Osaka governor says Japan should debate need for nuclear weapons

OSAKA – Osaka Gov. Ichiro Matsui, the head of Osaka Ishin no Kai, has voiced support for a national debate on whether or not Japan should possess nuclear weapons.

“With the perfect right to collective self-defense, we should debate whether our troops can completely cover the needs of our own country,” Matsui said during an informal meeting with reporters Tuesday at Osaka’s prefectural office. “If we possess weapons, the ultimate weapon will become necessary.”

The call for a national debate follows comments made by U.S. Republican presidential candidate and front-runner Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times where he said he would be open to both Japan and South Korea possessing nuclear weapons and the U.S. withdrawing its forces from the two Asian countries.

Touching on Trump’s statement, Matsui said he thought it would be best if Japan did not possess a nuclear arsenal, as it had been bombed by such weapons.

But, in calling for debate on the issue, he added: “What do we do if America’s military strength (in Japan) disappears? Wishful thinking doesn’t get us anywhere.”

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the government’s top spokesman, has said in the past that Japan will maintain the three nonnuclear principles that prohibit it from owning, developing and transporting nuclear weapons.

Matsui’s comments also came the same day the nation’s new security laws — which are expected to bind the U.S. and Japanese militaries even closer together — came into effect. It was also just a few days after the party released its basic plan for constitutional revisions.

Osaka Ishin leaders are close to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Suga, who see Matsui and his party as potential allies on a number of issues, including amending the Constitution.

The Osaka governor’s comments are believed to reflect the sentiments of other right-leaning politicians as well.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/30/national/politics-diplomacy/osaka-governor-says-japan-debate-need-nuclear-weapons/#.VvvKo8fH87Q

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How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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