We have the power to change the history!

By the Organizing Committee of March 11 Anti-NPP Fukushima Action in 2016 - January 1, 2016

Doro-Chiba Union calls for endorsement of and participation in Anti-Nuclear Power Plant Fukushima Action on March 11, 2016:

We have the power to change the history! This is the slogan of the Anti-Nuclear Power Plant Fukushima Action on March 11, 2016.

Against the legislation to exercise the right to collective self-defense more than 100 thousand of people filled the square in front of the Diet day after day. Since this mass uprising last autumn a rising tide of the struggle by millions workers, students and other people, has broadened deeply all over the country and around the world.

The struggle of the fifth anniversary of the Earthquake and nuclear reactor meltdowns on March 11th in Fukushima will be fought headed by the unions which have been waging strikes, with Fukushima people’s widespread anger, calling “down with Abe administration which promotes war bills and wages restarting of nuclear power plants”.

Please endorse and participate in this action from all over the country and around the world.

The Abe government plans to lift evacuation orders in all municipalities, where people could receive radiation doses of up to 20 mSv/year, and to force evacuees back into heavily contaminated areas by March 2017 except for “the difficult-to-return-to areas”, which even the government reluctantly classifies as uninhabitable area.

If officials unilaterally declare that their areas are safe, more than 100,000 evacuees could be forced to return home and lose vital monthly compensation from TEPCO. It amounts to economic coercion to cut off “the compensation for mental suffering” and the government-subsidized apartments for “voluntary evacuees”.

The big construction companies harvest large profits from wasteful and ineffective “cleanup” of the contaminated areas. Radioactive substances have been scattered from the decontamination sites including school-commuting roads. And new toxic hotspots have been emerging.

Beautiful forests were unsightly stripped, and the contaminated wastes are packed into thousands and thousands of black bags and moved to such stripped sites or other temporary sites, which lie scattered throughout the surrounding areas, including in the backyard of homes, parking lots and parks.

Nobody locates even now the whereabouts of the melted nuclear fuel.

It is evident that the solution of the problem of the contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant is impossible and that this radioactive water onslaught will eventually reach the breaking point and any resemblance of containment effort will be abandoned.

Even though over 150 Fukushima children have developed thyroid cancer, both the central and the prefectural governments repeatedly say, “The developments of thyroid cancers in children have nothing to do with the radiation effects.”  No one really believes such a lie to be true. The other day, more than four years after the nuclear accident, the Japanese government confirmed for the first time that leukemia found in a worker at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant is a result of the March 2011 atomic disaster. He is the first case to be awarded workers’ compensation insurance. His cumulative radiation exposure over one year and a half was 19.8 mSv. The Japanese government had set 20 mSv/y as a standard value of public dose limit for radiation exposure in Fukushima. It is really a murderous policy to force evacuees back into such heavily contaminated areas. People in Fukushima are seriously upset and furious.

The Japanese government is moving to promote nuclear power generation again as if nothing had happened. But the disastrous nuclear accident had actually happened and we can never erase the fact. Restarts of nuclear power plants and exports of nuclear power plant are absolutely unpardonable. We are now facing a threat of imminent world war. In this situation, what we need to consider is to change fundamentally the present structure of our society. Nuclear works and nuclear “decontamination” works are the ultimate savage casual works. Needy young people, deprived of the means of earning a livelihood, will be recruited through a “poverty draft” and assigned to the battle field by the same token. This is also the ultimate savage contingent hiring.

We should establish specific and practical strategies such as how we can set up a labor union which takes control of workplace to minimize radiation exposed work to the ultimate extent possible at Fukushima Nuclear Plant. The railway workers are now playing a leading role of the struggle. The East Japan Railway Company (JR-East) has attempted to open the whole length of the Joban Line which begins from downtown Tokyo and follows the Pacific coasts to Fukushima Prefecture for the purpose of forcing evacuees back to heavily contaminated areas. But the railway workers have organized Doro-Sorengo (Federation of National Railway Motive Power Unions) to stop the JR’s attempt by waging strikes against the work exposed to radiation. Fukushima Collaborative Clinic became the most credible and reliable facility for people who are anxious about daily radioactive exposure. Such constant challenges widen the circle of international solidarity.

Fukushima people earnestly desire to abolish all nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons from the earth and change the society. March 11 is the day for Fukushima People to wreak their anger and fight together with people all over the world.

Children, students, parents, evacuees living in temporary housings, farmers, fishermen and all workers—Let us join together to act as one!

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.