Chinese farmers protest state seizure of land

Similarly to nomads in Tibet,  Chinese farmers are protesting state seizure of their land.

In Communist China, the state legally owns all the property, but this has not stopped Guangdong farmers from protesting recent seizures and demolitions to make way for government projects.

20th Sunagawa Aki Matsuri remembers past struggles as it celebrates autumn

The soaring birds seem to ask:
Who created borders between countries?
Grass, birds, humans…
All are the same living beings.

Yesterday, in a tiny park located within the western metropolitan Tokyo city of Tachikawa, a collection of artists, musicians, political activists, local food growers, and community folks of all ages gathered for the 20th annual Sunagawa Aki Matsuri (Autumn Festival).

While the food stalls, children’s games, and overall festive atmosphere may have made the event appear to be just like any other neighborhood gathering, in fact there was a deeper story lying underneath the surface. Put in context of events occurring in the same vicinity 54 years earlier, the energy of the festival resonated with what might be described as pain that has been transformed into joy.

In October 1956, in land adjacent to the park, a collection of farmers, students, Buddhist monks, and other sympathetic citizens gathered to stop a group of surveyors and police officers who had come to measure the land for expansion of the nearby Tachikawa Airbase. The facility served as a launchpad for U.S. B-29 bomber planes, and plans were afoot to swallow up even more local farmland surrounding the existing base. When the protesters refused to back down, police began attacking them with batons. 500 people were wounded, resulting in a national outcry. Three days later, largely as a result of this fallout, the government canceled the surveys.

Dennis Banks, a Native American organizer and co-founder of the American Indian Movement, was stationed at the airbase at the time and witnessed the bloody melee of officers brutalizing the defenseless crowd, which included students as well as monks rhythmically beating their drums. When I had the fortune to speak with him several years ago in Hiroshima, he told me that this experience had had a huge impact on his psyche—and was one of the factors that helped lead him away from the U.S. military and into a life of activism.

The organizers of the Sunagawa Autumn Festival include several people who vividly remember the protests, and who view the event as a chance to help keep history alive. One such person is Katsuko Kato, the founder of the watchdog group Tachikawa Self-Defense Force Tent-Mura (known simply as Tent-Mura, or "Tent Village"). In 2004, three members of the organization were arrested and prosecuted after placing anti-war flyers in the mailboxes of a Japanese Self-Defense Force housing unit. Despite eventually losing at the Tokyo High Court to charges of trespassing, members still remain determined that peace and justice will prevail.

One case in point: at the edge of the park stands a small sign stating that the land is government property and not to be trespassed on. Holding the annual autumn festival there, as well as growing vegetables year-round in the adjacent field, therefore serve as small acts of civil disobedience on the part of organizers. Even in the face of government opposition, they continue to utilize the land to farm in peace--the natural, life-affirming purpose for which they believe it was always intended.

The daikon radish leaves rustle in the blue sky:
Autumn has arrived in Sunagawa.
Even the persimmon trees in the park
Beckon smiling visitors
As they continue to yearn for a true peace.

Left: Panel display featuring this year's festival theme of U.S. military bases in Okinawa

Right: Dancers dressed as yanbaru kuina (a bird native to the Yanbaru forest of Okinawa, which is now under threat of U.S. military construction of helipads for Osprey helicopters)

For more on the history of the Sunagawa Struggle, see this excellent article by Hasegawa Kenji.

--Kimberly Hughes

Poetry is from the Sunagawa Aki Matsuri event flyer (translations are my own).

Photos by Ishihara Mikiko
Text by Kimberly Hughes

Coalition of homeless, activists, and artists rally to save Tokyo's Miyashita Park from NIKE demolition

Photo: Irregular Rhythm Asylum blog

Prevent NIKE’s commercial exploitation of public land!
Together, we can stop the construction before it starts! 　

On March 10, 2010, the Shibuya Park Division announced that the Shibuya Ward Assembly’s Urban Environment Commission gave the green light to construction that will lead to the all-out conversion of Miyashita Park in Tokyo’s popular Shibuya district by sporting goods giant NIKE.

Miyashita Park is one of the few large public parks in the very crowded metropolitan Tokyo area. For years it has been used as a safe spot for homeless people to gather, as well as a launching ground for protest rallies and other grass-roots gatherings. Loss of this public space will seriously threaten the ability of countless homeless persons in the Shibuya area to survive, as well as prove detrimental to citizens' rights to free assembly.


According to the official governmental report, the scheduled project plan is as follows:

- Mid-March: Total closure of the Harajuku section of the park
- March 24: Briefing by NIKE for local residents
- April 1: Commencement of construction to convert the park (*to date, this has not started due to protest actions. Ongoing resistance is therefore now critical!)
- Late April to late July: Construction to install a new skateboarding facility
- August to September: Construction to install a new rock climbing wall
- End of October: Construction ends
- Early November: Opening of the new park

Under a contract signed between the mayor of Shibuya and the chairman of NIKE, the company will be responsible for paying all construction costs (estimated at approx. 4 to 5 hundred million yen, or 4.5-5.5 million US dollars), as well as an annual fee of 17 million yen (approx. 187,000 US dollars) payable to Shibuya Ward for a 10 year lease to the naming rights for Miyashita Park, which will allow NIKE to rename the (formerly) public space ‘Nike Park’. By this arrangement NIKE is being availed of, at a very low cost, an expansive swath of land located in one of the most valuable commercial districts in the world.

"Doite" in Japanese means "Get out of the way"

Since the signing of the contract in August of last year, growing numbers of local residents, park users, and concerned citizens have expressed their opposition to the plan. Thus far, organized protests have successfully resulted in the stalling of the scheduled park construction. (Coverage of the situation in late 2008 is available here.)

Despite the strength of this opposition, both Shibuya Ward and NIKE are adamant about pushing ahead with the plan. The Shibuya Ward Assembly is currently reviewing a new “Ordinance for the Administration of Sports Facilities in Miyashita Park”, along with amendments to the “Shibuya Ward Public Parks Ordinance” in order to give full legitimacy to the creation of ‘Nike Park’.

From the time that the plan to turn Miyashita Park into Nike Park came to light in May 2008, the Coalition to Protect Miyashita Park has been tirelessly working in pursuit of a singular goal: Shibuya Ward’s abandonment of this project. A Global Day of Action was held at the park on March 31st, with solidarity actions taking place overseas in such countries as Australia, France and Thailand. Young artists and activists continue to converge at the park daily, putting on various programs such as film screenings, crafts workshops, discussions, and other events.

The Japan Times recently ran an article detailing the issue, and here is a video with background information about the project featuring the voice of Naomi Klein, author of the classic brand exposé No Logo:

Links with more information:

* Nike Politics

* Founding Statement by the Coalition to Protect Miyashita Park

* Call for the 2008 International Day of Action

* The Coalition to Protect Miyashita Park (Japanese)

* NIKE　BOYCOTT　CAMPAIGN (Japanese)

Raise your voice and let NIKE know that you don’t believe public land should be exploited by corporate entities—especially when that land was obtained through undemocratic processes, without any public hearings or input.

NIKE CORPORATION (World HQ)
Phone: 1-503-671-6453, +1 503 671 2635,
Fax: +1 503 646 6926, Fax
Email: info@nike.com
E-mail: http://swoosh.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/swoosh.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

NIKE JAPAN
Phone: +81-3-5463-3300
Fax: +81-3-5463-3295

SHIBUYA MAYOR Toshitake Kuwahara
Phone: 03-3463-1234 ext.2454 - 7
Fax: +81-3-5458-4900
E-mail: mayor@city.shibuya.tokyo.jp
The Coalition to Protect Miyashita Park from Becoming Nike Park
Contact: Toshiro Ogaki, nojiren (at) jca.apc.org


Translation: Rayna Rusenko

Arundhati Roy on the new global conquistadors: violent grabs for remaining indigenous lands & "resources"

We hear reports about Indian farmers committing suicide from debt; militarized police forcing indigenous peoples from their forest homes that have been leased out to mining companies; cruel caste discrimination and the usual images of hundreds of thousands of starving children and elders in India--worsened with India's so-called modernization.

Worldwide we hear parallel stories of devastated lives and suicides because of debt resulting from predatory banking; militarized police enabling land grabs in indigenous lands; and record rates of hunger worldwide.

Arundhati Roy no longer sees people as "Indian," "American," or "Chinese," because of the globalized nature of the latest forms of predation upon indigenous and marginalized people (now including the middle classes of "developed" nations). Instead she sees a world in which domestic colonization vies with imperial forms of colonization. In India and many other nations, corporate elites backed by their nation's military and police power, are preying upon the last lands of the world's remaining indigenous peoples.

From Christopher Lydon at HuffPost:"Arundhati Roy's Version of Disaster in 'This Year of India.'"

Arundhati Roy is giving us "the other side of the story" in this "Year of India" at Brown University and elsewhere. Media consumers in the US don't get it all in the TED talks, or in Nandan Nilekani's success epic, much less in Tom Friedman's relentless celebrations of the Bangalore boom in The New York Times.

I sat with Ms. Roy for an hour and a half near MIT last Friday -- first time since her book tour in another life, with the Booker Prize novel, The God of Small Thingsin 1998. This time she was just off a remarkable journalistic coup for Outlook India -- an "embedded" report from the so-called "Maoist" uprising in the Northeastern states of India, the rebellion that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India's greatest security threat and Arundhati Roy calls a battle for India's soul:

AR: What does the boom do? It created a huge middle class -- because India is a huge country, even a small percentage is a huge number of people -- and it is completely invested in this process. So it did lift a large number of people into a different economic bracket altogether -- now more billionaires in India than in China, and so on. But it created a far larger underclass being pushed into oblivion.

India is home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. You have 180,000 small farmers who've drunk pesticide and committed suicide because they've been caught in the death trap. You have a kind of ecocide where huge infrastructural projects are causing a drop in the water table. No single river now flows to the sea. There is a disaster in the making.

The way I see it, we had a feudal society decaying under the weight of its caste system, and so on. It was put into a machine and churned and some of the old discriminations were recalibrated. But what happened was that the whole separated into a thin layer of thick cream, and the rest of it is water. The cream is India's market, which consists of many millions of people who buy cellphones and televisions and cars and Valentine's Day cards; and the water is superfluous people who are non-consumers and just pawns who need to be drained away.

Those people are now rising up and fighting the system in a whole variety of ways. There's what I call a bio-diversity of resistance. There are Gandhians on the road, and there are Maoists in the forests. But all of them have the same idea: that this development model is only working for some and not for others.

CL: How do we Americans listen for a true Indian identity in this period of fantastic growth and, as you say, fantastic suffering?

AR: You know, I have stopped being able to think of things like Americans and Indians and Chinese and Africans. I don't know what those words mean anymore. Because in America, as in India and in China, what has happened is that the elites of these countries and the corporations that support their wealth and generate it form tham have seceded into outer space. They live somewhere in the sky, and they are their own country. And they look down on the bauxite in Orissa and the iron ore in Chhattisgarh and they say: 'what is our bauxite doing in their mountains?' They then justify to themselves the reasons for these wars.

If you look at what is going on now in that part of the world, from Afghanistan to the northeast frontiers of Pakistan, to Waziristan, to this so-called "red corridor" in India, what you're seeing is a tribal uprising. And it's taking the form of radical Islam in Afghanistan. It's taking the form of radical Communism in India. It's taking the form of struggles for self-determination in the northeastern states. But it's a tribal uprising, and the assault on them is coming from the same place.

It's coming from free-market capitalism's desire to capture and control what it thinks of as resources. I think 'resources' is a problematic word because these things cannot be replenished once they are looted. But that is really the thing. And the people who are able to fight are those who are outside of the bar-coded, cellphone-networked, electronic age -- who cannot be tracked and who can barely be understood.

It's a clash of civilizations, but not in the way that (Samuel P.) Huntington meant, you know. It's an inability to understand that the world has to change, or there will be -- I mean, as we know, capitalism contains within itself the idea of a protracted war. But in that war... either you learn to keep the bauxite in the mountains, or you're not going to benefit from preaching morality to the victims of this war. A victory for this sort of establishment and its army and its nuclear weapons will never be a victory. Because your victory is your defeat, you know?

More on these issues with an Indian focus in Amy Goodman's interview with Roy at Democracy Now.

Jeju Island, Korea soft coral habitat under threat of planned naval base construction

This 2010 video shows the soft coral habitat in the Gangjeong sea, which will be destroyed, if the proposed Jeju naval base proceeds.Jeju Island is a beautiful volcanic island south of Korea, with Mt. Halla--the highest mountain in all of South Korea--at its center. 12% of the island is covered by a Gotjawal Forest, a pristine, naturally formed forest habitat for unique and endangered plants and animals. Groundwater from Gotjawal is the main water source for the island's half millon residents.

In 2007, UNESCO named Jeju a World Heritage site:

Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes together comprise three sites that make up 18,846 ha. It includes Geomunoreum, regarded as the finest lava tube system of caves anywhere, with its multicoloured carbonate roofs and floors, and dark-coloured lava walls; the fortress-like Seongsan Ilchulbong tuff cone, rising out of the ocean, a dramatic landscape; and Mount Halla, the highest in Korea, with its waterfalls, multi-shaped rock formations, and lake-filled crater. The site, of outstanding aesthetic beauty, also bears testimony to the history of the planet, its features and processes.

Jeju is also a UN designated biosphere preservation zone with 137 designated cultural assets all over the island.

The southern coast of Jeju is home to the soft coral habitat in the video. In 2001, the Korean Cultural Heritage Administration designated it a national monument protection area. It appeared that the South Korean government recognized and valued the irreplaceable and unique natural beauty and traditional indigenous culture of Jeju.

However, in 2006, the South Korean government made another designation based on a profit rather than a preservation motive. It named Jeju a "free international city" to make way for gambling casinos and a naval base in southern Jeju intended to port U.S. and South Korean Aegis destroyers outfitted with missile defense systems that the villagers say will be used to surround China's coast--potentially making their once peaceful island a target if hostilities break out.

Peace activist Bruce Gagnon wrote in October at his blog that the South Korean government approached three villages about hosting the base. The first two turned the government down. So, in the case of the third village, Gangjeong, the government decided to offer bribes to some of the residents. Most of the residents remained opposed to the base, but the bribes created enough of a division to allow government to say they will build the base in this village:

The villagers of Gangjeong do not see the Navy base as offering them much. Their local economy is thriving from the tangerine groves that are everywhere in the town and from the abundant numbers of tourists who come there to experience the seaside. In fact the Navy base would take significant portions of their village land now used for farming and would destroy the environment. The rocky shoreline would be covered with cement and the proposed base pier would extend to the edge of where the fresh water Gangjeong River flows into the sea.

Kang, Dong Kyun, the mayor of the village and a key protest leader, told me that 70% of the drinking water for the community comes from the river and would surely be negatively impacted by the Navy base. Take away our water, he said, and you destroy the town.

Throughout the village you see many tall bamboo poles with yellow flags on them that say, "We desperately oppose the Naval base." But no one in the government wants to listen to them. They have tried all the usual steps of meeting with government officials, organizing protests, and they recently tried to recall their provincial governor in a special election but did not turn out a high enough percentage of voters to make the vote official.

Mayor Kang told me, "This is the land of our ancestors that we must pass on to the future generations. This village must not be used as a 'strategic' base but must be preserved. The government is dividing people against each other which is the worst thing of all. The long lasting people will ultimately win."

Sung-Hee Choi at Nobasestorieskorea.blogspot.com has been following the nonviolent protests of the villagers which include elderly people and tangerine farmers.

The South Korean government must be reminded of its own earlier acknowledgement and understanding of the reality of the irreplaceable value of Jeju Island's natural and cultural beauty, including the residents of Gangjeong. A guided missile base is going to destroy the soft coral habitat and living cultural treasures (the tangerine farmers & elders), and is not going to attract tourists.