People Marching in Tokyo

"LandepNews"

People Marching in Tokyo

Anti-nuclear activists marched on Monday in the streets of Japan to build momentum as they want to gather ten million signatures on a petition they want to submit to the government on the one-year commemoration of Fukushima. Organizers predicted that the turnout would be of 50,000 but announced with joy that there were 60,000 who attended. Police estimates, however, say that the number of participants was of about 20,000 people.

The march was peaceful and went through a few streets and a park of the capital, with Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe demanding the Japanese government to follow the example set by Italy, where 94 percent of the population voted in a referendum three months ago against returning to the power produced by atomic fusion.

The Nobel laureate said that Japan should fear physical consequences of the accidents that involve the nuclear power, and that those consequences were similar to those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities, causing hundreds of thousands to die instantaneously and other millions to suffer from prolonged consequences of the exposure to nuclear radiation.

Oe said that it is for this that the march on Monday and others that are to come must send a very powerful message to the Japanese political leadership and to the business people in this country.

Feminist essayist Keiko Ochiai joined Oe in leading the rally and identified the nuke as cause to the unhappiness of the human being. For that reason she said she was against nuclear weapons and nuclear plants.

Polls indicate that the people in Japan manifest a growing concern over the use of the nuclear energy and that they favor a gradual phase-out of the nuclear plants in their country. However, only 10 percent favor an immediate shutdown of these plants.

The feeling has been growing after March 11, when one reactor exploded at Fukushima, following a powerful earthquake and a tsunami, provoking many damages and deaths. Thousands of people were forced to leave their homes and relocate because of the radiation leaks, and the accident was deemed as the worst in the world since Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.

The proliferation of the nuclear energy in Japan is due to the few natural resources of the country. The nuclear power made it possible for the Japanese economy to be lesser and lesser dependent on the imported fuel that generates energy.

Japanese new prime minister Yoshikiko Noda is expected to tell the United Nations on Thursday that his country will continue to rely on nuclear energy, but that the safety of the nuclear facilities will become top priority.

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