Japan

NOVANEWS by ROBERT HUNZIKER As time passes, a bona fide message emerges from within the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster scenario, and that message is that once a nuclear power plant loses it, the unraveling only gets worse and worse until it’s at its worst, and still, there’s no stopping it. Similar to opening Pandora’s box, there’s no stopping a ferocious atom-splitting insanity that knows no end. Four years of experience with Fukushima provides considerable evidence that splitting atoms to boil water is outright unmitigated madness. After all, nuclear power plants are built to boil water; yes, to boil water; it’s as simple as that, but yet at the same time it’s also extraordinarily complex. Conversely, solar and wind do not boil water and are not complex and never deadly...

NOVANEWS Elderly protesters were dragged off by riot police on Thursday after staging a sit-in and blocking a road in protest of the construction of a new US military base in Okinawa. Hundreds of people participated in the demonstration, sitting or lying on the ground in the road to Camp Schwab in an effort to prevent vehicles transporting building materials from accessing the site. “Don’t lend a hand in the construction of the military base!” the crowd chanted as they were dragged away. For two decades the military has been wanting to move the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma Okinawa base further north in Okinawa. The plan to relocate the installation has drawn protests by tens of thousands of residents who worry about sexual assaults by US service members, violence, and the environmenta...

NOVANEWS by OLIVER TICKELL The Japanese government  has made its first admission that a worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant developed cancer as a following decontamination work after the 2011 disaster. The man worked at the damaged plant for over a year, during which he was exposed to 19.8 millisieverts of radiation, four times the Japanese exposure limit. He is suffering from leukemia. The former Fukushima manager Masao Yoshida also contracted cancer of the oesophagus after the disaster and died in 2013 – but the owner and operator of the nuclear plant, Tepco, refused to accept responsibility, insisting that the cancer developed too quickly. Three other Fukushima workers have also contracted cancer but have yet to have their cases assessed. The Fukushima nudear disaster followed the t...

NOVANEWS RT  Fukushima police have finally reacted to a criminal complaint filed against TEPCO and 32 of its top officials two years ago over the contamination caused by the 2011 nuclear disaster. They have referred the case to prosecutors. The Fukushima District Prosecutors’ Office will now determine whether to pursue criminal charges against the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and its top management over the leaks of highly radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea. The criminal complaint alleges that the company and its executives failed to manage storage tanks of contaminated water or build underground walls to block the flow of radioactive material into the sea at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Notable people on the list include TEPCO’s Pre...

NOVANEWS by GARY LEUPP The Japanese Diet’s passage of laws that allow for Japanese military action in support of a “close ally” when attacked represent a violation of Japan’s fundamental law, which (since 1947) has clearly banned the right of the state to go to war, period. The three constitutional experts called upon by the lawmakers to comment on the issue all attested this. This Diet members’ action clarifies what ought to be widely understood: there is no connection between formal law in what are fundamentally lawless imperialist states and whatever pretty postulates appear in the law codes of such countries. In this country, we’ve gotten used to the fact that the U.S. government ignores the constitutional protection against “unreasonable search” through its Stasi-like rifling throug...

NOVANEWS by Dr: Richard Falk [Prefatory Note: The following post was originally published as an opinion piece in the leading Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, and appears here with their permission. The link to the Japanese version: http://digital.asahi.com/articles/DA3S11975719.html There are two converging dangers of a new Cold War—one is confronting Russia in the Middle East and Central Asia and the other is confronting China in the South China Sea and elsewhere with a containment mentality within their own immediate sphere of operations. Washington’s encouragement of Prime Minister Abe’s campaign for a ‘normal’ Japan represents a regressive move regionally and globally, and deserves critical attention from a wider geopolitical perspective as well as from the viewpoint of Japan. It m...

NOVANEWS By James Brown The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 38, No. 3 The territorial dispute between Russia and Japan over the Southern Kurils/Northern Territories has long been in a state of impasse. In simple terms, while Russia has conceded to transfer the islands of Shikotan and Habomai after the conclusion of a peace treaty, Japan insists that its sovereignty over all four of the disputed islands be recognised. Despite lengthy bilateral negotiations over seven decades and numerous imaginative proposals by academics and diplomats, the two sides have been unable to break this deadlock. Seemingly unperturbed by the lack of meaningful progress achieved by his predecessors, Prime Minister Abe has been proactive in pursuing a territorial deal with Russia. In particular, it has ...

NOVANEWS By RT Global Research At least 82 bags filled with contaminated material from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant have been swept away by flood water as typhoon Etau hit Japan, officials said. TEPCO said rainwater from the nuclear plant has been leaking into the Pacific. Flooding caused by Tropical Typhoon Etau has swept at least 82 bags suspected to contain radioactive grass and other contaminated materials that had been collected at the site of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP). They had been stored in a nearby town in the same prefecture, the Environment Ministry said on Friday, according to local media. Though the Ministry went on to say that most of the bags had been recovered undamaged, local media reported that only 30 of the bags had been fou...

NOVANEWS by Richard Falk [Prefatory Note: This is the tenth, and mercifully the last, in this series of posts prompted by the 70th observance of the atomic attacks in 1945. The intention has been to explore several of the more important dimensions of what is called here ‘nuclearism,’ the securitization of nuclear weaponry in the face of international law, international morality, and simple common sense, and what can and should be done to achieve desecuritization of such weaponry of mass destruction, reviewing the stubborn adherence to nuclearism by the nuclear nine, the marginalization of the UN with respect to disarmament and denuclearization, and the rise and fall of antinuclear activism in civil society. Hopefully, the time will come when a less gloomy depiction of the nuclear challen...

NOVANEWS Marshall Islands Nuclear Zero Litigation by Dr: Richard Falk [Prefatory Note: Two prior posts, The Nuclear Challenge (1) & (2) address indirectly the efforts of international law and lawyers to highlight the clash between international law and nuclear weapons. In this post I combine a focus on international law with a continuation of the inquiry into the role of civil society activism that was the theme of The Nuclear Challenge (8). Here I attempt a more concrete gaze at the promise and limitations of international law as a policy instrument by which to pursue the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Zero Lawsuits filed by the Republic of the Marshall Islands on April 24, 2014 offers an occasion for such an appraisal. This litigation represents both an encoun...