3.11 2014 - Los Angeles, CA Report

This is a summary of the report from LA by Isamu Kanno (No Nukes Asia Actions-Japan), an organizer based in LA.

This action was the fourth action in front of the Consulate general of Japan in LA. According to Isamu Kanno, an organizer based in LA says that there were more security personnel than ever, probably because it is a part of coordinated action, so the consulate was alerted. The security first chased  Mr. Kanno from the bench where he was preparing his visual aids just half an hour earlier than the gathering. This never happened in LA. Another activist, David from Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR), suggested the possibility that increased security is meant for their purpose to surveil on activists. They made a plan to gather outside even if they were not allowed to enter the consulate.

There were 15 participants, most of them were English speakers. They started from one minute of silence dedicated to Fukushima, and passed around the request letter (pasted at the end of this log) both in Japanese and English. 10 participants made appointments to enter the library inside of the consul, and read the letter and delivered additional comments and concerns. Points raised by participants were: Japan's cover-ups, increase in thyroid cancer amongst children, pro-nukes school books in local Japanese schools in LA (promoting food culture in Japan, without mentioning radiation in it), food radiation standard in general, lack of transparency in politicians' agendas, irresponsible attitudes of officials. 

Some local activists such as Libbe HaLevvy (Nuclear Hotseat) and Gary Hedrick, battling with shutting down San Onofre nuclear power plant, suggested that Consul Nakatani be educated with information available already on Fukushima. Consul Nakatani responded as usual, "I have my own opinions, but I do not see any point of expressing them right here." "What do you do with letters that we delivered?", "Can we expect any written response?" they asked. Mr. Nakatani said that he is going to forward letters to appropriate committees and our requests could impact Japan's policies, but concluded that we should not expect any written response. Next time, they hope to gather more people so they could walk to Little Tokyo.

If you are interested in the next actions in LA, contact Yushi Yamazaki at yushiyam@usc.edu (English) or Sam Kanno at  isamukay@gmail.com (Japanese).

対日本領事館アクションは4回目ですが、今回は”全米の1大使館、17領事館への一斉アクション”が呼びかけられたせいか、領事館側の警備が大掛かりでした。
1時開始の30分前には、建物前のベンチで集会に向けて用意していた私も追い出されて、敷地をぐるりと青いフェンスで囲って、出入りを一箇所に絞り、屈強な男性たちがチェックを始めました。これまでに無かったことです。

警 備・公安関係についてはＮＣＲＲ(Ｎｉｋｋｅｉ　ｆｏｒ　Ｃｉｖｉｌ　Ｒｉｇｈｔ　＆　Ｒｅｄｒｅｓｓ）の長い活動家であるＤａｖｉｄが、「集会参加者は 警備関係者と親しく話すな。彼らは情報収集が目的なのだから」「領事館に入館できない可能性もあるが、外で集会をやればいいのだから入館にこだわるな」 「入館にあたっての名前通報などは最小限に」などの注意を受けました。

1時が近づくにつれてアクション参加者が続々と集まって来ました。最終的にはまったく初めてお会いした方も含めて15人となりました。半分ほどが英語スピーカーの方です。

1 時15分より、Ｇｒａｎｄ　Ａｖｅに面した階段状の場所で、1分間の黙祷からＤａｖｉｄとＹｕｓｈｉの司会で屋外での集会を始めました。初めに私が呼びか け人としての挨拶を日本語でさせてもらいましたが、その後発言された、ＭＩＫＩさん、ＭＯさん、ＧＡＲＹさん、ＬＩＢＢＹさんなどは皆さん英語での発言で した。会場では「日本政府と日本領事館への申し入れ書」の日本語版と英語版を配布しました。

2時過ぎに、10名が入館の手続きをとり、恒例となっている領事館内の図書室に場所を移しての申し入れ書の読み上げと参加者による補足の要望を伝える
Ｍｅｅｔｉｎｇに臨みました。

初 めに私から申し入れ内容の核心として2点を確認しました。第一に、15センチの分厚い鋼鉄に囲われた原子炉と5センチの鋼鉄に覆われた格納容器に閉じ込め られているはずの核発電燃料とその廃棄物が、メルトダウンしてしまい(原発安全神話の崩壊)、生物界にむき出しのまま放置され、その発する即人命に関わる ほどの高放射線量ゆえに建屋に入ることもできず、あてずっぽうに水を注いで冷やしていることを「冷温停止状態」(野田前首相)と言ったり、「アンダーコン トロール」(安倍現首相)と言っているにすぎない。これが現実を直視できないウソだから、フクシマ原発構内では、地上に1000基もの高線量汚染水のタン クと燃料プールで水に遮蔽されただけの1300本余もの使用済み核燃料があり、地下には流れ込んだり、注がれたりの1日1000トンもの水が核燃料デブリ を冷やすと同時に汚染されて滞留したり、海に流出したりの状態にある。こんな危機一髪と膨大な環境汚染の状態にあることをどうして「収束している」といえ るのか。なぜ高等教育を受けたはずの役人の中枢の誰もがはっきりウソだと告発しようとしないのか?　それこそこの米国の地の領事館の中からでたらめを告発 する声が出ることをも視野に入れて申し入れに来ている。孫崎さんや浅井基文さん、古賀さんなど、官僚を卒業してからではなく現役の今こそ上に直言していた だきたい。

2点目は、これまでなんども指摘してきた小児甲状腺がんの子どもの爆発的な増加の問題です。1年6ヶ月前に一人と発表された子どもの患者が2月の 発表では74人とされていることです。今後どれだけ増えるかわからないのが冷厳な現実です。フクシマでの子ども達のこの現実をなぜ「放射能汚染と関係な い」と言えるのかこんな誤魔化しの状態を何とかしたい一心で申し入れに来ている。

その後「申し入れ書」(請願書でもいいが)を読み上げ、補足として参加者の皆さんが各自発言しました。

ＭＩＫＩさん；子どもが日本語補習校に通っているが、文部省検定教科書を使っている。その宿題で美味しい日本食という問題が出されたが、食品の放 射能汚染の問題が一言もでてこない。フクシマ以前の食品では実質0.1ベクレル／ｋｇ以下だったものが1000倍の100ベクレル／ｋｇにまで規制値が緩 められてしまっている。お米の場合60～80ベクレルが平気で入っているそうだが、どうしてこうしたことが教えられないのか。

ＫＩＭＩＫＯさん；今でも6割、7割の人が原発反対なのだそうだが、なかなか行動として現わせない。私たちのようなのがごく少数に見えるが、選挙で当選したからといって当選者の何でもが支持されているわけではない。

ＹＵＫＩさん；上の意向に従わないと職を失うという問題もあろうが、ナチスを裁く裁判に於いて、膨大な数のユダヤ人を殺したアイヒマンが、決して 特殊で冷血な殺人鬼では無く、自分の任務範囲で行動をしていただけの平々凡々たる役人だったという指摘が(ハンナ・アーレントによって)された。組織の歯 車であってもひとりひとりの決断が問われる。

ＧＡＲＹさん；サンオノフレ原発で働いていた。多少の事故やなにかの不都合が起きても外部に決して漏れない体制が作られてしまっている。日本人にはフクシマで現在起きている事態を収束させることが出来る力が充分にあると思うのだが。科学的、文化的力が備わっているはずだ。

ＬＩＢＢＥさん；私のやっているＮｕｃｌｅａｒ　Ｈｏｔｓｈｅｅｔというポッドキャストラジオで、小出さん、山本太郎さんなど原発に反対してきた方々の声が聞けますのでぜひ参考にして欲しい。

な どの発言がありました。さらに、こうした意見に対してナカタニ領事はどう考えるのかについては、「意見は無いわけではないがいまここで意見を述べることに 意味があるとは思わない」と、前回と同じ答えでした。また「私たちのこうした声はどう処理されるのか」「文書による解答はもらえるのか」との問いについて は、「しかるべき関係部署に送付する」「政策として反映される」「いちいち回答するという事にはならない」ということで終わってしまいました。

3時40分頃に終わり、野外集会をやった場所に戻るとグリーンピースＵＳＡの顧問でＷｅｂ『Ｅｃｏｗａｔｃｈ』の編集発行人ハーヴェイ・ワッサー マン氏が来ていました。残念ながら彼のスピーチを聞くことはできませんでしたが、お互い紹介しあって、集合写真を撮り、今後の予定を確認して解散になりま した。リトル東京までのマーチには少し人数が足りなかったです。

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Petition to the Japanese Consulate

Today is the third anniversary of 3.11 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. We are still extremely concerned about the worsening condition of people’s health, food safety, and environmental contamination in the Tohoku region, the greater Tokyo region, and beyond. The severity of the accident and the dispersion (geographical reach) of the accident-derived radioactive contamination of our air, water, soil and habitat have been overwhelming and unheard of in the human history. The first, second, and third reactors at Fukushima Daiichi have been emitting 10 million Becquerel of radioactive contaminants per hour. There has been 100 tons of contaminated water leaks from the unstoppably increasing number of storage tanks. Furthermore, the nuclear fuel must have been and still be melting down deep in the underground of the power plant and causing underground water contamination, which has been streaming out into the Pacific Ocean.

Indeed, we have seen the destructive and dehumanizing power of nuclear technology inflicted upon numerous human beings in the history. From 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to 1954 nuclear testing by the U.S. at Bikini atoll of Marshall Islands, to 1986 Chernobyl, and to this unfathomable catastrophe of Fukushima. They all indicate that the nuclear technology can devastate the mother earth and threaten all the humanity that lives on this planet.

The atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed immediately 120 thousand and 70 thousand people respectively. The slow death from the lingering aftereffect of radiation has been estimated to 260 thousand people, which the U.S. occupation force and the subsequent Japanese government under U.S. cold war/nuclear regime have tried to cover up.

60 years ago from this past March 1st, the U.S. government had exploded a thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll. The tested bomb, codenamed Bravo, sent a cloud of radioactive fallout across the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands (then part of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands). The Republic of the Marshall Islands is now an independent country, but the people of this Micronesian nation still live with the health and environmental consequences of the nuclear weapons program. Bravo was just one of sixty-seven atmospheric nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958.

The 1984 Chernobyl accident had contributed to the collapse of Soviet Union, which designated the accident as a top secret and deployed 60 million military and police/firefighting personnel to contain it. As Mikhail Gorbachev has testified, Soviet Union could not deal with the explosively increasing health problem and corresponding increase of compensation for it and five years later the USSR itself collapsed. People of Ukraine and Belarus are still suffering from the long-lasting effect of radiation.

Importantly, however, Fukushima seems to signal a culmination of this nuclear crisis, which derived from the idea of the earth not as a source of life but as a resource to be exploited, the idea of prioritizing profits of major corporations over human life and environment, and the idea of rejecting to consider future generation and the well-being of those who have been rendered disproportionately vulnerable (women, working-class people, children, and so on.) As we stated above, history tells us that the nuclear technology and industry have done and are likely to do devastate mother earth and threaten all our lives and livelihood. The Japanese government has been intentionally ignoring the scale and severity of the accident and left many people in highly contaminated areas of Fukushima by tyrannically changing its law on the limit of radiation exposure, thereby avoiding governmental expense of large-scale evacuation. The unfolding calamity of Fukushima is way more serious than what the Japanese government has globally advertised through its “nuclear safety myth,” which is essentially a lie and cover-up.

Through the three petitions that we have submitted to the Japanese Consulate-general at Los Angeles (6/22/12, 2/22/13, 12/11/13), we demanded that Japanese government and TEPCO disclose accurate information and call for international support and that Japanese government should immediately evacuate Fukushiman people, especially children. As we expect based on the health statistics from Belarus, the number of children’s thyroid cancer has skyrocketed. The on-going prefectural medical check of Fukushiman children, which has examined 254,000 kids so far and 110,000 more to go, has revealed that 75 kids have thyroid cancer. That number will likely soar up in years to come and the condition in Fukushima is much worse than Belarus, which has had the most severe health damage after Chernobyl. Still 170,000 Fukushimans live in temporal evacuation facilities or live far away in other prefectures, experiencing family separation and psychological burden. The Japanese government has rejected the collective evacuation of Fukushiman children proposed because of them being more vulnerability to radiation.

The previous Japanese government administrations, have never adequately informed its citizens of the dangers of contamination. The decontamination projects, whose contracts the major general construction companies received, turned out far from effective. They even made some residents go back to the highly contaminated area where the radiation reaches higher than 20 mili-sievert (mSv) per year, which, according to Chernobyl evacuation criteria, requires immediate and mandatory evacuation. They have even withdrawn from monetarily supporting those who live in highly contaminated areas and want to voluntarily evacuate. What is worse is that the central government has spent millions of yen in the “persuasion policy,” which is to disseminate wrong ideas that sickness is not from radiation but from stress that people have because they worry too much. Despite the internationally accumulated scientific and medical evidences that show 1 mSv/year should be the limit of radiation exposure even for medical workers dealing with X-ray and nuclear power plant workers, Japanese government changed the limit to 20 mSv/yr. It is obvious that Tokyo government intends to advertise that the accident has been contained and it is safe to host Olympic in Tokyo in 2020. This is precisely an example of prioritizing profits of economic policy whose benefit will not trickle down to ordinary workers over people’s lives and safety.

We, who envision nuclear free future, demand that the government and international community should establish and stipulate “People’s Right to Live Free from the Fear of Radioactive Contamination.” We also demand that the government should execute “Reparation/Redress” policies by covering all the cost of seriously needed evacuation in the contaminated area.

While we have an urgent need for evacuation, we also recognize many other problems of nuclear policy in Japan: 1. contaminated water leak; 2. dangerous process of containing and transporting used nuclear fuel; 3. food chain contamination; 4. new Secrecy Law and Cancer Registration Law; 5. attempts to export nuclear power plant. More than 1000 tanks storing contaminated water have been built, but leaks have been found as I mentioned before This leak not only streams into the Pacific Ocean but also has made the ground very unstable, on which TEPCO has been moving the nuclear fuel from the pool built in the upper floor of the four nuclear plants in Fukushima Daiichi. Nuclear fuel, which amounts to 100 times A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, are stored in those buildings which remain damaged from the earthquake. As a seismologist, Katsuhiko Ishibashi, who testified in Japanese Diet, pointed out, another large earthquake could devastate the fuel pools and bring about explosions that could “render a good portion of Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable”.

Food contamination is another, yet related, problem. In a country where seafood occupies a predominant part of the diet, radioactive Strontium can be taken in through fishbones, which eventually get stored in human bone and cause leukemia. The Japanese government has downplayed this problem too and has not monitored food contamination as comprehensively as they should. The new Secrecy law is likely to allow the government to intensify their media manipulation and to conceal more information on nuclear industry that is inconvenient for its continuation. The new Cancer Registration law can be used to hide the information on Fukushima-related cancer increase.

The class action lawsuit, the Nuclear Reactor Suppliers Lawsuit, that indicted plant makers for building what they had known as risky, highlights how the global nuclear industry is trying to profit from this devastating technology. When President Eisenhower advocated “Atoms for Peace” in order to restrain Soviet’s nuclear development and invited private companies to join nuclear energy projects, the federal government passed the Price-Anderson Act in 1957 to indemnify the nuclear industry against liability claims arising from nuclear accidents. When Japan introduced nuclear power plants, it institutionalized the same legal framework. As a result, General Electric, Hitachi, and Toshiba, who made the Fukushima plants, evaded their social responsibility, and they in tandem with Japanese government are even exporting nuclear power plants to Vietnam and Turkey. Through this lawsuit, we attempt to hold them accountable and responsible for the accident.

The implication for us Californians is also huge. Though 9000 kilometer away from Fukushima, there have mass deaths of sea creatures including seals and also contaminated kelp and tuna. The cities of Fairfax and Berkeley in Northern California have passed resolutions to demand that the U.S. federal government take initiative to monitor the radioactive contamination derived from Fukushima.

In conclusion, we again demand that the government and international community should establish and stipulate “People’s Right to Live Free from the Fear of Radioactive Contamination.” We also demand that the government should execute “Reparation/Redress” policies by covering all the cost of seriously needed evacuation in the contaminated area.

We petition based on the 16th article of Japanese Constitution, which dictates citizen’s right to petition and obligates the government to respond.

3/11/2014

No Nukes Asia Action
Sam Kanno, Yushi Yamazaki


March 11, 2014 - On the 3rd Anniversary of the Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster

We demand that the Japanese government and international community establish a framework;
“The People’s Right to Live Free from the Fear of Radioactive Contamination.”

We demand that the government award and honor “Reparation/Redress” for all victims which cover all costs of seriously needed evacuation in the contaminated areas.
Redress Now! Reparations Now! for the Fukushima Nuclear Diaster Victims

We demand that the manufacturers of the faulty nuclear reactors GE, Hitachi and Toshiba, take social responsibility for their part along with the Japanese govenment and issue Redress & Reparations.