The March 11, 2011 disaster attracted thousands of reporters and photographers from around the world. There was a brief deluge of Japanese and international media coverage on the first anniversary, this spring. Now the journalists have packed up and gone and by accident or design Japan’s government seems to be mobilizing its agenda, aware that it is under less scrutiny...
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Makiko Segawa: After The Media Has Gone: Fukushima [reopening of Minami-soma], Suicide, and the Legacy of 3.11
In-depth, eyewitness report from Fukushima by Makiko Segawa published at APJ: "After The Media Has Gone: Fukushima, Suicide and the Legacy of 3.11" explores realities in the exclusion zone:
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Gavan McCormack: "The Okinawan Alternative to Japan’s Dependent Militarism"
Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless in Tohoku; unemployment, hunger and poverty are on the rise in Japan, especially among elders (40 percent live on incomes of less than $1,000/month); 28 percent of Japanese in their twenties consider suicide; Unit 4 of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant is not just a domestic, but also a global nuclear hazard.
Yet, to the detriment of attending to these urgent issues, Tokyo is focusing on and spending billions of dollars in Japanese taxpayer money to support US military build-up in Africa (building Japan's first military base since the Pacific War in Djibouti) and the Asia-Pacific (building a joint US-Japan training facility on Tinian, the Pacific atoll that was the launching point of the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and before that, a site for a Japanese Pacific War base. "Most Japanese will think of this as a new base, so there is some irony in that, in fact, we would be going back to one of our old bases,” said Takashi Kawakami, a Takushoku University military affairs professor.
Given this preoccupation with military spending and build-up at a time of multiple domestic crises in Japan, Gavan McCormack's "The Okinawan Alternative to Japan’s Dependent Militarism" published at The Asia-Pacific Journal in 2008, is more relevant than ever:
In the post-Cold War world, the US has called for Japan to play a greatly stepped up military role (from the 1996 “Guidelines” to the 2005-6 “Beigun Saihen” or US military realignment), and governments in Tokyo have done their best to comply. My understanding of this is that these measures deepen and reinforce Japan’s dependence and therefore its irresponsibility, transforming the long-term dependent and semi-sovereign Japanese state of the Cold War into a full “Client State.” Far from pursuing its own “values, traditions, and practices,” (as other scholars have argued) 21st century Japan scraps them in order to follow American prescriptions, and the present political confusion stems at root from this identity crisis.US Officials...offer Japan a steady stream of advice – pushing, pulling, and manipulating it in the desired direction, to “show the flag” and “put boots on the ground” in Iraq, to send the MSDF to the Indian Ocean (and keep it there), to revise Ampo de facto and the Constitution explicitly. Yet few ordinary Japanese people share these priorities. It is as much these days as most can manage to cope with livelihood problems – pensions, welfare, and jobs - and so governments, torn between their desire to serve Washington and their need to seem to be serving their own people, always incline to attach priority to the former.In the post Cold War decades, the contest in Japan between civil society and state power has nowhere been sharper than in Okinawa...It is just 400 years since the Okinawan (Ryukyuan) king enunciated the principle of Nuchi du takara or non-resistance, in the face of the Satsuma samurai’s Sengun, initiating the process of forceful incorporation by Japan.Sengun militarism has been the bane of Okinawa ever since - under Satsuma, the modern Japanese state, the US, and now the joint US-Japan regime. Article 9 was in 1946 a new and astounding reversal for mainland Japan, but for Okinawa it was a reversion to an ancient ideal, and to the centuries when the culture of these islands was a byword for sophistication, culture and peace..."Only a recovery of Nuchi du takara values (and within them, presumably, a reassertion of cooperative, non-market, yuimaru values) can hope to save it. Plainly the Yambaru can be either militarized or protected, can follow either “Sengun” or Nuchi du takara, not both."
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Buddhists, Christians, Shintoists, Rightists, Leftists, Centrists Join to Co-create Nuclear-Free Japan
Buddhist monks in Matsuyama City in Ehime Prefecture in Shikoku are staging the sit-ins to protest against the prospect of restarting Ikata Nuclear Power Plant, which sits just outside the largest active fault in Japan (Median Tectonic Line) and part of the plant is built on the landfill. The monks are calling out to Christian churches to join them in the protest.
International radiation protection standards have historically weighed radiation risks and cost-benefit considerations in such as way as to protect the nuclear power industry at the expense of radiation victims, a Japanese interfaith network has said.
The Interfaith Forum for Review of National Nuclear Policy held a meeting from April 17-19 in Fukushima to debate claims by the Japanese government regarding the effects of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, which took place in March 2011. The government, following standards set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, a Canadian organization of scientists and policy makers, has said “there is no immediate [radioactive] impact on human bodies” from the disaster.
The Tokyo-based IFRNNP ― an 800-member anti-nuclear network co-led by 40 Japanese Buddhists, Christians, and Shintoists ― invited Kozo Inaoka, a Japanese physicist and author of a book about radiation exposure, to the meeting to lecture about the ICRP’s history and “ideological character.”
In his book, A History of Radiation Exposure, Inaoka claims the radiation protection standards are “scientifically disguised social standards” allowing the industry to impose exposure levels that suit its needs as it develops nuclear plants.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Deep Kyoto: IDRO JAPAN GOLDEN WEEK CHARITY SALE
Via Deep Kyoto:
Event: Massive Bargain Sale / Gathering / Sing-a-long / Cookie Fest
Purpose: To raise lots of cash/awareness for IDRO Japan’s great work in the disaster-struck Tohoku region!
Dates & Times: Saturday May 5th – 11:00 – 21:00 /Sunday May 6th – 10:00 – 15:00
Location: Very close to Demachiyanagi Station at the 左京西部いきいき市民活動センター (Sakyou Nishibu Iki-iki Shimin Katsudou Center). Please note – it’s not the same location as last year!
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Charles J. Hanley on the Korean peninsula: "Why has this state of no war, no peace dragged on for 60 years?"
This 2010 article by Pulitzer Prize-winning AP correspondent Charles J. Hanley is as relevant today as when first published.
Hanley, a rare example of a journalist of integrity sticking with a tough story over the long term, asks, "Why has this state of no war, no peace dragged on for 60 years? and the answers he receives all point to world powers manipulating the Korean peninsula to maintain the Cold War status quo:
South Korean scholar Hong believes four great powers -- the U.S. and Japan on one side, China and Russia on the other -- like it this way.
A unified Korea would align with one power or the other, upsetting the regional balance, said the former Korea University president, a prominent conservative commentator.
"By keeping Korea divided, they're in fact maintaining their own security," Hong said...
Despite normalizing relations with Moscow, Beijing and Vietnam, the U.S. "has chosen containment over engagement and peaceful coexistence with North Korea," he [historian Park Myung-lim] said.
"I don't understand -- Washington is much, much bigger and stronger than Pyongyang, but for 60 years they have failed to bring it into the international community, to invite them to the international community."
...Veteran Korea observer Selig A. Harrison, of the Washington research group Center for International Policy, sees "lots of missed opportunities for peace" over six decades of confrontation."
(Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek flank Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo "where the U.S., Great Britain, and China signed a communiqué in December 1943. The three signatories proclaimed for the first time that Japan would forfeit its control over the Korean Peninsula...The initial plan concept for an occupied Korea did not envision a peninsula separated into two independent occupation forces, but a joint trusteeship occupation similar to that which they later coordinated in Austria. There the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States were designated areas of administration coordinated by a central policy. Korea’s occupation divided the peninsula into two separate geographic and political zones. At the December 1945 Moscow Conference the Soviet Union and the United States reaffirmed their commitment to trusteeship and agreed that Korea would be granted its independence in five years, within which time the two superpowers would prepare the Korean people for general elections to form a unified Korean government. This plan never took hold. Within three years separate governments in the south and north were formed, which paved the way for all out war in June 1950." Text & photo: The Asia-Pacfic Journal)Democracy Now! interviewed Charles Hanley, co-author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, after South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released findings in 2008, "concluding the US military indiscriminately killed large groups of South Korean civilians during the Korean War in the early 1950s."
See also "North Korea's 100th – To Celebrate or To Surrender?" by Gavan McCormack and "Extended Nuclear Deterrence, Global Abolition, and Korea" by Peter Hayes.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Cherry Blossoms at Night in Tokyo's Nakameguro Neighborhood
This was taken in Nakameguro along the Meguro River, which has amazing views of the sakura. Last night the weather was wonderful and tons of people were out enjoying the food stalls. Photo: Kim Hughes
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Gavan McCormack: "Little basis for the view that North Korea poses a threat of regional aggression..."
(Gavan McCormack: "Note that this trajectory, traversing both China and Taiwan, would make any intervention by the US or Japan extremely difficult. Image: ROK Drop.com)East Asia scholar Gavan McCormack brings his attention to the latest revival of the media and political theatrical drama, "Pyongyang Peril", now in its 62nd season, in this rational and multi-layered analysis at The Asia-Pacific Journal: "North Korea's 100th – To Celebrate or To Surrender?":
Although there is no doubt that North Korea is a highly unpleasant dictatorship), there is little basis for the view that it poses a threat of regional aggression...
The real issue is the far too long continued state of "temporary" ceasefire on the peninsula. The task is to normalize relations between north and south and between North Korea and its former colonial master Japan and its bitter enemy of 62 years, the United States, and bring this country in from the "cold" of international isolation.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Minister of Nuclear Disaster Goshi Hosono: "Let's burn debris" street campaign in Kyoto, Japan
On March 31, 2012, the Minister of Environment & Nuclear Disaster Minister Goshi Hosono held a street campaign at Kyoto Station to persuade local people to deal with debris from Iwate and Miyagi prefectures.
Locals protested, concerned about nuclear radiation contamination and other public health (dioxin, asbestos, hexavalent chromium...) issues.
...via KJ on FB...
MPORTANTMore info: • "Government tabs 3 towns [Futaba, Okuma, Naraha] as dump sites for nuclear debris" (Asahi, March 11, 2012)
ガレキ受け入れ反対！
Local authorities around Japan have been given until April 6th to give their decision regarding whether or not to accept radioactive debris for incineration.
地方自治体ががれきを受け入れる意思決定の締め切りは2012年4月6日
See the details here and info on how to put pressure on your local authority
行動を起こしましょう! 圧力をかける方法: Don't Spread Gareki
You can check whether your local authority has already accepted debris (last updated March 30th)
がれき受け入れ自治体一覧＆マップ
http://one-world.happy-net.jp/ukeire/
• "Asbestos, dioxin threats in Japan tsunami rubble" (Physorg.com, April, 28, 2011)
• "Hosono asks 43 prefectures to take debris from Tohoku" (Japan Today, Oct. 5, 2011)
• "Goshi Hosono Short on Facts on Debris-Peddling Commercial" (EXSKF, March 18. 2012)
• YouTube video of the recent Hosono advertisement asking Japanese prefectures to burn Tohoku debris, dissected by EXSKF, above.
• "A new nightmare: Radioactive ash has nowhere to go" (Asahi, Feb. 29, 2012)
• "Cesium in incinerator dust across east Japan (Kyodo, Aug. 28, 2011)
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Two weekend 3.11-themed events encourage Tokyo residents to consider Tohoku realities
Top Right: Spring Love HarukazeBottom Left: Namida Project: Voices
Tokyo is a city with every possible sort of culture, subculture, and social activist-oriented organization in existence. With the array of events constantly on offer, I often find myself facing a dilemma choosing which ones to attend. This past weekend was a perfect example. I was scheduled to go to the Spring Love Harukaze event in Yoyogi Park as a member of its organizing committee, but another post 3.11-event scheduled at the same time, Namida Project: Voices, caught my attention.
"Voices" was advertised as a day-long event organized by a grassroots team of artists, designers, and activists known as the Namida Project. Held at the Shibaura House multi-media event space, it was to feature talk sessions, workshops, video screenings and musical performances to raise awareness and funds on behalf of the disaster regions. Even though it would require rushing across town and possibly shirking some of my responsibilities, I was determined to attend even for an hour or two.
I made it to the screening/director’s talk of Then and Now, Paul Richard Johannessen’s poignant short film exploring issues facing residents of Ishinomaki, a disaster-hit city in Tohoku . Although I had previously seen the documentary, I was anxious to speak with Toshihiko Fujita, one of the community leaders profiled in the film, whose volunteer group I had worked with during a previous visit to Ishinomaki. I would have to miss his talk since I had to leave early, but I did have a chance to speak with him before the session began. He told me he was glad to visit Tokyo to promote local Ishinomaki businesses that had restarted following the disaster, but were now in great need of assistance to survive—including the Kotobukiya saké shop, which was profiled in Then and Now, as well as in this excellent piece by photojournalist and seasoned volunteer Mike Connelly.
Fujita added that he had come bearing an important message for Tokyoites: "Build community before it’s too late." He pointed out that neighborhoods in Ishinomaki with tight relations prior to 3.11 had community soup kitchens up and running just days following the disaster, whereas those where neighbors barely knew each others’ names remained isolated, perhaps with stockpiled goods, but without the support of human connection. With the real possibility existing for disaster to hit Tokyo at any time, Fujita urged people here to learn critical lessons from Ishinomaki’s experience.
The additional "Voices" session that I was able to attend focused on health-related issues following the Fukushima disaster. Panelists explained in detail the environmental and health-related effects of radiation, pointing out that although many people tend to downplay its ill effects by citing naturally occurring forms of environmental radiation, the reality is that significant differences exists between natural radiation and the unnatural type released during the meltdowns—thereby indeed requiring caution.
Panelist Aya Marumori, Executive Health Director of the Citizens’ Radioactivity Measuring Station (CRMS), added that she routinely faced anger from some Fukushima residents who preferred to believe government explanations that the radiation emitted from the accident was “safe”, thereby resenting her taking measurements, and accusing her of “starting rumors.” Nevertheless, she voiced her determination to continue her efforts to empower local residents.
Discussion on health issues following Fukushima nuclear disaster, where panelist Aya Marumori utilizes props to explain the effects of radiation on the bodySimilar messages were echoed several hours later across town at the Spring Love Harukaze event, during the panel discussion that I helped moderate on post-3.11 sustainability-related issues. Tokyo-based reggae singer Likkle Mai, whose seaside hometown of Miyako in Iwate prefecture sustained enormous damage from both the earthquake and tsunami, has spent much of the past year spearheading various disaster relief projects throughout Tohoku while simultaneously running her own record label. “It is heartbreaking that survivors have to deal not only with piecing back together their lives and livelihoods following the disaster, but must also face the realities of radiation,” she said. “I have visited Fukushima to do live performances, and although I must at times be careful about how I choose my words due to locally existing sensitivities, I am always clear about my fundamental anti-nuclear stance.”
Also on the panel were Masaru Kohsaka, who quit his job as an office worker to become an organic farmer and run his own café/bar in Tokyo; and Gota Matsumura, another Ishinomaki resident who appeared in Then and Now. He helped initiate Ishinomaki 2.0, an organization that helps to rebuild the city through grassroots projects including an art and design studio offering DIY workshops, a solar-powered café, a guesthouse, a bar, and more.
“Our project is about realizing that you can create anything that you envision, without waiting for some official to give you orders from above,” explained Matsumura. “Everything that we have achieved has been entirely from citizen-led initiatives."
This perspective was echoed by Kohsaka, author of a recent book called Downshifters, who explained that he embarked on this path to prove that it was possible to “shift down” to a lifestyle that might earn significantly less money (in his case, half of his previous earnings)—but that was far richer in terms of fulfillment. Serving as the discussion facilitator, he commented, “I think this is the common factor amongst all three of us: the fact that we have each taken life into our own hands, rather than waiting for some big conglomerate or corporation to do things for us.”
Peace Not War Japan members Kimberly Hughes (far left) and Miho Yazawa Niida (far right) flanking panelists Masaru Kohsaka, Likkle Mai and Gota NishimuraThe talk was fascinating, but heavy rains and freezing winds at the outdoor Yoyogi Park venue unfortunately meant that only a handful of people ended up hearing it. Luckily, Paul Johannesenn’s film crew was on hand to film the talk for use in a longer future documentary on post-disaster Ishinomaki—footage is below.
Although Saturday’s weather also meant that most of the festival was cancelled, Sunday was mild and gorgeous, with the sakura (cherry blossoms) just beginning to peek out. The day was a wonderful gathering that featured the fantastic live music that Spring Love Harukaze is famous for, as well as organic food and goods stalls, live painting, a skateboarding ramp, stages powered by fuel from PET bottle caps, a lively parade through the streets of Shibuya, appeals from Peace Not War Japan for participants to support the anti-base movements in Okinawa and on Korea’s Jeju Island, and much more.
With the new fiscal year beginning in Japan, the first week of April is traditionally a time when everyone makes a fresh start at schools, companies, and in their lives in general. The reality that many people prefer to forget or ignore—particularly those in Tokyo—is that the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant remains far from under control. A sizeable earthquake could create enough damage to expose nuclear fuel rods. This would result in unthinkable levels of radiation exposure over a wide area, including the capital.
To borrow metaphors from the titles of these weekend events, it is hoped that the voices of those in Tokyo and Tohoku were able to reach one another along the harukaze (spring winds), with the former being more aware of ongoing hardships for those in the disaster regions while simultaneously re-thinking their own futures in more sustainable terms.
Toru Kimura and Nicholas Ree discussing issues of post-3.11 youth-led activism, disaster reconstruction and nuclear issues together with Peace Not War Japan moderator Miho Yazawa Niida during a panel discussion held on Sunday --Kimberly Hughes
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