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

"Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare" sheds light on low-level radioactive contamination in Washington State, Russia, Europe (& holds insights for Japan)

*"Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare" airs Oct. 16, 2011 on Sundance Channel*

Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare spotlights contaminated regions in Washington State (which has the highest incidence of cancer in the U.S.) and Russia, and overviews the problem of nuclear waste that also hangs over Japan, the UK, Germany, and France.

...Some notes from the film...

Filmmaker Eric Guéret and producer Laure Noualhat open their 2009 film overviewing how nuclear nations have strewn nuclear waste into oceans for decades. Some ocean bottoms have become nuclear dumping grounds, covered with radioactive waste after the barrels ripped open.

Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International describes the rusted radioactive waste barrels and answers his own question: "Where’s the radioactive waste? It’s in the environment. It becomes part of the food chain.

"Everybody did this. The British. The French. The Americans. The Russians. In less than 50 years, they've buried over 100 metric tons of nuclear waste in various oceans."

"It took ten years for nuclear activists to build worldwide support for a 1993 UN Treaty forbid dumping radioactive waste."


Hanford Nuclear Complex, along the Columbia River in Washington State, 1960
Hanford Nuclear Reservation (HNR), the world's first nuclear manufacturing site, is one of the most contaminated places in the world. In 1942, the Roosevelt administration chose Washington State as a site to develop radioative components for atomic bombs because they wanted a remote area to minimize fatalities in case of an accident.

At its peak, the massive complex (half the size of the state of Maryland) employed 51,000 people at 9 nuclear reactors and plutonium factories. A breeder reactor was built in 1943 to produce plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. No one was allowed to know how many leaks, accidents or fires took place at Hanford.

"This was all secret. It was a US Army operation."

Without the consent of nearby residents (farmers and members of the Yakima tribe, the indigenous people whose territory included Washington state), plant operators used water from a nearby river for plant cooling and discharged the used water right back into the river. Plant operators let people use the river without telling families of the dangers to which they were exposed.

(Exposure map for the "Green Run" U.S. Air Force nuclear radiation experiment at Hanford Nuclear Reservation that released somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 curies of iodine-131 into the air on December 2-3, 1949. (Image: Toxipedia.org)

The plant produced 1,500 billion liters of nuclear waste that operators dumped, contaminating the Columbia River ecosystem. They poured liquid waste directly into trenches dug in the earth and put 210 million liters of radioactive and chemical waste into 177 concrete tanks they buried in the ground. By the 1960's, some tanks were already leaking, and now 67 tanks have failed, leaking 4 million liters of waste, thereby contaminating the water table. In 2002, Strontium 90 was found present in Columbia River fish.

The film explains that, besides Hanford, the US government built a dozen nuclear sites in the U.S. to support the Manhattan Project, then shifts to a contaminated region in Russia that even most people in Russia did not know about until decades after the disasters, and that most people worldwide still don't know about...

In 1976, news leaked about an nuclear waste explosion in 1957 at the Mayak nuclear weapons complex (built by Gulag-era prison laborers in the eastern Urals and probably modeled after Hanford; U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers' destination when he was shot down in Soviet airspace in 1960). The explosion at Mayak, a Soviet plutonium production site, was the worst nuclear accident in the world before Chernobyl, and one of three catastrophic nuclear accidents at Mayak.

Villages in a previously idyllic region were contaminated by the fallout. The disaster was kept secret; no one could see the radiation, so didn't understand what had happened. The Soviet government buried the harvest, saying it was contaminated but they wouldn't explain how this happened; and dumped nuclear waste into lakes, which contaminated the Techa River which goes to Siberia.

Many villages were evacuated. Two thirds of the population have left. Now village houses are empty because almost everyone who stayed have died. Cancers. Heart conditions. Diabetes. All linked to radioactive contamination of the environment: tritrium and cesium-137 has transformed affected soil into radioactive waste. Plutonium 239 and 240, which creates the explosive component of nuclear bombs, is now part of the river.

One lonely peasant who refused to leave says, “When I see the empty houses, I feel the same anguish as after a bombing.”

Others who chose or had no alternative but to remain say they are waiting to die of cancer and are tested every year: “They are using us as guinea pigs.” Last year I lost my son. He would have been 48. He died of cancer. We live like guinea pigs. It’s our fate.”

The Soviet Union tried to keep the Mayak explosion at its top secret plant and the consequences of radioactive fallout secret. It wasn't until dissident scientist Zhores Mendedev reported the accident in 1976 that it became known to the outside world. The Gorbachev government confirmed this a decade later. With Glasnost, people began to talk...

A Russian interviewee in the film explains: “It’s dangerous to our entire society. The nuclear industry started to let its secrets go. There were rumor that wrong-doings were hidden; we started talking about Mayak. Then Yeltsin came to power. Things hushed up again."

All nuclear energy plants and weapons plants discharge nuclear waste, so the issue of low-level radiation contamination is problematic for the UK, France, Germany, Japan and other countries that have nuclear energy industries and also for nations that produce nuclear weapons.

The AREVA nuclear waste reprocessing plant in La Hague has long been dumping nuclear waste into the English Channel. Iodine 129 is being detected as far as the Arctic. Seaweed, shellfish and mollusks are contaminated because the adjacent seabed has been turned into a nuclear waste dump. Krypton-85 is released into the atmosphere and carried by winds all over Europe.

The largest utilities company in Europe, France's EDF, sends "radioactive material" (recycled uranium) by train in metal containers for storage at an open-air car park in Seversk, Siberia [formerly a secret "closed city" where there are several nuclear reactors, plants for reprocessing uranium and plutonium as well as storage and production facilities for nuclear weapons].

In Japan, the US and the UK, the usual way to deal with nuclear waste is to keep it in large storage pools (a hazardous non-solution, as we now know from Fukushima). If the pools lose their water, the waste fuel heats up and catches fire.

Both Germany and Switzerland pronounced storage pools unsafe. Germany has moved nuclear waste into concrete into hillsides or thick concrete buildings.

Now the world has 450 nuclear waste storage pools spread across countries using nuclear power. Some have proposed storing nuclear waste at very deep depths in the earth, but is this efficient give the totality of costs of the nuclear industry, which would cease to exist without extensive taxpayer-funded subsidies?

It's misleading to use Hiroshima and Nagasaki high-level radiation models as a comparison with continuous external and internal low-level radiation exposure.

The French government's attitude towards nuclear energy might be likened to a state religion. The state almost wholly owns AREVA, the French nuclear corporation and biggest atomic operator in the world; therefore the French government pushes nuclear energy worldwide for its own profit and has failed to develop renewable sources of energy. Germany markedly contrasts with France: the broad public is not inhibited by the state from engaging in serious debate about the risks of nuclear energy production.

----------

More on the film from the Int. Panel of Fissile Materials blog:

On 20 February 2010 Greenpeace issued a call for a moratorium on shipments of reprocessed uranium from France to Russia. Activists had been repeatedly blocking rail shipments of the material from the La Hague reprocessing plant to Cherbourg port.

Parliamentary enquiry, government statements, Greenpeace actions are a few of the stunning consequences of a 100-minutes TV documentary Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire (Waste - The Nuclear Nightmare) broadcast by the Franco-German station ARTE for the first time on 13 October 2009 and re-broadcast by various television stations since. The documentary presents the results of an investigation into nuclear waste management in the US, Russia, Germany and France. The authors Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat were often accompanied by technicians of the French independent radiation-monitoring lab CRIIRAD.

They detected and measured radiation in many places where they went, from the Columbia river close to the US nuclear weapons lab in Hanford to the Soviet counterpart Mayak in the Urals. Some of the most remarkable scenes include a Geiger counter that goes crazy under a publicly accessible bridge over the Techa river and a scene outside the French "plutonium factory" called reprocessing plant at La Hague. In the latter case a spokesman for operator AREVA, when asked about radiation levels in the fields outside the plant, stated after a long hesitation that he would not call this contamination, but "absence of impact" before stumbling: "Well, we'll redo that one..."

However, remarkably enough, the largest impact had a simple mass calculation that the journalists presented. Constantly facing the AREVA PR that states that 96% of the nuclear materials are "recycled" through the reprocessing scheme, the reporters inquired where the recovered uranium, roughly 95% of the mass of spent fuel, does end up. In fact, AREVA has been sending most of the reprocessed uranium (23,000 tons were still stored in France at the end of 2008), to Russia officially for re-enrichment.

In fact, even if all of that uranium had indeed been re-enriched, which is not the case, over 90% of the mass remains in Russia as enrichment tails. This material is waste, because there is absolutely no economic incentive to re-enrich it, in particular considering the hundreds of thousands of tons of "clean", first generation enrichment tails that are stored in Russia and in the other major enrichment countries, including in France (close to 260,000 tons at two sites).

The message that AREVA's "recycling" ratio had to be corrected from 95% to less than 10% of the original mass send a shockwave through the French political landscape. The minister of Environment asked for clarifications and the parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment (OPECST) organized public hearings. During the hearings EDF has admitted that, apart from a period of about five years, 100% of the reprocessed uranium had been sent to Russia.

Between 2000 and approximately 2005 (the EDF representative was not certain) reprocessed uranium was sent to URENCO's Dutch plant that can re-enrich reprocessed uranium (contrary to URENCO's UK and German plants). EDF signed a contract with AREVA to use part of the Georges-Besse-2 plant, currently under construction, to enrich reprocessed uranium for a period of about 10 years starting in 2013. The French Nuclear Safety Authority ASN announced that by the end 2010 it will have finished studies into the potential requalification of reprocessed uranium as waste.

The full version of the film "Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire", by Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat (in French and German with English subtitles) is available online. ARTE-Editions has also published a 210-page book by Laure Noualhat with the same title (in French).

More on nuclear waste:

• "Top Ten Talking Points on the Environmental Impacts Caused by Reprocessing High-Level Radioactive Waste" (Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear, November 2008)

• Heart of America Northwest: The Public's Voice for Hanford's Cleanup

• "Hanford Nuclear Waste Still Poses Serious Risks"(Marc Pitzke, Spiegel Online, March 24, 2011) In-depth report on radioactive contamination, including the intentional release of radioactive clouds during an experiment by Hanford physicists that they called "Green Run."

• "Risky Nuclear Experiments on a Global Collision Course -- it's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Radioactive World!" (Dvija Michael Bertish, HOANW blog, Feb. 2011):

the states of New York, Connecticut and Vermont have sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over a federal policy that allows nuclear waste to be stored at a nuclear power plant for 60 years after it has been decommissioned. The three states challenge this policy because it allows long term storage of nuclear waste without environmental review. Most nuclear plants were developed without sufficient infrastructure for safe long term waste storage.

• "Analysis Triples U.S. Plutonium Waste Figures" (Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times, July 10, 2010)

• "Mayak: A 50-year tragedy" (Greenpeace, September 28, 2007)

• "The French Nuclear Industry Is Bad Enough in France; Let's Not Expand It to the U.S. -- Areva, France's nuclear industry, has a solid reputation, but a trail of radioactive waste and deaths in Africa follow its wake."(Linda Gunter, Alternet, March 23, 2009 - mentions the French use of leftover radioactive dirt (tailings) and rocks from 210 abandoned uranium mines in school playgrounds and ski resort parking lots.)

• Cheylabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet (This site contains information about Kyshtym-57, an environmental organization which is working to help radiation victims in the Chelyabinsk region; a film description and script from Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet, a documentary by Slawomir Grunberg.)

• Cheylabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet official film website:

"Nobody knows anything about us. Chernobyl happened, but that's Europe. The pollution reached Europe, and the whole world was upset. But us, out here in the backwoods of Russia? Nobody knows about it, nobody in the world cares about the fate we've sealed for ourselves here." - Farida Shaimardanova, Muslyumovo teacher

• "Urals Nuclear Disasters Contaminated 450,000 : Russia: Figure is given by officials in account of events at the Mayak atomic plant from 1948 to 1967. They say site could still pose hazards" (Richard Bourdreaux, The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 30, 1993)

Peace in Asia and the Pacific: Alternatives to Asia-Pacific Militarization Conference - Oct. 21-22, 2011, American Univ., Washington D.C.

Peace in Asia and the Pacific: Alternatives to Asia-Pacific Militarization

October 21, 2011 - 7:00pm - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - 6:00pm

Initiated by the American Friends Service Committee

To register and for additional information: http://afsc.org/PeaceInAsiaPacific

Please join us and consider having your organization co-sponsor this uniquely important conference.

Even as the Pentagon has been pursuing its Long War across the Middle East and Central Asia, the campaign to contain China has been driving U.S. strategic war planning and military spending.

Our movements to prevent war and to address the impacts of the militarization of the federal budget are not prepared to the long term designs of the Pentagon, right-wing and the Military-Industrial-Complex to reinforce and deepen U.S. militarism across the Asia-Pacific.

As former U.S. Ambassador to China R. Stapleton Roy put it, “we poked China in the eye” by sending the nuclear powered and nuclear capable aircraft carrier the U.S.S. George Washington into the East China Sea “because we could.”

The U.S. still has more than 100 military bases and installations across Japan. In Korea, activists have engaged in hunger strikes and been jailed for opposing the decimation of their communities with new U.S. military bases. The U.S. now has tacit military alliances with Vietnam and India and is exploring the return of military bases to the Philippines. The National Military Strategy issued in 2010 also calls for expanded military cooperation with Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Singapore.

While the US economy stagnates under the tremendous burden of its military expenditures, China has poured resources into becoming the world’s workshop and building 21st century infrastructures and technologies. As the world’s financial centers tilt towards Beijing, new military spending in the region has increased the complexities of its territorial disputes with Japan and ASEAN nations with competing claims to South China Sea islands. A growing number of militarized “incidents” and violent conflict have also occurred on the Korean Peninsula.

The conference goals are:

Build our movements’ capacities to understand and respond to these developments
Identify and promote campaigns that challenge Asia-Pacific militarism and that advocate meaningful alternatives.
Facilitate solidarity between U.S. and Asia-Pacific peace movements, advocates and campaigns
In addition to our keynote speakers, panels will be devoted to Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and peace movement campaigns

Workshops to include:

Asia-Pacific Peace Movements

Southeast Asia

Central/South Asia

Economic Realities & Dynamics of the Asia-Pacific

Global Costs of Militarism

History 101: U.S. in Asia-Pacific

Human Rights

Korea

Nuclear Weapons Abolition

U.S.-China relations

Other workshops to be developed


Keynotes by Madame Yan Junqi, Vice President of the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament and the Vice Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress and by Professor Bruce Cumings, Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History Chairperson of the Department, University of Chicago* Panels on Northeast and Southeast Security Issues, Peace Movement Campaigns and Workshops (see below).

*Madame Yan is confirmed. Professor Cumings has been invited. This conference will also serve as the 4th Peace Forum organized by The American Friends Service Committee and the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament.

Additional information, including registration, available at http://afsc.org/PeaceInAsiaPacific.

Location

Kay Spiritual Life Center, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, DC 20016
See map: Google Maps
Contact Information:
Joseph Gerson
(617)661-6130
jgerson@afsc.org

Wangari Mathaai: When we destroy our natural environment, we degrade ourselves; in helping the earth to heal, we heal ourselves

Wangaari Mathaai, the late Kenyan visionary, articulated the interconnections between democracy, demilitarization, human rights and environmentalism in her holistic vision of a life-sustaining civilization:

Spiritual Environmentalism: Healing Ourselves by Replenishing the Earth

During my more than three decades as an environmentalist and campaigner for democratic rights, people have often asked me whether spirituality, different religious traditions, and the Bible in particular had inspired me, and influenced my activism and the work of the Green Belt Movement (GBM). Did I conceive conservation of the environment and empowerment of ordinary people as a kind of religious vocation? Were there spiritual lessons to be learned and applied to their own environmental efforts, or in their lives as a whole?...

However, I never differentiated between activities that might be called "spiritual" and those that might be termed "secular." After a few years I came to recognize that our efforts weren't only about planting trees, but were also about sowing seeds of a different sort—the ones necessary to give communities the self-confidence and self-knowledge to rediscover their authentic voice and speak out on behalf of their rights (human, environmental, civic, and political). Our task also became to expand what we call "democratic space," in which ordinary citizens could make decisions on their own behalf to benefit themselves, their community, their country, and the environment that sustains them...

In the process of helping the earth to heal, we help ourselves.

Through my experiences and observations, I have come to believe that the physical destruction of the earth extends to us, too. If we live in an environment that's wounded—where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust—it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological, and spiritual level. In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves.

The reverse is also true. In the process of helping the earth to heal, we help ourselves. If we see the earth bleeding from the loss of topsoil, biodiversity, or drought and desertification, and if we help reclaim or save what is lost—for instance, through regeneration of degraded forests—the planet will help us in our self-healing and indeed survival. When we can eat healthier, nonadulterated food; when we breathe clean air and drink clean water; when the soil can produce an abundance of vegetables or grains, our own sicknesses and unhealthy lifestyles become healed. The same values we employ in the service of the earth's replenishment work on us, too. We can love ourselves as we love the earth; feel grateful for who we are, even as we are grateful for the earth's bounty; better ourselves, even as we use that self-empowerment to improve the earth; offer service to ourselves, even as we practice volunteerism for the earth.

Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof. To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we can experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other animals. We can appreciate the delicacy of dew or a flower in bloom, water as it runs over the pebbles or the majesty of an elephant, the fragility of the butterfly or a field of wheat or leaves blowing in the wind. Such aesthetic responses are valid in their own right, and as reactions to the natural world they can inspire in us a sense of wonder and beauty that in turn encourages a sense of the divine.

The environment becomes sacred, because to destroy what is essential to life is to destroy life itself.

That consciousness acknowledges that while a certain tree, forest, or mountain itself may not be holy, the life-sustaining services it provides—the oxygen we breathe, the water we drink—are what make existence possible, and so deserve our respect and veneration. From this point of view, the environment becomes sacred, because to destroy what is essential to life is to destroy life itself.

Read more of this entire excerpt of Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World here.

Wangari Mathaai: "Rather than go backwards, we ought to move forward, towards a vision of a world without war."

...rather than go backwards, we ought to move forward, towards a vision of a world without war. A world where every nation would have an Article 9 in its constitution.

- Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Green Belt Movement

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

Global Article 9 Campaign: What Noda's Election as Japan's PM means to the Article 9 Debate

Global Article Campaign to Abolish War:

NODA YOSHIHIKO ELECTED PRIME MINISTER - IMPLICATIONS ON THE ARTICLE 9 DEBATE

On August 29, Noda Yoshihiko was elected President of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), thus set to become the third DPJ Prime Minister since the party came to power in August 2009.

Japan's Prime Minister Kan Naoto announced his resignation on August 26, amidst criticism of his handling of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as well as what is considered to be the biggest debt crisis in the industrialized world. Kan faced a no confidence vote in June, when he pledged to resign once Parliament passed a legislation promoting renewable energy.

In politics since 1987, Noda Yoshihiko joined the DPJ in 2000 and served as Finance Minister in Kan's cabinet in 2010-2011. His election platform has been based on getting the Fukushima nuclear power plant under control and restoring Japan's fiscal balance. A fiscal conservative, Noda is an advocate of tax increase to curb the country's debt and finance the country's reconstruction. Qualifying his policies as "reasonable" and "realistic", he wants to restart Japan's nuclear reactors and does not support his predecessor's vision of a nuclear-free Japan (though he is in favor of reducing Japan's reliance on nuclear power).

Known as a strong supporter of the US-Japan security alliance, Noda considers US-Japanese ties as the "very foundation" of Japan's foreign and security policies. Expressing concerns over China's military buildup, which he describes as the "greatest cause for worry in the (Asian) region", Noda favors a tough approach towards China.

Upsetting Japan's neighbors, Noda has repeatedly made controversial statements on Japanese A-class war criminals, denying that the country's wartime leaders were "criminals" and defending Japanese politicians' visits to the Yasukuni Shrine - the controversial war memorial that honors those killed in the service of Imperial Japan, including World War II war criminals, seen as a symbol of Japanese militarism.

The son of a Japan Ground Self Defense Forces career soldier, Noda stated in 2002 (then as an opposition politician) that Japan should get rid of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which renounces war as a means of settling international disputes and prohibits the maintenance of armed forces and other war potential. If not, he added, Article 9 should at least specify that Japan's SDF has military capability.

Yoshio Shimoji: U.S. military seizure of private property in Okinawa was a violation of the Hague Convention

Futenma cannot be relocated to Henoko

Yoshio Shimoji
August 15, 2011
Naha, Okinawa
Japan

In their recent telephone conference ("Kitazawa, Panetta agree on Futenma," July 17, 2011 The Japan Times), Japan's Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa and the newly appointed U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reaffirmed "that Tokyo and Washington will move forward with the plan to relocate the controversial Futenma base within Okinawa."

Futenma was constructed toward the end of WW II with an aim of attacking mainland Japan by B-29's in order to end the war quickly. But the war ended before that plan was actually carried out. Futenma should have been returned at that point; instead, it has continued to be in the firm grip of the U.S. military all these years to this day.

The area where Futenma Air Station sits was rich with water resources and so rice paddies were the main features of the farmland around here. Along a beautiful pine tree-lined highway were the villages of Ginowan, Kamiyama, Nakahara, Maehara and Aragusuku, of which Ginowan was the largest with houses and stores galore, where public facilities like a post office, a school (Ginowan Elementary School) and the village office, were located.

Evidently, the U.S. military seized the land in clear violation of Article 46 of the Hague Convention, which states: "Family honour and rights, the lives of persons, and private property, as well as religious convictions and practice, must be respected. Private property cannot be confiscated."

The illegality of Futenma would not disappear even if it were to be moved to Henoko or anywhere else in Okinawa just like dirty money would not become clean how many times it might undergo laundering.

Both Kitazawa and Panetta must realize this and search for an alternative solution, that is, to move it outside of Okinawa, most preferably, to the U.S. mainland.

Aerial photograph of beautiful, biodiverse Cape Henoko which the U.S. Marines want to destroy to make way for a mega-base. (Photo: The Asia-Pacific Journal)

(The blueprint for a new air station, a military port, and a pier, from the Master Plan of U.S. Navy Facilities on Okinawa, 1966. Image: The Asia-Pacific Journal)

Yoshio Shimoji: Futenma must be returned unconditionally

Futenma Air Station occupies 25% of densely populated Ginowan City. The U.S. Marines are storing nuclear waste from Fukushima at Futenma (and other bases in Japan). (Photo: The Asia-Pacific Journal))

Futenma must be returned unconditionally

Yoshio Shimoji
June 22, 2011
Naha, Okinawa
Japan

At the two-plus-two meeting held in Washington on June 21,2011 the two sides (Tokyo and Washington) reconfirmed the 2006 Roadmap which stipulated that an air station with V-shaped runways would be built on reclaimed land off the coast of Henoko District in northern Okinawa. This is what I would call a base laundering tactic similar to money laundering because the relocation is an attempt on the part of the U.S. side to hide the dirty nature of the Futenma air base.

Jon Mitchell writes in his recent article in the Japan Times: "With all of Okinawa under U.S. administration, the authorities started by tricking the landowners (in Iejima) into signing voluntary evacuation papers... But then, when some families refused to leave, 300 U.S. soldiers with rifles and bulldozers dragged women and children from their beds, tore down their homes and slaughtered their goats." ("Iejima: an island of resistance," May 22, 2011 The Japan Times)

But Iejima was only a precursor of forceful land expropriations by the U.S. military at bayonet point and by bulldozer to expand their already-existing bases in Okinawa during the 1950's Okinawa. Following Iejima came Isahama located now in Ginowan City (Camp Foster) and Gushi in Oroku (now incorporated into Naha City) (Naha Air Base, formerly operated by the U.S. Air Force, currently by SDAF). Futenma had already been turned into a forward operating base for the U.S. Marine Aviation Squadron to attack mainland Japan in 1945.

The Marine Corps says when the base was built, there was nothing in the area where Futenma now sits except for barren wilderness. But that's not true. There were five idyllic villages there before the war: Ginowan, Kamiyama, Nakahara, Maehara and Aragusuku, all ravaged during the Battle of Okinawa and then all the landowners were forced to move outside of the fences after the war, moving to areas that eventual became integral parts (districts) of today's Ginowan City. Their former villages were swallowed up into the Marine air base with a 2,700-meter runway, together with rich farmland. The Futenma village, after which the base was named, was located just outside of the encroached-upon land and so narrowly escaped the ill fate of the incorporation into the base.

If U.S. policy planners feel no qualms of conscience about the dark history of those U.S. bases in Okinawa, then they are real villains and villainesses with no human mind. I believe that that explains why they can brazenly demand a quid pro quo for Futenma's facilities to be built in Henoko, with all the expenses footed by Japanese taxpayers (Okinawa residents included).

Futenma must be closed down immediately with no strings attached. The U.S. has no inherent right at all to keep holding the base.Mr. Shimoji's "The Futenma Base and the U.S.-Japan Controversy: An Okinawan Perspective" was published at The Asia Pacific Journal earlier this year.

His letter letter, "How dare Obama ask Hatoyama to act without regard to democratic process in Okinawa?" was published at the The New York Times on May 28, 201javascript:void(0)0, and his article, "'Thanks' Doesn't Allay Okinawans," was published on July 11, 2010, at The Japan Times.

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.