Japanese people have gone back to the streets to protest against plans to reactivate nuclear reactors. Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the country has grown wearier of nuclear power and wants an end to atomic power.
The gathering in Tokyo was scheduled to coincide with the second anniversary of the nuclear disaster of March 2011, the worst since Chernobyl in the 1980s. Despite initial plans to move away from nuclear, the new conservative government is eager to plug back reactors, wrote AP.
“Two years later, 160,000 people have left their homes around the plant, entire sections of nearby communities are still ghost-towns, and fears grow about cancer and other sicknesses the spewing radiation might bring”, it said.
Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe told the crowd that he was going to fight against those who pretend Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima never happened. “I am going to fight to prevent any more reactors from being restarted,” he told the protesters during a speech.
On Sunday, Japanese music star Ryuichi Sakamoto played a free concert to protest against nuclear. Yesterday Japan carried out memorials for the 19,000 people who died as a consequence of the earthquake and the tsunami that followed and triggered off the nuclear disaster.
“Japan has been irradiated three times. However, our country has committed the same error, guised by the hallucinatory proclamation to use nuclear energy peacefully,” Sakamoto wrote on his website.
Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.
