November 24th (Thu) 

6:30pm~8:30pm
Strathcona Music Building
555 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec

Due to the McGill Universit strike, the lecture room hasn’t been decided yet.  Please meet some Japanese at the entrance where the statue of Queen Victoria is at 6:25pm. They will guide you to the lecture room.

———

「核に関する勉強会」
この勉強会は、広島県出身で作曲家のれいこさんが月１回のペースで主催している、少人数の勉強会です。核とはいったいなんなのか、さまざまな角度から理解を深めていくことを主旨としています。
今回はこちらの大学で教鞭をとっておられる政治学博士の古地順一郎さんが「カナダと核」というテーマ（日本語）で講義をしてくださいます。メモをとる方は筆記用具をご用意ください。どうぞふるってご参加ください。
日時：１１月２４日（木）集合6:25pm　講義6:30pm~8:30pm
Strathcona Music Building
555 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec
入り口にビクトリア女王の銅像がありますので、その近くまたはエントランス内で日本人グループがいますので声をかけてください〜＾＾
６時２５分の待ち合わせに遅れないようにどうぞご注意ください（会場となる教室が現在大学のストの関係で当日まではっきりしないため、いったん待ち合わせてから移動しています）。

I'm on the march! I'll keep marching til there's no more nukes.

URGENT! Anti-nuclear＋Anti-acceptance-of-radioactive-rubble-and-wreckage demonstration!!!!!!!! held in n Osaka.

Once Again, Again and Even Again, Osaka will witness an Anti-nuclear Declaration!!! A Sound Demonstration!!!!!!!!

“WTF???? WE’RE ALREADY PISSED OFF AT NUCLEAR POWER AND NOW, THE PROLIFERATION OF RADIOACTIVE RUBBLE?? NO WAY!!!!! MARCH!! MARCH!! MARCH!!!”

TIME: November 20th, 2011
PLACE: Utubo Park, Nishi-ku, Osaka

1:00 pm Let’s get together and make placards!
1:30 pm Speeches
2:30 pm Let’s begin our demonstration! “Sound Car” will be mobilized!!

※Bring anything with which you make a sound, such as music instruments, placards, pans, kettles, ANYTHING. Blast loud sound and shout!!

Kyushu Electronic Power Company restarted the reactors at the Genkai plant without making clear what is behind the scenes of the scam e-mail issue. Prime minister Noda pays so much attention to exporting nuclear power stations. The “safe” limits for radiation exposure has been increased to almost the highest level possible, which leads to Japanese local governmental acceptance of radiated wreckage. This goes on and on.

It is not too late to change how things are by holding a demonstration. Don’t give up so fast! Let’s march! March! March together!

Click the URL below for details:

http://1120antinukes.tumblr.com/

Contact us at:

11.20antinukes@gmail.com

Some articles of particular relevance for the following interviews include, “Positions (Revolutionary Flesh)” which can be found here. As well as a upcoming article in Mechademia entitled “Girliness Next to Godliness: Lolita Fandom as Sacred Criminality in the Novels of Takemoto Novala”, which can be found on MUSE here.

In addition to his current research, he plans to release an upcoming book of translations of short stories from Tomoyuki Hoshino for 2012.

In the first interview, we discuss the phenomena of otaku and hikikumori and the problem of criminalized youth in Japan, as well as the commodification of national cool and the marketability of perceived Japaneseness. This commodification of national cool can best be seen in a Reuters article published in September of 2008, entitled “Japan’s next PM Aso a “cool old dude”, which can be read here.  According to the article, as Foreign Minister, Aso has been credited with pushing a “manga diplomacy”, which includes the creation of a new, “international prize for manga artists in an effort to use soft power to further Japan’s diplomatic reach.

This concept of marketable Japaneseness is expanded upon in a Bangkok Post article,\”Japan officials promote hip home\” published in May of 2009. Following Prime Minister Aso’s declaration of the nation’s first “Anime Ambassador”, the robotic hero cat ‘Doraemon’, Takehiko Yamamoto, a professor of international politics at Waseda University, expressed his support for manga diplomacy. He later went on to say, ”Japan has been too quiet… and hardly made itself felt”, stating the use of anime and manga as “one of the few ways in which Japan can exert influence on other countries”.

 For those readers out there that may not feel comfortable with the terminology regarding otaku and otaku movement present in the interview, be sure to check out  McGill Professor Thomas Lamarre’s articles on Otakuology and the Otaku Movement that can be found here.

The first interview is avaliable for download here. To stream the interview, simply click the arrow below and listen away!

Those interested in delving deeper into marketing of Japaneseness under Prime Minister Aso, can read “Akihabara: Conditioning a Public Otaku Image“, which tells of the transformation of Akihabara into a tourist attraction under the Aso administration. Bringing attention to the economic, social, and political conditioning of the otaku image and what is now called the “Akihabara boom” and “Otaku boom”.

The interview brings up many compelling points, including the production of “bad youth” and the creation of a paternalistic government, one that changes youth from an autonomous body to a group of potential delinquents, uneducated and irresponsible. Society was seen as a vehicle that could change the direction of youth and therefore the reorient the nation in the direction of enlightenment. Education was seen as an assurance of development, and social policies formed around “helping” those orphans, at-risk youth, and poor children from the perceived failures of their parents. While the social policies could be considered more compassionate towards the fate of youth than the previous system, there is a blatant disregard to understand and undermine the systems that created these “uneducated” families. Larger structural problems were not critiqued and this led to a systematic marginalization and repression of youth autonomy. This is not particular to Japan alone and it is an important to recognize in all systems, ranging from the size of a country to one as small as a university campus. This is just one of the topics touched upon in the interview. I highly recommend a good listen to get even deeper into the issues involved.

In light of the crisis in Japan and out of the mobilization efforts around the world and at McGill University, a second interview was conducted to ask Brian about the state of Japanese Studies since the disaster, the relevance of the Teach In initiated by Adrienne Hurley, and the concepts of disaster capitalism, from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and disaster communities (or disaster utopia), from Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. as they apply to this crisis.

Brian is pictured below, demonstrating his passion for fantastic mugs, in addition to Japanese Studies.

The second interview is available for download by clicking  here. To stream audio, simply click on the arrow below.

In this interview, Brian urges listeners to seek alternative sources to learn about how the crisis in Japan is affecting the Japanese people on the ground. Nowadays the word “Japan” is synonymous with disaster, but this connection obscures the different responses and experiences that are present within Japan.

He emphasizes the misuse of culture-based explanations to base reactions and resistance against nuclear energy. He mentions the homogenizing quality of media accounts, an account that frames the Japanese locals as naive and unaware of the perils of nuclear energy. In fact, there has been a consistent voice of opposition within Japan towards the use of nuclear energy, a voice that the government has chosen to ignore. If you are a new reader to east306, peruse the blog and learn about the many passionate resistance movements that don’t get enough attention in the daily media.

Project east306 would like to thank Brian Bergstrom for providing such stimulating and insightful material and Olivier Marin for conducting the two interviews.

Northampton, MA
Unitarian-Universalist Church, 220 Main Street
Presentation – November 3 – 6:00 pm: Supper, 7:00 pm
Screening – November 10 – 7:00 pm
 

 
Presentations:
Hitomi Kamanaka, an award-winning documentary film director from Japan, first witnessed the terrible effects of radiation when she went to Iraq in 1998. Many Iraqi children were dying from leukemia after the Gulf War (1990) and the suspected cause was radiation exposure from depleted uranium warheads used during the War. She has studied the decades-long suffering of Hiroshima atomic bomb victims from internal radiation exposure, the nuclear contamination at the Hanford nuclear facilities on the Columbia River in Washington State in the 1980s, and the small northern Japanese village of Rokkasho, fiercely divided over the construction of a nuclear recycling facility.
 
Screening: “Ashes to Honey: Toward a Sustainable Future” (2010):
In this film, Ms.Hitomi Kamanaka, an award winning Japanese documentary film director, chronicles the lives of people in Iwaijima, a small island community in southern Japan. For thirty years this fishing hamlet has been protesting the government’s plan to build nuclear reactors across the bay. Can a small community fight the political and economic might of the nuclear power industry? She also takes us to Sweden in this poignant film to show how the collective determination of citizens can lead to a way out of reliance on fossil and nuclear fuel. Real people, real lives, exquisite cinematography. Enjoy Ms. Kamanaka’s acclaimed film. (2hrs. 15min)  
 
Sponsors: Upper Valley Sierra Club | The Safe and Green Campaign | The Citizen’s Awareness Network
The New England Youth Theater | The Savoy Theater | Chelsea Green Publishing
The Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

The movies may be deleted due to copyright issue in the near future.

For advertisement:

http://iwaiff.com/201109/en/index.html

Hiroyuki Koide:

http://iwaiff.com/201110/jp/friends/friends_after_311_movie_koide.html

Kokoro Fujinami, Masashi Goto, Hitomi Kamanaka, Yu Tanaka, Taro Yamamoto:
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v221297454cRSpnXF?h1=1-5+friends+after+3.11

Yasumi Iwakami, Tsuyoshi Yoshihara, Kokoro Fujinami, Yasuhiro Shimizu, Taro Yamamoto, タン･チュイムイ:
http://www.twitvid.com/JKSWW

Takashi Uesugi:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlg04o_yyyyfriends-after-3-11-yyy_news

Tetsuya Iida, Tsuyoshi Yoshihara, タン･チュイムイ:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlgoa0_yyyy-friends-after-3-11-yyyy-yyy-yy-yyyyy_news

Kunihiko Takeda:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlg03y_yyyyfriends-after-3-11-yyyy_news

Too many irons on the fire.  No translation of above video yet, but here it is in all its glory for those who know both Japanese and English.

We are woefully behind on getting LOTS of stuff uploaded, but wanted to make sure folks knew that END:CIV JP is underway!

Check out twitter.

Nataliya Gudziy is a singer from Ukraine. She had to evacuate from her hometown after Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. Her message is very touching.

In the video, she speaks Japanese,  but here is the translation of her message (I copied and pasted it from the link above) :

Over 60 years ago on this day, August 6 a tragedy occurred in Hiroshima. Like the tragedy that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tragedy which struck in Chernobyl over 20 years ago is still not over. The nuclear power plant at Chernobyl experienced a meltdown 22 years ago.

I was 6 years old at the time. Since my father worked at the plant, all of us family lived a mere 3.5 km from the plant. The accident happened in the middle of the night so most people were unaware that anything serious had occurred. For that reason, life went on as normal the following day. Children went to school and mothers took their young children out to play outside the whole day. As a result, they were exposed all day to invisible radiation.

We werent informed of the accident until the next day. We were told not to worry as it was not a serious accident, but that to be on the safe side, evacuate. No need to take your suitcases, we were told, just evacuate the city for 3 days. So we did as we were told and left the city without packing our bags. Nonetheless, we didnt return in 3 days, a month, or 20 years.

The forests we children had played in every day as well as the houses full of memories were destroyed by the radiation and buried in the dirt. Today nothing remains. What was once a vibrant city is now dead. We didnt just lose our beautiful hometown in that horrific accident, but many people also died. Many of my friends have died. Just kids at the time, many of us have grown up, married, and have kids of our own, some of whose health has been adversely affected.

Mankind has forgotten and is making the same mistakes over again. Dont forget these tragedies. Dont make the same mistakes. With this hope in mind, I will sing this lovely and meaningful song for you. “Itsumo, nando-demo(Always With Me)”

—————–

Transcription of the lyrics →　http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/song.html

Please click here to check out the site for the September 11th demo in Shinjuku, Tokyo.  This is the 5th action/sound demo organized by Shiroto no Ran.

Please send your solidarity message to: 911shinjuku[at]gmail.com

After a move across Turtle Island, our intrepid podcast producer is back at work, and we look forward to sharing the remaining podcasts from last spring very soon.  Please stay tuned.

We also have a number of translations that we’ll post asap, including another translation of one of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s blog posts by Francis Guérin!

A number of Project east306′ers are working on very large projects at this time.  One, which we’ve already announced, is nearing completion.  Daigo Shima has translated the film END:CIV into Japanese, and this film will be screened in Japan in October!!  Thanks so much, Daigo, for this major contribution!!  Along with Daigo, Yasuo Akai has translated information about the film, the director, and those interviewed in the film into Japanese.  You can see their efforts, along with those of the good people behind the tour, by clicking here.  The tour schedule is posted here.  Many thanks to Daigo, Yasuo, Irregular Rhythm Asylum, art space tetra, Cafe Lavanderia, Kisscafe, remo, and, of course, Franklin López!

Trois-Rivières, 29 août 2011

                    
On nous apprend qu’une fuite radioactive s’est produite à la centrale nucléaire Gentilly-2, il y a plus de 2 mois. Le Parti libéral, Hydro-Québec et un maire s’entêtent à nous dire qu’il n’y a pas de problème. Située sur les berges du fleuve Saint-Laurent, à proximité de la Basilique Notre-Dame-du-cap, notre technologie Candu vieille de plus de 30 ans, est-elle sous la bénédiction de la vierge Marie?

Le président du syndicat des ingénieurs d’Hydro-Québec, Ramzi Chahine, disait l’été dernier dans les médias, que des fuites radioactives survenaient régulièrement. De son côté, la Commission Canadienne de sureté nucléaire a soulevé plusieurs problèmes technologiques sérieux. Avec plus de 70 substances radioactives rejetées à tous les jours, des déchets qui s’accumulent, des mines d’uranium toxiques et une technologie que l’on ne maîtrise pas; comment le gouvernement entend-il justifier la reconstruction de Gentilly-2? Y aurait-il une fuite de la raison? Une contamination de conflits d’intérêts?

Les libéraux parlent de vouloir protéger les emplois, dont une majorité temporaire ou paramilitaire. Oublient-t-ils la réelle protection des travailleurs au cœur de la centrale et tous les autres travailleurs résidants dans un périmètre de 150 kilomètres? Le travail ce n’est pas toujours la santé. Les maladies professionnelles chez les travailleurs de l’industrie nucléaire sont reconnues aux États-Unis. Au Québec : non.

Gentilly-2 ne peut produire d’isotopes médicaux. Le Canada finance depuis peu les cyclotrons pour la médecine nucléaire. Cela permet d’être indépendant de centrale, comme celle de Chalk River en Ontario, qui fut aussi le théâtre d’un accident où plusieurs milliers de litres d’eau lourde contaminée au tritium se déversèrent dans l’environnement. Le tritium est mutagène, cancérigène et tératogène. Il n’y a aucune manière de le filtrer. Le Canada est l’un des pays au monde, où le niveau toléré est le plus élevé. En France, suite à un déversement radioactif dans une rivière, on y a interdit l’accès à l’eau.

Les militants pro-nucléaires ont-ils toujours le même discours? L’Ontario, grand producteur nucléaire, réoriente les milliards de dollars des contribuables vers les énergies renouvelables. Dernièrement Hydro-Québec, fervente promotrice du nucléaire, a mis les freins suite à Fukushima et a renvoyé la décision finale au gouvernement provincial qui avait déjà ralenti le processus de réfection.

Jean Charest vient tout juste de visiter le Japon. Il s’est recueilli en mémoire des victimes du Tsunami et de la catastrophe nucléaire. J’espère que cela a porté fruit. Ce pays a d’ailleurs annoncé sa sortie du nucléaire tout comme l’Allemagne, l’Autriche, la Belgique, la Suisse, l’Italie et la Suède. À ce nombre s’ajoute d’autres pays qui auparavant, avaient proscrit tout projet de construction suite à Tchernobyl. L’odieux de financer la réfection Gentilly-2 repose sur les épaules du gouvernement libéral en place et de leurs membres : Danielle St-Amand, Julie Boulet, Nathalie Normandeau, Jean Charest… Tout comme la décision historique d’arrêter le processus.

Sébastien Bois,
Porte-parole des CentricoisES et MauricienNEs pour le déclassement nucléaire (CMDN)
Trois-Rivières

Nucléaire / Nuclear : Fukushima City – Mother – English version – Extract – July 19, 2011

Note:  We did not translate this video clip, but are grateful to the translator(s) for making it available and wanted to share this.