Japan

NOVANEWS Civil Society Activism on Behalf of Nuclear Zero by Dr:  Richard Falk The Jeffersonian faith in the future of democracy rested on the cumulative impact of education on citizen participation encouraging a robust and vigilant civil society. The United States has developed a number of institutional paths to academic excellence, and can claim world leadership in crafting the modern university experience. At the same time, this type of excellence has become increasingly a disappointment from a Jeffersonian perspective, with the quality of American democracy declining in many respects since the earliest years of the republic despite several crossing several humane thresholds: including ending slavery, enfranchising women, and more recently, legally entrenching same sex marriage. Yet t...

NOVANEWS by Dr:  Richard Falk In the years after World War II there was a widespread belief that rational minds would prevail, and that nuclear weapons would not be further developed, and their possession as well as their threat or use prohibited. The onset of the Cold War, the Soviet acquisition of the bomb, and the Eisenhower threat to use nuclear weapons if necessary to end the Korean War basically extinguished any real prospect of nuclear disarmament. Of course, the diplomacy of peace advocacy and of nuclear nonproliferation made it expedient to continue to affirm nuclear disarmament as a goal of foreign policy. And indeed up through the 1960s both Washington and Moscow tabled disarmament proposals with some fanfare, yet clearly lacked the political will to confront what had already ...

NOVANEWS By Yoshimi Yoshiaki Global Research Translated and introduced by Ethan Mark Introduction: The People and the War As a young historian researching prewar popular political movements in the early 1970s, Yoshimi Yoshiaki (b. 1946) became increasingly struck—and troubled—by the systematic inattention to popular experiences of the war period, along with the virtually universal silence on questions of popular war responsibility. Imbued with the progressive convictions of a scholarly generation that came of age amid the political struggles of the late 1960s, he was dissatisfied with the near-universal academic focus on elites and abstract social structures that rendered the story of the Japanese experience of the war “a history without people.” After many years of research, stops a...

NOVANEWS International Scholars, Artists, and Activists Petition. World Eyes on Okinawa By Steve Rabson Global Research Introduction by Steve Rabson International Scholars, Artists, and Activists Petition to Prevent a New U.S. Military Base in Okinawa In Okinawa after three U.S. servicemen raped a 12-year-old school girl in 1995, the U.S. and Japanese governments sought to tamp down boiling outrage by promising to close a dangerous and noisy U.S. Marine airbase located in the center of densely populated Ginowan City. But there was a catch. The base would not close until completion of a new base at another location in the prefecture, Henoko in Nago City. Okinawans resoundingly rejected this plan, vigorously opposing it in local and prefectural elections, referenda, and in sustained pu...

NOVANEWS ByDr: Richard Falk The terrifying nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011 associated with the reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosion, and release of radioactivity at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex was an anguishing complement to the awful collective memories of the Japanese people arising from the atomic attacks seven decades ago. We can only wonder about the lingering effects on the Japanese national psyche of being twice so severely victimized by the diabolical power of the atom? Fukushima was an exemplary tragedy of this new century, exhibiting the destructive force of nature in lethal interaction with the Promethean embrace of nuclear technology, a gigantic earthquake causing oceanic fury in the form of a massive tsunami engulfing Fukushima and surrounding areas, and causin...

NOVANEWS By: Dr Richard Falk The Weird ‘Good Fortune’ of Tsutomu Yamaguchi Over the years I have often thought about the political and moral consciousness associated with the atomic targeting of Japanese cities, as well as the absence of any expression of official remorse for the suffering caused and the precedent set. I was struck by the decision to bomb Hiroshima instead of Kyoto out of respect for Kyoto’s cultural heritage, and by giving the flight crew orders not to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki if weather conditions obscured the city center. It was the then Secretary of War, Henry L Stimson, who is credited with making the successful plea to the president to spare Kyoto. Stimson, an American patrician public servant, had visited Kyoto twice in the 1920s, and was impressed by the...

NOVANEWS by: Prof Richard Falk No public figure was more convincing and determined to pursue the ideal of a world without nuclear weaponry than Mikhail Gorbachev while he was the transformative General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between the years of 1985 and 1991. Of course, Gorbachev is appreciated in the West mainly as having presided over a political process that led to the nonviolent ending of the Cold War, the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet he was also perhaps the only head of an important sovereign state during the nuclear era whose commitment to nuclear disarmament and the conditions of a peaceful world reflected a deep realization that the existing world order was not sustainable and not serving the inter...

NOVANEWS Sputnik  According to London-based independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment Dr. Ian Fairlie, the health toll from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe is horrific: about 12,000 workers have been exposed to high levels of radiation (some up to 250 mSv); between 2011 and 2015, about 2,000 died from the effects of evacuations, ill-health and suicide related to the disaster; furthermore, an estimated 5,000 will most likely face lethal cancer in the future, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. What makes matters even worse, the nuclear disaster and subsequent radiation exposure lies at the root of the longer term health effects, such as cancers, strokes, CVS (cyclic vomiting syndrome) diseases, hereditary effects and many more. Embarrassingly, “[t]he Japanese Govern...

NOVANEWS by Prof: Richard Falk [Prefatory Note: What follows is a poem by David Krieger on what happened 70 years ago during those few fateful days in August that forever altered the human condition followed by the joint introduction that we contributed to Geoffrey Darnton’s Nuclear War and International Law, which was just published, and is available for purchase at the usual online outlets and via book store Poetry is for David a seamless mode of expression that merges his life’s dedication to human wellbeing with his inner reflective consciousness, and bears a special relevance to his central mission of achieving a world without nuclear weapons. In my understanding, David’s poem that follows and others he has written dealing with other aspects of nuclearism enables him to enter what ...

NOVANEWS   by: Prof Richard Falk [Prefatory Note: I have been preoccupied for many years with the multiple challenges posed by nuclear weapons, initially from the perspective of international law and morality, later with regard to prudence diplomacy and political survival in international relations, and in all instances, with an eye favoring deep denuclearization associated in my mind with an abiding abhorrence over the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II and with the avoidance of any future use of nuclear weaponry or even threatened use. The annual observance of these terrible events encourages reflection and commentary on this darkest of legacies. Zero nuclear weapons is the unconditional goal that I affirm, achieved in a man...