Japan Press Weekly

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2014 March 5 - 11 TOP3 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Citizens join nationwide actions for withdrawal from nuclear energy

Calling for a no nuclear Japan, on March 9, two days before the third anniversary of the Great East Japan Disaster, 32,000 citizens rallied around the Diet building.

In a rally at the Hibiya Amphitheater which started at 1 p.m., victims of the Fukushima nuclear accident and people from prefectures where nuclear reactors are located delivered speeches.

Hayakawa Tokuo in his speech introduced himself as the 30th generation chief priest of the 600-year-old Hokyoji Temple in Naraha Town, Fukushima Prefecture. He hoped that his grandson would succeed him as the chief priest, but he will be the last because his town has been designated as an evacuation area, Hayakawa said. “The nuclear accident destroyed the whole town, ruined people’s lives, and deprived us of our previous ways of living,” he stated, and expressed his determination to achieve a zero-nuke Japan.

After the rally, participants marched in demonstration to the Diet building. They met with lawmakers of political parties including the Japanese Communist Party to hand them written requests calling for a united effort to bring the Fukushima Daiichi accident under control, reconstruct Fukushima, and create a Japan without nuclear power.

Another rally began at 3 p.m. in front of the Diet building. Dietmembers along with participants from South Korea and the United States spoke out.

JCP Chair Shii Kazuo in his speech criticized the government’s new energy plan by saying that it is attempting to revive the nuclear safety myth. The most important lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster is that there is no such thing as a “safe” nuclear plant, he pointed out. Under the situation in which the cause of the meltdown accident is still under investigation and evacuation plans for residents living near NPPs have yet to be established, any restart of nuclear power plants is unacceptable, Shii stressed.

One of the participants, Itoi Ku, a high school student in Saitama Prefecture, told Akahata that he went to the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant in Miyagi Prefecture on a school visit. He said he felt fear knowing that if the tsunami three years ago had been a little bit stronger, the Onagawa plant could have undergone the same crisis as the Fukushima plant. The high school student said it is wrong to restart idled reactors while measures to safely dispose of radioactive wastes have yet to be taken.

On the same day, anti-nuke rallies and demonstration marches took place at various locations around the country. In Osaka, 7,000 people attended these kinds of actions, 4,000 demonstrators in Fukuoka, and 2,500 in Nagano.