Abe Cabinet says Article 9 does not ban possessing, using N-weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons

On 26 April, 2016, the Abe Cabinet has decided that same theory (as nuclear weapons in the below article) applies to biological weapons and chemical weapons (including toxic gas) i.e., the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution does not necessarily ban Japan from possessing and using chemical/biological weapons.
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At the same time, they also explained that Japan has signed and ratified Biological Weapons Convention and Chemical Weapons Conventions.
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Abe Cabinet says Article 9 does not ban possessing, using N-weapons
AWJ by Asahi Shimbun : 2 April 2016

The Abe Cabinet has decided that war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution does not necessarily ban Japan from possessing and using nuclear weapons. In an April 1 written answer to opposition lawmakers in the Diet, the Cabinet also says the government “firmly maintains a policy principle that it does not possess nuclear weapons of any type under the three non-nuclear principles.”
The address was adopted at a Cabinet meeting in response to memorandums of questions submitted to the Lower House by Seiji Osaka of the largest opposition Democratic Party and Takako Suzuki, an independent.

Successive administrations have maintained a constitutional interpretation that Paragraph 2 of Article 9 does not ban Japan from possessing armed forces that is the minimum necessary for self-defense.
In a statement to the Diet in 1978, Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda said Article 9 does not absolutely prohibit the country from possessing nuclear weapons as long as it is limited to the minimum necessary level. But Fukuda added that it is Japan’s national principle to abide by the three non-nuclear principles, introduced by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1967.

The written address adopted by the Abe Cabinet on April 1 maintains the previous governments’ interpretation of the Constitution that Article 9 allows the country to possess an armed force that is the minimum necessary for self-defense.

“Even if it involves nuclear weapons, the Constitution does not necessarily ban the possession of them as long as they are restricted to such a minimum necessary level,” it says.
The written address also referred a controversial remark by Yusuke Yokobatake, director-general of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, at the Upper House Budget Committee on March 18 that he does not believe the Constitution bans the use of any type of nuclear weapon. It says Yokobatake’s remark only reaffirmed the government’s principle.

Abe’s secrets law undermines Japan’s democracy

On December 2014. the Doraconian law called "special secrets law" became effective in Japan. (for details, please refer to the below JT article.)
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Last year, 43 independent journlists filed a lawsuit against the State, claiming "the law deprives of their freedom to investigate and report, therefore it violates the constitution." They demanded to make void the law and asked for compensation. However, Tokyo district court dismissed the case. Then, 37 journalists appealed to Tokyo High Court. Yesterday, the case was again dismissed. In Japan, the case for "violation of constitution" shall be proved by concrete incident and "visible" victim(s). So far, no journalist was arrested under this law. The plaintiff is willing to appeal to the Supreme Court.
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Meanwhile, about 500 civil activists (led by lawers and former judges)filed lawsuit to Tokyo district court, and 200 in Fukushima, alleging "new security bill violates the constitution" yesterday.
.http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604270035.html
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Abe’s secrets law undermines Japan’s democracy
The Japan Times : 13 December 2014
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On Dec. 10, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new special secrets law took effect despite overwhelming public opposition. The new law gives bureaucrats enormous powers to withhold information produced in the course of their public duties that they deem a secret — entirely at their own discretion — and with no effective oversight mechanism to question or overturn such designations. The law also grants the government powers to imprison whistle-blowers, and prohibits disclosure of classified material even if its intention is to protect the public interest. This Draconian law also gives the government power to imprison journalists merely for soliciting information that is classified a secret.
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But if the designation is itself secret, how is a journalist to know if they are courting arrest? The constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press now confronts the discretionary powers of an unaccountable bureaucracy swathed in secrecy. In the course of doing their job, journalists could unwittingly solicit secret information and thereby be in violation of the new law and subject to imprisonment. The government maintains that the new law would never be applied in such a way, but the wording of the law remains vague enough that it could be.
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It is not terribly reassuring that journalists from media outlets that “properly serve the public interest” (presumably this excludes the Asahi Shimbun) are exempted from prosecution unless they “break the law or use especially unjust means.”Susumu Murakoshi, president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, says the law should be abolished because it jeopardizes democracy and the people’s right to know.
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Meiji University legal scholar Lawrence Repeta agrees with Murakoshi.
“Establishing a balance between national security secrecy and the people’s right to know is a monumental task,” Repeta says, but suggests that such a balance is embodied in the Open Society’s “Tshwane Principles,” which provide for the protection of whistle-blowers who disclose information in the public interest.
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Abe understands that the public is against the secrecy legislation and tried to reassure us in an interview on TBS last month. “If there is a case where news reporting is suppressed, I will quit,” he said, adding that the law is “aimed at terrorists and spies. Citizens have nothing to do with it.” But the enforcement of law should not depend on good intentions and a politician’s promise. Laws outlast the former and the latter are repeatedly broken. The current legislation grants the government too much discretion to decide what is secret and hide inconvenient information from public scrutiny. This is a recipe for bad governance and abuse of power.
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Americans know this all too well. The Freedom of Information law in the United States did not become an effective tool for transparency until after President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the 1970s. More recently, Americans learned about a massive government data collection program regarding their phone calls, web searches and emails involving the secret cooperation of private sector service providers. We know this because of a whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, who exposed the sweeping extent of this illegal surveillance.
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Japan’s new secrecy legislation provides for imprisonment of up to 10 years for leaking or seeking classified information deemed damaging to Japan’s national security. Nixon also invoked the nebulous concept of national security to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, but the Supreme Court rejected this sophistry and the public discovered what the government didn’t want them to know about the calamitous Vietnam War.
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Japan’s media-muzzling initiative has drawn criticism from domestic civil-society groups and Reporters Without Borders because the people’s right to know and freedom of the press — essential pillars of a democratic society — are at risk. “The right to know has now officially been superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know,” wrote Jake Adelstein in The Japan Times last year.
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There are good reasons why 80 percent of the public opposes this bill. Would the investigations into the causes of the Fukushima nuclear accident and the collusive relations between coopted regulators and the utilities that compromised reactor safety have been made public under the new law? The reason why the public and media pressured the government to enact the national Information Disclosure Law in 2001 was because similar prefectural and local ordinances had exposed extensive malfeasance by bureaucrats and their squandering of vast sums on lavish wining and dining in the 1990s.
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The grass-roots spread of such ordinances was prompted by the experience of survivors’ families who wanted to find out about the 1985 Japan Airlines crash that claimed 520 lives. They did so by using the U.S. Freedom of Information Law to access crash investigation reports that they couldn’t get from their own government. People supporting greater transparency are also mindful of the government’s role in knowingly allowing the distribution of HIV-tainted blood products in the 1980s to support Japanese pharmaceutical firms at the expense of hemophiliacs.
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Bureaucrats are not so keen about disclosure. Back in 2002, the Defense Agency was caught illegally investigating and maintaining dossiers on 142 people requesting information. The press was tipped off about this surreptitious surveillance, again showing the value of whistle-blowers and the need to protect, rather than persecute, journalists helping the public exercise oversight.
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Responding to public criticism, the Abe government has established a toothless oversight mechanism. The “public document inspector” will be based in the Cabinet Office, raising questions about how independent the review process will be. Moreover, ministers can turn down requests by the inspector to declassify material and need not submit documents for inspection at their own discretion. This perfunctory oversight mechanism will ensure a cocoon of impunity that threatens Japanese democracy.
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So who gets to handle the state’s precious secrets? The Cabinet Secretariat has warned government offices that such sensitive tasks should not be assigned to staff that have studied or worked abroad or attended foreign schools in Japan. Huh? So after years of spouting off about the benefits of internationalization and encouraging young Japanese to study abroad, the government is now penalizing those who have done so? Apparently the state is suspicious that such people might pose a greater security risk.
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Based on this logic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must be a hotbed of spies and will be reduced to recruiting diplomats with no international experience whatsoever. With all these special secrets to protect, won’t Japan now need a special police unit to keep them safe and round up the globalized subversive elements lurking within the bureaucratic labyrinths?
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Satoko Norimatsu of the Peace Philosophy Centre worries about a climate of fear. “One of my blogger friends told me he was going to close his political blog because of the law coming into effect,” she says. “I told him that such self-censorship is exactly what the government wants.”Professor Repeta further warns that excessive secrecy leads to war.
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“The Japanese people should not forget that the same U.S. officials who pressured Japan to adopt a law that imposes heavy penalties on whistle-blowers and others who may seek to release secret information have also demanded that Japan revise Constitution Article 9,” he says. Abe’s re-election gives him more time to expand on the bitter legacy he is intent on bequeathing, one that many Japanese already rue.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/12/13/commentary/japan-commentary/abes-secrets-law-undermines-japans-democracy/#.Vx-sqLlwXIX

Japan’s Double Standard on Freedoms and Rule of Law

PM Shinzo Abe is maintaining a double standard on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The Diplomat : 20 April 2016

A number of domestic and international developments have revealed a glaring disconnect between the Japanese government’s preaching and its practice on the issue of universal values.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proudly declared a values-based diplomacy for Japan in both his first (2006-07) and second administrations (2012-), emphasizing universal values such as democracy, human rights and the rule of law. In January 2013, not long after the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) regained power, he outlined the basic principles on which his government’s diplomacy would be based. One of these fundamental principles was the concept of “universal values.” A month later, he publicly repeated this commitment to “diplomacy that places emphasis on universal values.”

As a diplomatic tool, rhetoric such as “democracy, human rights and the rule of law” justifies the Abe government’s continuing alignment with Japan’s long-standing democratic allies and with other semi-democracies in Asia that share his strong reservations about China’s unpeaceful rise. It also pointedly excludes China by definition from any putative coalition of democratically aligned states.
On the other hand, several recent actions and policies of the Abe administration, particularly in the domestic domain, suggest that the prime minister’s declarations of a commitment to universal values are primarily a diplomatic device for international consumption. They do not represent a guide to the government’s stance at home on a number of key issues. Quite the contrary, the prime minister’s record clearly shows that his government is taking Japan in an authoritarian direction that is unprecedented in the postwar era. What is more, these steps seriously question Abe’s commitment to universal values.

Among a series of deleterious developments, the Abe administration’s record in dealing with the media demonstrates that it is falling well short of observing first principles of democratic accountability. Amongst the most egregious examples of media-muzzling are attempts to silence media critics, including creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation amongst journalists and other commentators who dare to question the government’s and ruling party’s policies, personnel and actions. In addition to the administration’s explicit actions to control the message, the 2013 State Secrets Law compounds the threat to freedom of news reporting by hanging over journalists’ heads like the sword of Damocles.

In the education sector, the Abe government has censored school textbooks, ensuring that the latest versions for students follow the government’s uniform line on history and territorial issues. The bottom of this slippery slope will land Japanese students in the same position as those in China, for whom only official accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre are available and who are taught that the Dalai Lama is a terrorist.

The Abe government has also heavied universities to rid themselves of humanities and social science departments, arguably, amongst other things, to discourage the training of students’ critical thinking skills, thus silencing another potential source of criticism of the government.

Yet another and possibly the most disturbing example is the proposed content of the LDP’s May 2012 draft revisions to the 1947 Constitution. In glaring contrast to the human rights Abe cites internationally as “universal,” the draft explicitly rejects this notion. It states that human rights derive from a country’s history, culture, and traditions, and are, therefore, qualified to the extent that they are influenced by these factors. Indeed, the maintenance of so-called “public order” is elevated over all individual rights, raising the question, “public order” as defined by whom? Presumably “the government of the day.” Instead of universal human rights, Japanese citizens will be given “duties and obligations” (unspecified) – no doubt, once again, to be defined by public authorities. At the same time, the prime minister has undermined the rule of law by claiming in the Diet to be the ultimate source of authority regarding interpretation of the Constitution, an act for which he will be judged by the electorate. In short, the meaning of the constitution is what the prime minister says it is, which would potentially remove the Japanese constitution’s safeguards against the rise of authoritarianism.

Last but not least is the Abe government’s flouting of the ruling of the highest court of the UN, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Japan’s whale hunt in the Southern Ocean. In March 2014, ICJ ruled that Japan’s Antarctic whale hunts were unscientific and ordered it to stop hunting. Only three months after this ruling, in June 2014, Prime Minister Abe told the Japanese parliament that he wanted to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research. He thus personally endorsed the resumption of commercial whaling, which Japan had been conducting on spurious scientific grounds under the politicized term “research whaling” (chōsa hogei) used ubiquitously by Japanese authorities and in the media.

Japan has since resumed lethal research whaling under the much publicized heading of NEWREP-A and stated that it will not accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ on marine living resources, reflecting a clear double standard in its stance on the rule of law internationally. Nor does Japan recognize the Australian Antarctic Territory’s EEZ, or its Whale Sanctuary, or the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

The reality is that Japanese whaling is neither scientific nor commercial. It is a government-subsidized and sponsored industry conducted for the benefit of the Japanese whaling industry-cum-lobby and is certainly not for the benefit of Japanese consumers. This lobby is headed by the semi-governmental Institute of Cetacean Research, charged with propagandizing the virtues of whaling and an affiliated organ (gaikaku dantai) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF). Apart from providing plum positions for retired bureaucrats, many such groups play key roles in the ancillary apparatus of government intervention by undertaking regulatory and/or allocatory functions as well as participating directly in markets.

Whaling is defended against international attack on spurious cultural grounds, traditionally the last defense of the protectionists. The Japanese government tried the same defense of its rice industry at the Uruguay Round of the GATT, proselytizing the notion of rice as quintessentially a cultural good in Japan. Here it was considerably more successful, extracting a concession that allowed rice to be spared from tariffication under the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA).

http://thediplomat.com/2016/04/japans-double-standard-on-freedoms-and-rule-of-law/

Dumping tritium from Fukushima into sea is best option: ministry

AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 20 April 2016

The industry ministry concluded that releasing diluted radioactive tritium into the sea is the most feasible option in dealing with contaminated water accumulating at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The ministry’s working group said at a meeting on April 19 that separating tritium from the contaminated water is proving extremely difficult, ...and that four other options studied about disposal were either too time-consuming or expensive.
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Releasing the water into the sea would cost 3.4 billion yen ($31 million) and take seven years and four months to complete, according to the group. Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the embattled nuclear plant, will decide on a disposal method based on the group’s findings. The utility has said it will not release treated water that still contains radioactive substances into the sea without gaining the understanding of local fishermen.
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TEPCO has been struggling to ease the buildup of polluted water at the nuclear plant. Every day, tons of groundwater become contaminated with radioactive substances after entering damaged reactor buildings. About 800,000 tons of water containing tritium are stored at the nuclear complex. This water was mostly used to cool melted nuclear fuel in the affected reactors.
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TEPCO has been using a device called ALPS (advanced liquid processing system) to eliminate 62 kinds of radioactive substances, including cesium, from the water. But it cannot remove tritium. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry solicited ideas from the public on how to separate tritium from the polluted water. Six companies and one university submitted proposals.
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However, experts in and out of Japan who evaluated the proposed methods concluded that none of the plans could be put into practical use in the near future. The ministry’s working group narrowed its analysis to the five options that involved disposing of water containing tritium. One suggestion was to inject the polluted water into deep layers of the Earth. Another proposal was to electrolyze the tritium-contaminated water and release it into the atmosphere.
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The highest estimated cost in the proposals was 388.4 billion yen, with the longest period for completion reaching 13 years, according to the group’s study. Ministry officials concluded that releasing water containing tritium into the sea after diluting it would be most reasonable in terms of both cost and time.
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http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604200041.html

Reform proposal calls for plea bargaining, limited recording of questioning, more telephone wiretapping and email surveillance

The Japan Times : 1 July 2014

 In April 2016, Criminal Justice Reform Bill (of the below contents) is under discussion at the Diet. 

The Justice Ministry has released a reform proposal for criminal investigations and trials seeking to introduce mandatory recording of questioning in limited cases, expansion of wiretapping and introduction of a plea bargain system.

The ministry plans to submit relevant bills to the Diet next year to push for substantial reforms after the Legislative Council recommends the proposed measures.

The proposal calls for audio or video recording of the entire interrogation process for suspects in cases subject to lay judge trials and investigations conducted exclusively by prosecutors.

The proposal comes after bar associations and other groups demanded that interrogation processes in all criminal cases be recorded to help prevent false charges.

It also seeks to extend law enforcement authorities’ use of telephone wiretapping and email surveillance to more than 10 additional crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder, arson, robbery, fraud and theft.

(Wiretapping and email surveillance are done at the presence of the staff(s) inside the communication company, so far. Under the proposed bill, the police can process these activities witho...ut the attendance of the communication company's staff(s) inside police office. )
 
The proposal also calls for plea bargaining to be introduced, under which prosecutors would agree to withdraw an indictment if a suspect provides depositions or evidence in connection with other cases related to financial and drug crimes.

 (Some people worry that this may increase the false charge.)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/07/01/national/crime-legal/reform-proposal-calls-for-recording-of-questioning-plea-bargaining/#.VxMHuP1FDZ7

 

U.N. rights expert sees threats to Japanese press independence

AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 19 April 2016



A U.N. rights expert warned Tuesday of "serious threats" to the independence of the press in Japan, including laws meant to protect coverage fairness and national security that he said could work as censorship. U.N. Special Rapporteur David Kaye, finishing a weeklong visit to Japan in which he interviewed journalists and government officials, said many Japanese journalists were feeling pressured to avoid sensitive topics, and that some told of being sidelined because of complaints from politicians.
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"The independence of the press is facing serious threats--a weak system of legal protection, persistent government exploitation of a media lacking in professional solidarity," Kaye told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo. He said he was taken aback by a widespread fear among journalists in Japan, many of whom requested anonymity to talk to him, fearing repercussions.
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The picture of Japanese journalism he painted was unflattering, including newspapers delaying or killing stories critical of the government. He also said a reporter was demoted and given a salary cut after writing an article on the nuclear plant in Fukushima, which went into meltdowns in 2011.
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Among Kaye's concerns is a law meant to ensure media-coverage fairness that allows the government to revoke broadcasting licenses over perceived violations. He also said the so-called "secrets act" law, meant to protect national security and public safety, is so broad it could obstruct people's right to know. Japan's government has repeatedly said freedom of the press is protected in the country, and sees nothing wrong with the law about the broadcasting license. That penalty has never been carried out on a broadcaster, but Kaye noted such measures can work as a threat to keep outspoken journalists in check. He said he decided to visit Japan after hearing about well-known broadcasters quitting, fueling speculation that they had been forced out.
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Kaye, whose report Tuesday was preliminary, is making a full report next year to the U.N. Human Rights Council. He said his job is not to take action but to identify problems, and urged reporters and activists in Japan to work together to change the climate for journalists. Japan needs to pass anti-discrimination laws, instead of focusing on hate speech, which could backfire and curb the freedom of expression, he said. It also needs to protect whistle-blowers, crucial for providing reporters with information about nuclear power, disaster response, national security and other topics of public interest, Kaye said.
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http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604190063.html

Atomic Cover-Up: The Hidden Story Behind the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Democracy Now : 9 August 2011

As radiation readings in Japan reach their highest levels since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdowns, we look at the beginning of the atomic age. Today is the 66th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which killed some 75,000 people and left another 75,000 seriously wounded. It came just three days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing around 80,000 people and injuring some
70,000. By official Japanese estimates, nearly 300,000 people died from the bombings, including those who lost their lives in the ensuing months and years from related injuries and illnesses. Other researchers estimate a much higher death toll.

We play an account of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the pilots who flew the B-29 bomber that dropped that bomb, and feature an interview with the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller, who was the first reporter to enter Nagasaki. He later summarized his experience with military censors who ordered his story killed, saying, "They won." Our guest is Greg Mitchell, co-author of "Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial," with Robert Jay Lifton. His latest book is "Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and The Greatest Movie Never Made." [includes rush transcript]

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TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

 

AMY GOODMAN: "The worst nuclear disaster to strike Japan since a single bomb fell over Nagasaki in 1945 occurred in the spring of 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the epic tsunami. Just last week, it was reported that radiation readings at the site had reached their highest points to date. The wide release of radiation, and fear of same, has forced the Japanese and others all over the world to reflect on what happened to the country in 1945, and the continuing (but usually submerged) threat of nuclear weapons and energy today."

Those are the words of Greg Mitchell, co-author of the book Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial. Mitchell is our guest today. He has also written Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made.

Yes, today is the 66th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which killed some 75,000 people and left another 75,000 seriously wounded. It came just three days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing around 80,000 people, injuring some 70,000. By official Japanese estimates, nearly 300,000 people died from the bombings, including those who lost their lives in the ensuing months and years from related injuries and illnesses. Other researchers estimate a much higher death toll.

The atomic bombings of Japan remain the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war to date. At a ceremony over the weekend, the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, honored the dead from the World War II bombing, adding he deeply regrets having believed the so-called "security myth," which suggested Japan could be safely powered by the same atomic forces that instantly killed so many Japanese people over six decades ago.

Well, today, we’ll look at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and their legacy amidst Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis. We turn first to Nagasaki through the story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller. Weller was the first reporter to enter Nagasaki, defying a U.S. media ban in southern Japan. He worked for the Chicago Daily News, hired a rowboat to get himself to Nagasaki. He wrote a 25,000-word report on the horrors he encountered. When he submitted his story to the military censors, General Douglas MacArthur personally ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. George Weller later summarized his experience with the government censors, saying, "They won."

Well, six years ago, George Weller’s son Anthony discovered a copy of the suppressed dispatches among his late father’s papers. George Weller died in 2002. They’re now published as a book called First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War. This is an excerpt of an interview that Juan Gonzalez and I did with Anthony Weller, George Weller’s son, shortly after he first discovered his late father’s papers.

ANTHONY WELLER: Well, I think the thing that astonished him the most—I mean, there were many things that he found astonishing. Remember, he went in there four weeks, almost to the minute, after the bomb was dropped, which was on the 6th of September in mid-morning, is when he arrived. And he was struck, obviously, by several things—by the physical appearance of the city, which was still smoldering here and there, by the surgical precision of the bomb itself. Later, he was to learn that, in fact, a great deal of damage had been done not just by the bomb, but by the fires that erupted, because people were cooking their midday meal when the bomb hit, and a number of wooden residences just caught fire, and the fire spread. So, in a way, it was kind of like a Dresden.

And as he went around the ruins of the city and rapidly began visiting all the hospital facilities that still existed, I know he was struck immediately, first by the absence of any American medical personnel there—four weeks later, there were still no doctors or nurses—and then, by the great precision and care with which the Japanese doctors had already catalogued the effects of the bomb on individual organs of the body.

And over the next few days, he was as astonished as the Japanese doctors were, of course, by what he referred to in his reports as "Disease X." It was perhaps not so astonishing to see some of the scorches and burns that people had suffered, but to see people apparently unblemished at all by the bomb, who had seemingly survived intact, suddenly finding themselves feeling unwell and going to hospital, sitting there on their cots surrounded by doctors and relatives who could do nothing, and finding when he would go back the next day that they had just died, or that, let’s say, a woman who had come through unscathed making dinner for her husband and having the misfortune to make a very small cut in her finger while peeling a lemon, would just keep bleeding, and bleed to death, because the platelets in her bloodstream had been so reduced that the blood couldn’t clot anymore.

So there were case after case like this, and, in a way, I think my father found them more poignant than the obvious destruction or the obvious burn victims, because here was a whole team of Japanese doctors, very able, very aware from long before the war had started about the potentials of radiation, absolutely baffled. And he had a wonderful phrase he used. He said the effects of the bomb uncured because—excuse me, the effects of "Disease X," which is what they were calling it, uncured because it is untreated, and untreated because it is undiagnosed.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Weller, the son of George Weller, whose story on the Nagasaki bombings was blocked by military censors. As we turn now to an account of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the pilots who flew the B-29 bomber that dropped that bomb. This is an excerpt of the documentary Hiroshima Countdown, produced by Andrew Phillips.

REPORTER: This is one of a series of interviews conducted by the Air Force historical division. Today, we are interviewing Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets, Jr.

PAUL TIBBETS, JR.: They were definitely military targets. There was no question about that. And they offered such a—well, you could almost say a classroom experiment, as far as being able to determine later the bomb damage. These were good virgin targets, and they were ideal for the purpose that we wanted to use them for.

The consideration of targets would be Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata, Kokura, and there’s one more that I don’t remember. The 20th Air Force had been told they would not attack those targets under any circumstances. In other words, the ground was laid.

NARRATOR: As well as these targets, Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, was strongly recommended by the man with overall control of the bomb project, General Leslie Groves. But Secretary of War Henry Stimson, approaching 80 years of age, would not have it. He had visited Kyoto with his wife in the '20s and had enjoyed the city's cultural riches. It was a city of great religious significance to the Japanese, and Stimson felt Kyoto’s destruction would damage America’s post-war stature.

UNIDENTIFIED: The selection of the targets in the month of May 1945 was actually done by the intelligence community in headquarters, U.S. Air Force. The requirements given to them was: You will select cities that have military targets in them. And they also selected the type of terrain that they wanted. They also were interested in the type of construction that they could expect to run into, because in reality not only was this a military mission, but it was also of extreme scientific importance, because they wanted to know what a weapon of this type could do against reinforced concrete, what it could do against steel, what it would do against anything that was in the building materials line. It had to be something that had not been attacked by the 20th Air Force up to that time, call it virgin targets, undamaged, unhurt by any other type of an explosive or munition.

CHARLES SWEENEY: I know the type of bomb we were working on…

NARRATOR: Charles Sweeney flew with Tibbets in an observer aircraft to witness the bombing of Hiroshima. Three days later he lead his crew first to Kokura, the primary target for the second bomb, and then to Nagasaki. Kokura was clouded in that day.

CHARLES SWEENEY: As he was talking, he picked up a handful of earth. He said, "Basically what we’re working on is a single bomb that will turn a whole city into this." And he just tossed a handful of sand into air.

AMY GOODMAN: The voices of the men who loaded and flew the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, from the documentary Hiroshima Countdown, produced by Andrew Phillips. We’ll link to the whole documentary at democracynow.org. When we come back from break, we’ll speak with a man who has followed this story for decades, the author of Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell. Stay with us.
[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Greg Mitchell. He writes the "Media Fix" blog for TheNation.com. He is the author of numerous books. His latest is Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made.
Welcome. You have been covering this for decades. The significance, Greg, of this day, August 9th, 66 years ago, and what it means today in a nuclear-ravaged Japan.

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, of course, it’s particularly poignant, given the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the—similarly to after Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the fears of so many people that they’ve been tainted by released radiation. And so, the psychological effects of the nuclear disaster are severe. And the other—in fact, survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been campaigning this year against nuclear power, which is something they haven’t particularly done in the past, linking nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the fear of radiation, the chance of catastrophe, the chance of disaster. So it’s a special day for that.

And, of course, the other reason is because, as I’ve pointed out for many years, the U.S. is the only country that has used the bomb twice in war, as you mentioned. And, you know, it may surprise many people to know we still have a first-use policy in the United States. And the lesson that has been handed down to us for decades now is that, yes, never again, we should never use nuclear weapons again; however, we continue—most Americans, certainly American leaders, American policymakers, American media—all defend the use of the bomb, or the double use of the bomb, back in 1945. So the message is, these weapons are too dangerous to use, but we used them before, we continue to defend it, we continue to have a first-strike policy. So, to me, that’s a very dangerous lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the color videotape of the atomic bombing that has rarely been shown.

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, it’s been around, well, since after, right after, the bombing

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, that’s basically what my new book is about. It’s about the suppression of this footage, both the American footage, which is in color and was shot by the U.S. military, and the Japanese footage, which was shot by the Japanese newsreel team and is in black and white. In fact, in your first part of this program, almost all the images that people saw on the screen was black-and-white footage. Even to this day, not many people have seen much of the color footage, and that’s because the U.S. suppressed that color footage, shot by our own military, for decades. And it really wasn’t until the 1980s that any of it came out. Snippets have been used in film, you know, so we see a little bit more of it now. But in this key moment in our nuclear history, as nuclear power was becoming entrenched, as a nuclear arms race continued for decades, Americans were not exposed to the full truth of the bomb.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, the scientists at Los Alamos who made the bomb, most of them thinking that it would be used, if need be, on Germany

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —actually were privately shown this video, weren’t they?

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah. And so, the video was taken by the Pentagon, and parts of it were made into training films to show—you know, show our policymakers and our military what the bomb could do. What my book focuses on is two U.S. military officers who shot the footage, and then, for decades after, tried to get it released, tried to get it shown on TV, tried to get it made into a movie—

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us their names.

GREG MITCHELL: —to be shown in theaters. Daniel McGovern and Herbert Sussan. And they tried for decades to get it released and shown to a wider public, and it really didn’t happen until, you know, just a few years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the YouTube video that you just didn’t think was particularly controversial. It was a kind of promo for your book—

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —illustrating your point.

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah. Well, it’s—if people search for it on YouTube under "Atomic Cover-Up," they’ll find it. It’s just a two-minute video. And it includes some of the suppressed footage. And I think that’s why, after I loaded it on YouTube, I got a notice from Google that they were not going to allow any ads for it, because it showed—because of the "promoted violence," as they said, which was of course 180 degrees from what it really did. It’s sort of against violence and against war. And, of course, the real irony was that it was an act of suppression about a book and a video that is about suppression. So, there were—a lot of people protested, and that sort of ended it after a few days.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, speaking of the stories that were told about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I wanted to go to Wilfred Burchett, the first journalist to make it into Hiroshima—

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —which was bombed three days before Nagasaki—it was bombed August 6, 1945—an Australian reporter who defied the U.S. military ban, who took a train for 30 hours. The whole area of southern Japan was off-limits. He took this train to Hiroshima. In this recording, an excerpt from the documentary of Andrew Phillips called Hiroshima Countdown, Burchett describes what he saw.

WILFRED BURCHETT: I went to a hospital, which had survived in the outskirts of the city. These people were all in various states of physical disintegration. They would all die, but they were giving them whatever comfort could be given until they died. And the doctor explained that he didn’t know why they were dying. The only symptoms they could isolate from a medical point of view was that of acute vitamin deficiency. So they started giving vitamin injections. Then he explains where they put the needle in, then the flesh started to rot. And then, gradually, the thing would develop this bleeding which they couldn’t stop, and then the hair falling out. And the hair falling out was more or less the last stage. And the number of the women who were lying there with sort of halos of their black hair which had already fallen out. I felt staggered, really staggered by what I’d seen. And just where I sat down, I found some lump of concrete, I remember, that had not been pulverized. I sat on that with my little Hermes typewriter, and my first words, I remember now, were, "I write this as a warning to the world."

AMY GOODMAN: "I write this as a warning to the world," Wilfred Burchett wrote, his reporting exposing the horrors of the bombings and particularly talking about—well, he didn’t have the words for radiation. He talked about an "atomic plague."

The New York Times correspondent told a very different story. The reporter, William Laurence, was not just working for the Times, though. He was also on the payroll of the U.S. War Department. That’s what the Pentagon was called at the time. Laurence wrote military press releases and statements for President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Stimson, all the while faithfully parroting the line of the U.S. government in the pages of the New York Times. He was awarded the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Nagasaki, as well as on the U.S. government’s development of the atomic bomb. His work was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb.

In 2005, I joined my brother, the journalist David Goodman, to call on the Pulitzer board to strip Laurence and the New York Times of the Pulitzer for their atomic bomb reporting. Juan Gonzalez and I talked to David on Democracy Now! about the William Laurence’s deception.

DAVID GOODMAN: William Laurence was—had immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in the 1930s, at a time when actually the New York Times was laying off reporters, due to the Great Depression. They asked Laurence to become both the newspaper’s and the nation’s first dedicated science reporter. Laurence was—became fascinated with atomic power and atomic weapons and was an ardent supporter of atomic power in the articles that he wrote throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. This is probably what caught the attention of the War Department.

In the spring of 1945, a remarkable meeting took place, secretly, at the headquarters of the New York Times in Times Square in New York City. General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which was the name of the program that was developing atomic bombs for the U.S. military, came to Times Square to the New York Times and met secretly with Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, and William Laurence. At that meeting, he asked Laurence if he would become a paid publicist, essentially, for the Manhattan Project. So, while simultaneously working as a newspaper reporter for the New York Times, he would also be writing essentially propaganda for the War Department. Officially he was asked to put in layman’s terms the benefits of atomic weapons and the development of atomic power. Other New York Times reporters were unaware of this arrangement, this dual arrangement where he was being paid by both the government and the newspaper, and in fact were somewhat mystified when Laurence began taking long leaves of absence.

Well, the government’s investment in Laurence paid off in spades, because he was rewarded for his loyalty. He was also writing—ended up writing statements for Secretary of War Stimson and for President Truman himself. He was rewarded by being given a seat in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. I’ll read to you a little excerpt of Laurence’s dispatch. In general, his writing—well, these days journalists would call it "purple prose," but it was often imbued with these messianic themes about the potential and power of atomic weapons.

Here’s what he had to say in describing the bombing of Nagasaki. This bombing is thought to have taken about 70,000 to 100,000 lives. Laurence recounted, quote, "Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned" —he’s speaking here of the atomic bomb— "into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural."

Now, Laurence went on to write a series of 10 articles about the development of the atomic bomb. This is—this and his reporting about the Nagasaki bombing won him the 1946 Pulitzer Prize in reporting. He seems to have been completely unashamed and unrepentant of what was clearly an egregious conflict of interest by any of the most basic canons of journalism ethics. Laurence later wrote in his memoirs about his experience as a paid publicist for the War Department. He wrote, quote, "Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution. No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter."

AMY GOODMAN: David, I think it’s instructive, the effects of this reporting. I mean, on the one hand, you had someone like Wilfred Burchett on the ground, talking about—he didn’t even have the words to describe. He talked about "bomb sickness." He talked about "atomic plague." And then you have Laurence’s front-page story, September 12th, 1945, "U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales: Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm that Blast and Not Radiation Took Toll." This, after William Laurence, while he didn’t go to Hiroshima, was taken by Leslie Groves, the general in charge of the Manhattan Project, that was responsible for the bomb, took Laurence and other reporters to New Mexico to counter what the War Department, what Groves was calling Japanese propaganda of the effects, the deadly effects of radiation.

DAVID GOODMAN: And, in fact, Laurence knew better, because having observed the Trinity test, the first explosion of the atomic bomb in the deserts of New Mexico, he knew that Geiger counters had spiked around the area of the bombing long after the actual bomb itself. In fact, an interesting footnote to this whole encounter is that when Laurence was brought by Groves in this effort, as Amy describes...

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to pull out of that clip of David Goodman describing William Laurence. William Laurence, Greg Mitchell, the original embedded reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports, was also on the payroll of the War Department, writing the Stimson press releases and statements.

GREG MITCHELL: Right, right. Well, it was—I mean, he’s a symbol, I guess, but really it was—we’ve had decades of the suppression. You know, my book talks about the film footage, which was extremely significant, but, of course, in the media and in the official statements by the government, there was basically a Hiroshima narrative. And it was important that it get established early, and then it be maintained, because of the arms race. We wanted to build the hydrogen bomb, which we did a few years later. And so, it’s been important to the development both of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy in the U.S. that this Hiroshima narrative be disseminated. And, you know, really, from the first words of the nuclear age, it was lie when Truman said that they bombed Hiroshima, which was merely a military base. And so, it’s been 66 years of that kind of misstatements and misleading arguments.

AMY GOODMAN: The words "nuclear power," "nuclear weapons" and "suppression of information" follow through right to today.

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is where we’re going to end, as the Japanese people deal with their government in the last few days, hearing that the radiation levels are highest than they’ve ever been since the nuclear meltdowns.

GREG MITCHELL: Right, right, yeah, that’s—it’s continuing today, certainly, in Japan. And one fears it would happen in the U.S., as well, if we had a nuclear crisis here. So, it seems like anything that nuclear weapons or the nuclear energy touches leads to suppression and leads to danger for the public.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Mitchell, his latest book is Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made. A contributor at TheNation.com, he was the editor of Nuclear Times in the 1980s, has written widely about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll link to his articles at democracynow.org.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/9/atomic_cover_up_the_hidden_story

 

Kyushu QUAKES

17 April 2016 : SNS by Nelson Surjon

Kyushu is experiencing extremely powerful quakes. Thursday was a M-6.5, followed by strong after shocks with some measuring up to M6. Then a M-6.4 tremor on Friday. Saturday, another quake M-7.3 (officially now raised to a M-7.4) rocked the area (felt all the way to Tokyo). Strong tremors are still expected.

More than 100 000 people displaced, 180 000 have no electricity and 80 000 without water. Over 2000 people injured and 41 people confirmed dead (as of 18h00 on Saturday 16th). Many are trapped under collapsed houses. People and children sleeping outside for the third straight night and food is becoming scarce.

The Castle of Kumamoto has had serious damage. Landslides, fires and floods are reported across. The volcano Mt Aso had a small eruption, the Aso bridge totally collapsed and a shinkansen derailed. The nearby Sendai Nuclear Power Plant is holding up (per the government's say) and scumbag Minister of Environment Tamayo Murakawa has stated there is no need to interrupt the newly restarted reactors.

With the railways and highways obviously not operational, these promised evacuation routes in case of a nuclear and other disasters are clearly not options. In truth, the Japanese government has no valid evacuation plan in place. The Japanese government are thugs. Murakawa is gambling with people's lives.

Scumbag Shinzo Abe won't come to Kumamoto.



 
 

RSF concerned about declining media freedom in Japan

Reporters without Border : 11 April 2016

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has evaluated the current state of media freedom and freedom of information in Japan ahead of this week’s visit by David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.

RSF draws Kaye’s attention to the decline in media freedom in Japan since Shinzo Abe became prime minister again in December 2012. The Abe administration’s threats to media independence, the turnover in media personnel in recent months and the increase in self-censorship within leading media outlets are endangering the underpinnings of democracy in Japan.

The latest disturbing sign of government pressure on the media is public TV broadcaster NHK’s dismissal of current affairs presenter Hiroko Kuniya, which has caused widespread dismay among journalists. She hosted “Close Up Gendai,” one of the few NHK programmes to contain investigative reporting and analysis. Her interview of chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga in July 2014 has been cited as one of the reasons for her contract’s termination last month.

Other journalists have been the subjects of presumably forced departures. They include Shigetada Kishii, a Mainichi News journalist and anchor of the “News 23” programme on the TBS channel, who criticized the proposed security legislation at the end of last year, and Ichiro Furutachi, a well-known government critic who presented TV Asahi’s “Hodo Station” programme.

“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government seems to be taking less and less account of media freedom and the public’s right to information,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“The special rapporteur must raise the issue of government meddling in the editorial policies of Japan’s public broadcasting service. We also urge him to examine the legislative framework governing the media, the law on state secrets and the constitution, whose revision could pose an additional threat to media freedom.”

The government has not hidden its hostility towards critical coverage. Addressing parliament on 8 February, communication minister Sanae Takaichi threatened to shut down broadcasters that continue to air “biased political reports.”

Questioned by journalists the next day, Takaichi reiterated her threat, citing article 4 of the TV broadcasting law, which prohibits distorting the facts, and article 76 of the law on radio broadcasting, which allows the communications minister to issue closure orders without reference to a judge.

Conservative businessman Katsuo Momii’s appointment as NHK’s president in 2014 was seen as a government attempt to control news coverage. Momii caused a controversy when he said NHK should not “deviate from the government’s position in its programming.” He also supported adoption of the law on the protection of state secrets.

In June 2015, members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party urged the government to punish critical media outlets by pressuring advertisers to withdraw business from them.
Finally, inclusion of the concept of “harming the public interest and public order” in a proposed constitutional amendment could provide a mechanism for curbing free speech and media freedom. Introduced with any further details, this notion could be exploited by officials to arbitrarily brand media reports and opinions as threats to the nation.

The special rapporteur was originally supposed to have visited Japan in December 2015 but the government asked him to postpone the visit. Many observers suggested that this was because the government wanted to avoid any discussion of the law on the “Protection of Specially Designated Secrets.”

This law provides for sentences of up to 10 years in prison for whistleblowers who leak “state secrets” and for journalists and bloggers who report information they obtained “illegally” or sought from whistleblowers.

Japan is ranked 61st out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-concerned-about-declining-media-freedom-japan

Anti-hate speech bills likely headed for Diet consideration, but is it effective to protect ethnic Koreans.

Last year, the opposition parties submitted the bill for "Hate Speech Regulation Act", but voting was postponed because the diet came to conclusion "the definition of hate speech is unclear". Now, the ruling party (LDP and Komeito coalition) is submitting their own version of bill for "Hate Speech Regulation Act" to the Diet.
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As reported earlier, some cabinet ministers from LDP are befriending with notorious racist organization called "Zaitokukai" (right-wing nationalist).... It is skeptical if the ruling party is serious about protecting ethnic Koreans in Japan, the main target whom "Zaitokukai" attacks.
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Takashi Nagao, a cabinet member of LDP and the member of Japan Conference, explained about this bill at Channel Sakura (a Japanese TV channel and video-sharing website to promote Japanese right-wing and nationalist points of view. It hosted Abe and right wing politicians/intellectuals mainly to discuss topics about positive portrayal of Japanese imperialism, war crime denial, anti-Korean and anti-Chinese sentiments as well as attempting to present a "pure" Japanese cultural image.). The purpose of Nagao's presentation was to ease the fear of "Zaitokukai" like minded rightist supporters of LDP.
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Nagao explained them "no penalty for violating this law", "it is not like Human rights protection bill" and "no third party organization". However, the audience of Channel sakura was still complaining to Nagao thru SNS, "if it is illegal for Japanese to tell "get out" to ethnic Korean, it is dicrimination against Japanese." Nagao tweeted back, "this regulation is applicable if hate speech is meant to drive US soldiers out of Japan".
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The bill submitted by LDP has the provision that the law is applicable for the hate-speech against "foreign-born residents and their descendants in Japan", but the treatment of ethnic Koreans is in gray-zone . The majority of Koreans in Japan are Zainichi Koreans, often known simply as Zainichi ,who are the permanent ethnic Korean residents of Japan. The term "Zainichi Korean" refers only to long-term Korean residents of Japan who trace their roots to Korea under Japanese rule. ("Zainichi Korean" is main target of the attack by "Zaitokukai") Japanese nationality was forced to them under colonial rule. (as Korea was part of Japan at that time, it is vague if their status can be defined as "foreign born".)
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Anti-hate speech bills likely headed for Diet consideration
AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 6 April 2016


Debate over regulating hate speech targeting ethnic minorities in Japan is finally likely to begin soon in the Diet, with the ruling coalition expected to submit its long-awaited draft bill as early as next week.

Katsuei Hirasawa, a Lower House member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who heads a team to address the issue, on April 5 proclaimed the draft as “significant.”

“Although the bill does not come with a provision to punish violators, it is significant that we have shown our attitude against hate speech,” he said.

But it is unclear whether effective legislation will be enacted as many lawmakers acknowledge the difficulty in ensuring freedom of speech while regulating racism. The main opposition Democratic Party and other opposition parties submitted their own anti-hate speech legislation last May.
The opposition's version also does not include penalties for those violating the law.

The push to enact an anti-hate speech law follows a call by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In a recommendation in August 2014, the committee urged the government to pass and enforce a law regulating hate speech by Zaitokukai and other groups blaring discriminatory and menacing taunts at their street rallies.

Zaitokukai, formed in 2006, is short for the Japanese name of the group that is roughly translated as a group of citizens who oppose privileges for ethnic Korean residents in Japan.

It has been aggressively criticizing ethnic Koreans, staging rallies in front of a Korean school in Kyoto and in neighborhoods that host ethnic Koreans in Tokyo and Osaka.

The LDP moved swiftly to set up a team examining the issue in August 2014, but it has dragged its feet until recently to regulate it.

The proposed legislation by the LDP and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, defines hate speech as “wrongful discriminatory words and deeds that are intended to fuel or encourage a sense of discrimination against so as to incite a movement to exclude (the targets) from a local community” targeting foreign residents and families.

The LDP was initially reluctant to define hate speech in the bill, citing potential gaps, but acceded at the prodding of Komeito.

The bill states in the preamble that “wrongful discriminatory words and deeds will not be permitted.”

The draft calls on the central and local governments to offer counseling services and programs to educate the public against hate speech and racial discrimination.

The opposition parties' draft bill prohibits “insults, harassment and other wrongful discriminatory words based on race and other reasons” and states that “no one should undertake wrongful, discriminatory statements and actions.”

Differing from the ruling coalition’s version, the opposition draft clearly spells out the government's responsibility in addressing the issue.

The opposition calls on a panel tasked with tackling racial discrimination to be set up in the Cabinet Office, probe important matters regarding discrimination and issue warnings to government ministries and agencies over suspected cases.

The opposition bloc seeks to hold talks with ruling coalition lawmakers to explore whether they can integrate the two bills.

Legislators acknowledge that they will have to work more to give teeth to the legislation.
Speaking of the ruling coalition's bill, Toshio Ogawa, the Democratic Party’s director-general in the Upper House and a former judge, said, “The police would have no legal grounds to deny an application for a rally that is aimed at spewing hate speech. And police would not be able to do anything at the site.”

Kiyohiko Toyama, a Komeito member in the Lower House, expressed concerns about the opposition’s legislation, citing possible infringement of freedom of speech.

“In an extreme case, police on the street could clamp down on (demonstrators) if they deem (their actions) as discriminatory,” he said. “It raises questions about the compatibility with freedom of expression.”

The central government, in its first-ever survey, confirmed 1,152 cases of hate speech demonstrations and campaigns between April 2012 and September 2015.

Although such incidences declined somewhat in 2015, the government described the situation as “not quietening down.”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604060055.html

Infringing the Freedom to Hate
Shingetsu News Agency : 13 April 2016

SNA (Tokyo) — The global conversation on hate speech has seen a resurgence due to US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s appeals to racism, but hate speech does not exist only within the scope of US presidential elections — in Japan it has been largely unimpeded since the turn of the decade.

On April 8, the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito jointly submitted to the House of Councillors a bill seeking to regulate hate speech targeting Zainichi Koreans (Koreans with permanent resident status in Japan). The opposition parties had already submitted a similar bill last May.


Last year’s opposition-sponsored bill crucially included a ban on racial discrimination — but this is not included in the bill submitted by the ruling coalition this month. Both bills fail to stipulate any specific penalties for engaging in hate speech. Even so, the ruling coalition is worried that the opposition’s approach would have been too heavy-handed, and would have infringed on freedom of expression, a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Although hate speech is not an issue that receives a great deal of public recognition in Japan, violent and aggressive speech targeting resident Koreans has been prevalent in Japan since around 2012. On March 30, the Ministry of Justice released survey results on hate speech targeting specific races and found that from April 2012 to September 2015, there had been 1,152 demonstrations in 29 prefectures by organizations said to be engaging in hate speech.

Of these organizations, the most prominent is the ultra-nationalist Zaitokukai (Citizens’ Association That Will Not Permit Special Privileges for Resident Koreans).

In July 2014, the Zaitokukai was fined 12 million yen (about US$110,000) in reparations by the Osaka High Court — utilizing UN conventions that Japan had signed — for disturbing classes taking place at the Kyoto Korean School. The Zaitokukai reportedly used loudspeakers to make inflammatory statements such as, “Cockroaches, maggots, go back to the Korean Peninsula.” The Zaitokukai appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court, but this was rejected.

In August 2014, the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, after watching videos of anti-Korean demonstrations taking place in Japan, recommended Japan to ban hate speech. Committee members were reportedly very harsh on the Japanese government, claiming that a ban on hate speech would not infringe freedom of expression.

During this time, when international pressure to ban hate speech was escalating, media sources reported a connection between the Abe Cabinet and the Zaitokukai. In late 2014, a photo of Eriko Yamatani, then the minister overseeing the National Police Agency, posing with Shigeo Masuki, a former official of the Zaitokukai, became a subject of controversy. In a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on September 25, 2014, Yamatani was grilled by journalists on this subject. Yamatani responded that she did not have a relationship with Masuki, despite him saying that he had known her for fifteen years. She also failed to specifically reject the Zaitokukai’s worldview.

During the same time period, photos of Tomomi Inada, the Liberal Democratic Party’s policy chief, and Sanae Takaichi, Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, posing with a leader of a neo-Nazi organization in Japan, also surfaced on the web.

Many voices within Japan’s ruling party have argued that banning hate speech raises concerns from the perspective of protecting the freedom of expression. Ironically, however, it is the Abe administration itself that is now becoming a focus of international concern regarding its own alleged attempts to intimidate the news media. For example, Minister Sanae Takaichi’s statement this February that the government could shut down “biased” broadcasters sits in an uncomfortable relationship to the view of some ruling party lawmakers that those who engage in hate speech may simply be exercising their free speech rights.

The bill submitted by the ruling coalition does not include a ban on hate speech, and probably does not satisfy the UN’s demands for decisive legislative action.
Nobuaki Masaki is a contributing writer to the Shingetsu News Agency.

http://shingetsunewsagency.com/2016/04/13/infringing-the-freedom-to-hate/

 

 

LDP keeping close watch on foreign media reports on Japan

AJW by Asahi Shimbun :  11 April 2016

Sensitive to media coverage of its policies, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is monitoring foreign reporting on Japan and rebuking some journalists in a section on its online site.
The move comes despite frequent criticism over remarks by ruling party politicians about keeping the media in line. LDP Upper House member Ichita Yamamoto, who serves as Internet strategy adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his capacity as LDP president, defended his actions as the section's emcee. "It is normal to respond in a civil manner to those individuals who say incorrect things about Japan, and it by no means represents pressure," Yamamoto told The Asahi Shimbun. "There are no journalists who will stop writing because they feel cowed."

However, others, such as Martin Fackler, the former Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, have a different view. "While debate is important, a stance that considers opinions different from one's own as wrong is not an appropriate way to conduct debate," he said.

Yamamoto's section on the LDP site responds through social networking services such as Twitter to foreign reporting on Japan. It began on Feb. 17. Yamamoto not only takes up responses sent in by foreign journalists, but he has also reported on what he has written through his personal SNS accounts to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of foreign journalists. He has, so far, written about 18 articles that have appeared in Western newspapers and magazines. He touched upon, for example, an Internet article published by The Wall Street Journal, dated Feb. 10, which was titled "How Japan's 'Abenomics' Reached an Impasse."

Yamamoto directed remarks to the writer saying he disagreed with the article because it was still too early to make an appraisal about the Abenomics package of economic measures. According to Yamamoto, about 30 foreign journalists who have a large number of followers on their SNS accounts were selected, and their articles written in English, German and French are being monitored. If any writer responds to the comments sent by Yamamoto, those remarks are taken up on Yamamoto's Internet program. Yamamoto said he also informs Abe about such remarks.

The LDP has also asked TV networks based in Tokyo to conduct fair reporting of elections. One LDP lawmaker said at a party study session that the mass media "had to be taught a lesson."
Communications minister Sanae Takaichi, a close ally of Abe, stirred up a hornet's nest recently when she threatened to shut down broadcasters over "biased" political programming.
Yasuhiko Tajima, professor of media law at Sophia University, is a critic of the pressure being applied on the media.

"Politicians and others in authority should hold the position of accepting why counter-arguments emerge. It is putting the cart before the horse for those in authority to keep an eye on the media that must keep an eye on those in authority." Meanwhile, Iwao Osaka, a lecturer on political communications at Komazawa University, referred to the Japanese system of "kisha" press clubs in which member reporters from media outlets cover certain beats attached to government agencies and political parties.

"Debate in the open is not necessarily a bad thing, and I do not think those in foreign media organizations that are not part of the kisha clubs in Japan will feel any sort of pressure," Osaka said.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604110035.html

Contamination: Kadena Air Base’s dirty secret

For the first time, documents released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act reveal extensive pollution on an active American base in Japan.

The Japan Times : 9 April 2016

Located in the center of Okinawa island, Kadena Air Base is the largest U.S. Air Force installation in Asia. Equipped with two 3.7-kilometer runways and thousands of hangars, homes and workshops, the base and its adjoining arsenal sprawl across 46 square kilometers. More than 20,000 American service members, contractors and their families live or work on the base alongside 3,000 Japanese employees. Kadena Air Base hosts the biggest combat wing in the U.S. Air Force — the 18th Wing — and, during the past seven decades, the installation has served as an important launchpad for wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

Given the long history of Kadena Air Base and its city-sized scale, it is easy to understand why the U.S. Air Force calls it the “keystone of the Pacific.” But until now, nobody has realized the damage the base is inflicting on the environment and those who live in its vicinity. Documents obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act reveal how years of accidents and neglect have been polluting local land and water with hazardous chemicals, including arsenic, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos and dioxin. Military authorities have often hidden this contamination, putting at risk the health of their own service members and the 184,000 civilians living in neighboring communities.
This week, we examine the pollution of local water resources and the exposure of on- and off-base residents to lead and asbestos. The accompanying article explains the flaws in current guidelines that allow the U.S. military in Japan to conceal such contamination.

Next week, we will investigate the installation’s ongoing struggles to manage contamination from PCBs, its coverup of the discovery of hazardous waste near two on-base schools and the human impact of this pollution. In January, the U.S. Air Force released 8,725 pages of accident reports, environmental investigations and emails related to contamination at Kadena Air Base. Dated from the mid-1990s to August 2015, the documents are believed to be the first time such recent information detailing pollution on an active U.S. base in Japan has been made public.

The documents catalog approximately 415 environmental incidents between 1998 and 2015; 245 of these occurred since 2010. Incidents range from small leaks that stayed within the confines of the base to large spills discharging tens of thousands of liters of fuel and raw sewage into local rivers.
During the 1998-2015 period, total leaks included almost 40,000 liters of jet fuel, 13,000 liters of diesel and 480,000 liters of sewage. Of the 206 incidents noted between 2010 and 2014, 51 were blamed on accidents or human error; only 23 were reported to the Japanese authorities.

The year 2014 saw the highest number of accidents — 59, only two of which were reported to Tokyo.
Large parts of the documents have been redacted and reports for the years from 2004 to 2007 are missing. These omissions almost certainly mean that the actual statistics are much higher. Due to its location, Kadena Air Base plays an integral role in the supply of the island’s drinking water. There are 23 wells within the installation, some of which contribute to on-base potable water. More than 300,000 meters of drains carry the installation’s storm water into local rivers, including the Hija River, which supplies drinking water for six municipalities and Okinawa’s capital, Naha.

Documents suggest that mistakes and negligence on the base have contaminated this water supply.
In August 2011, for example, 760 liters of diesel spilled into the Hija River when an operator abandoned a generator tank prior to the arrival of a typhoon. In December 2011, 1,400 liters of diesel leaked from U.S. Air Force housing on Camp McTureous after officials ignored a warning light; the fuel contaminated the Tengan River.

Other reports suggest that miscommunication exacerbated spill incidents. In June 2012, an engineer took an hour and 20 minutes to respond to a 190-liter fuel spill because he was at a food court on the base and could not hear his telephone ringing. More recently, in February 2015, environmental teams failed to respond to two incidents — the first involving 170 liters of fuel and the second 23 liters of hydraulic fluid — despite being alerted by emergency crews. As well as fuel leaks, the base mistakenly released at least 23,000 liters of fire suppressant foam between 2001 and 2015. In August 2012, a Japanese firefighter set off a fire system in an accident that leaked 1,140 liters. Then in May 2015, a drunk U.S. marine, released 1,510 liters in an act of vandalism. Such foams can contain carcinogens, chemicals known to cause reproductive and neurological disorders, and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS).

PFOS, categorized by the Environmental Protection Agency as an emerging contaminant, has recently become the focus of concerns both on Okinawa and in the United States.
In January, Okinawa Prefecture announced that waterways around Kadena Air Base were currently contaminated with PFOS; in 2008, levels in an on-base well had measured as high as 1,870 nanograms per liter. The EPA’s provisional health advisory limit for drinking water is 200 nanograms per liter. Last month, the U.S. Air Force promised to conduct tests for PFOS contamination on 664 bases in the United States.

At the time of publication, a spokesperson for U.S. Forces Japan was unable to confirm whether similar tests would be conducted on Okinawa or elsewhere in the country. Komichi Ikeda, an adviser at Environmental Research Institute Inc., Tokyo, says “current research suggests (PFOS) may cause cancer, reproductive disorders and damage the next generation.” “Pregnant women and young children ought to be especially careful to avoid consuming water contaminated with PFOS,” Ikeda says. Since 2008, Kadena Air Base has also spilled at least 1,670 liters of hydraulic fluid, a known source of PFOS; meanwhile, drains from the base’s fire-training area, where foams are routinely sprayed, feed into local waterways.

Another threat to Okinawa’s water supply comes from leaks of raw sewage, which the base apparently only started recording in 2010. In November 2010, a 57,000-liter spill contaminated the Shirahi River and the sea with sewage measuring 36,000 fecal coliform colonies/100 milliliters — 90 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum limit for swimming waters. More recently, in June 2013, an overflowing manhole leaked 208,000 liters of sewage into the Hija River. The base took 27 hours to notify local authorities but its subsequent press release stated, “The health and safety of our service members and our friends in local community is our top priority.” Follow-up emails exchanged among U.S. Air Force officials include the comments: “We received little media coverage. So that’s good news.”

Furthermore, the documents highlight the dangers of operating a busy airport in the midst of civilian communities. Numerous in-flight emergencies cause pilots to abort their missions — two occurring in a one-week period in January 2015. Also, in August 2011, an in-flight emergency caused an F-15 to dump 150 liters of fuel from low altitude. The summary concluded, “There was no impact to the local community.”

Back on the ground, the documents released under the Freedom of Information Act point to the exposure of U.S. and Japanese nationals to dangerous levels of lead and asbestos.
For many decades, a furnace within the installation burned ammunition and “other exotic pyrotechnics” without any emission controls.

In 1993, investigators discovered this incineration had contaminated nearby land with lead at 13,813 milligrams/kilogram and more distant jungle with 6,000 milligrams/kilogram. There were “small farms and vegetable plots” in the area and the site was near a waterway. Another burn pit, cited in an April 1994 report, was blamed for lead concentrations in soil exceeding 500 milligrams/kilogram with fields again apparently in the close vicinity. The Japanese government’s cleanup standard for lead contamination in soil is 150 milligrams/kilogram. Japan has no standard for agricultural land but in Germany the maximum level permitted is 100 milligrams/kilogram.

“People working in the area need to worry about intellectual disabilities and damage to their nervous systems,” Ikeda says. “Also if they inhaled this lead and other substances over a long period, it may have caused reproductive damage and harmed blood and organs such as kidneys. Because the levels are so high, there is the very strong chance that the land remains contaminated today.” Ikeda also criticizes the reports for their lack of data on other heavy metals likely discharged during the incineration of ammunition, including depleted uranium, which the U.S. Air Force used widely in the 1990s.

Moreover, surveys from 2000 to 2001 revealed serious contamination from asbestos in many buildings such as dormitories, mess halls and boiler rooms. Inspectors found large chunks of deteriorating asbestos materials scattered onto nearby lawns. One of the locations was an abandoned hospital that had been used for “readiness training” prior to 2000. Investigators noted how military personnel had used axes and chainsaws to breech asbestos-packed doors, resulting in the spread of “friable” (easy to crumble) material across an area of 460 square meters.

The World Health Organization estimates that asbestos is responsible for one-third of occupational cancer fatalities worldwide. In recent years, Japanese base employees have struggled to win compensation from Tokyo for illnesses attributed to their work in asbestos-contaminated environments. Many were instructed to work without proper safety equipment. In 2014, the Japanese government agreed to pay compensation to 28 victims but experts estimate the number of sick is likely in the hundreds.

Former base worker Susumu Tamura witnessed firsthand the dangers of asbestos. Employed on U.S. bases for 43 years until the 1990s, his testimony helped to win compensation for the family of a colleague killed by asbestos-related lung disease. In a recent interview with The Japan Times, Tamura recalls the dilemma faced by many Okinawans employed by the U.S. military. “Even if we thought what we were ordered to do was wrong, we didn’t refuse,” Tamura says. “We were worried that we’d be fired.”

During his time on the bases, Tamura regularly witnessed lax environmental standards, including the illicit dumping of waste and shoddy cleanup work. “Nowadays, safety conditions may have improved,” Tamura says. “In the past, however, the only way to describe them was yaritai hodai — the U.S. military did whatever it wanted.” The first installment of a two-part series on contamination at Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base. The second installment will be published on April 17.

Freedom of Information Act lifts lid on secret history of contamination at Kadena Air Base

One hundred and thirty U.S. bases are in operation in Japan — 32 of which are located in Okinawa Prefecture — but the Americans who serve upon them and local residents know nothing of the dangers these installations pose to human health or the environment. At the root of the problem lies the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which makes no allowances for Japanese officials to conduct pollution checks within U.S. bases — nor does it hold the military responsible for cleaning up land that is returned for civilian use.

In 2015, Washington and Tokyo pegged a supplementary agreement onto SOFA giving local authorities the right to request a base inspection following a spill. To date, however, the Pentagon has failed to green-light any such checks. With both SOFA and the new agreement failing to protect the country’s environment, it comes down to Japan Environmental Governing Standards. The guidelines specify when U.S. forces need to report spills to the Japanese government, for example, after they surpass a certain volume or contain a substance listed as hazardous. However, they do not assign punishment to bases breaching environmental policies or hold the military responsible for contamination outside its bases.

Documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal instances of U.S. Air Force officials conspiring to hide environmental incidents from the public. In July 2014, for example, the discovery of a buried barrel of chemicals within Kadena Air Base sparked emails urging responders to keep a “low profile please. Don’t want this release (sic) to press.” This combination of flawed regulations and lack of transparency creates obstacles for researchers trying to ascertain pollution within U.S. bases in Japan. Scientists can only check land that has already been returned for civilian use — by which time it is too late to prevent contamination — or conduct tests on wildlife captured near active bases in the hope their tissues will reveal traces of any toxins. Given these constraints, one of the most effective ways to lift the lid on locked-tight bases is the FOIA.

“This release of documents about Kadena Air Base is a great example of the power of the FOIA. Because the U.S. government has a hand in many global activities, the international community has many questions for it,” says Beryl Lipton, a member of MuckRock, the organization that helped to secure the release of the documents. “The FOIA gives great power to the people,” Lipton says. “Official press releases and statements are no longer the final say on a matter — you can check what public officials say. The FOIA can hold the U.S. government to their own words by their own law.”