Helena Norberg-Hodge: On Earth Day, an Economics for People & Planet

Helena Norberg-Hodge's summary of the clash of two major worldviews we now see in play throughout our planet:

Much has changed since the first Earth Day in 1970. Not only have our ecological crises come into sharper focus, it has also become obvious that we need to rescue not just the Earth, but also its people from the clutches of an economy gone mad. Worldwide, more and more people are recognizing that fundamental changes to that economy are urgently needed if our most pressing problems – ecological, social, economic, and even spiritual – are to be solved. Instead of trying to tackle a seemingly endless list of separate problems, strategic shifts in economic policy would put us on a path that is good for both people and the planet.

Over the past decades, globalization, or the continued deregulation of trade and finance, has created a world dominated by giant banks and corporations. Because governments almost everywhere have catered to their demands, we are now faced not only with global warming, extinction of species and dramatic increases in pollution, but also with financial instability, endemic unemployment, increased conflict, and epidemics of ill health and depression...

We need to move in exactly the opposite direction – away from economic globalization and towards the local. This doesn’t mean eliminating all trade or adopting an isolationist attitude – it simply means shortening the distances between consumers and producers wherever possible....

The localization movement is beginning to bridge the divides between groups that are working to make the world a better place: environmental activists, small business owners, community leaders, educators, social justice campaigners, farmers, workers’ rights advocates, religious and spiritual groups. An exciting, once-in-a-generation coalition is emerging: a coalition that offers real hope for broad-based and lasting renewal.

Read the rest here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/22-1

Japanese Scholars Fight for Democracy

Via Japan-based journalist Kjeld Duits, 3-minute video report, "Japanese Scholars Fight for Democracy." 

Green Action briefing from Kyoto: Nuclear accident evacuation planning in central Japan

Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action, a Kyoto-based nuclear-free advocacy organization, speaks about nuclear power accident emergency planning in central Japan. Plans call for the evacuation of more than a quarter million people to sites such as Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe.

Cherry Blossoms in Hibiya Park

Cherry Blossoms in Hibiya Park, Tokyo (Photo: Kimberly Hughes) 

Cherry Blossoms in Shinjuku Gyoen

Cherry Blossoms in Shinjuku Gyoen, Tokyo (Photo: Kimberly Hughes) 

Green Action: Japanese citizens sue, saying "No!" to restart of nuclear power in Japan

Instead of moving forward and focusing on the development of better energy conservation methods and renewable energy, Japan, under the Abe administration, is going backward.  Japanese energy companies, the second highest importers of coal in the world after Chinese energy firms, are spending billions of dollars on new coal-fired plants.  Moreover, the Abe administration has aggressively promoted the export of nuclear plants overseas and is now pushing for the restart of nuclear plants in Japan, despite the opposition of the majority of citizens.

Our friends at Green Action, a Kyoto-based nuclear-free advocacy organization led by Eileen Mioko Smith, recently released this video press statement about their legal action to stop the restart:

On March 20th 2014, Japanese citizens gathered at the Osaka District Courthouse at the final session of the injunction lawsuit (filed in 2012) against the restart of Fukui Prefecture's Ohi nuclear reactors units 3 and 4.

Currently all nuclear reactors in Japan have been temporarily shut down following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in March 2011. However, Japanese electric utilities have 17 applications in to restart reactors. The Ohi reactors are among the first slated for restart. The litigants are seeking that the courts address three main issues:

1) underestimation of earthquake impact on the reactors

2) no method of preventing radioactive discharge into the ocean in the event of a serious accident

3) not taking into consideration an active fault very near the emergency coolant pipe, or faults moving simultaneously near the reactor site.

(Note: Past earthquake examples show that Japanese earthquakes produce greater seismic motion with the same AREA of earthquake fault shifting than foreign earthquakes.)

Die for Japan: Wartime Propaganda Kamishibai (paper plays)

The Abe administration's move—towards political censorship, fuller remilitarization (this week the Japanese government discarded a half-century ban on the export of weapons), and overturning Article 9, the Peace Clause of the Japanese Constitution—has reminded many of prewar and wartime Japan.

Professor Jeffrey Dym's (Sacramento State) terrific Die for Japan: Wartime Propaganda Kamishibai opens a window on popular Japanese culture of that period. The  2012 short documentary film explores how the wartime government appropriated kamishigai, a form of popular Japanese street art, to exhort Japanese people to embrace death during war as a duty to the state.

Dym shows how wartime Japanese propaganda glorified dying for the nation, and, in contrast, American Second World War propaganda glorified killing the enemy.

We live in an increasingly visual culture and I believe it is important for us as scholars to become involved in creating and adding scholarly contributions to it and not just as talking heads in a documentary. Thus, I have embarked on a road I call "visual scholarship."

I would like to announce the publishing of an eighteen minute documentary--"Die for Japan: Wartime Propaganda Kamishibai" (paper plays; 国策紙芝居)--I recently completed. The film examines Japanese propaganda from a unique angle and the film could be used to spark classroom discussion, particularly if paired with an American wartime propaganda film like "Know Your Enemy Japan."

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Recent posts on Japanese concern about remilitarization:

 "Kenzaburo Oe, Jakucho Setouchi, Masahide Ota found “1000-member committee to prevent Japan from entering wars" (Rally @Hibiya Park, March 20, 2014)" (March 18, 2014)

"Yoji Yamada's Kabei (Our Mother) explores repression and militarization during wartime Japan" (April 2, 2014)

Yoji Yamada's Kabei (Our Mother) explores repression and militarization during wartime Japan

Since the Koizumi administration (2001-2006), LDP-run Japanese governments have enthusiastically moved towards increasing political repression (especially freedom of expression), concomitantly with remilitarization (yesterday the Japanese government discarded a half-century ban on the export of weapons). These shifts, reminiscent  of 1930's and early 1940's Japan, have not only triggered concerns in other Asian countries, but has also in Japan: bringing to the surface memories of the build-up to Japan's last war.

This illuminating interview,"YOJI YAMADA: Voice of dissent revives forgotten war memories," by Mark Schilling with an antiwar filmmaker  (published at JT in 2008) reflects these concerns.  (Yamada is renowned in Japan for his 1969-96 film series Otoko wa Tsurai Yo (Tora-san) that follows the romantic ups and downs of a goodhearted peddler;  at a deeper level, the series is an exploration of postwar Japanese society from the perspective of ordinary people living on the economic margins.)  Kabei takes a similar perspective at an earlier time period: exploring how prewar repression and militarization affected the lives of ordinary Japanese individuals and their families.

(Yoji Yamada.Photo: Yoshiaki Miura)

...Based on a memoir by Teruyo Nogami, a script supervisor for Akira Kurosawa for more than four decades, "Kaabee" is a family drama set in Tokyo in 1940-41, when war clouds were darkening and freedom of expression was vanishing.

In the opening scene the father, a scholar of German literature, is arrested on the charge of shisohan (a"thought" crime).

The mother, played by Sayuri Yoshinaga, then has to raise her two young daughters, Teruyo and Hatsuko, on her own, though her art-student sister (Reiko Dan) and her husband's bumbling-but-dedicated former student (Tadanobu Asano) rally to her side.

"Kaabee" is set in the early 1940s, but its themes, including the suppression of dissent, still have relevance today. Was that your main reason for wanting to make this film?

What attracted me first was the childhood memoir by Teruyo Nogami. Her father was actually arrested under the Peace Preservation Law (which had the goal of clamping down on communists, labor activists and opponents of Japan's militarism) and spent time in jail. That's what Japan was like in 1940 and 1941, but Japanese today don't know this. I wanted to rekindle their memories. Those were frightening times, when Japan started the Pacific War with an unstoppable wave.

Can we say the same frightening, out-of-control forces that started that war are absent from Japan today? In 1945 we made what was supposed to be a strong commitment to peace. But now (certain forces) are trying to change the "peace Constitution."

Japan should have remained the one country in the world with no military and a prohibition against war (in the Constitution). Now Japan is going along with America and the Bush administration. I have doubts about whether that's right.

I imagine that the audience in Berlin will understand this theme.

Yes, in the 1930s and 1940s Germany went through similar experiences. We were both fascist countries. It must have been scary to oppose Hitler at that time, so I think the German audience will understand that aspect.

I've seen a lot of Japanese movies about the war, but yours is something different — you focus on one family instead of combatants.

There aren't many films about that specific time. The movies made in the 1940s had to pass military censors, so they don't express any reality. The movies made after 1945 are also lacking in that they don't portray the lives of ordinary people during wartime...

What message would you like people to take away from the film?

When the war ended in 1945, Japan was the loser and there was an international trial. Then (former Prime Minister Hideki) Tojo and other Class-A war criminals were hanged. But in Japan the police had been rounding up people who were opposed to the war and killing them without trial. About 60,000 people were arrested.

In Germany, those who cooperated with the Nazis were tried in German courts, separately from the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. In Japan we didn't have that. The husband in "Kaabee" is basically killed by the police, but the killers weren't put on trial. They brazenly returned to the police force.

Japan made a wonderful postwar Constitution, but no amends have been made for past wrongs. In Germany, the Nazi collaborators were made to pay for what they did; in Japan, a war criminal could became prime minister, such as Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of our recent prime minister, Shinzo Abe. There's something strange about that...

The rest of this important interview at the above link.

Vernal Equinox in Kyoto: Weeping Plum Blossoms at Jonangu Shrine

Looking for images of Spring Equinox in Kyoto, and these are the most beautiful: Deep Kyoto's stunning set of photos of weeping plum in full bloom at Jonangu Shrine.

How Gary Snyder's and Daniel Ellsberg's chance meeting in Kyoto in 1960 changed them and world history...

Ryoanji stone garden, Kyoto (Photo: The Kyoto Project)

In The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World, Donald Rothberg suggests that change is mysterious and always possible, illustrating his point by relating an encounter between poet Gary Snyder and Daniel Ellsberg in Kyoto.  This chance meeting influenced the latter's decision to release the Pentagon Papers to the media, with the hope it would speed the end of the Vietnam War:

Daniel Ellsberg tells the story of meeting activist, poet, and Zen practitioner Gary Snyder by chance at a bar near the Zen monastery of Ryoanji in Kyoto, Japan, in 1960. Ellsberg was living in Tokyo, working on nuclear weapons policy for the Office of Naval Research, through the Rand Corporation.  Snyder was then midway through a nearly ten-year period of Zen practice, staying at or near Zen monasteries for the bulk of that time.

Ellsberg had gone to see the Zen garden at Ryoanji because he had read about it in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums in which Snyder was the lightly fictionalized major figure.

The impact and memory of Ellsberg's conversations with Snyder at the bar and the next day at Snyder's cottage, Ellsberg later reported, played a significant role in his later decision, some nine years later, to divulge the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the planning of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg's action was a major contribution to the turn against the war in public opinion and political discussions in the United States.

Gary Snyder on the porch of 
Shoden-ji Rinzai temple, Kyoto.

(Photo: Terebess.hu)

Daniel Ellsberg in Vietnam (4 years after meeting Gary Snyder; 

5 years before he released The Pentagon Papers). 

(Photo: Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg) 

More about Daniel Ellsberg's shift in awareness (and advice to peace builders, and thoughts on Gary Snyder) in this 2006 interview at Busted Halo:

 I’d like peoples’ consciences to be re-thought and reshaped as much as possible to adopt new norms of nonviolence and truthfulness and that’s a fairly revolutionary change in awareness and specifically in conscience for many people...

Learning from people who have already had that conversion is very helpful. In my case, it was crucial for me to meet people who were of that mind and who were going to prison rather than to take part at all in what they saw as a wrongful war...So I think that courage is contagious and coming into contact or exposing yourself to people who are taking those risks is very helpful and a first step toward doing it yourself... And doing the reading, readings like Joan Valerie Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence, for example, on Gandhian theory, Gandhi himself or Barbara Deming...

You know, the difference that I see between Gandhi and Gandhi’s thought in Buddhism is that there is a very explicit activist theme to Gandhi in which the idea of organized nonviolent civil disobedience in particular but withdrawal of support and even obstruction of wrongful activities are a major factor. And there is a strain of what is called Engaged Buddhism that Joanna Macy and Gary Snyder and others have been prominent in and my wife is attracted to. But that is just one way of being Buddhist and in general, the teachings didn’t point toward organized activity, mass activity, dedicated to changing processes in society or wrongdoing in society. It had more of an emphasis on inward transformation rather than transformation of a society.

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Daniel Ellsberg's website: http://www.ellsberg.net/

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: http://www.mostdangerousman.org/

Daniel Ellsberg: Secrets: Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers: http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Daniel-Ellsberg-Secrets-Vietnam-and-the-Pentagon-Papers-7033

-JD