The Fukushima Secrecy Syndrome – From Japan to America

Published on Friday, January 24, 2014 by Common Dreams

Published on Friday, January 24, 2014 by Common Dreams

The Fukushima Secrecy Syndrome – From Japan to America

by Ralph Nader

(Photo: AP)Last month, the ruling Japanese coalition parties quickly rammed through Parliament a state secrets law. We Americans better take notice.

Under its provisions the government alone decides what are state secrets and any civil servants who divulge any “secrets” can be jailed for up to 10 years. Journalists caught in the web of this vaguely defined law can be jailed for up to 5 years.

Government officials have been upset at the constant disclosures of their laxity by regulatory officials before and after the Fukushima nuclear power disaster in 2011, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

"The Obama administration must become more alert to authoritarian trends in Japan that its policies have been either encouraging or knowingly ignoring – often behind the curtains of our own chronic secrecy."

Week after week, reports appear in the press revealing the seriousness of the contaminated water flow, the inaccessible radioactive material deep inside these reactors and the need to stop these leaking sites from further poisoning the land, food and ocean. Officials now estimate that it could take up to 40 years to clean up and decommission the reactors.

Other factors are also feeding this sure sign of a democratic setback. Militarism is raising its democracy-menacing head, prompted by friction with China over the South China Sea. Dismayingly, U.S. militarists are pushing for a larger Japanese military budget. China is the latest national security justification for our “pivot to East Asia” provoked in part by our military-industrial complex.

Draconian secrecy in government and fast-tracking bills through legislative bodies are bad omens for freedom of the Japanese press and freedom to dissent by the Japanese people. Freedom of information and robust debate (the latter cut off sharply by Japan’s parliament in December 5, 2013) are the currencies of democracy.

There is good reason why the New York Times continues to cover the deteriorating conditions in the desolate, evacuated Fukushima area. Our country has licensed many reactors here with the same designs and many of the same inadequate safety and inspection standards. Some reactors here are near earthquake faults with surrounding populations which cannot be safely evacuated in case of serious damage to the electric plant. The two Indian Point reactors that are 30 miles north of New York City are a case in point.

The less we are able to know about the past and present conditions of Fukushima, the less we will learn about atomic reactors in our own country.

Fortunately many of Japan’s most famous scientists, including Nobel laureates, Toshihide Maskawa and Hideki Shirakawa, have led the opposition against this new state secrecy legislation with 3,000 academics signing a public letter of protest. These scientists and academics declared the government’s secrecy law a threat to “the pacifist principles and fundamental human rights established by the constitution and should be rejected immediately.”

Following this statement, the Japan Scientists’ Association, Japan’s mass media companies, citizens associations, lawyers’ organizations and some regional legislatures opposed the legislation. Polls show the public also opposes this attack on democracy. The present ruling parties remain adamant. They cite as reasons for state secrecy “national security and fighting terrorism.” Sound familiar?

History is always present in the minds of many Japanese people. They know what happened in Japan when the unchallenged slide toward militarization of Japanese society led to the intimidating tyranny that drove the invasion of China, Korea and Southeast Asia before and after Pearl Harbor. By 1945, Japan was in ruins, ending with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The American people have to be alert to our government’s needless military and political provocations of China, which is worried about encirclement by surrounding U.S.-allied nations and U.S. air and sea power. Washington might better turn immediate attention to U.S. trade policies that have facilitated U.S. companies shipping American jobs and whole industries to China.

The Obama administration must become more alert to authoritarian trends in Japan that its policies have been either encouraging or knowingly ignoring – often behind the curtains of our own chronic secrecy.

The lessons of history beckon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Politicians and Textbooks

Both Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea are pushing to have high school history textbooks in their countries rewritten to reflect their political views.

Mr. Abe has instructed the Education Ministry to approve only textbooks that promote patriotism. He is primarily concerned about the World War II era, and wants to shift the focus away from disgraceful chapters in that history. For example, he wants the Korean “comfort women” issue taken out of textbooks, and he wants to downplay the mass killings committed by Japanese troops in Nanking. His critics say he is trying to foster dangerous nationalism by sanitizing Japan’s wartime aggression.

Ms. Park is concerned about the portrayal of Japanese colonialism and the postcolonial South Korean dictatorships in history books. She wants to downplay Korean collaboration with the Japanese colonial authorities and last summer pushed the South Korean Education Ministry to approve a new textbook that says those who worked with the Japanese did so under coercion. (A majority of professionals and elite civil servants today come from families that worked with the Japanese colonizers.) Academics, trade unions and teachers have accused Ms. Park of distorting history.

Mr. Abe and Ms. Park both have personal family histories that make them sensitive to the war and collaboration. After Japan’s defeat in the war, the Allied powers arrested Mr. Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, as a suspected class A war criminal. Ms. Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, was an Imperial Japanese Army officer during the colonial era and South Korea’s military dictator from 1962 to 1979. In both countries, these dangerous efforts to revise textbooks threaten to thwart the lessons of history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/politicians-and-textbooks.html?_r=0

Angry Workers Swarm Seoul's Streets, Demand President Resign

South Korea may best be known for slick electronics and saccharine pop tunes, but less of that stereotypical effervescence was present in Seoul in December. Instead, the streets were filled with throngs of angry union workers, facing down riot police in a show of defiance against a government plan that they say would lead to layoffs and privatization.

On December 28, workers staged a one-day general strike that capped about three weeks of intense smaller protests involving thousands of workers and activists and causing sharp service reductions. The establishment of a parliamentary committee to resolve the railway dispute has paused the demonstrations for now. But unions, who see the fight as a broader labor struggle beyond the rail issue, are not giving up and have vowed to keep protesting. On Friday, theydemanded the president's resignation.

In recent months, the government has proposed subdividing and commercializing the national railway, Korail--supposedly a cost-saving measure to deal with the railway's debt burden and financial losses. Recently, tensions escalated when the government announced plans to split Korail services into separate segments and to create a subsidiary to run part of the high-speed rail service under a separate corporation, which would purportedly stay primarily state-controlled.

Labor activists suspect the claims of financial concerns mask the government's underlying aim to incrementally privatize the vital public institution, in turn triggering job losses and pay cuts. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and the Korean Railway Workers' Union (KRWU) have also argued President Park Guenhye's administration pushed through the plan without adequate public or opposition consultation. In response to the government's railway proposal, rail union workers voted to go on strike on November 22, launching a wave of public rallies and pickets that grew to flood the streets of downtown Seoul. In mid-December, after the Prime Minister declared the strike "illegal," police began clamping down on union leadershipby issuing arrest warrants and confiscating equipment and documents from several local union offices.

When police then moved on to targeting the headquarters of the umbrella labor organization KCTU, which represents a multi-sector membership of more than 690,000 workers, union activists struck back. Eric Lee of LabourStart reported at OpenSecurity that the activists "formed a defensive cordon but eventually riot police charged the building, smashing down glass doors and firing pepper gas, causing several injuries. There were reports that some of the trade unionists responded with improvised water cannons."

After the blockade of the KCTU building resulted in 138 arrests of protesters, as Lee put it, "An enraged KCTU leadership issued a call for a million-worker strong general strike." Internationally, meanwhile, labor activists garnered about 14,500 signatures online on astatement of solidarity.

For union advocates, the key goal of the protests now going forward is not to push one particular alternative plan for the railway overhaul, but simply to ensure an accountable decision-making process. On the eve of the general strike day, Wol-san Liem, International Affairs director for the Korean Federation of Public Services and Transportation Workers' Unions (KPTU), which, like the KRWU is part of the KCTU, told Working In These Times, "We're just saying: Halt what you're doing now, so we can have a real debate where all of the parties involved--the workers, the employer, the government and the traveling public--can have their voices heard, put forth their proposals" and then develop a plan through deliberations before seeking the review of the National Assembly. Though the new parliamentary committee may pave the way for such debates, more union actions are planned to keep the focus on broader issues of labor equity and government accountability.

This isn't the first time militant union campaigns in South Korea have clashed with the government. Last January, KCTU issued several demands for the incoming Park administration, calling for the reinstatement of union members allegedly fired in retaliation for organizing and demanding "enforcement actions against anti-union retaliation by employers and the establishment of company unions." KCTU has also criticized the widespread exploitation of "dispatch" workers--temporary workers nominally hired by the company through outsourcing, but who essentially do the same work for less pay, without the job security of regular workers.

The unions got a legal boost last March when the Supreme Court upheld a ruling against General Motors Daewoo, declaring that subcontracted auto manufacturing work was actually illegal dispatch work. The violation carried millions of dollars in fines for both the employer and the subcontracted firm.

Of course, sometimes bosses don't feel like heeding the courts or the unions. In 2012, after a court found that Hyundai Motors had illegally misclassified a full-time employee as a  subcontractor, the company refused to reclassify him, instead hitting back with its own lawsuits against several of its plants where protests had broken out.

And the government has taken to simply refusing to recognize some troublesome unions. The Korean Government Employees Union staged a sit-down strike last year before the National Assembly, after the government repeatedly rebuffed its attempts to register as an official union and fired more than 100 members, including the union's president and secretary general, alleging they were leaders of an "illegal" organization. Similarly, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology threatened in January 2013 to de-register the teachers union unless it amended its bylaws to exclude from its membership retired and dismissed teachers. When the union balked, it was decertified in late October, despite protests from members and international labor activists.

Beyond Korail, the general strike was an explosion of long-brewing resentment from many sectors of Korean civil society, particularly workers who feel left behind by the country's breakneck development and right-wing regime.

Now that the Korail issues has newly highlighted the government's anti-union activity and authoritarian tactics, Liem says, there has been a groundswell of public solidarity from students and civil society groups. The protests might even have the potential to bubble into a broader populist movement, paralleling the anti-austerity campaigns that swelled in Europe in 2012.

"There has always been, for the last several years, an alliance between civil society and the labor movement, and that is continuing of course, and I think it will get stronger," Liem says. Though, like Occupy Wall Street, the movement currently lacks a single agenda or formal political leaders, she adds, "there is potential for that to become the basis of something much larger and hopefully a political leadership will emerge through that process."

Originally published at In These Times

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-chen/angry-workers-swarm-seoul_b_4547508.html

Underground Nuclear Explosion at Crippled Japan Atomic Plant Shocks World

Underground Nuclear Explosion at Crippled Japan Atomic Plant Shocks World

• 

TEHRAN (FNA)- An edict issued from the Office of the Russian President said a series of underground nuclear explosions occurred at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Aomic plant on 31 December.

The edict issued to all Ministries of the Russian Government ordered that all “past, present and future” information relating to Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster now be rated at the highest classification level “Of Special Importance”, stressing that this condition is “immediately and urgently needed” due to a series of underground nuclear explosions occurring at this crippled atomic plant on 31 December as confirmed by the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

“Of Special Importance” is Russia’s highest classification level and refers to information which, if released, would cause damage to the entire Russian Federation, Whatdoesitmean.com reported.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a catastrophic failure at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant on 11 March 2011. The failure occurred when the plant was hit by a tsunami triggered by the 9.0 magnitude Tōhoku earthquake.

The plant began releasing substantial amounts of radioactive materials beginning on 12 March 2011 becoming the largest nuclear incident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the second (with Chernobyl) to measure at the highest Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).

According to the report, MoD “assests” associated with the Red Banner Pacific Fleet detected two “low-level” underground atomic explosions occurring in the Fukushima disaster zone on 31 December, the first measuring 5.1 magnitude in intensity, followed by a smaller 3.6 magnitude explosion moments later.

The MoD further reports that the 5.1 magnitude event corresponds to the energy equivalent in megatons of TNT of 0.0005, while the 3.6 magnitude event equals 0.0000005.

As a comparison, the MoD states that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 by the United States released the equivalent of 16 Kilotons = 0.016 megatons of TNT, about the energy equivalent of a magnitude 6 earthquake, and the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated was the Tsar bomb, a device exploded by the Soviet Union on 30 October 1961, with an energy equivalent of about 50 megatons of TNT.

Important to note, this report continues, was that the architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, warned on 17 November 2011 warned that a “China Syndrome” (aka: Hydrovolcanic Explosion) was “inevitable” due to the melted atomic fuel that had escaped the container vessel and was now burning through the earth.

The MoD further reports that evidence that these underground nuclear explosions were about to occur began after mysterious steam plumes were first spotted on 19 December for a short period of time, then again on 24, 25, 27 December, and confirmed by a report Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) published on its website.

Most curious to note, this report continues, is that the United States appears to have had a more advanced notice of these underground nuclear explosions as evidenced by their purchase earlier this month (6 December) of 14 million doses of potassium iodide, the compound that protects the body from radioactive poisoning in the aftermath of severe nuclear accidents, to be delivered before the beginning of February 2014.

With experts now estimating that the wave of radiation from Fukushima will be 10-times bigger than all of the radiation from the entire world’s nuclear tests throughout history combined, and with new reports stating that dangerous radiation levels have been detected in snows found in Texas, Colorado and Missouri, this MoD report warns the US, indeed, is going to face the severest consequences of this historic, and seemingly unstoppable, nuclear disaster.

And not just to human beings either is this nuclear disaster unfolding either, this report grimly warns, but also to all biological systems as new reports coming from the United States western coastal areas are now detailing the mass deaths of seals, sea lions, polar bears, bald eagles, sea stars, turtles, king and sockeye salmon, herring, anchovies, and sardines due to Fukishima radiation.

As to the American people being allowed to know the full and horrific mass death event now unfolding around them, this report warns, is not be as the Obama regime has, in effect, ordered all of their mainstream news media organs not to report it, and as recently confirmed by former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur who was told not to warn the public about the danger posed by the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant during his time as a host on the cable network.

And with Russian experts now warning that as Fukushima pollution spreads all over Earth (as large amounts of fish, seaweeds, and everything in ocean has been already been polluted, and these products are the main danger for mankind as they can end up being eaten by people on a massive scale) this report warns that Putin’s order to classify all information relating to this nuclear mass death event “Of Special Importance” is vital to protect the economic and social stability interests of the Russian Federation as this global catastrophe continues to worsen by the day.

Seoul , man who set himself on fire to demand Park’s resignation dies

 01/02/2014 11:46
SOUTH KOREA
Seoul , man who set himself on fire to demand Park’s resignation dies
by Joseph Yun Li-sun
The victim, identified only as Lee, held his demonstration on a flyover in the capital. In his last message before killing himself he asked the government to "tell the truth " about the electoral fraud of 2011 and the South Korean people to " stand up " for democracy .

Seoul ( AsiaNews) - After less than a day in the hospital , the man who set himself on fire to demand the resignation of South Korean President Park Geun - hye is dead. The victim, identified only by the surname Lee (pictured), left a message before killing himself in which he asked the government for " justice and truth " about the electoral fraud of 2012 and the South Korean people to " stand up for democracy" .

The suicide took place in the afternoon of 31 December. Lee, who had joined the nationwide strike called for the end of the year, was demonstrating on a flyover in Seoul near the central station. He had posted two placards calling for the resignation of the Park and the creation of a team of investigation on Secret Service interference in national politics. In addition, he had his hands tied behind his back by a chain.

A store clerk in Seoul, Lee had studied for the entrance examination for the civil service. Before setting himself on fire , he wrote his last message . The text reads: "Although Park's government has intervened in the general election through NIS, the truth was hidden while only regarded as personal deviation. This is clear infringement upon democracy. I will bear all the fears on behalf of the public. Everyone, please stand up for it "

The funeral will be held this afternoon at the Hangang Sacred Heart Hospital , where Lee was hospitalized after his self- immolation. The family , however, has also decided to allow a public celebration to be held at the railway station in Seoul on January 4: more than 286 civic groups have announced their intention to attend the funeral .