Peace Talk — Autumn 2005

The Quarterly Newsletter of Peace Action Maine
In Japan, public awareness of nuclear issues is high
by Greg Field

At about 7:30 a.m., August 6, 2005, I walked with a small group of people along the streets of Hiroshima, Japan. The sky was starkly clear and the sun was already strong. The heat and humidity were rising. The buzz of cicadas hung over the 55,000 people who gathered at the city’s Peace Park. I looked up at that clear sky with an eerie sense: 60 years ago, August 6, 1945 had begun similarly for many in Hiroshima. That day was clear with brilliant sun beating down, and people had begun streaming back into the city after a night in the bomb shelters in the outlying hills, walking the same routes I now trod.

But there the similarities ended, for I was on my way to the public commemoration of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At 8:15 a.m. 60 years before, the Enola Gay dropped its one-bomb load on the city and unleashed almost total devastation across Hiroshima’s center city. We will never know how many people died in the immediate aftermath of that bomb, or after another bomb was dropped just days later on Nagasaki. The guestimates range between 120,000-140,000 in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and perhaps two-thirds of that in Nagasaki. It is probable that double that number of people died in the years and decades to follow, for we do know that these are bombs that have kept on killing: the cancers and birth defects resulting from the radiation exposure have taken a toll that continues to this day.

At the invitation of Gensuikin (the Japanese Congress Against the A- and H-Bombs), and on behalf of Peace Action’s national network, I attended the commemorations and conferences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I traveled to Japan with a mix of awe at the solemn nature of why I traveled there, and excitement at the trip’s possibilities for exploring a new country and making connections with the Japanese movement. My hosts were gracious, and deeply committed to a vision of building a future free from the shadow of nuclear weapons.

I participated in Gensuikin workshops focused on efforts to create a nuclear-free zone in Northeast Asia and a review of Japanese and U.S. nuclear policies. In and outside the workshops, what made the greatest impression on me was the level of awareness of nuclear weapons issues among Japanese. There is deep concern among many of them over the roadblocks that nuclear weapons states, especially the U.S, are putting in the way of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Also, efforts by a small bloc of Japan’s legislators to revamp their Constitution and remove Article 9, which renounces war, has been met with broad popular efforts to protect this commitment to peace. Youth walking down city streets had hats with a “9” on the cap; t-shirts with 9’s were common‹and these were not the insiders at the workshops.

People frequently asked me questions about the future of the six-nation talks regarding North Korea’s nuclear policies. I was amazed at the depth of knowledge most people had and most of the time I turned the questions back‹asking them about their estimation of the situation. Gensuikin’s commitment to an international movement was also crucial. At the closing ceremony in Nagasaki, organization officials introduced me to delegates from a Korean group of A-bomb survivors. The Koreans had been in Japan as forced laborers during the war, and the recognition of the wrongs perpetrated by the imperial Japanese government in invading other countries has been a significant step in fostering regional bonds.

Gensuikin is also building alliances within their own country. Japan’s government is going ahead with plans to open a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Rokkasho. Working with groups such as Greenpeace Japan and with local fishing families, Gensuikin hopes to derail the plans to start the plant. The reprocessing system is different from Iran’s efforts to produce enriched uranium, but the final result is the same: the end-product is fuel for power plants that is “dual-use” and can be diverted to weapon making within months. It should come as no surprise that Japan’s activities are not receiving the same attention from the U.S. government as Iran’s.

On my last night in Japan, while I was out with friends, I mentioned how impressed I was by the high levels of popular awareness of nuclear weapons issues. I compared this to the U.S., where the breakdown at the NPT review a couple of months back got little mainstream visibility. It’s the difference, they observed, between living in the country that dropped those two bombs in 1945, and living where those bombs were dropped.