Letter to Obama from sansei Soji Kashiwagi reflects tensions of Japanese North Americans over nuclear bombings in Japan

Last year, after President Obama's now-famous April 5, 2009 speech in Prague promising that the U.S. would take concrete steps to creating a world without nuclear weapons, many people and organizations wrote letters, urging him to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Published on August 15 last year at Discover Nikkei, the web project of the Japanese American National Museum, this eloquent letter to Obama from third-generation Japanese American Soji Kashiwagi to President Obama reflects the intimate tensions that many Japanese North Americans feel about their government using weapons of mass destruction against people (who may have been grandmothers or cousins) in Japan.

Two things, for me, made matters much worse, and truly brought it home:  One, that our country, the United States of America, was responsible for this and the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki; and two, that members of my own family were there to suffer through it all.  Seeing the devastation is one thing.  Knowing that it happened to my own family makes this very personal.

Kashiwagi challenges advocates of nuclear weapons who cite the rebuildings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to support the use of more nuclear bombings. The survivor of the Japanese-American wartime incarceration reminded President Obama that the severe emotional trauma of the nuclear bombings and the physical aftereffects of radiation do not "go away."

Today, Hiroshima, by all outside appearances, looks to be a thriving city, rebuilt and reborn.  However, to use Hiroshima as a shining example of how a city can recover from an atomic bomb attack is misguided and simply untrue.  When told of a conservative talk radio host in Los Angeles saying on the air, “Look at Hiroshima, they’ve gotten over the bomb” as if to suggest the use of nuclear weapons is somehow acceptable, both Takeshi and his younger brother, Katsuzo, both reacted in anger and became very emotional.

“This is the kind of attitude that will allow this to happen again,” said Takeshi.

“There is no compassion in this attitude,” said Katsuzo.

Having visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I have concluded that there is absolutely no way to “get over” an atomic bombing. Yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have “recovered.”  But not far from the surface, the suffering and aftereffects of the atomic bomb continue to this day.  Hibakusha, or A-Bomb survivors, currently live in all parts of Japan and around the world, and continue to suffer debilitating aftereffects of radiation poisoning.  In our friend’s family, a baby girl born two generations after the bombing is disabled with severe birth defects, due to radiation in her mother, passed onto her from her mother who survived the bomb.  And as Takeshi said, it took him 40 years to recover—40 years!

These are the stories most Americans know nothing about.  But if we’re going to prevent a nuclear holocaust, these are the stories Americans need to know, and constantly be reminded of so that what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never happen again to anyone, anywhere.

Kashiwagi and his family emphatically repeat the message that hibakusha peace activists have proclaimed worldwide for sixty-five years: "Never again."

Read Soji Kashiwagi's entire letter and see his photos of Hiroshima here.

Hikari Matsuri (“Festival of Light”) commemorates Hiroshima & Nagasaki as it celebrates the arts & sustainable lifestyles

Similarly to other countries worldwide, Japan is home to an extensive lineup of summer outdoor music and arts festivals. A favorite event for festival-goers is the Hikari Matsuri, held in early August in Fujino, Kanagawa prefecture, which is located southwest of Tokyo along the Sagami River.

The festival features the usual fare of musical performers, international food stalls and nearby camping and onsen (hot springs) facilities. Additionally, the Hikari Matsuri offers a unique location: the grounds of a former elementary school, whose all-wooden buildings were converted in 2003 into an artists’ studio complex known as the Makisato Lab.

From August 6-8, 2010, the 7th annual Hikari Matsuri transformed the old school grounds into a dynamic space featuring a market with organic goods, a striking outdoor stage enshrouded in billowing white cloth, and classrooms converted into spaces for musical performances, mini dance clubs with DJs, film screenings, and more.

As its name suggests, the event also featured various impressive displays of light. Huge strobes beamed multi-colored patterns onto the surrounding trees, gorgeous installations of candles inlaid into clusters of bamboo tree trunks were placed throughout the grounds, and a dramatic fire dance performance took place on Saturday night—the highlight of the entire weekend for many.

The fire’s significance, however, went beyond simple artistic expression. All of the flames onsite were lit from embers of the fires in Hiroshima that followed the dropping of the atomic bomb exactly 65 years prior, which have been tended by Buddhist monks and other peace advocates ever since.

The festival’s opening ceremony on Friday evening featured a screening of the documentary film Atomic Flame (Japanese title: Gate), a project of the Global Nuclear Disarmament Fund that follows Japanese Buddhist monks as they walk across the southwestern United States to extinguish the flame at the Trinity test site in New Mexico where it originated. Festival organizers explained:

Gate will be shown on the outdoor stage, using solar powered electricity and candles to create a subdued, minimalist space where we may together call for peace. Truthfully speaking, there is not much more that we can do with regard to this issue beyond learning, thinking, feeling, and praying. While such actions may seem like trivial things, they are in fact immensely important.

Hikari Matsuri also included a nighttime study program, organized by Peace Not War Japan and the Neo Ryukyu Arc network, to explore various contemporary issues related to peace and sustainability.

The first speaker was Oyama Mikae, a member of the local NPO Transition Japan. The organization has gradually been recognized as an active hub of the international Transition Network movement, thereby earning the town of Fujino global recognition for its progressive action. The website describes the initiative:

A Transition Initiative (which could be a town, village, university or island etc) is a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and increasingly, economic contraction. There are thousands of initiatives around the world starting their journey to answer this crucial question:

"For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly rebuild resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and economic contraction) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

In response to these environmental challenges, the Fujino community has begun holding regular workshops on permaculture and other sustainable practices, publishing a regular newsletter titled “Transition Fujino”, and spearheading additional initiatives designed to elicit peoples’creative ideas regarding how to live without depending on fossil fuels. An excellent article highlighting the Transition Intitiative project in Fujino—which, coincidentally or not, has one of the highest concentrations of artists in all of Japan— may be read here.

Left: Information about the Transition Network posted in the former gymnasium of Makisoto Elementary School (now, Makisato Labo)

Right: Participants of nighttime study session

This presentation was followed by a screening of Hopi no yogen (The Hopi Prophecy), a 1986 documentary by Japanese director Miyata Kiyoshi. The film describes how the Hopi and Navajo tribes in the southwestern United States have responded to the resource colonization of their lands

that have been repeatedly plundered for plutonium and uranium, or—in their words—“carving out the earth’s vital organs.”

The film, a classic among social activists in Japan, recounts how tribal leaders—horrified after learning that plutonium and uranium taken forcibly from their land were used to create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—decided to go public with a prophecy that had been passed down from Hopi elders. The message described how humankind has now come to stand at the crossroads of two possible futures, depending on which actions are taken: one of total annihilation, and the other of peaceful sustainability.

The last of the four messengers chosen to interpret the prophecies, Thomas Banyacya, tried repeatedly to reach decision makers with the prophecy, with little success. His obituary in The New York Times following his 1999 death poignantly describes his efforts:

Although he was often warmly received by United Nations officials, his efforts to give a speech were repeatedly rebuffed. But then, as he explained, the elders had told him to knock on the door four times. On his fourth attempt, in 1992, he was allowed to make a brief speech at the General Assembly hall, but on a day when the General Assembly was in recess. Only a few delegates were present when he carefully sprinkled cornmeal on the podium and then delivered his message stressing the need for world leaders to listen to those still living in harmony with nature.

The rest of the obituary may be read here, and the full text of Banyacya’s address may be read here.

Left: Entrance to Hikari Matsuri festival grounds

Right: Night view of the festival taken from the second floor of a former classroom building

As part of grassroots citizen efforts to promote sustainability and ensure that our future is the more positive of the two possibilities outlined in the Hopi prophecy,



Peace Not War Japan and the Neo Ryukyu
Arc network will continue their series of
Peaceful New Earth events to highlight efforts of indigenous cultures and fostering connections between peace movements. Read about the first two events in the series here and here.









Text by Kimberly Hughes
Photos by Sheila Souza

Urakami, Nagasaki: August 9, 1945 & Today (rebuilt cathedral & renewed community at Ground Zero)

The city of Nagasaki came into being when Portuguese adventurers came to Japan in 1542 and asked Lord Sumitada, who ruled the area, for the use of the beautiful harbor. Japan's most southern island, Kyushu, had long been the archipelago's principal crossroads for Silk Road traders, and, before that, prehistoric travelers, but their route took them through Hakata, an ancient port city, slightly to the north.

After a squabble with Ming China interrupted old commercial routes, the newly arrived traders became the Japanese elite's only source of Chinese silk, Indian and Persian luxury goods, and European guns. Military unifier Oda Nobunaga welcomed the European merchants and accompanying missionaries, aligning with them to create leverage against rival daimyos backed by powerful Buddhist temples in Kyoto. Franscisco de Xavier arrived with other Spanish Jesuits in 1549, and after two years, left behind behind 1,000 converts.

In 1582, after Nobunaga's suicide during a battle in Kyoto, power transferred to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who, inspired by European imperialism, launched an invasion of the Korean peninsula ten years later. Within six months, superior Korean strategists routed his troops (but not before they forcibly brought back tens of thousands of Korean master potters who created renowned Imari and Arita ceramics). Confounded by his loss and threatened by the power of Kyushu's daimyo traders and their European allies, Hideyoshi responded by issuing orders to execute Christians and instituting a draconian policy that came to define Japan: he began closing its borders to foreigners. By this time, hundreds of thousand Japanese in Kyushu had become Christian. Many of the conversions were nominal, ordered by daimyos; yet others would prove enduring.

After Hideyoshi died in 1597, his successor Ieyasu Tokugawa, restored trade with Korea, China, and European-controlled outposts throughout Asia. However the shadow cast by European imperial military power and Japan's growing community of native Christians proved too daunting for following shoguns who partially closed the archipelago's borders (allowing Chinese, Korean, Ryukuan, and Dutch exchanges at some ports).

Japanese Christians were forced to go underground, not to resurface until 1865 when several thousand Catholics from the fishing village of Urakami confessed themselves to a French priest in Nagasaki. In 1895, these descendents of Christians worshipping secretly for two centuries built the first cathedral in Asia in Urakami, a site of repeated earlier persecutions.


(Urakami Cathedral before August 9, 1945)
On August 9, 1945, clouds prevented an American B-29 from dropping a plutonium bomb on its original target, the weapons manufacturing center at Kokura. So the pilot aimed the bomb "Fat Man" towards their alternate target, the spires of Urakami Cathedral, the center point between his secondary targets, Mitsubishi's torpedo factory and steel and arms factory.


(11:02 a.m. atomic bomb "Fat Man" explodes above Nagasaki)

(People walking down a street in Nagasaki, unaware of the plutonium bomb explosion about to hit them.)

Urakami Cathedral after August 9, 1945

The plutonium bomb exploded over Japan's (and East Asia's) largest church at 11:02 a.m.—while a priest was beginning midday Mass. More Japanese Christians (8,000 among 70,000 mostly civilian victims) were killed in that moment than in all the previous shogunate persecutions of Christians combined.


(Ground Zero Memorial, a few minutes walk from Urakami Cathedral
In 1959, parishioners rebuilt the cathedral on the exact spot where it was destroyed, on Angelus Street. They decorated the new cathedral with charred angel faces from the bombed building, and left blackened and broken statues of saints (now covered with chains of colorful origami cranes) standing in the front, as a memorial.


(Urakami Cathedral today)
After spending the night traveling on the Akatsuki ("Red Moon"), a slow night train that left Kyoto in the early evening and arrived in Nagasaki early morning, I hopped on a streetcar and found myself in Urakami just as Sunday morning mass at St. Mary's had started. All the seats in the church were filled, so I joined people standing in the entrance way. The women all wore white veils and nuns wore old-fashioned blue habits. In this quiet place, I experienced awe, witnessing a renewed faith community that had experienced archetypal devastation.

After the service, I asked a tall, young, bushy-haired, smiling priest where I could find the ruins of the old cathedral. He asked an older, also smiling parishioner, to show me the broken and charred statues of saints, all covered with chains of colorful origami cranes. Looking into the eyes of the parishioner, a peaceful, even joyful survivor of the atomic bombing, I thought of Dr. Martin Luther King's view that the universe is held together by an invisible force of unsentimental, unshakeable love.


(Broken and burned statue of a saint at Urakami Cathedral)
The recreated community seems to prove that this love that binds people together—is alive in the people of Nagasaki—and more enduring than man's greatest weapon of mass destruction.


(Stained glass street art in the Urakami District)

(More street art depicting the music of peace)

Children's art in the Urakami District

— Jean Miyake Downey (text; contemporary photos)

Multiple traumatic effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the thousands of nuclear test explosions worldwide; other uranium weapons; nuclear plant meltdowns, & uranium mining have not healed, even if survivors and their descendants have been able to renew their communities. Please support nuclear abolition.

Photos of hibakusha and citizens in Hiroshima calling for peace and a Nuclear-Free World

These photos, while obviously unable to capture everything that took place in Hiroshima on August 6th, 2010 (65 years following the atomic bombing), will hopefully impart at least a fraction of the peoples' desire for the abolishment of nuclear weapons, an aim that was palpable throughout the city during the entire day's events.


Mr Kazuo Fukushima, 78, gives a talk while showing a map of Hiroshima at a session held on August 7th in a room of the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. He is a hibakusha whose family ran an inn 250 meters west of ground zero, just over the river from the A-bomb Dome. The sole survivor of his seven family members, he had been sent to work in a factory a couple of kilometers away as a child of merely 13 years old. All six other family members were burned to death by the blast into bones so carbonized that no identification of the corpses was possible.


Mr Tetsushi Yonezawa, 76, the `miracle survivor of A-bombed streetcar'. On the morning of August 6, 1945, he boarded a tram leaving Hiroshima station that was blasted in the downtown Hatchobori district, 750 meters from ground zero. The more than 100 passengers in the train car all died instantly except for Yonezawa, the lone survivor. As a small boy of 11 years old, he had been protected by the bodies of the others inside the packed rush hour train, thereby escaping the fierce direct radiation. Although he was told that he would not live long, he is still alive and continues to tell his story.


This youth, who is from Kyoto, embarked on a Peace Cycle beginning on Aug 1st from Nishinomiya-city to Hiroshima. He participated in a one-day friendship tour on August 5th to Iwaishima island, whose residents have been refusing a planned nuclear power plant by Chugoku Electric Power Company for the past 28 years.

--Photos and text contributed by Hitosada Yoshitake, a Kansai-based social activist engaged in peace and justice issues including disability rights, equality for ethnic and sexual minorities, justice for "comfort women," peace and democracy in Okinawa, Article 9.

Ikuo Hirayama, artist from Hiroshima: War is the "supreme folly of humankind"

(Image: Art Acknowledgement News)

Ikuo Hirayama passed away in December 2009, five months before the Miroku Project's Nara 2010: Conferences on the Future of East Asia, which he chaired, was to begin.

The renowned artist and Silk Roads preservation activist said that the wish for peace was the core of his work. His fervent quest was born when he was a fifteen-year-old living in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. That morning, he witnessed the atomic bombing "like a flashbulb had gone off right in front of me." Suffering from radiation-induced leukopenia, Hirayama knew he wanted to work for world peace but did not know how to do this until his mind suddenly filled with spontaneous image of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang who defied his government to go in search of Buddhist texts:

As a child I suffered from the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. This devastating experience has made me harbor a strong wish for world peace, just as I believe monk Xuanzang did. Identifying with him thus, I have wished to relive his journey of sacrifice and discovery along the Silk Road.

In following Xuanzang's footsteps across the Silk Roads, Hirayama realized the deep historical and cultural interconnections between Eurasia, Africa, and the Middle East, all the way to Japan:

What we call Japanese fine arts have their origin in China...If Chinese art objects of the early Tang age were excavated (in Japan) now, they would be taken for Japanese objects. With the passage of time, Japanese fine arts became recognizably different from Chinese fine arts, but in the Asuka, Hakuho and Tenpyo periods, that is, in the seventh century, the two were identical.

This realization of human unity helped to heal Hirayama's psyche and spirit. His journeys west also reinforced his knowledge of the devastation of war:

It’s no exaggeration to say that a culture can be wiped out in a second by war. Many ruins and remains found along the Silk Road are the result of war, the supreme folly of humankind.

It took the artist decades to recover enough personal strength to look backwards into his life, at what happened in Hiroshima. When he did, he was ready to portray the atomic bombing in his medium, Nihon-ga, the richly colored traditional Japanese paint medium using dry mineral pigments, which originated in India and was brought to Japan via the artist's beloved Silk Roads.

"Ikuo Hirayama says the wish for peace is at the core of his art work" by NPR's Robert Rand, published in 2008, explores Hirayama's peace activism through visual art and historic preservation:

Today, the Japanese city of Hiroshima is a thriving metropolis of 1.2 million that speaks with the rumble and squeal of streetcars and traffic. But on Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb shattered the city, killing more than 90,000. Of those who survived, one man, Ikuo Hirayama, would go on to turn the devastation into art...

"There was a powerful flash right in front of me. I covered my ears. And there was a strong wind, and I squatted down and the wind went right over my head. And I then tried to escape through waterfalls of fire..."

Many of his friends died. Hirayama grew ill from radiation sickness and his white-blood-cell count plummeted, but eventually he recovered. He left Hiroshima, adopted Buddhism as a way of honoring the dead, and took up painting, practicing an ancient technique called Nihonga, in which colors are blended from ground-up mineral pigments, then attached to the canvas with glue.

Hirayama became famous as a painter of Buddhist images and of the Silk Road, the highway that brought Buddhism to Japan. His Silk Road paintings convey Hirayama's belief that the road, with its exchange of commerce and ideas, showed that cultures can interact constructively. The paintings epitomize a sense of hopefulness and cooperation, peace and tranquility, the antithesis to Hiroshima, 1945...

Two decades after the bombing, Hirayama finally returned to Hiroshima. He visited the city's Atomic Bomb Memorial Park, and found himself drawn by the hiss and flicker of a flame honoring the dead.

"I saw the color of the fire, which was orange. It reminded me of the day of the bombing, and I could not get rid of that color behind my eyelids," he says.

Hirayama immediately began sketching out what would become one of his most powerful works, a huge, six-paneled canvas called "The Holocaust of Hiroshima..."

(Takato Kageyama, who lost his parents and two sisters in the bombing, stands before "The Holocaust of Hiroshima." Photo: NPR)

Hirayama says that despite the sorrow and destruction portrayed in "The Holocaust of Hiroshima," the painting offers a message of hope.

"The Buddhist god is telling everybody to rise like a Phoenix, to stand up and live for all eternity," he explains. "I believe that art can overcome hardships. I believe that flowers can blossom from anguish and inhumanity. You can overcome these things and make something beautiful..."

"I started to create my artwork as a requiem for those who lost their lives in the war. The wish for peace is at the core of my work," says Hirayama.

Read Rand's entire article here.

— JD

Voices from Survivors of Hiroshima & Nagasaki: "There were a great number of shooting stars."

Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall before the atomic bombing

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

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

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

At Hiroshima on the night of fifth of August in 1945
There was a great number of shooting stars.
She was born on August 6, 1925. It was her last night in her teens.
In Hiroshima before dawn on August 6, 1945
It was so quiet as if every creature were dead.
It was a night with lots of stars twinkling in the sky and a crisp coolness in the air.
Why does she keep following her father around today? I wondered.
We haven't seen our mice this morning, have we?
She was born in the worst of times...
The atomic bomb cloud looked like a sun with a halo around it.
Rays shimmered like heat haze on the ground.
I can hardly describe what the cloud looked like.
I thought Hiroshima was moaning...
It seemed as if the sun covered half of the sky over Hiroshima.
Na-mu-a-mi-da-butsu, they chanted in their Buddhist prayers...
I will write real stories, though they may not be printed in the newspaper...
Flames shot up into the sky like the Niagara Falls inverted...
My little brother died. I should not have yelled at him.
Maybe it was my mother's soul that visited me...

Witnesses to Hiroshima from August 7 through August 14, 1945

Daybreak, August 7th, 1945 Hiroshima
From upper stream bodies drifted and hit the oar of the boat
We dug the riverbank and buried her two daughters
My family of four was burnt to death under our collapsed house
He would rather not see us
A man stripped the straw mat off me, then sold it to another person
All my family is dying...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki - August 15, 16 in August to The first ten days of September, 1945 (1)

August 15th. Hiroshima and Nagasaki learned Japan's unconditional surrender.
Japan failed in war...
My wife said, "I wished the war had came to an end a little earlier."
If Japan had surrendered a week earlier, my father would not have died.
I didn't care whether Japan has won or lost...
You may die in a few days...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki - August 16 in August to The first ten days of September, 1945 (2)

Morning is the bitterest memory...
Even her tears were the colour of blood.
There is no medical treatment.
Evening primroses had been in bloom over a burial mound where we buried the dead people

Nagasaki, A-bomb victim's opinion.

It is we ourselves and no one else that suffer from wars.
Why don't we give up war in this world?
We have to revenge by achievement of peace...
Please make use of my story.

The emotions of the voices are unforgettable, describing how the sky itself (lit up by falling stars), animals, and children sensed what was to come:

It was around six o'clock in the morning. My husband was leaving for work. I didn't know why, but my little daughter kept following her father around. She clung to her father's arm and went out of the door with him. She looked like she did not want him to go alone. I wondered why she kept following him around that particular morning.

Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, reincarnated into the Genbaku Dome (Hiroshima Peace Memorial), after the atomic bombing

— Jean Downey

"MUSIC NOT BASES" — US for Okinawa voice appeal for Okinawans & dugong at Fuji Rock Festival

Via Emilie McGlone of US for Okinawa:

From July 29th - August 1st, Jonathan and I participated in the 2010 Fuji Rock Festival in Naeba, Niigata, Japan.

As representatives of US for OKINAWA, we joined the NGO PangeaSeed at the "Ocean Love" booth at the festival's NGO Village. Various NGOs were represented and the theme this year was "Biodiversity and Nature Conservation." Our booth was near the Avalon stage and focused on the protection of sharks and Okinawan dugong.

We gave 3 stage appeals on behalf of Okinawa. To see a video of the most important appeal in front of 30,000 people on the Green stage, click here.

Electricity used at the NGO Village was produced from bio diesel and solar power to tackle CO2 emission. A Chill out and relaxed hospitality area, including Gypsy Avalon, the NGO Village, was set up to appeal for human rights, environmental and peace causes, Organic Village, the Flea Market and workshops.


It was a great place for Peace Boat, US for OKINAWA, and other NGOs to network, promote activism and use their creativity for a good cause.

I even met Zach de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine and got a photo with him - showing his support for workers' rIghts in collaboration with the other NGOs present at the village. I hope we can join again next year.

To see more photos, click here.

NHK: Court orders compensation for victims of Futenma base noise pollution; states Japan lacks law limiting US military activity

From NHK yesterday: "Court orders compensation for US base noise".

A high court in Japan has ordered the government to pay about 4.2 million dollars in damages to residents for being exposed to noise from a nearby US air base.

The amount is 2.5 times that ordered by a lower court.

About 400 people living near the US Marine Corps Futenma Air Station in Ginowan City in the southern prefecture of Okinawa had demanded a ban on night-time flights and compensation.

Both the residents and the state had appealed against a lower court ruling that ordered the state to compensate all the plaintiffs but did not grant a ban on flights.

On Thursday, the presiding judge at the Fukuoka High Court's branch in Okinawa ruled that the residents have suffered mental pain from the noise that has disturbed their sleep, conversation and TV watching.

The judge added that the damage is too severe for the residents to endure, and that low-frequency noise made by helicopters and propeller planes is making the damage even worse.

He ordered an increase in compensation, citing the government's failure to take radical measures against noise, even though the residents' suffering has increased since a US Marine helicopter crashed inside a nearby university campus 6 years ago. He added that a limitation on flights after 10 PM, based on an anti-noise agreement, has not been observed.

But he upheld the lower court ruling that dismissed the plaintiffs' claim for a suspension of night-time flights, saying that Japan has no law that can limit the activities of US forces.

In similar noise pollution lawsuits filed across the country, Japan's courts have ordered state compensation but not bans on flights from US and Japan's Self-Defense Forces bases.

Okinawan Prayer: "Do not destroy the sea"

When the Okinawa War was ended in 1945, 

mountains as well as villages were burned and pigs cows and horses were burned. Everything on the landwas completely burned out. Anything which we could eat was a blessed gift from the sea. Repay Mother Nature for her favor. Do not destroy the sea.

By Uminchu (fisherman in Okinawan language) Yoshikatsu Yamashiro, 

Via Save Life Society, for protection of all lives and livelihoods, Henoko, Okinawa

Kyodo: "DPJ election defeat, Okinawa poll" stalls proposed new U.S. military base in Henoko

Kyodo reports snags ahead for the planned new, upgraded U.S. military base in Okinawa in"DPJ election defeat, Okinawa poll may stall Futenma plan: Senate panel," published yesterday:

A Senate panel has speculated that the relocation of a U.S. Marine base in Okinawa could be delayed beyond its planned 2014 deadline due partly to the crushing defeat of the governing Democratic Party of Japan in the national election earlier this month.

According to the report drawn up by the Senate Appropriations Committee, which became available Wednesday to Kyodo News, a gubernatorial election in the prefecture scheduled for November could also stall the base relocation.

The report said the DPJ's setback in the July 11 House of Councillors election ''could weaken its ability to govern, and the Okinawa gubernatorial election scheduled for November could further cloud the future of the realignment process.''

The transfer of some 8,000 U.S. Marine troops from Okinawa to Guam is part of a package deal between Japan and the United States which also includes the realignment of U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station.

The report noted that the Okinawa governor must sign a landfill agreement to proceed with the construction of a replacement facility on reclaimed land on the coast of the U.S. Marines' Camp Schwab in the Henoko district in Nago.

The Pentagon views the signing of the landfill agreement, which it considers tangible progress toward the completion of the Futenma replacement facility, '' as the linchpin for entire plan,'' the report said.

However, the Senate panel report said that while the landfill permit was originally expected to be issued in August, the permit ''will likely be delayed until after the gubernatorial election in November, and could be delayed into 2011.''

On the 2014 deadline, the report said, ''Given the delay in initiating the realignment, that deadline will be difficult, if not impossible, to meet.''

The report also touched on the severe political situation that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan faces over the base issue.

''The newly appointed prime minister has faced political protest from the residents and elected officials in Okinawa for acknowledging that the current agreement must go forward,'' it said.

Read the rest here.