AFSC - San Francisco
Ten Peace Issues in Japan
A Brief Introduction and Fact Sheet
1. HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI
Courts continue to hear lawsuits filed by survivors
who say they haven't received sufficient medical care for ailments
caused by exposure to
radiation. It is said that the number of officially acknowledged victims
of A-bomb is only 0.7 % of the total.
It's more difficult for Hibakusha
living outside Japan (most in South Korea) to get Hibakusha aid from
Japanese government and the city. Japanese government has refused
to apply "Atomic Bomb Victims Relief Law (Hibakusha engo Hou)" to
the foreign victims of the Atomic Bomb. Giving support to second and
third generations of Hibakusha who are out of the aid target is also
important.
Organizations
2. ANTI-NUKE
To prevent a nuclear calamity from happening again,
a total ban and the elimination of nuclear weapons are now more urgent
than ever before.
The incident that led most directly to the formation of Japan's movement
against nuclear bombs was the H-bomb test by the United States at Bikini
atoll on March 1, 1954. The incident, which was closely covered by
the press, shook the Japanese public.
A signature
campaign against atomic and hydrogen bombs began, and the movement
spread like wildfire throughout
the country. The campaign introduced many Japanese citizens to the
voices of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had already been
calling for the abolition of nuclear bombs.
The fear of the "ashes
of death" aroused by the Bikini disaster and the anti-war feelings
inspired by a new awareness of the terrible reality of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki combined to generate a powerful movement against A- and H-bombs.
And it extends to all types of nukes, including the "peaceful
use" of nuclear energy.
Organizations
- Gensuikyo (Japan
Council against A & H
Bombs)
- Gensuikin (Japan
Congress Against A- and H-Bombs)
3. OKINAWA, U.S. MILITARY IN JAPAN
Starting in 1945, during the ground battle
in Okinawa, U.S. troops forced thousands of Okinawans off their lands
using “bayonets
and bulldozers” to build military bases. Although the U.S. officially
turned over the island to Japan in 1972, it remains one of the largest
concentrations of U.S. forces anywhere in the world, where resulting
social and environmental
disruption, including sexual assaults, continues
with impunity. The Okinawa prefecture comprises 0.6 percent of Japan's
total landmass.
However, of all the U.S. military forces stationed in Japan, 75 percent
of those forces were located in Okinawa. Japan consists of 47 prefectures
and U.S. military bases are located in 27 prefectures from north to
south including Hokkaido, Honshyu Island (such as Tokyo, Kanagawa,
Shizuoka, Hiroshima etc.), Kyushu Island (such as Nagasaki, Oita, Miyazaki,
etc.) and Okinawa.
Okinawa is considered the “linchpin” of
U.S. military strategy in Asia. The vast U.S. military infrastructure
in Northeast Asia is a remnant of the cold war. But it also supports
U.S. economic interests like multinational corporations and banks
— the primary forces behind globalization.
Organizations
4. WAR AND POST-WAR RESPONSIBILITY IN JAPAN
After the end of WWII, non-Japanese veterans,
civilian employees of the army, bereaved families as well as comfort
women are omitted from
Japan’ s postwar period compensation and support. The consistent
attitude of the Japanese government is that compensation issues were
brought to a conclusion legally with the San Francisco treaty (effected
in 1952).
However, under the cold war circumstances, U.S. policy
on Japan was to make it “the factory in Asia”. Most countries
mentioned in the S.F. treaty abandoned the rights to demand compensation
for the reason that Japan didn’t have the sufficient ability
to do so and needed its postwar rehabilitation. In Japan-Korea basic
treaty (effected in 1965), the compensation was turned into “economic
cooperative system,” which profited just a handful of Japanese
dominant corporations and the Korean military dictatorial administration.
The people’s fight in court for the right to demand compensation
and for the pursuit of Japanese responsibility began in 1990. But the
courts shift the responsibility onto the Diet by saying that it’s
about legislative policy not administration of justice, thus it’s
about politics. The courts have rejected most of those demands.
Organizations
5. HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
Japanese nationalism, which attempts to justify past
war atrocities and colonial rule, is on the rise in the country. The
history and civics
textbooks published by the Society for New History Textbooks (Tsukurukai,
which was formed in 1996) are a problem as textbooks for kids.
The history book’s problems:
- It attempts to justify Japan's aggression and invasion as a
war of liberation, of liberating Asia from Western colonial rule.
- It is written from the Emperor's historical viewpoint and glorifies
the Emperor.
- It questions the actuality of the Nanjing
Massacre in China and erases from its records any mention of
the Japanese military sexual
slavery system or "comfort women" system.
- The subject of history is portrayed as only that
of the nation-state; the people and minorities are absent and not
represented.
- It defends the family system and emphasizes
the "good wife,
wise mother" mould with a traditional gender role-based
division of labor. In other words, the textbook is a self-race
centered,
nation-state centered, power politics centered, male chauvinistic
view of history.
Such a view of history can also be seen in their civics textbook.
It proclaims a nation-centered, anti-foreign and racist philosophy.
This
nationalism,
however, spreads and provokes conflicts and violence all over
the world as a counteraction to globalization.
Organizations
6. YASUKINI SHRINE
Those spirits housed in Yasukuni Shrine in
Tokyo were only those who died "for the Japanese Emperor" and/or "for
the country" regardless of their religions. The deaths for the
Emperor and/or the country are glorified and considered as the most
precious
beings - the gods (kami). Thus it worked as a shrewd system to mobilize
the army until the end of the WWII.
In 1946 it became a religious establishment
and broke off its relations with the state based on the new constitution,
although
successive Japanese
Prime Ministers kept visiting officially. The official visit to the
shrine has to come into question from the legal point of view. In
addition to that, in 1978 it enshrined the 14 who were hanged for war
crimes,
including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. Since then, each Prime
Minister's official visit has been criticized, most especially by
Japan’s
Asian neighbors.
7. HINOMARU AND KIMIGAYO (NATIONAL FLAG AND ANTHEM)
The Japanese government passed a law legalizing
the “Hinomaru” and “Kimigayo” as
Japan’s national flag and anthem (effected on August 9, 1999).
These were very powerful symbolic devices that have been used by the
Japanese state to produce chauvinistic and nationalistic sentiments
around the symbols of the Emperor. Therefore, Hinomaru and Kimigayo are national symbols that are intimately associated with
Japan's history of military and colonial aggression. The lyrics celebrate
and admire the Emperor
and the Imperial Family, and wish their prosperity to be continued
forever.
Boards of Education have forced schools in their
prefectures to hoist and sing Hinomaru and Kimigayo even before the
Law was made.
And many teachers and students have been punished because of refusing
Hinomaru and Kimigayo. And now, the Basic Legislation
for Education
is being targeted.
It’s said that the aim to make this change
is that the state can then control the entire educational system
including what is uniformly taught at schools. These moves to change
the law
have one point in common; make Japan a country that can go to war.
Organizations
8. NEW LEGISLATION
On June 6, 2003, the three bills comprising
Japan's proposed emergency legislation, "Yuji-hou" for
short, were approved. A discussion of the implications of the bills
impact on basic human rights was postponed.
The point is that if the Japanese Prime Minister
judges a situation emergency (an estimate is enough), the new legislation
authorizes
the Prime
Minister to command the Self-Defense
Forces (SDF), all local
governments and citizens. And Japan even can strike first. If you
don't cooperate, you will be punished. It allows SDF to fire "warning
shots" at the people who resist cooperating or who demonstrate
against those actions. Another new bill that will allow Japan to dispatch
the SDF to Iraq was approved in July, and the SDF will be sent after
the middle of November under new legislation.
The SDF have already
been sent to Jordan to cooperate in rebuilding Iraq by providing
fuel, medicines, relief goods under the Peace Keeping Operations (PKO)
Law
that was effected in 1992. In other words, the new Iraq law is unnecessary
in terms of cooperation by providing stuff to rebuild Iraq. This
series of revisions or broad interpretation of existing laws, and new
legislation
is seen widely as breaking section of Article 9 that is the peaceful
constitution section of which Japanese are very proud:
"Aspiring sincerely to an international
peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever
renounce war as a sovereign
right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means
of settling international disputes."
"In order to accomplish the aim of the
preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as
other war potential, will never
be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will
not be recognized."
The Constitution of Japan, Chapter II;
Renunciation of war, Article
9
(effected in 1946)
Organizations
9. NORTH KOREA
North Korea relies heavily on international
food aid to feed its population, but many people in the country are
suffering from hunger and malnutrition,
while the state continues to expend resources to maintain an army of
about one million. The North Korean nuclear crisis has risen since
George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" in
January 2002. Tensions really started escalating in October, when the
U.S. accused North Korea of developing a secret nuclear weapons program.
It's often very difficult to tell what lies behind
North Korea's moves. But it seems possible that North Korea has been
trying to use the nuclear
issue as a hard-line ploy to negotiate a non-aggression pact and
improved economic aid from other countries as they did in the mid-1990s.
The
way to deal with this nuclear issue has to be peaceful means rather
than militarization by new laws such as Yuji-hou and National Missile
Defense (NMD) Program etc. in the name of Self Defense.
This militarization
could only worsen the situation. What is really needed is peaceful
diplomatic efforts and negotiations on all issues of concern to
both sides, including dismantlement of DRNK nuclear weapons capabilities,
its food and energy needs, and full normalization of political
and
economic relations. The forced abductions by North Korea issue
that Kim Jong-il admitted in 2002 as well as Japanese compensation
for
the occupation and the Pacific War should be solved as one of the
facts in the negotiations.
Organizations
Resources
10. JAPANESE PEACE MOVEMENT TODAY
A fresh wind blew for the Japanese peace movement.
Before the war on Iraq started, there were demonstrations in many
cities in Japan
as well as other countries. Fast communications and sharing information
by using the Internet and email with computers and cell pones made
it easier to organize demonstrations. Speaking of Japanese movement,
the image "demonstrations = dangerous, scary" has spread
among the Japanese society since around the middle of 1970s when acts
of violence became brutal inside the movement within labor, student,
Ampo (Japanese name for Japan-U.S. Security treaty) and anti-Vietnam
War movement.
Since then, it's been said that the number of people
who keep away from any kind of activism and those who are not interested
in politics or social issues has increased and most movements in
Japan have been declining. But since September 11, 2001, the Japanese
peace movement grew
larger involving many young people who have not experienced the
movement in 1960-70s, and also those who had not cared about politics
or social issues before. Twenty-five thousand people gathered in
Tokyo on February 14, and 40,000 on March 8.
Those demonstrations changed
its
negative images in Japan into peaceful, powerful and diverse. It
can be said
that those tragic incidents made politically and socially sleeping
people in Japan wake up. Hope this is not temporary but the thing
connected with the future movement.
Organizations
- Beheiren (Peace
for Vietnam; citizens coalition -Japanese only)
- World Peace
Now (a network of nonviolent action
beyond political parties, religions and citizens groups)
- No-War
Net (NGOs network recently formed)
Compiled by Yuka Ogaki, AFSC Summer Intern, August
2003.
Contact: smcneil@afsc.org.
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