake and the tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed, veteran anti-nuclear power writer Hirose Takashi, in a passion of despair and anger, wrote the book Fukushima Meltdown in about six weeks or less, which was published by Asahi Shinsho and became a national best seller in Japan.

A group of us decided that it was vital to get this book out in English, and we formed a translation team, trying to learn from Hirose's passion of energy.

As of 19 September 2011 the book has become available online at Amazon Kindle Books, under the title Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster.  

As you know, we are not going to learn what happened at Fukushima by reading the mainstream media, or by studying the pronouncements of the Japanese Government and TEPCO.  For people who want to know what went wrong at Fukushima, what went haywire with the media, and what is likely to happen next in earthquake-prone Japan, I think this is a must read.  If you agree, please send this information along to any person or group that you think might be interested.  Thanks!

C. Douglas Lummis, for the translation team

John Einarsen's In the Realm of the Bicycle up for People's Choice Award!

 Congratulations to John Einarsen for the nomination of his recent book of photography, In the Realm of the Bicycle, for a People's Choice Award.

The photographer (and KJ's founding editor, stylish art director) uses photography as a medium to expand and deepen perception. In this book, the focus is bicycles in Japan's ancient capital, but the field of vision is infinite:

Each encounter I had with a member of this vast race revealed an individual with a personality all its own, the result of a history at once common and mysterious. Inevitably, I came to see them as they really were: creatures who populated the niches and nooks and corners and alleys of neighborhoods and streets and lives....

Most of the images in the book were taken in Kyoto over the years.

Cycle Kyoto adds this note:

Each photo in In the Realm of the Bicycle is a haiku, a brief fleeting moment that contains a larger truth.

To view a sample some of the pages, go to: blurb.com.

The cover of In the Realm of the Bicycle is by long-time KJ graphic designer Tiery Le.

The Kyoto Journal: Perspectives From Asia (a/k/a KJ) emerged from Kyoto's international cultural milieu during the 1980's; the iconic English-language quarterly will embark a new incarnation online in September.

John Einarsen: In the Realm of the Bicycle

John Einarsen says this about his new book of photographs:

Each encounter I had with a member of this vast race revealed an individual with a personality all its own, the result of a history at once common and mysterious. Inevitably, I came to see them as they really were: creatures who populated the niches and nooks and corners and alleys of neighborhoods and streets and lives....

Most of the images in the book were taken in Kyoto over the years.

Cycle Kyoto adds this note:

Each photo in In the Realm of the Bicycle is a haiku, a brief fleeting moment that contains a larger truth.

To view a sample some of the pages, go to: blurb.com.

John Einarsen is the founding editor & art director of Kyoto Journal, an iconic English-language quarterly that emerged from Kyoto during the 1980's, about to embark a new incarnation online.

The cover is by Tiery Le.

Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa reading at the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday, May 7, 2011

(Joy Kogawa beside the old cherry tree at the family home where she lived her first six years, before her family's forced removal and detainment with other Japanese Canadians during World War II. Photo: Kogawa Homestead)

)Japanese Canadian writer Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan, the classic novel on the Japanese North American World War II-period forced removal and detainment will be in Los Angeles at an event held at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Saturday, May 7, 2011:

8+1: A Symposium: Voices from The Asian American Literary Review is a day-long celebration of Asian American literature and Asian American writers. Featuring paired readings and Q&A sessions by established and emerging authors whose work has or will appear in the pages of the literary journal The Asian American Literary Review.

Readers include Joy Kogawa, Kip Fulbeck, Rishi Reddi, R. Zamora Linmark, Reese Okyong Kwon, Viet Nguyen, Hiromi Itō with translator Jeffrey Angles, Ray Hsu, and Brian Ascalon Roley.

Community sponsors include the Japanese American National Museum, the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California Irvine, Poets & Writers, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA English Department and the UCLA Friends of English, the USC Asian American Studies Program, the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association Giant Robot, Hyphen Magazine, Audrey Magazine, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, the Asian American Journalists Association's Los Angeles Chapter, and Philippine Expressions Bookshop.

Come to any or all of the readings; stay and get your books signed by the authors. Free to the public. For more information about the Asian American Literary Review, visit www.aalrmag.org/.

More on Joy Kogawa at this TTT post originally posted at the Kyoto Journal website, "Repairing Broken History: Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa's childhood home in Vancouver saved."

8th Anniversary of Global Protest Against Iraq War—Relook at Phyllis Bennis' Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, & the UN Defy U.S.

Thousands in NYC protest the Bush administration's planned invasion of Iraq war on February 15, 2003. (Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton, via Common Dreams)

On February 15, 2003, tens of millions of people, on the streets of 600-800 cities worldwide, co-created the largest anti-war demonstration in history to protest the US/UK invasion of Iraq.

Among the people who marched for peace: 3 million in Rome • 750,000 in London • 50,000 in Glasgow, Scotland • Between 100-200,000 in Paris (total of 500,000 in 80 cities in France) •  Between 300-500,000 in Berlin (joined by Germans in 300 cities and towns, including trade unionists and church leaders •  100,000 in Brussels •  10,000 in Warsaw • 150,000 in Athens • 80,000 in Lisbon • 60,000 in Oslo • 60,000 in Stockholm & Gothenberg, Sweden • 100,000 in Montreal •  80,000 in Toronto • 40,000 in Vancover (& more in 67 other Canadian cities) • 300,000 to one million in NYC • 50,000 in LA • 4,000 in Colorado Springs (withstanding violence from police using tear gas, stun guns and batons) • 100-300,000 in Damascus • 10,000 in Beirut • 5,000 in Jordan • 25,000 in Tokyo, followed by another 5,000 the next day (including protests at some of the 100 US military bases located in Japan and Okinawa-- where the U.S. train and station troops before deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan) • 10,000 in India • 3,000 in Seoul • 20, 000 in Cape Town, South Africa • 200,000 throughout Australia • 10,000 in New Zealand.

As global mass protests shake up Empire as usual—on the 8th Anniversary of Global Protest Against Iraq War—we're taking a relook at Democracy Now!'s Feb. 15, 2005 "Look at Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, & the UN Defy U.S. Power" by Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who advises we must work to stop upcoming wars before they start.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis has a new book, arguing the anti-war movement has evolved into a major force for global change. The book is called Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power...

PHYLLIS BENNIS:...We didn’t succeed at stopping the war. But I think that would be a very partial assessment. What was created—and it wasn’t only around February 15, but that emerged as the centerpiece of this extraordinary global mobilization—was an exemplar of what it’s going to take to challenge this global drive towards empire, this drive towards war that has been so characteristic, not only of the Bush administration, but in a far more blatant and aggressive way than we had ever seen before.

It was an amazing thing, because I think what was so important was not only that you had so many people in the streets in so many different cities mobilized under one slogan in so many different languages—"The world says no to war"—but it was powerful enough that governments around the world were forced, for a combination of reasons, the pressure of their own citizens being the most important, but for their own opportunist reasons, as well, to do the right thing, even if, for the wrong reasons sometimes, to stand up to the U.S., to refuse to give in to the pressure that not only the powerful countries like France and Germany, but smaller, weaker countries, those on the Security Council, the six so-called uncommitted six, that refused to give in to U.S. pressure, under enormous threats. Chile, Mexico, Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Pakistan. These were not countries that could ordinarily go head to head with the U.S. When there were enough of them, it forced the U.N. to do what the U.N. is supposed to do, but so rarely does, which is to stand against what its own charter calls the "scourge of war."

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis, I wanted to stop you for a second on the issue of the U.N. Security Council right before the invasion, which goes to another controversy that the Bush administration is trying to deal with right now, and that’s the issue of domestic spying, the idea of spying on Americans.

PHYLLIS BENNIS:: Right.

AMY GOODMAN:: But we saw this before the invasion, and that was on the U.N. Security Council members.

PHYLLIS BENNIS:: That’s correct.

AMY GOODMAN:Can you remind us what happened?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: That’s right. In the months leading up to what was hoped by the Bush administration to be a vote on a real resolution endorsing the war, a vote they were never able to get, they were spying—the way they’re spying on the American people now, they were spying on every major country in the United Nations. They were spying on U.N. missions, on U.N. ambassadors, on cars, perhaps on the U.N.’s own territory, something which is not new. We know there has been spying on U.N. delegates ever since 1948—sorry, 1945, when the U.N. was first created. But this was an extraordinary blatant effort to find out what delegations were thinking and figure out ways to pressure them.

But we know it didn’t work, and I think this is what’s important about that mobilization. It wasn’t able to succeed at making this war globally acceptable and legal. That was what the Bush administration desperately wanted, and that’s what they failed to get, because the U.N. refused to vote to endorse the war, because government stood against it, and crucially, because there was this global movement that brought millions of people, somewhere between 12 and 14 million people, what the Guinness Book of World Records said was the largest global mobilization in history. It brought those people into the streets to say no to war. And that meant that when they did launch the war, there was no question around the world that this was an aggressive, illegal war.

And the question of how to mobilize against it was put much more on the agenda. Now, of course, the challenge for us is to figure out how to make real, when the governmental opposition has collapsed, the U.N. opposition has collapsed—what we have left is the most important centerpiece, the global people’s movements against this war, how to remobilize them to take up the demand to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq, bring all of the troops home now at a time when we know there’s going to be troop withdrawals. They will probably be on a large scale but will not lead to an end to occupation, and at a time when we have to be mobilizing to prevent the expansion of the war into Iran in the face of these extraordinary threats that are going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis, you met with Kofi Annan, the U.N. Secretary General; Harry Belafonte; and South Africa’s, well, former Archbishop, Desmond Tutu?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: On the morning of February 15, before the demonstrations began, we had an extraordinary moment when that small group went to meet with Secretary General Kofi Annan on the 38th floor in his office at the United Nations, only moments before the rally was to begin downstairs on that freezing cold New York day. And Bishop Tutu opened the meeting, and he said to his old friend—the two Nobel Laureates, African statesmen, who had worked together for so many years—he looked at Kofi Annan across the table, and he said, "We are here today on behalf of the people that are marching in 665 cities around the world. And we’re here to tell you that those people marching in all of those cities, we claim the United Nations as our own. We claim it in the name of the global mobilization for peace."

It was an extraordinary moment. It was the last thing Kofi Annan wanted to hear, at a moment when he was under such enormous pressure from the United States to put the U.N. on the side of the U.S. war. But he refused and ultimately did say the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegal. We have to reclaim that role for the United Nations. It didn’t last long. It was a blink in history. It was an eight-month moment, when we had the countries, the governments and the U.N. on the side of this popular mobilization, but it’s that three-part mobilization—people, governments, and the U.N.—that we’re going to have to rebuild to stop the war that’s going on now, to prevent the next war that’s emerging as we speak...

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's just-released To the Diamond Mountains sheds much-needed light on the Korean peninsula's past & present

Released on November 16, Tessa Morris-Suzuki's To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred-Year Journey through China and Korea could not be more timely.

Korea scholar Alexis Dudden gives this description:

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is the most important writer of Northeast Asia today.

Told through a historian's eyes and with a humanist's compassion, To the Diamond Mountains achieves an artful balance between the geopolitical concerns swirling around the region and the lives lived there now, particularly among North Koreans. The book lucidly blends together ancient pasts with present realities, presenting a subtly powerful case that those who would fail to understand the layers of Northeast Asia's deeply interwoven whole are playing with fire.

To sample this travelogue/history that creates an illuminating, multi-dimensional portrait of Korean peninsula, read an excerpt at The Asia-Pacific Journal.

(Diamond Mountain (Kŭmgangsan) is one of the best known mountains in North Korea. Its name means "a firm heart in the face of truth." Between 1998-2010, Pyongyang allowed South Korean tourists to visit (by ship and bus) the craggy, wild, relatively untouched scenic area. In 2002, North Korea separated Diamond Mountain from Kangwŏn Province and created a a separately-administered tourist region, allowing South Korean conglomerate, Hyundai, to operate hotels there. Over a million South Koreans visted the area, but in 2008, after a South Korean woman was shot, when she allegedly entered a military area, Seoul banned further travel there. In 2010, after South Korea blamed the North for the mysterious sinking of the Cheonan, Pyongyang seized the South Korean hotels.)

The Practice of the Wild featuring Gary Snyder comes to NY starting Nov. 10

John J. Healey's The Practice of the Wild featuring deep ecologist and poet-essayist Gary Snyder and author Jim Harrison comes to NY this month.

There will be a screening at the Jacob Burns Film Center on Wednesday, November 10. The second event will be an opening night screening at the Quad Cinema (13th Street in Manhattan between 5th & 6th Avenues) on Friday, November 12.

The San Francisco International Film Festival description:

The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.

So writes legendary Beat poet Gary Snyder in his influential 1990 collection from which this celebratory documentary takes its name and finds its restoring rhythms of nature, image and word. Occupying a hallowed yet humble position within the realms of poetry, academia, ecological activism and spiritual practice, Snyder has distinguished himself among peers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac by becoming both a countercultural hero and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Director John J. Healey skillfully intertwines the many fascinating aspects of Snyder’s journey through nature and across the page, sagely pairing the poet with his cantankerous compadre and fellow scribe Jim Harrison. Together, the two old friends roam the verdant hills of the central California coast, musing eloquently and with hard-won wisdom and earthy humor on Bay Area bohemia, Zen Buddhism and the morally charged interdependence of all living things.

Whether reminiscing about a camping trip with Kerouac, recalling the writing of his seminal Turtle Island or being held by his ankles and dangled over a cliff in Japan as a test of truth-telling, Snyder is a warm and captivating presence.

“Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight,” the poet tells us, and true to his ageless inquisitiveness, The Practice of the Wild seeks out and finds so much more.

KJ's biodiversity issue features Snyder's seminal "Ecology, Place and the Awakening of Compassion" (first published in Buddhist Peace Fellowship's quarterly, Turning Wheel):

Oecology, as it used to be spelled, is a scientific study of relationships, energy-transfers, mutualities, connections, and cause-and-effect networks within natural systems. By virtue of its finding, it has become a discipline that informs the world about the danger of the breakdown of the biological world. In a way, it is to Euro-American global economic development as anthropology used to be to colonialism. That is to say, a kind of counter-science generated by the abuses of the development culture (and capable of being misused by unscrupulous science mercenaries in the service of the development culture). The word “ecological” has also come to be used to mean something like “environmentally conscious.”

Read Gary Snyder's entire essay — "Ecology, Place, and the Awakening of Compassion" — at KJ online at this page.

(Gary Snyder during his Japan years (1956-1964). Image: Modern American Poetry)

For more on Gary Snyder, see this comprehensive collection of background info at Modern American Poetry.

A set that includes The Practice of the Wild DVD and a companion book (The Etiquette of Freedom) is available at online book dealers for around $US20.

Gavan McCormack on the DPJ election: Kan victory only postpones crisis over unwanted US bases in Okinawa

From Gavan McCormack's "The US-Japan 'Alliance', Okinawa, and Three Looming Elections" posted last week at Japan Focus:

The second looming election is that for leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan, which because of the party’s majority in the House of Representatives carries with it the office of Prime Minister. Scheduled for 14 September 2010, current Party leader (and Prime Minister) Kan Naoto confronts challenger Ozawa Ichiro.

The two candidates contested Okinawa, in particular Futenma policy. While both had been notably silent during the fierce trans-Pacific exchanges that eventually brought Hatoyama down (save for Ozawa’s enigmatic rhetorical question late in 2009: “Is it permissible to bury that beautiful, blue sea?”), once the Hatoyama surrender deal of May 2010 was in place, Kan clung to it and accused Ozawa of causing “confusion” by wanting to revisit it. In essence, however, both presented a study in ambiguity: Kan insisted on honouring the Agreement while “reducing the base burden” on Okinawa and declaring that he would “not make a decision over the heads of local residents.” Somewhat remarkably, he was reported as saying, “I am fully aware that the agreement is unacceptable for the Okinawa people.” Ozawa struck a similar note, saying that the Agreement had to be revisited, because “[w]e cannot carry out the current plan as it is due to opposition from Okinawa residents,” though he admitted he had no clear idea of how to revisit it. He seemed puzzled that Japanese leaders were apparently incapable of speaking their mind when meeting with US government officials. At that level, both were saying they would do what the agreement with the US required to be done but would not do it forcibly. This could only mean that it would not be done at all, under either, but given US pressures they could not bring themselves to say so.

It was the broader vision that Ozawa presented that filled Washington with fear and anger, as when he reiterated his controversial 2009 position that the US 7th Fleet home-based at Yokosuka should be sufficient to any Western Pacific security purpose, in which case not only Futenma but all other bases would presumably be returned to Japan (and Okinawa) as redundant. Washington’s “Japan handlers” could not tolerate this. They were presumably also less than happy when Ozawa made an offhanded comment that he “liked” Americans though he found them tansaibo or unicellular, a gentle way of saying rather stupid. When Ozawa took five plane loads of Japanese parliamentary and business leaders on a mission to Beijing shortly after the DPJ took office in 2009, Richard Armitage scathingly referred to “the Japanese People’s Liberation Army descending on Beijing.”

Washington’s hostility to Ozawa was reflected throughout almost the entirety of the Japanese national media. In sharp contrast to the irresponsible and corrupt profligacy of successive Japanese governments (of which the Cabinet Secretary’s secret fund was characteristic), to which media and politicians readily turned a blind eye, actions by an Ozawa staffer, for which he himself denied personal knowledge, were trumpeted across the national media as corruption rendering him unworthy of public office.

Both Kan and Ozawa stressed the importance of the US relationship and were at pains to avoid anything that might be construed as serious doubt about the “alliance.” Neither could openly admit that the series of agreements between the two countries on the Henoko construction dating back to 1996 but culminating in May 2010 no longer made sense. Not only was it impossible to impose an unwanted base on Okinawa but the idea that the Marines played a crucial “deterrent” role, such that the peace and prosperity of East Asia somehow depended on them, when many of them were actually absent fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as of late 2009 there were only 14,958 US Marine Corps servicemen in total in Okinawa, with 9,035 family members. If 8,000 Marines and 9,000 family members were to be transferred to Guam as stipulated in the various Agreements, that would leave a few thousand Marines and no family members in Okinawa. It was laughable to suggest that their retention was crucial to the peace of the region, and perverse to ignore the fact that the Pentagon itself had decided to build its core Marine concentration for the Western Pacific and East Asia on Guam.

Neither Kan nor Ozawa could concede that the decision was not theirs to make because it was already being made by Okinawans. Neither had any answer to the problem. An Ozawa victory would lead to an immediate “crisis” as he would be obliged to return to the status quo of the Hatoyama government as it took office in 2009, i.e., to summon Washington to the negotiating table, while a Kan victory would postpone the crisis while he exhausted every possibility of “persuasion” and then began to take steps towards implementing the Agreement. In other words the 14 September DPJ choice (so far as the “alliance relationship” and the Okinawa issue was concerned) was to face the crisis immediately or to postpone it.

It is also worth noting that part of Ozawa’s proposed alternative was for the Japanese Self Defense Forces to assume responsibility from the US for the defence of Okinawa and other island territories. The idea that a Japanese military presence might be acceptable in Okinawa where an American was not has a certain superficial attraction, but was based on ignorance of the deeply anti-military sentiments of Okinawans, who remember many centuries of peaceful coexistence with China and have little if any of the mainland sense of “China threat” while their memory of being exploited and betrayed by the Japanese military in 1945 is seared deep into the Okinawa soul. An expanded SDF military presence might therefore stir just as much opposition as an American Marine one.

Read the entire analysis of the Nago election, today's DPJ election, and the upcoming Okinawan gubernatorial election (and exploration of catastrophic environmental and biodiversity consequences here. McCormack also explores the castastrophic environmental and biodiversity consequences (destruction of unique habitats and extinction of species) inherent in the U.S-Japan military expansion proposals for Okinawa and Guam.


(For comprehensive background on the strange, unequal relationship between Washington and Tokyo, read Gavan McCormack's 2007 Client State: Japan in the American Embrace. Glenn D. Hook: "Gavan McCormack's important new book on Japan as an American 'client state' sheds a penetrating light on the seismic changes to have affected the country in the early years of the twenty-first century, thereby exposing how the American embrace of Japan has become increasingly stifling.")

Richard Rhodes's The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World without Nuclear Weapons

Richard Rhode's latest book, The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World without Nuclear Weapons, was published today.

In time to provide hopeful background to the latest nuclear news: The UN is asking Israel for openness about its secretive nuclear weapons program. Iran began loading fuel in its first nuclear power plant (under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an arm of the UN). Sudan has announced plans to build four nuclear power plants. The Obama administration is working to persuade reluctant Republican senators to ratify the US-Russia New START treaty. Japan admonished India over possible future nuclear test bombings, as the former competes with the U.S. France, and Russia for Indian nuclear plant contracts. The U.S. renamed the Nevada Test Site (the Rhode Island (or Okinawa-sized) tract of land where it detonated over 1,000 nuclear bombs) the Nevada National Security Site.

The Twilight of the Bombs is the last volume in Rhodes's quartet of histories about nuclear bombs:

The book examines the post-Cold War years after 1991, securing the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, the first Iraq War, nuclear proliferation, North Korea, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the run-up to the second Iraq War and the prospects for nuclear abolition. With the completion of this last volume, my quartet of nuclear histories, The Making of the Nuclear Age, will comprehend the story of the introduction of a historic new technology across more than one hundred years.

Arsenals of Folly, a third volume of nuclear history that follows my The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), was published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2007. It carries the story of the superpower nuclear arms race and the dangers and challenges of the Cold War from 1949 up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, focusing especially on the Reagan-Gorbachev decade of the 1980s.

The Twilight of the Bombs charts the roller coaster movement towards nuclear weapons disarmament from the collapse of the Soviet Union to Obama's Prague speech on April 5, 2010 in which he promised U.S. commitment to a "world without nuclear weapons." His words energized nuclear abolitionists preparing for the NPT Review Conference held in New York in May.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the center of international efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Ireland and Finland first proposed the treaty which came into force in 1970. The treaty allows the use of nuclear production of energy in return for controls of the importation/exportation of nuclear technologies and materials and imposes a legal obligation upon member states to eliminate their nuclear weapons arsenals through negotiations. 189 nations are party to the treaty, including the five major nuclear weapon states: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council). Four nations that possess nuclear weapons are not NPT members: India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. The last joined the treaty, but withdrew in 2003.

Related to the NPT are treaties prohibiting nuclear weapons testing. The Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) outlaws atmospheric, space, and underwating testing. The Threshold Test Ban Treaty (1974) outlaws underground tests over 150 kilotans. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) bans all nuclear explosions in all environments, for both military or civilian purposes. The U.N. General Assembly endorsed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996. The U.S. and China have signed, but not ratified the CTBT. After these countries ratify, and North Korea, India, and Pakistan sign and ratify the CTBT—it will go into force.

George Bush, who spoke of "World War III," seemed determined to destroy decades of movement towards nuclear weapons nonproliferation. The militaristic president withdrew the U.S. from the U.S.-Russia Anti-Ballistic Missle (ABM) treaty, the NPT (the 2005 Review Conference ended without an agreement), and the CTBT. The neocon's 2006 deal with India initiating nuclear energy cooperation overlooked its nuclear weapons proliferation and damaged the NPT regime. The Bush administration also championed the "nuclear renaissance," resurrected Cold War threats, revived the idea of tactical nuclear weapons, and continued to use the same depleted uranium weapons deployed during his father's and Clinton's administrations, by which time the adverse health effects of depleted uranium on U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians were well known.

Despite initial promise, President Obama's nuclear weapons policies have turned out to be a mixed bag. He proposed massive spending ($80 billion) to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but is also working to reverse Bush's legacy by reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and supporting the U.S.-Russia New START treaty which the Senate will vote upon in September. While disappointing nuclear abolitionists when his policies failed to match his flights of rhetoric, Obama did participate in the 2010 NPT Review Conference.

Historian Lawrence Wittner, author of Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Disarmament Movement covered the ups and downs of this event in "What's Next for the Nuclear Disarmament Movement," posted at Foreign Policy in Focus:

Reflecting on the contrast between the Obama administration's nuclear abolition rhetoric and its record, Kevin Martin, executive director of America's largest peace organization, Peace Action, concluded that supporters of a nuclear-free world needed to wake up to the reality that the administration's nuclear disarmament activities were going to be quite limited without very substantial movement pressure.

"Obama is in a way being held accountable to expectations he himself raised," Martin remarked, "when in fact it appears all he ever had in mind was a return to the modest, incremental arms reduction treaties of the 1980s and 1990s, not a serious push toward eliminating nuclear weapons."

In this context, peace and disarmament groups would have to take a more proactive role, endorsing incremental measures while, at the same time, keeping the idea of nuclear abolition at the forefront of public discussion...

In specific terms, this approach will probably mean that the nuclear disarmament movement will back U.S. Senate ratification of the New START Treaty and of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and oppose congressional funding of the administration's nuclear "modernization" plan, while steadfastly championing the opening of negotiations for a nuclear abolition treaty. If the conference on a Middle East nuclear-free zone gets off the ground — and it might not, given strong Israeli government resistance — the movement will almost certainly support that venture as well.

Can this mixture of somewhat mundane incremental steps and a dazzling long-range vision — the vision of a nuclear-free world — be sustained?  It will require activists willing to put significant efforts into securing immediate gains on the road to their long-term goal, and vigorously champion their long-term goal as they engage in immediate struggles. Over the course of history, this has always been a tricky balancing act for social change movements. But with wise leadership and a committed following, there is no reason that the nuclear disarmament movement — which, after all, has campaigned against the bomb, with some effectiveness, for 65 years — cannot manage it in the future.

Rhodes shares Wittner's measured optimism and explores successes in nuclear abolition in Twilight of the Bombs: The collapse of the Soviet Union transformed one single nuclear state into four: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan; however effective diplomacy resulted in the new nations surrendering their nuclear weapons to Russia. South Africa voluntarily gave up its nuclear arsenal.

Rhodes also examines failures, such as the Clinton's administration's inability to secure Senate ratification for the CTBT. The historian details the Clinton's and Bush's negotiations with North Korea that resulted in the isolated nation's withdrawal from the NPT in 2003, followed by its first nuclear test in 2006. (North Korea subsequently shut down plutonium production in 2007 and destroyed the cooling tower at its nuclear weapons plant in 2008.)

Rhodes explores how Iraq, initially a nonproliferation success story after U.N. inspectors and Saddam Hussein himself dismantled Iraq's uranium enrichment program, was followed by Bush's 2003 invasion based on false claims of Iraqi WMD.

Despite the glacial pace towards nuclear weapons disarmament; the gap between U.S. rhetoric and policies; the proliferation of nuclear power as a source of energy; and the stubborn refusal of several nations (including volatile Israel, Pakistan, North Korea) to join the NPT, Rhodes believes that the world is moving in the right direction.

In a recent interview, Rhodes explains the universal scale of his soul-searching:

I've always felt that these four books that I've written are kind of a tragic epic of the 20th century. In the epigraph of my book it says, "Mankind invents the means of its own destruction."

And where does the human race go from that? We're still mixed in with all of that…Nuclear weapons are vast destructive forces encompassed in this small, portable mechanism. They have no earthly use that I can see except to destroy whole cities full of human beings.

The chronicler of this macabre history points to the U.S., the creator of nuclear weapons and apocalyptic policies such as MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) that fueled the nuclear arms race, as the only nation able to change the tragic direction of history it unleashed:

We’ve led the way in nuclear weapons, and now we have to figure out a way to lead in the other direction.

Nonviolent Pink Joan of Arc duo lead World Peace Now's commemoration of the 7th anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq this Saturday in Tokyo

"Pink Jeanne d'Arc" performance artists Kunihiko Ukai and Rena Masuyama, a/k/a "Momo Iro Jean," promise to liven up the event with their special celebration event against war...(Photo: Renaart.exblog.jp)

At this time of record military spending; the push for military schools, and obstinate military empire-building by a few very rich people against the wishes of the billions of peace-loving people in our world—the world more than ever needs a Nonviolent Pink Joan of Arc.

Performance artists Kunihiko Ukai and Rena Masuyama subvert the dominant Western paradigm (embodied in the original Joan of Arc who wielded a sword and killed in the name of God—in quest of power and territory) that violent force is the best way to acquire resources, land, and resolve conflicts. Of course—on an unevolved and morally challenged level— it makes some sense that nations that have no legitimate claim to territories would resort to violence—knowing that their positions would not be honored in civilized forums.

Rena Masuyama is the wife of Shiva Rei, a freelance journalist who reported from Iraq. Rei will be one of the speakers at Peace Not War, Japan's upcoming "Spring Love" event. Masuyama used to be part of a performance art peace group called the "Momoiro (peach-colored, as in the color of buttocks) Guerillas"—another subversive inversion of the the concept of the macho mindset that emotionally fuels the war paradigm. The "Momoiro Guerillas" had nothing (no ill will, no violent intent) to hide in contrast to armored, armed, and camouflaged guerilla warriors.

Pink Jeanne D'Arc will be performing at the World Peace Now event commemorating the 7th anniversary of the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq.

Thanks for the head's up to Martin Frid at his Kurashi--the "Eco" Blog:

Peace groups are gathering at noon in Tokyo on Saturday for a big anti-war event on the 7th anniversary of the Iraq War.

The booths with information as well as rally speeches start at 13:00. Do join the parade, as they call the demonstration, starting at 15:00 from Shiba Koen.

There are events in the evening as well, with music and presentations.

Background on World Peace Now from Jennifer Chan's Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizen Education (short excerpt of interview with Machiko Hanawa):

World Peace Now (WPN) came into being as an amorphous network when youth-centered groups centered around CHANCE!pono2 and many civic groups (dominated by relatively older people) taking action against the attack on Iraq got together and organized the first demonstration on October 26, 2002. In that first attempt, eight hundred people joined.

WPN started as a broad coalition of individuals in citizens' groups, religious groups, and international NGOs who have agreed on four principles: no more war, opposition to the war in Iraq, opposition to the Japanese government's support and cooperation for the attack on Iraq, and nonviolent action. There were some thirty organizations at the beginning, but currently the number has increased to fifty.

Until this kind of coalition came into being, many NGOs in Japan focused on a single theme and acted separately. In order to overcome this, we requested the participation and self-expression of NGOs in different fields, including Peace Boat and Greenpeace Japan. In this way, on Jan. 18, 2003, before the start of the attack on Iraq, seven thousand people participated in the demonstration in Tokyo, and fifty thousand people joined on March 21, 2003, right after the attack was started. After December 2003, when the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) joined the occupation of Iraq, opposition to the occupation of Iraq and immediate withdrawal of SDF became WPN's demands.

In March 2004, the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, WPN also joined the international antiwar action again. This time, 130,000 people in 120 places across Japan marched on the streets.

A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency & A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change

"The world itself has a role to play in our awakening. Its very brokenness and need call to us, summoning us to walk out of the prison of self-concern."

-- Joanna Macy

In a new book and recent declaration, Buddhist leaders are urging people to pay attention to and work individually and collectively to end global warming.

Editors John Stanley, David R. Loy, and Gyurme Dorje bring together voices of the world's leading Buddhist teachers in A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency, released by Wisdom Publication in August to precede the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The Dalai Lama, Robert Aitken, Gyalwang Karmapa XVII, Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Chatral Rinpoche, Sakya Trizin, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanna Macy, Joseph Goldstein, Lin Jensen, and others address ending energy waste; deforestation; reforestation; renewable energy; and breaking the addiction to fossil fuels––within a framework of interconnectedness; individual and collective responsibility; and awakening awareness.

An excerpt from Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche's "Minimum Needs and Maximum Contentment:"

All religions are based upon principles that constitute an ethical way of life. Our current lifestyle does not uphold the human spirit and does not support an ethical way of living. In response, religions around the world must advance a strong spiritual approach to climate change based upon common principles of an ethical way of life: we are not against wealth or business in themselves. We simply point out that that it’s good for business to lose a bit of that excess weight. It’s good for business to make a positive contribution to the world. And it’s good for individuals to examine their own consciousness in terms of what sustains them while living on this planet.

The karma of global warming is not nature turning against us—we have turned against ourselves. We are doing something hostile to nature. It is not that “God has turned against us”— Hurricane Katrina was a manifestation of global warming. If we wish to avoid such disasters, we have to take corrective measures now. Our climate itself is now in our own hands.

An excerpt from Ringu Tulku Rinpoche's "The Bodhisattva Path at a Time of Crisis:"

When society degenerates, the world becomes worse. Peoples’ negative emotions and actions become raw, aggressive, greedy, and deluded. Environmental damage accumulates, militarism and war come to the fore, disease, famine, and diminishing lifespan begin to increase. Excessive greed causes us to disrespectfully take everything from the earth or sea, while ignoring the pollution we cause. This collective negativity harms ourselves, of course, and in the case of global warming, the damage will extend long into the future of ourselves and others. Consumerism relies upon fundamental confusion, amplified by advertising. The resulting over-consumption sows the seeds of self-destruction, as we can now see in the Arctic. The sea ice has melted so much that there is a waterway all round the top of the world. Instead of taking urgent stock of what this may mean for the survival of the world we know, the neighboring countries have started to fight about who gets any oil reserves beneath the ocean.

Emptiness, interdependence, impermanence, and the dreamlike nature of things do not prevent us from taking altruistic or positive action. It may be like a dream, but it still affects beings… If there is environmental or climate collapse, everybody will assuredly be affected — some more, some less, but there will be an unprecedented negative impact. Clearly it is a vitally important bodhisattva activity to prevent a universal disaster like the collapse of our living world.

The Ecological Buddhism: A Buddhist Response to Global Warming website's "Buddhist Climate Project" webpage provides more information and excerpts; and the accompanying "A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change:"

In the run-up to the crucial U.N. Climate Treaty Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, the Declaration that follows will present to the world's media a unique spiritual view of climate change and our urgent responsibility to address the solutions. It emerged from the contributions of over 20 Buddhist teachers of all traditions to the book A Buddhist Respose to the Climate Emergency. "The Time to Act is Now "was composed as a pan-Buddhist statement by Zen teacher Dr David Tetsuun Loy and senior Theravadin teacher Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi with scientific input from Dr John Stanley. The Dalai Lama was the first to sign this Declaration. We invite all concerned members of the international Buddhist community to study the document and add their voice by co-signing it at the end of this page...

Repairing Broken History: Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa's childhood home in Vancouver saved

What this country did to us, it did to itself.

But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms. Love flows through the roots of the trees by our graves.

– Joy Kogawa, Obasan, 1981

The real-life drama to save the Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver reached its climax at on April 28, 2006, with The Land Conservancy of British Columbia deciding to take a mortgage to buy the house after not yet raising the necessary funds for purchase and restoration.

The Land Conservancy (TLC) is preserving the house as a memorial of the Canadian treatment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Kogawa, the daughter of an Anglican priest, was six-years-old when she and her family, including her brother, Timothy, now also a priest, were forced from their home during the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Canadians. TLC also wants to offer the house to writers-in-residence who have survived human rights abuses.

Joy Kogawa responded to the news:

What the house means to me — these days it's a sense of miracle that surrounds me.

The fact of The Land Conservancy coming along and taking this on, the fact that it just happened to be that Naomi's Road was made into an opera at this time, that Vancouver Public Library chose Obasan as the One Book for Vancouver – these were miracles enough, without it all happening at this particular time…

When we look at the uncaring in our planet, here is evidence that relationships can be rehabilitated, the formerly despised can be embraced. The dream that writers who are presently among the despised of the world, can come and write their stories here, fills me with even more hope.

Racism is a present tragedy in the world, as it has been in the past. Here is one small way that we can say in Canada, that racism can be overcome.

Joy Kogawa is the internationally renowned second-generation Japanese Canadian author of a series of novels that provide insight into the experience of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II. Her first novel, Obasan, an allegorical narrative about the Japanese Canadian experience, centers upon a young girl, Naomi, who survives sexual assault by a white neighbor, loses her mother, is forced to leave her home during the relocation, and is separated from her father when he is sent to a forced labor camp.

Cared for by her aunt, Obasan, and her uncle, who both stoically suffer in silence, and also by her Aunt Emily, who speaks out fearlessly and engages in political activism, Naomi survives and begins a journey of healing, informed by both her aunts’ responses to trauma. She transforms from a child stricken by emotional repression of suffering into an adult who struggles to face painful memories before being reborn as an advocate for truth and justice. To arrive at this place of psychological empowerment required Naomi to face harsh realizations, including the discovery that her mother, who traveled to Japan prior to the relocation, had died in the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.

Kogawa's second novel, Emily Kato, reflects upon how seeking justice as a political activist facilitates personal as well as collective healing, in a recounting of the Japanese Canadian quest for justice through an apology and reparations.

These narratives parallel the real life of Joy Kogawa, who emerged from her interrupted childhood and her troubled young adulthood onto the world stage as a prophetic literary and public moral voice.

Obasan, published in 1981, was the first by a Japanese Canadian to explore the wartime relocation experience.

Both Canadians and Americans have adopted it as the classic literary representation of the North American relocation and incarceration experience, requiring it for both university and high school reading. Translated into Japanese, it is a poignant narrative of their North American diasporan Nikkei experience. Kogawa adapted the story for Naomi’s Road, a children’s version. Last year, the Vancouver Opera created an operatic interpretation.

Kogawa’s rich synthesis of Buddhist and Christian imagery brings to mind the Japanese Christian novelist Shusako Endo’s greatest work, Deep River. Both authors treat the theme of divine abandonment. They both draw on water symbolism as a means of communion: Japanese family bathing in Obasan to losing one’s ego-centered self in the Ganges in Deep River. Both fuse parallel Buddhist and Christian motifs into an all-embracing vision of humanity's suffering and search for meaning, community, and love.

The motherless heroine, Naomi, presents a poignant and challenging counterpoint to the world’s best-known Canadian literary figure, Anne of Green Gables, another orphan, who is beloved in Japan.

TLC's initial campaign to save the Joy Kogawa house targeted individual donors to raise the purchase amount In April, a final drive to save the house received attention in Canada and in Japanese American circles, including the Nichi Bei Times, the oldest Japanese American newspaper. When donations were insufficient, TLC launched a last-minute appeal to the Canadian government which did not respond with an immediate promise of assistance so it was uncertain whether the house would be saved or not.

The Canadian government has not supported memorialization of Canada's forced removal, detainment and deportation of Japanese Canadians to the extent that the U.S. government has for Japanese Americans. People living in democratic nations tend to take their civil liberties for granted and assume that human rights is a problem “out there,” and are often oblivious to the historical human rights skeletons and spectres of contemporary civil rights abuses rattling loudly in their own backyards.

Slocan City, an abandoned ghost town in the interior of British Columbia, where the Canadian government deported Joy and her family, all Canadian citizens. Little remains of Slocan (and other Japanese Canadian prison camps) today. After the war, Ottawa did not preserve Slocan as a memorial park. (Image: Kogawa Homestead)

While at least the contours of the wartime forced removal and detainment of 120,000 Japanese Americans are well known (although the worst details remain obscured – high school and university textbooks make the incarceration seem more like a summer camp experience), few outside of Canada know that Japanese Canadians, most of them naturalized or Canadian-born citizens, were also removed from their homes and incarcerated. The reason that the Canadian government gave for the wartime forced relocation of 22,000 Japanese Canadians on the Pacific Coast was “national defense.”

In photographs of the Nakayama family—Reverend Nakayama, wearing an Anglican priest's collar; Mrs. Nakayama, smiling; and two small children, Tim and Joy—this family look like top candidates for the least-likely in Canada to aid wartime Japan’s anti-Christian militarist government that had created its own state ultra-nationalist religion.

The reason commonly given for what happened to Nikkei in North America was “wartime hysteria,” bringing to mind images of widespread panic. This was not the case. Instead, a small group of virulently racist British Columbia politicians, long looking for an excuse to expel Japanese immigrants from the west coast, seized their chance when war broke out, cynically and shrilly proclaiming a threat of Japanese invasion. Senior Canadian military officers and civil servants countered: arguing against the forced removal, on the grounds that Japanese Canadians did not pose a threat. However, racist politics won out against reason.

What happened to Japanese Canadians in Canada happened in stages—starting with curfews, interrogations, the closure of Japanese language newspapers before the relocation began. The Canadian government first targeted male non-citizens, followed by male citizens, and finally women and children (who did not know what had happened to their disappeared sons, husbands, and fathers).

As Kogawa recounts in Obasan:

None of us escaped the naming. We were defined and identified by the way we were seen. A newspaper in B.C. headlined, "they are a stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada." We were therefore relegated to the cesspools.

“Excremental assault,” a practice also used in Nazi death camps, was indeed what happened to the women and children. They were sent to Hastings Park Manning Pool, a maggoty livestock pen smelling of urine and manure that the Canadian government converted into a holding pen for human beings. Open troughs became toilets. Cattle stalls became living quarters. Some of the later “internment” housing included former chicken coops. Forcing innocent women and children into animal pens could only have had one motive: degradation, humiliation, and demoralization.

Men were separated from their wives and children “to prevent further propagation of the species,” and sent to road camps to as forced laborers to work on roads and railroads.

These practices were so inhumane and abusive that they can only be construed as intentional psychological and physical violations, motivated by racism. This was a state-perpetrated hate crime with long anti-Asian roots.

The Canadian government also confiscated Japanese Canadian property, selling it at rock-bottom prices. Joy Kogawa’s brother, Reverend Timothy Nakayama describes the selling of their father’s church:

It must have been decided that our removal from along the Western Coastal 100-mile zone would be permanent, because while we were in "camp", all our property was sold by the government's "Custodian of Enemy Alien Property".

The Anglican Church, Diocese of New Westminster, must have come to the same conclusion, because the new Church of the Ascension, kindergarten building and property were sold to a pharmaceutical firm. All the buildings including the new Church were razed, to be no more. A place for the cure of souls became the location of a medicine factory.

The Canadian government's final plan, at the end of the war, was to deport all Japanese Canadians, including Canadian-born and naturalized citizens (most who could not speak Japanese) to defeated, bombed and starving Japan.

However, public support for Japanese Canadians had been building in the East throughout the wartime period. A few political leaders, joined by Christian organizations, created even more momentum by publicizing the atrocious treatment of detainees. To the credit of ordinary Canadians, widespread protests erupted against Ottawa's calls for wholesale deportation of citizens of Japanese heritage succeeded.

However, West Coast residents were not allowed to return home until four years after the war ended, in 1949. The Canadian government wanted to impede Japanese Canadian community and political empowerment. Removal and detainment; loss of property and income; and forced dispersals throughout Canada did succeed in destroying the original West Coast Japanese Canadian communities. Most Japanese Canadians now live in eastern Canada.

Japanese Canadians (and others) were told that racism was their fault because they failed to "assimilate" into the Anglo-Canadian culture. Only if they totally assimilated (whatever that meant), would they be given equal opportunity in Canadian society.

Celebrated in literary circles, Obasan won numerous awards. The power of the “freeing words” of this book was in large part responsible for the move towards reparations in Canada. Parts of Obasan were read aloud in the Canadian House of Commons when the 1988 restitution to Japanese Canadian survivors was announced, after Prime Minister Mulroney formally apologized.

In a 2002 interview, Kogawa explained how some Japanese Canadians abandoned their ethnic heritage because of their “camp” experience while others became more activist, joining with Native Canadians:

Japanese-Canadians who went through the political process of attempting to publicize their story and gain redress would have developed political wings, a new form of consciousness.

After the redress movement, many joined in alliance with native peoples and created an identification and moved on in a kind of solidarity. There are others who continued to move away from their origins, to dissociate themselves from everything poor and downtrodden in an attempt to become as rich as possible.These are psychological realities common to many immigrants. When the mainstream identifies any group as less than desirable, then you have that gap, and have to overcome that gap one way or another.

What happened to Japanese Canadians might be forgotten and dismissed as a wartime anomaly of otherwise democratic Canadian history, instead of a chapter consistent with Canada's struturally racist history. However the telling of this history by Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki, and other Japanese Canadian poets, writers, visual artists, performing artists, political activists, scholars, and ordinary people keeps this history alive and relevant. Japanese Canadians have joined with indigenous Canadians to address injustice:the National Association of Japanese Canadians dedicated a portion of the 1988 redress to establish the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, identifying the situation of Aboriginal Peoples a high priority, because Japanese-Canadians also understand the links between racism and loss of land in the Canadian context.

The Canadian government officially adopted a multicultural policy in 1971. However, unacknowledged racist history and contemporary issues remain a part of the Canadian landscape. Doudou Diene, the U.N. inspector who last year criticized Japan, did the same with Canada in 2003, recommending government reparations to Chinese Canadians and to African Canadian former residents of a Nova Scotia community, Africville. Diene’s report also called for a national commission to fight ongoing discrimination.

Prodded by the grassroots and outside criticism, the Canadian government is making efforts to conform to its multicultural persona. In April of this year, the government has responded to Chinese Canadian call for redress; immigrants were made to pay an excessive tax simply because of their heritage.

As Kogawa tells us in Obasan, "Don't deny the past. Remember everything.... Denial is gangrene.”

We are living in a time in world history when people are speaking out about the interrelated broken history we've all inherited demanding attention. This past is not “out there,” but inside of us, in our lives now, and a legacy that we pass down to our children. Joy Kogawa's novels are luminous examples of the genre of broken history, a genre that makes up much of contemporary world literature.

Last year, Vancouver Public Library selected Obasan as the book all people in Vancouver should read.

Todd Wong describes a reading:

When asked what was happening with the Kogawa homestead in Vancouver's Marpole neighborhood, Joy replied: "When we rediscovered it was still there, Tim and I tried to buy it but we didn't have enough money, so I let the idea go. When Roy Miki organized the reading at the house, it was very special. I was very excited to see the cherry tree again."

Then Joy held up a little plastic bag and said "Seeds from the cherry tree," as she smiled broadly.

Todd Wong says, “The Kogawa House at 1450 West 64th Avenue has become symbol of hope, and has also become a pilgrimage site for many readers of Obasan and Naomi's Road - not only for elementary, highschool, college and university students, but for people from around the world. It has been compared to Anne of Green Gables House in Prince Edward Island, and Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Joy Kogawa, forced from her home by her own government at age 6, has come "home."




(For further reading, Ann Gomer Sunahara charts this history in The Politics of Racism published online. Stephanie Bangarth's Voices Raised in Protest explores how some Canadians resisted the removal, detainment and deportation of their fellow citizens of Japanese heritage. More photos of Slocan City at Vanishing B.C., a website chronicling vanishing historical sites.)

Originally posted at the Kyoto Journal website