Japanese government & media censor critical information about the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis

Satoko Norimatsu of Vancouver-based Peace Philosophy Centre is following the Japanese media coverage of the nuclear crisis and observes:

Hiroko Tabuchi and Keith Bradsher of The New York Times have been reporting things that Japanese media has failed to report. For example, yesterday, Tepco made 750 workers evacuate while 50 workers stayed behind.

The latest news says 5 workers have died of radiation poisoning since the quake. NONE of the Japanese government public press conferences TEPCO, and no Japanese media have reported this. what is going on? At recent TEPCO conference, officials said they did not rule out recriticality; some media are reporting but NHK has totally ignored it.

Incredible information control and manipulation is going on at this "critical" time.

Follow Satoko's updates on Twitter here.

Yumi Tanaka, director of the New York Peace Film Festival, is also concerned abou the free flow of information to Japanese people, and is posting at Twitter in both English and Japanese here.

Paul Arensen of the Tokyo Progressive posted on this pattern after the first explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power facility.

Tim Shorrock: South Korea admits to firing the 1st shot (during live-fire U.S.-S. Korea military exercises)

Most of the U.S. media is framing the tragic latest from the Korean peninsula as if N. Korea fired upon S. Korea out-of-the-blue. Few reports, if any, mention the important fact that this year, the U.S. and South Korea have been holding frequent (almost monthly since July) joint military exercises directed at North Korea.

Here's crucial context from Tim Shorrock in a recent Democracy Now interview:

AMY GOODMAN: The fighting came just days after was revealed North Korea had made rapid advances in enriching uranium at a previously undisclosed plant. For more, I’m joined by Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist who has covered Korea for more than 30 years and grew up partly in South Korea. Tim, welcome to "Democracy Now!" First, explain exactly what happened.

TIM SHORROCK: Over the last couple of days, the South Korean military, which is part of a joint command with the U.S. military, held massive exercises in a disputed area, near the disputed maritime zone area on the west coast of Korea. These exercises had been planned months in advance and North Korea of course knew about then. They involved tens of thousands of South Korean soldiers, many warships and air force planes as well as personnel from the U.S. Marines and Air Force. And these exercises, as you said, they are live fire exercises.

North Korea, shortly before, in the days leading up to these exercises, warned they would react if shells fell in their line of this maritime line, demarcation line, which they dispute and have disputed for years. Apparently, some shells did land on their side of this line and they retaliated by shelling this island and causing many, you know, some casualties. It was a very serious and grave incident that deserves the very serious and sober analysis, which we have not seen in the U.S. media in the past 24 hours. That is what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised by what has taken place? The media is making a great deal of the North Korean leader taking his young son, heir apparent on a tour of a soy sauce factory while this was going on.

TIM SHORROCK: You’re always kind of surprised when these things happen.

But in the context of the last 50 years, it is not really that surprising, particularly if you look at the maritime zone and particularly if you look at the history of U.S.-South Korean military and its standoff with the North Korean regime.

First of all, over the last few years, there has increasing tensions over this zone. As I said, this border area in the sea, this border line was imposed unilaterally by the U.S. Navy in 1953 right after the Korean war. That line has never been recognized by North Korea, nor by the international community.

A few years ago, under the former presidency of Roh Moo-Hyun, there was actually a meeting, a summit meeting, between the president of South Korea and Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea. They sat down and worked out sort of a set of agreements to try to decrease tensions in that maritime area, including the making of free fishing zones and having discussions to alleviate the attention to make sure there were no incidents like this.

This new president Lee is very conservative man who has rejected the former sunshine policies of Kim Dae-Jung and his predecessor, who were much more open and tried to cement closer relationships and end the enmity between North and South Korea. Lee unilaterally pulled away from this agreement.

And over the last few years, our listeners and watchers will remember, there have been quite a few incidents. Earlier this year, in March 2010, a South Korean naval ship was blown up allegedly by North Korea by a torpedo and sank, killing about 33 sailors. This was also a very serious incident. And many people who watch North Korea believe that that particular attack, if North Korea did it, was in retaliation for an incident that took place last year when South Korea fired on a North Korean ship that had crossed the line and many North Korean sailors were killed in that attack. And so you know this has been going on.

I think the first thing that needs to be done is it would be important to restore some kind of discussion, some kind of negotiation so they can reduce tensions in that specific area.

Read the rest of the interview here.

More important context (via Tim Shorrock's blog) by staff writer Son Won-je of the South Korean newspaper, The Hankyoreh:

North Korea’s artillery attack Tuesday on Yeonpyeong Island was a high-intensity military provocation without precedent since the armistice that ended the Korean War. Unlike previous military clashes over the year, private South Korean homes and civilians were subjected to an indiscriminate attack.

For the time being, North Korea is using South Korea’s military defense exercises as its rationale for the attack. On Tuesday morning, Pyongyang sent a message to South Korea criticizing the exercises as “effectively an attack on North Korea.”

The Hoguk Exercise in question involve 70 thousand South Korean armed forces troops, 600 tracked vehicles, 90 helicopters, 50 warships, and 500 aircraft. The U.S. military is contributing the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and 7th Air Force to the land and air training exercises, respectively. Pyongyang regards the exercises as training for an attack on North Korea, citing the fact that it is a large-scale joint South Korea-U.S. exercise encompassing naval fleets, air forces, and land exercises.

A former [South Korean] Navy admiral with experience as a squadron leader around the West Sea Northern Limit Line (NLL) said that Yeonpyeong Island “was probably chosen as the site for the attack because it is closest to the North Korea coast, allowing for easy firing and high precision.”

The former admiral added, “Given that civilian homes were also targeted, it is too deliberate to be viewed simply as a response to the defense exercises.”

Analysts have suggested that the different form of military behavior seen this time stemmed from an urgent situation within North Korea.

Korea National Defense University Professor Kim Yeon-su said, “There is a possibility that the reason North Korea has shown this pattern of provocation, ratcheting up the crisis index on the Korean Peninsula, has to do with some problem that arose in the establishment process for the leadership succession system.”

In other words, North Korea may have sensed a need to deal a high-intensity international and domestic shock in order to surmount the immense challenges presented in the succession system establishment process.

Observers predict that this attack will have the effect of increasing solidarity behind the Kim Jong-un system, which emphasizes songun, military first, domestic policy. This analysis suggests that North Korea may have been attempting to foment the belief that amid a situation of military confrontation with South Korea, there is no alternative to a response centered on the Kim Jong-un succession system, which has inherited Kim Jong-il’s songun policy.

Another possibility mentioned by analysts is that the attack was ultimately intended to promote and strengthen Kim Jong-un’s leadership by effecting changes in Washington and Seoul’s North Korea policy through hardline military measures.

The prevailing analysis is that the decision to wage an attack on the area near the West Sea NLL, coming on the heels of the sudden disclosure of a uranium enrichment facility recently to a U.S. expert visiting North Korea, carried the political message of “highlighting the seriousness of the political situation on the peninsula.”

An expert who requested anonymity said, “North Korea’s recent actions may in some respects be aimed at forming an environment favorable for negotiations in the long term, but at least in the short term they strongly suggest a show of force to indicate that Pyongyang is not going to be dwelling on negotiations.”

Another possibility mentioned by observers was that the move was based on the calculation that if North Korea ratcheted up the peninsula’s crisis index, the United States would inevitably be compelled to pursue negotiations with Pyongyang in order to manage the situation. In spite of North Korea’s recent “dialogue offensive,” Seoul has maintained the position that the resumption of large-scale aid and Mt. Kumgang tourism is an impossibility.

“Since the recent conciliation offensive spearheaded by the United Front Department did not work out, it may be the case that North Korea is trying to spark conflict within South Korea by using shock treatment methods to shake up South Korean society, thus pressuring Seoul into taking part in dialogue,” said an expert at one state-run think tank.

With this latest incident, the situation on the Korean Peninsula has plunged into a murky crisis where it is impossible to see what lies ahead. While the sudden revelation of North Korea’s uranium enrichment facility is likely to have more of a negative impact on the Northeast Asia situation in general than on inter-Korean relations, Tuesday’s artillery battle around Yeonpyeong Island is a major disaster that will deal a fatal blow to already strained inter-Korean relations. Depending on the way in which the situation unfolds, it could go beyond this to have a major impact on the political situation surrounding the peninsula.

Read the rest here.

"Connections become obvious when we destroy them" Winifred Bird on Biodiversity

Stewart Wachs of Kyoto Journal listens intently to Winifred's interpretation of biodiversity

What does "biodiversity" mean to you and me? Is it just another catch phrase for the corporate world to use in the mass media?

Or is it more?

With the intricate gardens of Eiun-in Temple painting a rich landscape behind her, Winifred Bird, a writer for Kyoto Journal, shares her awakening to the deep interconnections between the biodiversity of the natural world and the seemingly disconnected experience of human beings in today's societies at the Kyoto Journal Biodiversity Special Launch Party.

I’ve been thinking a lot about biodiversity lately. Actually, since last summer, biodiversity has pretty much taken over my life. Partly that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to be working on this great special issue of Kyoto Journal, and partly for a couple of other projects. I guess you could say I’ve hopped on the COP10 media bandwagon, but the funny thing is, I sometimes still don’t feel like I have a firm grasp on what biodiversity actually is and why it matters. This could have something to do with the fact that I haven’t formally studied biology since tenth grade, but I think a lot of the general public is also pretty hazy on the term, if they’ve heard it at all. It’s not one of those easy-access words like “nature” or “open space” or even “extinction,” that you hear and just immediately visualize. It’s not even really about individual species – a panda here, a tiger there - it’s about the whole picture, how everything works together and is connected, and for me, that’s been a hard thing to get my head around because it’s just so huge. But I had a bit of a biodiversity breakthrough earlier this summer that I’d like to share with you.

Around July I had a lull in my writing work, so I went up to Gifu to help my husband out with a project he was doing there. He’s a carpenter, and he was building a cabin up in this vacation development way out in the mountains near Gujo Hachiman, and to cut costs we were camping at the worksite. It’s a vacation area, so during the week the place is a real ghost town, and it became our own little world. One morning, we’d set up our breakfast table, which was actually a plank balanced on top of some boxes, and we were sitting across from each other drinking our tea, and suddenly it was just like I had fallen inside a cheesy love song. It just struck me that we were made for each other. Not just on a personal level, but on a biological one, the level of elemental man and woman. We fit together perfectly and we literally can’t live without each other, in the sense that we need each other in order to procreate our species. And the amazing thing is that this not only works on a utilitarian level, but this interdependence is also incredibly beautiful. It’s not only procreation, but also love. And then it hit me really strong that the same thing is true for the whole world – that the fox and the rabbit, the flower and the bee, everything, is made for each other, everything fits together in the most immense and beautiful pattern.

Of course, it’s the most obvious of clichés to say that we’re all connected and that that every piece of the puzzle matters. These are things that I know on an intellectual level, as I’m sure you all do, but how often is it that we really feel that connection? How often does the pattern flash before our eyes in all its Technicolor complexity? I said a second ago that it’s completely obvious that everything is connected, but in another sense it’s not obvious at all. It’s not like the connections are visible, like a giant string net tying me to that tree to that cat to that mosquito. My basic instinct, admittedly as an American and someone who’s neither a biologist nor a Buddhist, is to think of myself as an independent unit, rather than as part of something larger, a part that doesn’t work when it’s isolated from that larger picture.

The connections become obvious, of course, when we destroy them. When we hunt all the sea otters and then the urchins that they used to feed on explode out of control and eat the kelp forests where they live down to the nub, and then the fish that breed in these kelp beds decline and we go fishing and there aren’t any fish out there, then we understand that nature is a network where every piece matters. The trick is to see it before we’ve destroyed it, to somehow raise our awareness enough to protect what we’re used to taking for granted.

I was talking to a scientist recently who gave me another example of how we often don’t become aware of the value of biodiversity until a disaster strikes. His name is Thomas Elmqvist, and he teaches natural resource management at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University, and he’ll also be in Nagoya for COP 10 as part of the Swedish delegation. For about twenty years, Elmqvist has been studying a forest in Samoa where two different types of flying fox play a key role in dispersing seeds. Basically they eat tree fruit then drop the seeds throughout the forest. One species, the dominant one, did most of this work while the other was less abundant and played a fairly minor role in the forest.

In the early nineties, a major hurricane hit the forest and knocked down a lot of trees. What happened afterwards with the flying foxes is really fascinating. The dominant species went down to the forest floor to search for fallen fruit, and when these animals are on the ground they’re very slow, they kind of creep along, so this species was essentially wiped out by predators. Meanwhile, the subdominant species stayed up in the trees and survived by eating young leaves. When flowers and fruits started to appear in the remaining trees again, this formerly inconsequential flying fox was the one that was still around to carry on seed dispersal.

Elmqvist says he suspects that if there hadn’t been this diversity in the flying fox species – he calls it “response diversity within functional groups” – it’s quite likely many of the plant species in the forest would not have been propagated, and alien plant seeds would have blow in on the wind and been able to gain a foothold in the forest, possibly causing it to flip to a very different kind of environment. His point in telling this story was that diversity is what gives ecosystems their resilience when disaster inevitably strikes. It’s kind of like biodiversity is the ultimate life insurance policy: it ensures that in one form or another, life will go on.

But on a more basic level, what this story illustrates for me is that there is a whole lot of stuff going on in the natural world that I’m unaware of, yet completely dependent on for all sorts of goods and services. We don’t want to mess around out there too much. We don’t want to start saying, why do we need two kinds of flying fox? One is doing the job just fine. We’ve got to keep reminding ourselves of the limits to our own knowledge. At the same time we’ve got to keep trying to learn more and become more aware of how everything, including ourselves, is interrelated. Hopefully this issue of Kyoto Journal can be a part of that.

-Posted by Jen Teeter. (Thank you Winifred for sharing your speech with us!)

Karel van Wolferen: New U.S. military base construction at Henoko "not implementable"

In an interview with The Diplomat, Karel van Wolferen said that Washington unrealistically wants to go back to the days when the LDP rubber-stamped U.S. demands upon Tokyo. The Japan commentator goes on to say that proposed U.S. military expansion in Okinawa is not implementable:

Washington wants an administration like they had before, that will do what they say. Although of course the Liberal Democratic Party wasn’t doing that—they had a way of shoving it ahead of them. The LDP had been postponing this whole base plan for six years and they were going to postpone it further.

Why? Because it’s not implementable. That’s a very basic point, which the Tokyo-based media haven’t been sufficiently pushing because they haven’t been paying attention to Okinawa...

The most important thing to remember is that the LDP would not have carried out the Henoko relocation plan, because you can’t carry it out. It’s impossible. It also means that Naoto Kan’s cabinet could also be torpedoed by Washington. And it may well happen. Because Japan is not an ally of the United States—Japan is a protectorate.

He also notes that:

Twenty or 30 years ago there were quite a few American correspondents in Tokyo who had a pretty good historical background on the relationship, and they’d have put all this in perspective.

But today, the American media gets what they write about this from informants in Washington.

There are a couple of people in Tokyo, but they don’t bring the same kind of depth and understanding to it. Which means the story becomes the story that Washington wants people to see and read. And if you were the government in Washington, you’d want it to be like that. So in other words, there’s no countervailing interpretation of what’s going in Japan to what is coming out of Washington.

"Battleground Okinawa" — Sonia Narang reports on Okinawan opposition to U.S. military bases

For the most part, the English-language news media has ignored the voices of the people in the Okinawan struggle against Washington and Tokyo's imposition of military bases on their island. The focus, is, instead upon the interactions between Prime Minister Hatoyama and the Obama administration. This narrow approach effectively distracts their audience from the urgent and unanimous Okinawan appeal for no more bases.

Sonia Narang, a journalist with the Global Post defies this trend with her video report "Battleground Okinawa —Tensions between Locals and Political Leaders Rise over a US Miltary Base." In this seven-minute video filmed during Prime Minister Hatoyama's visit to Okinawa in the beginning of May, she outlines the situation in Okinawa through interviews with local people, Ginowan City Mayor Iha, U.S. military personnel, and academics, highlighting how policy leaders and U.S. military officials are out of touch with the day-to-day experience of Okinawans living near the bases.

One protester appeals for a base-free Okinawa for future generations

Mayor Iha expresses his disappointment over Hatoyama's broken promise to move Futenma Air Field out of Okinawa

A resilient protester dedicated to ensuring that Washington and Tokyo no longer force bases on Okinawa

The fragile ecosystem at beautiful Henoko Bay at risk from the U.S. military base expansion proposal

Fumiko Shimabukuro has been engaged in sit-ins at the relocation site for over 2000 days

Unable to live surrounded by noise pollution and fear caused by the Futenma Airfield, this

shop owner had no other choice but to move away

More protesters dedicated to the struggle for a base-free Okinawa until the end

Follow this link to watch the entire video.

Sonia's biography and her previous stories for Global Post can be found here:

Sonia Narang covers Japan for GlobalPost. She is a multimedia reporter who previously worked as a video journalist for NBC News, where she reported, filmed, and edited stories for the "Nightly News" and msnbc.com. She was also an associate interactive producer at the PBS international documentary program Frontline/World, where she reported an award-winning multimedia series in rural India. Sonia’s video and print work has also appeared in Forbes, the San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times Magazine. She has filmed and photographed throughout Asia, and she lived in Japan six years ago.

PBS broadcast "Battleground Okinawa" on "News Hour," its daily news program, and posted the video with a transcript at its website.

—Jen Teeter

Network for Okinawa & JUCON place full-page ad in The Washington Post

Via the Network for Okinawa:

A full-page ad calling for the closure of the Futenma Marine Corps base and no base relocation within Okinawa prefecture has appeared in The Washington Post on April 28. This ad appears in the wake of the April 25 demonstration of nearly 100,000 Okinawans protesting the planned base relocation.

“Would You Want 30 Military Bases in Your Backyard?” reads the headline of the ad. “The new base would damage the health and safety of people and threaten a unique ecosystem that contains many rare species. This includes the Okinawan dugong, an endangered cousin of the manatee.”

The sponsors of the ad, the Network for Okinawa and the Japan-U.S. Citizens for Okinawa network, want to send a message to the Obama administration that a significant number of Americans support Okinawan concerns about the environmental and social consequences of U.S. military bases on the island. The ad challenges the prevailing consensus in Washington that the Futenma base is essential to U.S. national security.

The full-page ad coincides with a letter sent to President Obama and Prime Minister Hatoyama, signed by more than 500 organizations, that demands the immediate closure of Futenma and the cancellation of plans to relocate it to Henoko Bay. The letter can read at this link.

NHK's "Korekara" focuses on the planned expansion of a US Marine base in Henoko--an ecologically sensitive area in northern Okinawa

From Martin Frid's Kurashi--News From Japan blog:

If you live in Japan, tonight's program at NHK starting Friday evening at 22:00 pm promises to be a very interesting show. The NHK Korekara is a debate program with a long history. They do their resarch and invite only the best to talk about the Korekara issues.

これから of course in the sense of "from now on" or "what's next" so it is very timely that NHK will devote this hour to Okinawa issues.

Living here, I just humbly wish this NHK show would be broadcast elsewhere as well, as an inspiration to all the peace activists around the world.

Do write and ask your local TV station to contact NHK and find a way to talk about this issue not only in Japan but everywhere else where American military bases are a part of the daily life. How many places? How many military bases does the United States of America have on foreign soil?

The NHK Korekara program is a standard feature with a long history. The producers and everyone will take great care to make a balanced, fair program that makes sense to Japanese viewers. I'm glad that people like long-time Japan resident Kimberly Hughes from US for Okinawa will participate. But I'm actually more interested in how NHK Korekara will portray and present the concerns of people in Okinawa, Japan. Stay tuned.

Live theater performers from Iraq and Tunisia bring deep emotion, human connection to Tokyo stage

While living in Tokyo for nearly the past decade as a community peace activist, I have had several opportunities to interact with people from Iraq (human rights journalists, pediatricians, and visual artists, to be precise) during their visits to Japan on grassroots-level exchanges organized by local peace groups. Each time, I came away from the experience with marvelous memories and new friendships.

Last week, a fellow member of the Iraq Hope Network alerted members to two short theater acts taking place at Tiny Alice, a cozy theater in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. The only available information was a short blurb including the names of the performers and the titles of their pieces: “Abu Ghraib Prison” from the Mustaheel-Alice theater troupe in Baghdad, Iraq; and “Woman Sindyan” from SINDYANA in Tunisia. Knowing from experience that this could be an opportunity for another interesting encounter, I headed together with one of my most engaged university students to check out the shows.

As we entered the diminutive theater, three foreign men who I assumed to be the Iraqi actors were standing in the doorway—one of them bedecked in all camouflage and wearing an extremely stern expression on his face. Still unsure of what to expect, my student and I took a seat in the only available spots, which were on the floor directly in front of the stage.

We soon learned from a pre-show announcement that the three men were in fact the play’s writer, director and musical composer, and that the show was inspired by the story of one of the writer’s friends—a musician who was jailed in Abu Ghraib Prison during the reign of Saddam Hussein. The play began shortly thereafter, immediately shocking the full range of our senses. The camouflaged man, who was clearly acting the part of the guard, cast a brutal gaze as the two prisoners writhed around on the ground, enshrouded alternately inside white sheets and silver tubing material. Also taking center stage were several musical instruments encased in chains and plastic wrap, which all three men took turns reaching for—and then violently throwing aside—to the backdrop of a screaming cacophony of dissonant music.


While the abstract, chaotic nature of the short work (as well as the fact that the only fleeting dialogue was in Arabic) precluded any fast conclusions about what precisely it might have been trying to convey, the general themes were hard to miss by virtue of their universal resonance: the pain and confusion of imprisonment; the resilience of the human spirit even in instances of severe repression; the blurred borders between captive and capturer.

The second work began after a brief intermission, when we were still reeling from the dramatic effects of the first. As it turns out, the Tunisian performance was in fact a one-woman show, with the actor embodying several personas—male in addition to female—and French phrases occasionally mixed in with the mostly Arabic dialogue. While the Japanese subtitles beamed above the stage were somewhat sporadic, we were able to understand that her various characters were expressing anger and indignation at certain times toward colonialist repression, and at others toward gender-based objectification. With a fire and passion that literally seemed to engulf the entire tiny theater house, the full range of characters and emotions embodied by this actor may as well have been those of an entire theater troupe.


The limits of language and theatrical understanding were finally transcended after the final curtain call, when all four performers immediately reassembled onstage for a fully interpreted discussion with the audience. We learned that the Iraqi prison guard had indeed been in character when greeting us at the door, as his previously steely expression had melted away to reveal an entirely different personage of warmth and friendliness. We also learned—as I had begun to suspect—that the Tunisian woman, Zahira Ben Ammar, was a well-respected, world famous performer.

“As actors, we serve as mirrors of society, expressing what is often left unsaid,” she told the audience. “As a female actor, I have the privilege of being able to express myself in ways that are normally not possible for women in other Arab countries. In addition, my show also tries to give voice to the profound pain that has touched all colonized peoples—whether in Tunisia, Gaza or Iraq. I suspect that some of these themes may also resonate with Japanese people, due for example to your painful history in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Anas Abdhul Sammad, the stage director for Mustaheel-Alice, continued, “The first time that I saw Zahira Ben Ammar perform, in Morocco, I was moved beyond words. I am not a person who cries much, but after seeing her I actually went back to my hotel room and wept. I knew that I wanted to bring her with me to Japan to share her work with audiences here, and I am so grateful that she took time out of her incredibly busy schedule to join us.

I would also add that at the same time as the theater allows us to express the deep pain of things like oppression and war, I also find it very disheartening that the television in other countries only shows things like bombs and violence. Of course this is happening and it’s real, but what the TV does not show is the reality of ordinary people living our day-to-day lives. We are one small acting company among countless others in Baghdad, and we try to use theatrical expression to portray various aspects of the human condition.”

Echoing Iraqi visual artist Qasim Sabti, he continued, “The profession of acting, which has been around since the age of Babylon, will long outlive technologies such as modern weaponry. It has always been there to provide support and comfort to people during difficult times—even though the historical contexts are different—and it will continue to do so into the future.”

“I would like to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for being here tonight, and for allowing me to express a part of myself,” Zahira Ben Ammar said at the close of the nearly hour-and-a-half long discussion session. “I felt a strong energy in this room tonight connecting me with all of you---and this is the reason why we continue to do what we do.”

Before leaving the theater, my student and I were able to have a friendly engaged conversation and e-mail exchange with all of the actors, which served to confirm what I already knew: that the real relationships which matter most are not the unhealthy and destructive ones perpetuated by governments and militaries—but the deep connections that take root in intimately engaged spaces such as the one we created in the theater that evening.

 

Zahira Ben Ammar and the Mustaheel Alice Theater Troupe

(Photo: Kimberly Hughes)

--Kimberly Hughes

Performance photos: Tsukasa Aoki

Posthumous justice awarded in Yokohama Incident Trial

The Japan Times reported on Feb. 5, that the Yokohama District Court ordered compensation to be paid to the families of five now deceased men who were wrongfully imprisoned during wartime Japan. According to the article:

The Yokohama District Court ordered the government Thursday to pay compensation to the relatives of five now-deceased men for falsely imprisoning them in the "Yokohama Incident," often described as Japan's worst case of repression of free speech during the war.

The three-judge panel ruled that the wartime "tokko" thought, or political, police launched a one-sided, speculative investigation that prosecutors and judges endorsed.

The police, the prosecution and the court all bear heavy responsibility for the outcome, it said. In the decision, (Presiding Judge) Oshima accused the political police of conducting an "illegal" investigation, including the torture of suspects.

The five defendants were convicted in August and September 1945 of procommunist activities based on the wartime Peace Preservation Law.

Another articleThe Japan Times published last year reported:

In the Yokohama Incident, the Kanagawa thought-control police arrested about 60 journalists on suspicion of spreading the idea of communism in violation of the Peace Preservation Law during the Pacific War; more than 30 were indicted. Torture was employed during interrogation and four died while in detention. Most of the defendants were given suspended sentences right after World War II ended. The former defendants are all dead.

A longer article at The Asia-Pacific Journal entitled "The Retrial of the 'Yokohama Incident': A Six Decade Battle for Human Dignity" may be read here.

- Posted by Kimberly Hughes