In the past year, protests grew bigger and bigger, peaking in July, when 100.000 protester demonstrated against the relaunch of the Oi-reactors. Government’s propaganda always insisted on Japan’s dependency on nuclear power, calling a phase out impossible under these conditions. Nevertheless, with only two nuclear reactors running right now, Japan got over a hot summer without major black outs. This gives the Japanese anti-nuclear movement some encouragement, arguing that Japan can live without nuclear power.
But critics raise their voices regarding the government’s new policies: while the government supposedly wants to say goodbye to nuclear energy, it still plans to continue to recycle nuclear fuel rods. These can be used to keep up the nuclear energy supply or be represent the basic condition for the production of atomic weapons. Nuclear energy industries used to promote the nuclear cycle provided through the rod’s recovery as the endlessness of these energy supplies. Even Tepco had to realize, though, that this nuclear cycle is not feasible.

Isabel Pichler, who wrote our last blog post, also pointed out some points of critique:

“A shift from nuclear means Japan should remain the world’s biggest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and third-largest purchaser of oil to feed its power stations. Japan is also likely to increase reliance on coal.

The decision to stop nuclear energy by 2030′s seems to be good, but the new strategy also seems lacking in key details.
What we all want to know is what the government is going to do with the restarting reactors!?

Well, Noda’s decision won’t probably resolve fierce debate over whether reducing atomic power’s role will do more harm or good to the economy.
And with Noda’s Democratic Party expected to lose the general election, there is no guarantee that the next government would stand by the policy.”

But still, it is unbelievable, that the Japanese anti-nuclear movement, who got hardly any attention from Japanese and international media in spring and summer 2012, within a year, grew to such an extend, that a pro-nuclear government sees its only possibility to get re-elected in making concessions to them.

So, we’d like to conclude this post with the last words of Isabel’s statement:

“But for the moment, I really wanna say THANK YOU and WELL DONE to ALL PROTESTERS!!

NEVER GIVE UP!”

More information:

Isabel Pichler’s statement

BBC

Washington Post

Süddeutsche Zeitung (German)

In Japan, summer is not over, in contrary, it’s still really hot and humid. However, tens of thousands of citizens have continued to chant against the restart of Japan’s nuclear reactors. They didn’t stop for summer vacation, but organized protests against nuclear power and the miss-action of the japanese government throughout juin, july and august.

Just to remind you:
On June 16, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda decided to restart the Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture. On July 5 it became the first reactor to be restarted since the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 of last year.

However, the protesters’ efforts are beginning to have an effect. In August, Noda announced that he will meet the leaders of the antinuclear protests in front of his office, where the gatherings have been held every Friday evening since March 29.

The weekly protests are among many recent demonstrations against nuclear power. The biggest of these were a protest in front of the prime minister’s office on June 29, a demonstration that filled Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park on July 16, and a rally that included a human chain that surrounded the Diet building on July 29.

Two collectives are responsible for the dissemination of information for the antinuclear rallies. One of them is Sayonara Genpatsu Issenmannin Akushon (Goodbye Nuclear Power, 10 Million People in Action), a coalition of older organizations, and the other is the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes, made up of newer organizations.

Sayonara Genpatsu was responsible for the massive rally in Yoyogi Park. It consists of 60 citizens’ organizations that include the long-standing antinuke group Gensuikin, the Consumers Union of Japan, celebrities such as Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, and journalist and writer Satoshi Kamata.

The Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes was established in September 2011 and includes a network of more than 10 groups.
In contrast to Sayonara Genpatsu, I would say that this collective is less bureaucracy and more grassroots.

And it’s exactly in front of the PM’s office that both collectives, that protests and demonstrations take place since March. But it’s since PM Noda decided to restart the nuclear plants in Oi that the protests are getting bigger and bigger. The coalition says the number of the protesters has remained steady at around 90,000 in August. This is the reason why also the police is getting more nervous.
Since July 13, police have placed metal fences between the pavements and the roads in front of the PM’s office. Although the media was told by the Metropolitan Police Department that it had decided to place the fences after consulting the coalition, this was not the case, according to the colectives.

Meanwhile, now that the antinuclear movement has become a major issue, not only the authorities but also the public are starting to pay attention to whether the movement can continue to grow in the future.
..and we believe that it WILL GROW!

On Friday, June 29, more than 150.000 people gathered in front of Noda’s residence in Tokyo. The demonstration has been organized by the Metropolitan Coalition against Nukes, which has been active since March 2012, gathering 45.000 people just one week ago. For more than three months they have been organizing peaceful demonstrations against the restart of nuclear reactors in Japan. But their last demonstration sure was a miracle: Despite of the masses of people, nobody got hurt or arrested.

150.000 people gathering in front of the Japanese prime minister's residence on June 29.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people tried to block the entrance to the reactors in Ōi and stop workers from entering the power plant. And of course people protested in other Japanese cities, in Ōsaka for example. Live streams via Ustream made it possible to follow these demonstrations all over Japan for the whole weekend.

Under the slogan “Stop nuclear power plants! Stop Noda!” the Amateurs’ Revolt, which we focussed on in RADIOACTIVISTS, held a demonstration as well on July 1. You can see some pictures here.
Another action took place at the other side of the world: In New York, people from Todos Somos Japon showed solidarity with the Japanese protesters and conducted a hunger strike in front of the Japanese consulate.

Articles in English are also available in Mainichi and the NY Times.

Besides that we’re still trying to raise awareness for the Japanese anti-nuclear movement by showing our film RADIOACTIVISTS. We were present at a screening in Berlin a couple of weeks ago in order to have a chat with the audience who had just seen the film, when a young woman voiced her critique that we’ve merely presented one group of activists in the film although the anti-nuclear scene in Tokyo and Japan is very diverse. She is very right in this point and we had a vivid exchange about this topic. She has come back from Japan very recently was very active in the movement during her stay. And she also made short film, that tells some background information about the organization of the demonstrations which we could not include in our film. So we proudly present Isabel Pichler and her very interesting piece ‘Voices Against Indifference‘ and hope that she will soon summarize the current situation of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement in a separate blog post. Until then, enjoy…

Last-ditch attempts by the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, to win support for the early restart of two reactors at Oi power plant in western Japan have failed amid a hardening of public opposition to nuclear power.

Of course, anti-nuclear activists have been celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime-success all weekend. Who would have imagined a year ago that all reactors would shut down so soon after the Fukushima disaster in 2011?

Watch them celebrating (last Sunday, Koenj, Tokyo) in the following video:

A group called ‘Amateurs’ revolt’ (in Japanese: Shiroto no ran) organized this demonstration shortly after the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima on March 11, 2011. They have been organizing demonstrations in Tokyo since 2004, and after 3.11 they decided to protest against the government, the nuclear agency and TEPCO. When they announced the demonstration, they expected the turnout to be around 500 participants. No one expected that on the day 15,000 would show up. It was exciting for everyone involved to see such a mass of people protesting and voicing their anger about the biggest manmade catastrophe in Japan’s history: not only long-term activists, but families with children, punks, subcultures, young and old people, foreigners living in Tokyo… It was the spirit of this moment to change a hole society and to abandon all nuclear power plants as soon as possible. But what happened in Japan since this first major demonstration? How did this emerging protest movement continue to develop?

On our blog, we tried to follow the anti-nuclear movement over the past year. The Amateurs’ revolt continued to organize a anti-nuclear demonstration every month from April on: in May, June, August, September… On September 19, 2012, they joined forces with every anti-nuclear group and organization in Japan and performed the biggest success so far with more than 60,000 people participating in an outstanding demonstration with a lot of media coverage in Japan as well as internationally. On the other hand, the police forces became more and more aggressive over the summer, resulting in an arrest of 13 people (including some of the organizers) on that day and holding them back in prison for up to 23 days.

It came as a shock for the amateurs’ revolt. They felt responsible for getting their friends arrested and decided that it was not worth risking more people to get arrested, so they temporarily stopped to take the leading role in organizing the anti-nuclear demonstrations in Tokyo.

Other people soon started to fill that empty space, for example No Nukes More Hearts, Tanpopo, Drums of Fury… it seemed that more and more organizations entered the stage, and the demonstrations were a bit smaller, but all in all the number of demos increased rapidly, not only in Tokyo, but all over the country. We reported about some of them on our blog: here, here, and here.

In the last couple of months, we saw huge protest events with several thousands of people happening to commemorate the first year anniversary of 3.11, and we heard that by now 53 out of 54 reactors in Japan are stopped – sure it is not an official government’s decision yet, but we are sure that hundreds of demonstrations, ten thousands of participants and more than 70% of the Japanese society being against nuclear power plants now is a huge argument that cannot be ignored by the Japanese politicians after all.

If you had asked anybody at the demonstration at April 10 one year ago, I guess that nobody would have expected this development. But it is still no time to rest, and nothing is certain yet. We have to continue to protest, to discuss it, to talk about it and bring the issue up in the media. One year after, we are still excited about how this will continue, just like after the first demonstration…

Another highlight was our first official festival appearance at the One World Human Rights Festival 2012 in Prague. Watch our interview her:

Another reactor in Japan was shut down, leaving just one reactor -out of the 54- running. As stated in this article, the official reasons are maintenance and stress tests, but also local governments and electric companies are facing a big public opposition.

There was one panel at the Left Forum in New York City that broached the issue of this public opposition called ‘People’s Movement In the Post Fukushima Nuclear Power Catastrophe‘. Panelists were Keisuke Jinno, Yuko Tonohira as well as Sabu Kohso - the latter two are founders of jfissures.org, a bilingual blog/webpage where we found a lot of information for the preparations of RADIOACTIVISTS and also some of our interview partners (Yoshitaka Mori, Yoshihiko Ikegami, Chigaya Kinoshita. We were also invited as panelists but since we couldn’t come to New York we ended up sending a video message where we summarize our experiences with RADIOACTIVISTS.

You can watch the whole panel here:

While first panelist Keisuke Jinno explains some general facts concerning the situation of the nuclear catastrophe regarding social, political and economical aspects, Yuko Tanahira goes into different aspects of people’s movements against nuclear power in Japan. Her discourse (which can be followed starting video number 5) answers a lot of questions we got asked at the Q&As after screenings of RADIOACTIVISTS, so if you are interested in the issue, please watch her lecture. Also Sabu Kohso gives some relevant insights on the issues of public opposition to nuclear energy in Japan, also explaining differences and similarities with the Occupy Wallstreet movement.

Last but not least, you can watch our video message for the panel here:

Last Sunday (March 11, 2012) a lot of protest events took place all over Japan (and the world) to commemorate the triple catastrophe and especially the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident of 3.11. The “Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes”, a network of anti-nuclear organizations and individuals which formed in September 2011, organized the biggest protest march at Hibiya Park, Tokyo, with more than 30.000 participants under the following appeal:

The Tohoku Earthquake occurred at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011.
This disaster not only resulted in nearly 20,000 the deaths and
missing persons by the earthquake and tsunami, but developed into the
serious accident by explosion and meltdown of Fukushima Daiitchi
Nuclear Power Plant.
In this accident, the vast area of East Japan was polluted by the
radioactive material, and people who were obliged to refuge exceeded
100,000.
Futhermore, the life and health of people, especially children who
live in this country, are exposed to serious danger even now by the
government which does not try to protect people’s lives.
Now, almost plants stop for a periodic inspection, and the schedules
of re-operation are not clear because of the disapproval by local .
The public opinion of the anti-nuclear power is increasing, and the
possibility of the big accident by a future big earthquake is pointed
out.
However, the government and the electric power companies are going to
advance re-operation.
We think that true revival is facing firmly not only the damage of a
natural disaster, but the damage of the nuclear power plant disaster
which is a man-made.
The unprecedented mixed disaster of earthquake and nuclear power plant
accident is advancing even now which will be one year soon from that
March 11.
We mourn for victims , renew the oath to anti-nuclear and perform a
big demonstration parade.
Starting a demonstration with a silent prayer, and we join surrounding
the National Diet Building for mourning and a protest with the candles
after the parade.
With people in the world who are opposed to nuclear power.

This demo in Tokyo was just one among may. In Koriyama, Fukushima, for example, more than 15.000 people gathered to demonstrate against nuclear power.

Another protest event was organised by the Kyoto-based band “Frying Dutchman”, which was virtually unknown a year ago, but became an internet sensation over the past few months with their protest song “humanERROR”. To commemorate the events of 3.11 they appealed:

Please play this song wherever you are; in the streets, shops, your car, your friend’s or colleagues’ cars. Even if you are alone at home, please play this tune in your room.
Of course, if you are at a large-scale gathering, such as a demonstration, rally, exhibition, etc., we hope humanERROR will be noticed.
But participation is not limited to where there are many people. Even listening on your media player, or your smartphone, pc, etc. is participation in the humanERROR parade.

The parade started at March 10 at noon, Japanese time. We hope this parade as well as all the other events were successful and were able to bring the issues related to the Fukushima accident back in the people’s minds.