Japanese teenager calls for nuke-free world at U.N. disarmament confab 

Japanese teenager calls for nuke-free world at U.N. disarmament confab  https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2021/08/fbf868a14e17-japanese-teenager-calls-for-nuke-free-world-at-un-disarmament-confab.html

 KYODO NEWS – Aug 13, 2021  A Japanese teenager on Thursday called for the abolition of nuclear weapons at a U.N. disarmament conference session that highlighted the importance of incorporating the voice of youth in its discussions.

“We must take a big step towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” said Rio Sasaki, an 18-year-old student at a senior high school in Hiroshima, which, along with Nagasaki, was one of the two Japanese cities devastated by U.S. atomic bombs in the final days of World War II.

Addressing the conference online, she related the physical and psychological pains suffered by her grandmother throughout her life as a victim of the atomic bomb and said that young people like herself bear a strong responsibility to eliminate nuclear weapons.

“I hope the world will respond to our call,” she said.

The session, which was dedicated to a discussion on youth and disarmament, was opened by U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu.

Nakamitsu highlighted in a video message the huge potential of youth to bring positive change in the world, including in the field of disarmament.

Noting that 40 percent of the world’s population is under the age of 25, Nakamitsu said that “inclusiveness is necessary to achieve the ultimate objectives of disarmament, nonproliferation and arms control, and for the effectiveness and sustainability of the agreements that we reach and the work that we do.”

Other youths who attended the meeting included those from Canada and Vietnam.

Sasaki is among Japan’s so-called high school student peace messengers who are selected each year to convey the messages of the two Japanese A-bombed cities.

The messengers have usually visited the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, where disarmament conferences take place, and submitted signatures that they have collected to push for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

But this year, like last year, they have not been able to travel to Switzerland due to the coronavirus pandemic.

August 16, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nagasaki remembers the atomic bomb, Olympic officials refuse to allow a minute’s silence.

Nagasaki nuclear attack remembered   https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2021/08/10/2003762363

ATOMIC BOMB ANNIVERSARY: Small turnout due to COVID-19 did not lessen the observance, also marking the first year of a mostly symbolic nuclear ban treaty

The Japanese city of Nagasaki yesterday commemorated the 76th anniversary of the detonation of a US atomic bomb over the city, with the mayor calling for the global community to build on a new nuclear ban treaty.

Nagasaki was hit by an atomic inferno that killed 74,000 people, three days after the nuclear bomb that hit Hiroshima.

The twin attacks brought forth the nuclear age and gave Japan the bleak distinction of being the only country to be struck by foreign atomic weapons.

Survivors and a handful of foreign dignitaries offered a silent prayer at 11:02am local time, the exact time the second — and last — nuclear weapon used in wartime was dropped. For a second year, the number of people attending was much smaller due to COVID-19 restrictions. The ceremony is the first since an international treaty banning nuclear weapons came into force last year.

“World leaders must commit to nuclear arms reductions and build trust through dialogue, and civil society must push them in this direction,” Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue said.

The treaty has not been signed by countries with nuclear arsenals, but activists believe it will have a gradual deterrent effect.

Japan has not signed it either, saying the accord carries no weight without being accepted by nuclear-armed states.

The country is also in a delicate position, as it is under the US nuclear umbrella, with US forces responsible for its defence.

As the only country that has suffered atomic bombings during the war, it is our unchanging mission to steadily advance the efforts of the international community, step by step, towards realization of a world free of nuclear weapons,” Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at the ceremony.

On Friday, Japan marked 76 years since the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing around 140,000 people.

Barack Obama in 2016 became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, but Washington has never acceded to demands for an apology for the bombings.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach traveled to Hiroshima in July, before the start of the Tokyo Games, to mark the start of an Olympic truce — a tradition that calls for a halt to global conflict to allow the safe passage of athletes.

However, city officials were disappointed after the IOC refused a request to stage a minute of silence at the Games to mark Friday’s anniversary.

August 10, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Hiroshima City remembers the sudden cruelty of the atomic bombing

—  On this day 76 years ago, a single atomic bomb instantly reduced our hometown to a scorched plain. That bombing brought cruel death to countless innocent victims and left those who managed to survive with profound, lifelong physical and emotional injuries due to radiation, fear of aftereffects, and economic hardship.

One survivor who gave birth to a girl soon after the bombing says, “As more horrors of the bomb came to light,
and I became more concerned about their effects, I worried less about myself and more about my child. Imagining the future awaiting my daughter, my suffering grew, night after sleepless night.”

 City of Hiroshima 6th Aug 2021

August 7, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Tokyo’s Games Are Harming the Nuclear Weapons Ban

a two-week Olympic media blitz that normalizes nuclear disasters and shrugs at rising nuclear dangers, which illustrates why –

we need a new drive for mass nuclear literacy. With arms control in retreat, an informed citizenry could be our last, best line of defense.

Tokyo’s Games Are Harming the Nuclear Weapons Ban Movement  https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tokyo-olympics-nuclear-weapons/

By paying lip service to the Fukushima disaster and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, these games are downplaying the growing danger of nuclear catastrophe.

By Alyn Ware
The Olympics are supposed to be a tangible symbol of global cooperation and peaceful competition. But the games carry a lot of baggage—not only from the pandemic but also from the Fukushima disaster and Japan’s nuclear politics.

As Covid cases spread in the Olympic Village and in Tokyo, protesters continue to demand the Olympics be canceled, and they continue to be ignored. But the tone-deafness of these Olympics goes back further—to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In 2019, then–Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dubbed the Tokyo Olympics the “Recovery Games,” meant “to showcase the affected regions of the tsunami” and the nuclear meltdown of 2011, which continues to pose threats today.

That’s why some Olympic events are being held in Fukushima’s Azuma Stadium, and why Olympic torch runners have been routed through Fukushima prefecture, hitting what the official Olympic website calls “places of interest” near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It started at J-Village, a former logistics hub for crews working to remediate the stricken reactors, now a sports complex, where Greenpeace detected a radiation hot spot in late 2019. It passed through Ōkuma and Futaba, where the plant is located, and other nearby towns long abandoned after the disaster.

This is intended to project an image of recovery and normalcy to the world. But it’s government propaganda, deaf to citizens’ concerns, and blind to ongoing threats. Fukushima Daiichi continues to leak radioactivity. New radiation hot spots and other impacts are being discovered all the time.

This sort of Olympic spin tactic has been used before. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the government sought to portray Japan as a modern industrial nation with its own nuclear research program. Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was dropped, lit the Olympic flame. A scant year and half after the Cuban missile crisis, this gesture soft-pedaled the dangers of nuclear technology, nuclear weapons, and the burgeoning arms race.

Today, the tone-deafness continues. This month, on the anniversary of the Trinity nuclear tests that enabled the atomic bombings of Japan, IOC President Thomas Bach went to Hiroshima to lay a wreath at a memorial, prompting an angry response. “President Bach using the image of ‘a peaceful world without nuclear weapons’ only to justify holding of the Olympics by force under the pandemic is a blasphemy to atomic bombing survivors,” a coalition of civic groups wrote. “An act like this does nothing but do harm to the global nuclear weapons ban movement.”

Billions watching the games are imbibing the idea that, protests notwithstanding, Covid, Fukushima, the atomic bombings, and rising nuclear dangers today pose no impediment to normalcy. This should be countered with factual context and truth-telling.

Nuclear Games, a new documentary available online, attempts this by contrasting the Olympic ideals of peace and humanity with our history of nuclear violence and inhumanity (full disclosure: My organization Basel Peace Office is one of several NGOs helping with the project). It uses manga and interactive content to counter Olympic spin and teach mass audiences, including young people, Nuclear History 101: the Cuban missile crisis, Chernobyl, the victims of uranium mining and nuclear testing, the North Korean nuclear program.

We urgently need remedial education on nuclear issues. Most millennials believe nuclear war will occur within the next decade, yet they also rank nuclear weapons as the least important of 12 global issues. They’re both justifiably anxious and badly misinformed.

Achieving basic nuclear literacy is indispensable now. Nuclear dangers are more acute than in 1964, the risk of nuclear war is growing, and the arms control regime is failing. This year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead to 100 seconds before midnight—closer to the zero hour than during the Cuban missile crisis.

Nuclear weapons states are turning away from arms control and embarking on a second Cold War–style arms race. As China builds missile silos and Russia builds new types of nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals, the United States is spending billions to “modernize” its arsenal, and other nuclear powers are following suit.

To be sure, there is pushback. Some 1,200 policy-makers, celebrities, academics, and civil society leaders issued a joint letter to presidents Biden and Putin flagging growing nuclear dangers and urging them to adopt a no-first-use policy to defuse nuclear tensions and facilitate disarmament. US Senators Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and their colleagues on the Nuclear Arms Control Working group recently called on Biden to guide the Nuclear Posture Review towards a pledge of no first use and the elimination of new types of nuclear weapons.

But such things can hardly compete with a two-week Olympic media blitz that normalizes nuclear disasters and shrugs at rising nuclear dangers, which illustrates why we need a new drive for mass nuclear literacy. With arms control in retreat, an informed citizenry could be our last, best line of defense.

July 31, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A-bomb survivor activist, 89, calls Japan’s failure to back nuclear ban ‘disgraceful’

A-bomb survivor activist, 89, calls Japan’s failure to back nuclear ban ‘disgraceful’  https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210729/p2a/00m/0na/034000c

July 30, 2021 (Mainichi Japan)   TOKYO — The world took a major step toward a nuclear-free world when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons completely banning the use and storage of atomic arms went into effect in January.

Nuclear powers and countries like Japan which are under the U.S. nuclear umbrella have not signed the treaty, only going as far as joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but the influence of the ban treaty on the NPT is enormous.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that top-level meetings concerning both treaties have not been held as planned, grinding international discussion of them to a halt. The pandemic has also thrown cold water on citizens’ anti-atomic weapons activism, forcing events to be minimized or canceled outright.

With the 76th anniversaries of America’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fast approaching, what do hibakusha — people exposed to the effects of the bomb — still alive today think of these dilemmas?

“This is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear bombs in wartime, and yet it can’t ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I think it’s so pitiful, so disgraceful,” said Terumi Tanaka, the 89-year-old co-chair of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. Anger laced his calm tones, obvious even over the online video conference.

In response to the nuclear arms ban treaty going into effect, Tanaka began a petition drive to urge the Japanese government to join the treaty. But half a year has passed now with him unable to go out in the streets due to the pandemic………..

Countries with nuclear weapons won’t attend the conference of the signatories, and only countries without the arms will need to seek ways to ban them. “How do we get nuclear-armed countries involved? I think a time is coming where a great effort will have to be put in (to activism),” he said.

Getting nuclear powers and those under the nuclear umbrella like Japan to take part is no simple task. But while the coronavirus has prevented certain forms of activism, and spread with apparent ease across borders, Tanaka sees a silver lining in the situation, saying, “It’s presented the opportunity to realize that the conflicts countries have between each other are meaningless.”

With this year marking the 65th anniversary of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations’ founding, Tanaka had in mind that it would mark a sense of closure. Its general meeting is held every June, but due to the state of emergency declared in Tokyo, it has been turned into an on-paper event this year.

“It was very disappointing. We’d needed to do a full review of our activism so far,” Tanaka said regretfully. The average age of hibakusha now is over 83. The generation of people with clear, unshakeable memories of that time like Tanaka, who was 13 when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, are gradually but steadily leaving this world.

“We experienced that sound with our bodies. The people who will make up the core of the activism going forward were very young children when they were exposed to the bomb, so they have few memories of the time involving their five senses. But, they might at some point remember what was for them a strange experience. In that sense, those people can be said to have experienced it first hand, too,” he said.

In March, Tanaka ended the international campaign he has pursued for five years to see an earlier implementation of the ban treaty. At the end of May, he resigned as chair of the Saitama Prefecture hibakusha association. After days spent passionately involved in anti-nuclear activism, Tanaka is thinking of using the time he has now to write about the life he spent giving himself to his work.

“Nuclear weapons are so cruel it seems they don’t even qualify for the name ‘weapon’. This testimony must, even when all the hibakusha are gone, be passed down for as long as the human race exists,” Tanaka said.

(Japanese original by Kayo Mukuda, Tokyo City News Department)

July 31, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, weapons and war | Leave a comment