{"id":106,"date":"2021-08-23T18:52:49","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T18:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/reactions-to-fukushima-part-i\/"},"modified":"2021-08-23T20:20:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T20:20:00","slug":"reactions-to-fukushima-part-i","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/migrated-posts\/reactions-to-fukushima-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Reactions to Fukushima (part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019m back in Japan after a year away, and thus the blog is back too, after a long hiatus.\u00a0 My itinerary this time has me in Tokyo first, after which I will head back up north for another round of volunteer work plus interviews with a variety of people about their experiences on 3\/11 and since, and their concerns (and hopes) for the future.<\/em><\/div>\n
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\u518d\u7a3c\u50cd\u53cd\u5bfe\uff01 \u201cSaikad\u014d hantai!<\/em>\u201d \u2013 A Remarkable Demonstration<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve arrived in Tokyo at a fascinating time.\u00a0 In previous posts, I\u2019ve mentioned the concerns surrounding condition of Japan\u2019s nuclear reactors, in particular their ability to withstand a disaster of the kind that hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant.\u00a0 Last summer and fall, the government ordered the shutting down all of Japan\u2019s reactors, until their operators could prove compliance with \u201cstress tests,\u201d thus effectively taking Japan completely off nuclear power for the first time in decades.\u00a0 Although there were concerns over the criteria to be employed in determining compliance with the new government standards, in general this was a popular move with the Japanese people, especially as more and more information became known about the scope of radioactive contamination produced in the wake of the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, and the system of collusion \u2013 bordering on corruption \u2013 between the nuclear power industry and the government that created the loose safety standards that led to the \u201cunforeseen\u201d catastrophe.<\/p>\n

It thus came as a rude awakening to many Japanese when the government of Prime Minister Noda \u2013 who had previously seemed to lean toward moving Japan away from nuclear power over the long term \u2013reversed itself in June by giving a green light to Kansai Electric Power Company to restart reactors at its facility in the town of Ohi, Fukui Prefecture.\u00a0 On top of this, many people were outraged by the findings of an official government inquiry into the background of the Fukushima disaster, especially in regard to its vagueness in assigning responsibility for it.\u00a0 Rather than blaming TEPCO, the government itself, or a combination of the two, the report postulated that it was ultimately an innate trust of authority and unwillingness to question its established practices on the part of the Japanese people as a whole that was responsible.\u00a0 Simply put, the problem was culture; not collusion or corruption.\u00a0 One does not need to be a firebrand Japanese nationalist to see how this might be an irksome charge for such a report to make.<\/p>\n

Popular anger over the evasiveness, duplicity, and apparent disregard for the popular will on the part of the government has led to the return of mass protest to the Japanese political scene.\u00a0 \u00a0A mass demonstration in Tokyo\u2019s Yoyogi Park on July 16 drew an estimated crowd of 170,000.\u00a0 Perhaps even more remarkable have been the weekly Friday demonstrations in front of the Prime Minister\u2019s residence, which began in April when it first came to light that the government was considering industry requests to permit the reactivation of some reactors.\u00a0 Although initially small in scale, these protest meetings mushroomed in size in June, with the government\u2019s decision on the Ohi plant.\u00a0 On July 20th<\/sup> I was one among a turnout of 90,000.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s some footage I took, starting from the stairs leading up to ground level from the Kokkai Gijid\u014d-mae subway station, which serves the Diet building and surrounding area, including the Prime Minister\u2019s residence.<\/p>\n

Had I known what to expect before exiting the train, I would have started shooting much earlier.\u00a0 The first thing that struck me as I walked through the gate and approached the area where the stairwells to the various above ground destinations diverge, was the overwhelming police presence in the station.\u00a0 The demonstration started as 6pm.\u00a0 By the time I arrived at 6:30, the police had formed a foreboding phalanx to prevent people from taking that exit for the Prime Minister\u2019s residence.\u00a0 I was tempted to go back down the stairs and get a shot of them, but I didn\u2019t want to push my luck with Tokyo\u2019s finest, especially since I don\u2019t know what the rules are regarding the filming cops on-duty in Japan.\u00a0 As it turned out, of course, I\u2019d be seeing many, many more police officers that evening.\u00a0 None of them, as it turned out, seemed to mind being on camera.<\/p>\n

As you can see from the video, protestors were directed to gather along the sidewalks surrounding the Diet Building by police officers and people who appeared to be members of the network of grassroots organizations that convened the weekly demonstration (more on this group later).\u00a0 \u00a0The police presence on the streets was slightly less concentrated than it had been in the station, but what really struck me was the complete absence of a sense of tension between the cops and the demonstrators.\u00a0 Officers shouted directions into yellow plastic megaphones to amplify their voices, but their tones were more like those of ushers at some sort of performance \u2013 or clerks in a busy department store \u2013 than police engaged in trying to maintain order and security while facing a crowd of 90,000: no threats, no tear gas, no brandishing of night sticks.\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cTHE AREA IN FRONT OF THE PRIME MINISTER\u2019S RESIDENCE IS VERY CROWDED AND HAS BEEN CLOSED TO FURTHER ACCESS AT THIS TIME,\u201d an officer stationed right by the exit shouted to passengers emerging from underground.\u00a0 \u201cPLEASE CONTINUE ALONG THE ROUTE TO THE AREA IN FRONT OF THE DIET BUILDING.\u00a0 THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.\u201d<\/p>\n

For its part, the crowd was indeed cooperative.\u00a0 Despite the massive turnout and the narrow spaces along the sidewalk into which all these people found themselves wedged, everyone seemed to be doing their best not only to stay behind that metal pipe barricades that the police had set up along the road, but also made every effort to keep a path open so that people could continued to move along the route.<\/p>\n

The crowd was diverse, too: in terms of age, apparently socioeconomic background, and what one might call, for lack of a better term, apparent degree of long-term commitment to causes of this kind.\u00a0 Folks who fit the description of \u201chard core\u201d anti-nuclear protesters rubbed shoulders with office workers who looked like they had decided to stop by the protest on their way home from work.\u00a0 Women I guessed to be comfortably upper middle class housewives \u2013 some with little children in two \u2013 stood and chanted slogans along side college-aged youths, some clean cut in appearance, others decidedly scruffy.<\/p>\n

Even with such diversity, though, a stroll through the crowd revealed the semblance of a kind of zoning schema \u2013 one most likely devised by the organizations that hosted the protest, in cooperation with the police.\u00a0 On one of the corners closest to the front of the Diet Building, I saw a placard among those with protest statements that informed me I was now in the \u201cfamily section.\u201d\u00a0 Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the same thoroughfare \u2013 and about as far way from the Diet Building and the Prime Minister\u2019s residence as any part of the protest could be, a younger and more boisterous group, complete with a drum corps to add power to the chanting, held forth.\u00a0 The police presence in this section was noticeably heavier than in the \u201cfamily section,\u201d although I still didn\u2019t sense much in the way of tension on either side.<\/p>\n

Here as elsewhere, the phrase \u201csaikad\u014d hantai!<\/em>\u201d (roughly, \u201cwe oppose reactivation\u201d) rang out in a call and response chant.\u00a0 Other chants followed a similar syllabic pattern: \u201cgenpatsu iranai<\/em>\u201d (\u201cwe don\u2019t need nuclear reactors\u201d) and \u201ckodomo mamore<\/em>\u201d (\u201cprotect the children\u201d) being two prominent examples.\u00a0 The rather dense nature of the language \u2013 the way the ideographs can pack a lot of meaning into relatively few syllables \u2013 probably has something to do with this preference from brevity.\u00a0 It might also just be the rhythm of protest in Japanese; the same way that you can\u2019t go to a protest in America without hearing some permutation of the \u201chey-hey, ho-ho\u201d chant.<\/p>\n

More than the slogans themselves, though, it is the turnout itself that suggests the degree to which people from various backgrounds share a sense of concern for the safety of the reactors in the shadow of widespread mistrust of the government and TEPCO for their handling of the Fukushima crisis, and attempts to conceal the truth of its severity from the public.\u00a0 There is most certainly a spectrum of views on the issue of nuclear power in general represented within this crowd; from those who would accept reactivation if \u2013 and only if \u2013 solid guarantees that another disaster like Fukushima Daiichi would never be allowed to happen again, to those who claim that such assurance is impossible in Japan \u2013 or anywhere, for that matter.\u00a0 But concern for safety and a sense of mistrust have supplied the galvanizing energy for these demonstrations.\u00a0 The situation at Fukushima Daiichi is not the only trigger for such feelings, moreover: a day before the July 20th<\/sup> protest, The Asahi shinbun<\/em> reported the findings of a commission charged with reevaluating the seismic vulnerability of some of Japan\u2019s nuclear reactors, including the recently reactivated Ohi facility.\u00a0 Many of these \u2013 including Ohi \u2013 appear to sit atop potentially active fault lines.\u00a0 The report suggests, at the very least, that the review board which initially cleared the sites for these reactors back in the 1980\u2019s heyday of nuclear power development did not do due diligence.\u00a0 It also raises further suspicion of the depth of collusion over the years between the government and the nuclear power industry in Japan.<\/p>\n

It is this sense of mistrust \u2013 that one\u2019s own government doesn\u2019t have one\u2019s best interests in mind, either because of the self-serving greed of powerful cabals of politicians, bureaucrats, and industry leaders, or because of a state commitment to an ideology of development at all cost \u2013 that has brought people out into the streets of Tokyo\u2019s Nagata-ch\u014d section.\u00a0 In spite of postwar Japan\u2019s \u201cwelfare state\u201d approach to managing society \u2013 or perhaps because of it \u2013 I have always found Japanese people to have a particularly deep sense of cynicism about how their government works and whom it really works for.\u00a0 This cynicism seems pretty consistent across the political spectrum, and tends to border on a \u201cbut what are you gonna do?\u201d kind of fatalism: politicians will always serve their own interests before those of the nation as a whole; those who need help the most won\u2019t get it (or get enough of it); and things are destined to limp along like this forever because, ultimately, that is the nature of Japanese democracy \u2013 at least that is the sense of the prevailing sentiment I have gained since I first came to Japan in the mid 1980s.\u00a0 Although this view of politics is by no means wrong, however, like cynicism anywhere it tends to discourage one from trying to change things.\u00a0 \u00a0That\u2019s why these demonstrations are so remarkable; not since the heyday of the student movement in the late 1960s have crowds this large gathered to protest anything.<\/p>\n

Another intriguing feature of the Friday demonstrations, as well as the other anti-nuclear rallies that have taken place since 3\/11, is spontaneity of participation.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already mentioned the diversity of the crowd.\u00a0 This seems to be connected to the very personal nature of people\u2019s motives for coming out.\u00a0 The Friday gatherings themselves are the work of the \u201cMetropolitan Coalition Against Nukes\u201d (\u9996\u90fd\u570f\u53cd\u539f\u767a\u9023\u5408), a collection of thirteen organizations with various aims and orientations \u2013 including, according to a story in the July 19 Asahi<\/em>, at least one right-wing group.\u00a0 But the vast majority of the people who show up probably have no connection to any of these groups.\u00a0 I made a point of asking someone who looked like she might be an organizer about this \u2013 a young woman holding a small plastic flag with \u201cguide\u201d written on it, who was urging people to cross the street to relieve the congestion that was building up in that particular area of the demonstration:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere have all these people come from?\u00a0 Did the coalition mobilize them?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d she said, with obvious wonder at the sheer number of people milling around her, \u201cthis is just happening \u2013 it\u2019s the will of the people.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it great?\u201d<\/p>\n

Local Concerns, Global Frustrations<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The anti-nuclear power demonstrations also come at a very interesting time of uptick in political protest across the globe.\u00a0\u00a0 Movements like the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in much of the Western hemisphere, and anti-nuclear protests in Japan are in one sense certainly disparate movements arising from concerns specific to each case.\u00a0 \u00a0These recent Japanese protests do, however, share some interesting features with the Arab Spring in Egypt and Occupy.\u00a0 Historian Oguma Eiji noted this in a lengthy interview in the July 19th<\/sup> edition of the Asahi shinbun<\/em> (\u201cSeiji o hanas\u014d \u2013 intaby\u016b & rupo \u2013 kiny\u014dbi no yoru, kanteimae de,\u201d p. 15). If you look at the people who are taking part in these movements, you find that the majority of them are people of fairly high educational background: college students, recent graduates, or folks who graduated from college years ago to join the rank of the middle class.\u00a0 In the case of Egypt, these were the people who felt most frustrated by their lack of a political voice.\u00a0 In Occupy, and now in the Japanese anti-nuclear protests, Oguma sees a similar sense of socioeconomic disenfranchisement at work.\u00a0\u00a0 As much as the American media has tried to marginalize Occupy as an unwashed collection of stoners, whack-jobs, hand-out seekers, and people so intoxicated on extremist conspiracy theories about the nefarious aims of multinational corporations that they are incapable of reason, the vast majority of participants are so-to-be college graduates or job seekers with a college degree and enormous loans taken to pay for it.<\/p>\n

In the case of Japan, too, most participants are college students, recent grads languishing in what might be called. \u201ctemp staff hell\u201d kinds of jobs, or people in their mid to late 30s and on who feel the shock of the demise of \u00a0the \u201cmiddle class life for everyone\u201d promise of the high-growth years.\u00a0 They are frustrated with the inequity they see around them.\u00a0 In the US, it was the bailouts in the wake of the Lehman shock, and the strikingly unrepentant attitude of Wall Street that provided the touchstone.\u00a0 In Japan, it is the strong sense that entrenched political interests within the state, in collusion with vested corporate interests outside of it (although just barely so, in the case of amakudari<\/em> bureaucrats and politicians turned private sector board officers), have rigged the game of state development in their favor for too long, and in ways that are ultimately detrimental to the well-being of the citizens.\u00a0 The Fukushima disaster became both an emblem of the problem and a touchstone popular dissatisfaction.<\/p>\n

Oguma also notes another similarity between these movements: the growth of a population with time on its hands to question that status quo, as well as a sense of frustration with it to urge them to do so.\u00a0 The demise of the mass protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 came as the Japanese government\u2019s \u201cincome doubling plan\u201d began to deliver the sense of personal wealth that it promised.\u00a0 Wealth, of course, came at the price of leisure \u2013 and it was during these high growth years that the image of the workaholic sarariiman<\/em> office worker \u2013 perhaps never entirely accurate but certainly indicative of something real \u2013 became a hegemonic symbol of Japanese middle class life.\u00a0 As long as the raises and promotions kept coming, and families could continue to afford the \u201cmy car,\u201d \u201cmy home\u201d (and \u201cmy wife, my kids\u201d) lifestyle, people saw very little to take to the streets over.\u00a0 Much the same dynamic prevented the student protests of 1968 from finding support among this middle class; it also meant that once the students who took over their campuses and clashed with riot police graduated and joined the white collar work force, their fervor for overthrowing the system succumbed to the desires and demands of a busy, generally upwardly mobile life.\u00a0 \u00a0One could mention similar dynamics of the relation between perceptions of wealth, time, and orientation toward political action in the recent history of any other industrialized nation.<\/p>\n

These dynamics have stopped functioning, in Japan as elsewhere.\u00a0 Whether the momentum that the anti-nuclear movement in Japan has gained over the past few months will continue to build, or whether the government and the electric power industry will ultimately win the day by continuing to turn a deaf ear to the \u201cbig noise\u201d of the demonstrations (to borrow the phrase that Prime Minister Noda employed to describe the weekly protests at his doorstep) remains to be seen.\u00a0 My sense, though, is that the momentum will gradually impel the movement to evolve, both in terms of its tactics and its aims \u2013 just as Occupy continues to change since eviction from Zucotti Park and its other encampments.\u00a0 The sense of uncertainly caused by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and the exacerbation of frustrations over the political and economic status quo that the government\u2019s apparent disregard of popular concern has exacerbated, aren\u2019t likely to evaporate so rapidly.\u00a0 It takes more than a passing concern to bring 90,000 Japanese out to spend a few hours packed together in the muggy air of an early summer night, especially in a section of Tokyo that is one of the deadest places imaginable on a Friday night.<\/p>\n

One last observation of the demonstration is in order, and this is where it differs greatly from Occupy.\u00a0 By agreement with the police, the Friday night protests begin at 6 and end at 8.\u00a0 As 8pm approached, I began to wonder how quickly and peacefully the crowd would disperse.\u00a0 Would any of the groups try to resist and make a stand?\u00a0 Resisting the police is for many demonstrators in protests around the world the very hallmark of what it means to by politically engaged.\u00a0 In postwar Japan as well, the anti-treaty protests in 1960 and numerous student and labor union protests in the late 1960s featured significant clashes with riot police; especially in the latter, demonstrators came out \u201cready to rumble\u201d in contests that pitted the demonstrators\u2019 brightly painted hard hats, lance-like polls, and Molotov cocktails again the shields, truncheons, fire hoses, and tear gas fusillades of the police.\u00a0 In contrast, though, the only riot gear I saw on the 20th<\/sup> were a few shields leaning rather casually against the legs of the phalanx of officers in the subway station who blocked off the exit to the Prime Minister\u2019s residence.\u00a0 Perhaps this was simply to suggest to those arriving for the demonstration that the cops meant business; once above group, shields gave way to yellow plastic megaphones as the standard police equipment for crowd control.<\/p>\n

When 8pm rolled around, the roar of \u201csaikad\u014d hantai<\/em>\u201d seemed to crumble into the general noise created by thousands of conversations going on at once at such close quarters, and the police now took to their public address loudspeakers to advise people to walk a few blocks away from the Diet Building to use other stations (rather than trying to pack into the closest option), and to thank us for our cooperation \u2013 all in the same polite tones of a department store salesperson or hotel reception desk clerk.\u00a0 And people did just that.\u00a0 I followed along with the general drift of the crowds away from the Diet Building, until it dispersed along various streets into the Tokyo night.<\/p>\n

Some will scoff at this as just another example of \u201cslavish\u201d Japanese obedience to authority and desire to preserve order for order\u2019s sake, much like the displays of gaman<\/em> that the foreign press commented upon in the wake of the tsunami with such admiration were also interpreted along cultural essentialist lines.\u00a0 In a case like this, though, there would be more to lose than gain by resisting.\u00a0 What possible point could it have served, anyway, especially when the police chose to meet the crowds with courtesy rather than suspicion or open hostility?\u00a0 The anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo and the Occupy demonstrations employ different tactics in line with different aims, after all.\u00a0 But perhaps the police forces tasked with crowd control elsewhere could learn a lesson from the way the Tokyo police have handled these demonstrations so far.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m back in Japan after a year away, and thus the blog is back too, after a long hiatus.\u00a0 My itinerary this time has me in Tokyo first, after which I will head back up north for another round of volunteer work plus interviews with a variety of people about their experiences on 3\/11 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"parent":694,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":721,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106\/revisions\/721"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}