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DESCRIPTION:12/11 Berkeley Screening Of Australian Film "When The Dust Settles", Report 
 On Japan & Video Of Diet Member Taro Yamamoto\n\n\nNo Nukes Action will be 
 having a film screening of "When The Dust Settles" about Australian uranium 
 miners, a video of anti-nuclear independent Tokyo Diet member Taro Yamamoto 
 and a report on Fukushima and political developments in Japan.\n\n\nWhen 
 The Dust Settles - Uranium Miners In Australia 37 min. (2010)\nBy David 
 Bradbury\nAustralia is a major center of the mining of uranium. This film 
 shows how the mining companies recruit electricians and other workers who 
 are encouraged to work in the open pit uranium mines. Behind the clean 
 mining towns is dangerous contamination from the uranium mines. The film, 
 financed by the ETU (Australian Electrical Trade Unions), is a docu-drama 
 on how these workers and their families are bribed to take the jobs and 
 what the real cost of this mining is.\nWhen The Dust Settles - Uranium 
 Miners In Australia 37 min. (2010)\n\n\nNo Nukes Action Committee is a 
 organization that works on education and action against nuclear power 
 in\nJapan and around the world and is also opposed to 
 militarization.\n\nDate and Time: Thursday, December 11th, 5:30-7:30\nPlace 
              : Berkeley North Branch Library, Community Room\n              
           1170 the Alameda (x Hopkins) Berkeley, 94707\nAdmission       : 
 Free, but donation will be appreciated\n\nFor more 
 information\n510-495-5952\nnonukesactioncommittee(at)gmail.com\nhttp://nonukesaction.wordpress.com/\n\n\nAnd 
 monthly rally at Japanese Consulate 275 Battery St., San Francisco at 3:00 
 PM\n\n\nDecember 11, 2014 3:00 PM Rally at Japanese Consulate to Oppose 
 Restarting Japan's 50 nuclear plants and for evacuation of children and 
 families of Fukushima.\nThere will also be the monthly rally at the 
 \nJapanese Consulate San Francisco\n275 Battery St./California\nSan 
 Francisco, California\n\n\n\nJapanese politician causes uproar by giving 
 letter on Fukushima to 
 emperor\nhttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/07/japanese-politician-letter-fukushima-emperor\nTaro 
 Yamamoto faces criticism after handing note to Emperor Akihito at garden 
 party in breach of strict protocol\n\n	• Associated Press in Tokyo\n	• 
 theguardian.com, Thursday 7 November 2013 04.24 EST\n\nThe Japanese 
 lawmaker and anti-nuclear activist Taro Yamamoto hands Emperor Akihito a 
 letter. Photograph: Koji Sasahara/AP\nA novice Japanese lawmaker who wanted 
 to draw attention to theFukushima nuclear crisis has caused an uproar by 
 doing something taboo: handing a letter to the emperor.\n\nIt began at an 
 annual autumn Imperial Palace garden party last week. As Emperor Akihito 
 and his wife, Michiko, greeted a line of guests, the outspoken 
 actor-turned-lawmaker Taro Yamamoto gave the emperor the letter – a 
 gesture considered both impolite and inappropriate.\n\nVideo of the 
 encounter, repeatedly aired on television, shows the 79-year-old emperor 
 calmly taking the letter, written on a folded "washi" paper with ink and 
 brush, and briefly talking with Yamamoto. An apparently wary Empress 
 Michiko gently pulled her husband's elbow from behind. The chief steward, 
 who was standing next to Akihito, grabbed the letter the instant the 
 emperor turned to him.\n\nYamamoto's action drew criticism from both ends 
 of the ideological spectrum and left many Japanese baffled by what they 
 consider to be a major breach of protocol: reaching out to the emperor in 
 an unscripted act.\n\nThe controversy shows how the role of Japan's emperor 
 remains a sensitive issue, nearly 70 years after Akihito's father, Emperor 
 Hirohito, renounced his divinity following Japan's defeat in the second 
 world war and became a symbol of the state.\n\nMany conservatives still 
 consider the emperor and his family divine – "the people above the 
 clouds" – and believe a commoner should not even talk to him. Decades 
 ago, commoners were not even allowed to look directly at the emperor, but 
 today Akihito does meet ordinary people, including those in disaster-hit 
 areas in northern Japan.\n\nThere is no specific law, but people are not 
 supposed to talk freely to the emperor, touch him or hand him something 
 without permission. Taking a mobile phone picture of the emperor or his 
 family is also considered impolite.\n\nAn upper house committee is 
 discussing whether to discipline Yamamoto and a decision is expected this 
 week. The 38-year-old lawmaker, who was elected in July as an independent, 
 has apologised for troubling the emperor but rejected calls to step 
 down.\n\nYamamoto, an anti-nuclear activist, said he wanted to make an 
 appeal to the emperor about the crisis in Fukushima and its possible health 
 impact on residents and workers cleaning up the power plant, which suffered 
 three meltdowns after it was devastated by the 2011 earthquake and 
 tsunami.\n\nNeither Yamamoto nor the palace has released the letter's 
 contents. If Yamamoto sought the emperor's assistance, he may have violated 
 a law requiring cabinet approval for such requests.\n\nYamamoto denied any 
 intention to use the emperor for political purposes – a possible 
 infringement of the postwar constitution, which relegates the emperor to a 
 non-political, ceremonial role.\n\n"My behaviour was indiscreet for a place 
 like the garden party," Yamamoto said at a news conference on Tuesday. "I 
 just wanted the emperor to know the reality. I was frustrated by not being 
 able to achieve any of my campaign promises yet."\n\nLiberals criticise 
 Yamamoto for turning to the emperor for help rather than upholding 
 democratic principles as an elected lawmaker. Some worry that Yamamoto's 
 ploy reinforced the idea that the emperor is Japan's most trusted public 
 figure, and fear that could play into conservative efforts to give the 
 emperor more powers.\n\nOthers criticise Yamamoto as an amateur and 
 populist politician who has set back the anti-nuclear movement, said Koichi 
 Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo.\n\nJapanese 
 Right Attacks Newspaper on the Left, Emboldening War 
 Revisionists\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/world/asia/japanese-right-attacks-newspaper-on-the-left-emboldening-war-revisionists.html?ref=world&_r=0\nBy 
 MARTIN FACKLERDEC. 2, 2014\nPhoto\n\nFormer The Asahi Shinbun reporter 
 Takashi Uemura in front of the university where he teaches.CreditKo Sasaki 
 for The New York Times\n\nSAPPORO, Japan — Takashi Uemura was 33 when he 
 wrote the article that would make his career. Then an investigative 
 reporter for The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second-largest newspaper, he 
 examined whether the Imperial Army had forced women to work in military 
 brothels during World War II. His report, under the headline, 
 “Remembering Still Brings Tears,” was one of the first to tell the 
 story of a former “comfort woman” from Korea.\n\nFast-forward a quarter 
 century, and that article has made Mr. Uemura, now 56 and retired from 
 journalism, a target of the Japanese political right. Tabloids brand him a 
 traitor for disseminating “Korean lies.” Threats of violence, he says, 
 have cost him one university teaching job, and could soon rob him of a 
 second. Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting 
 messages on the Internet urging people to drive his teenage daughter to 
 suicide.\n\nThe threats are part of a broad, vitriolic assault by the 
 right-wing news media and politicians here on The Asahi, which has long 
 been the newspaper that Japanese conservatives love to hate. This most 
 recent campaign, however, has gone beyond anything postwar Japan has seen 
 before, with nationalist politicians including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe 
 unleashing a torrent of abuse that has cowed one of the last strongholds of 
 progressive political influence in Japan. It has also emboldened 
 revisionists calling for a reconsideration of the government’s 1993 
 apology for the wartime coercion of women into prostitution.\n\n“They are 
 using intimidation as a way to deny history,” said Mr. Uemura, who spoke 
 with a pleading urgency and came to an interview in this northern city with 
 stacks of papers to defend himself. “They want to bully us into 
 silence.”\n\n“The War on The Asahi,” as commentators have called it, 
 began in August when the newspaper bowed to public criticism and retracted 
 at least a dozen articles published in the 1980s and early ’90s. Those 
 articles cited a former soldier named Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have 
 helped abduct Korean women for the military brothels. Mr. Yoshida was 
 discredited two decades ago, but the Japanese right pounced on The 
 Asahi’s gesture and called for a boycott to drive the 135-year-old 
 newspaper out of business.\n\nSpeaking to a parliamentary committee in 
 October, Mr. Abe himself weighed in, saying The Asahi’s “mistaken 
 reporting had caused many people injury, sorrow, pain and anger. It wounded 
 Japan’s image.”\n\nWith elections this month, analysts say Japan’s 
 conservatives are trying to hobble the nation’s leading left-of-center 
 newspaper. The Asahi has long supported greater atonement for Japan’s 
 wartime militarism and has opposed Mr. Abe on other issues. But it is 
 increasingly isolated as the nation’s liberal opposition remains in 
 disarray after a crushing defeat at the polls two years ago.\n\nMr. Abe and 
 his political allies have also seized on The Asahi’s woes as a 
 long-awaited chance to go after bigger game: the now internationally 
 accepted view that the Japanese military coerced tens of thousands of 
 Korean and other non-Japanese women into sexual slavery during the 
 war.\n\nContinue reading the main story\nMost mainstream historians agree 
 that the Imperial Army treated women in conquered territories as spoils of 
 battle, rounding them up to work in a system of military-run brothels known 
 as comfort stations that stretched from China to the South Pacific. Many 
 women were deceived with offers of jobs in factories and hospitals and then 
 forced to provide sex for imperial soldiers upon arriving in the comfort 
 stations. In Southeast Asia, there is evidence that Japanese soldiers 
 simply kidnapped women to work in the brothels.\n\nAmong the women who have 
 come forward to say they were forced to have sex with soldiers were 
 Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in 
 Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.\n\nBut there is little evidence that the 
 Japanese military abducted or was directly involved in entrapping women in 
 Korea, which had been a Japanese colony for decades when the war began. The 
 revisionists have seized on this one fact to deny that any women were held 
 captive in sexual slavery, and to argue that the comfort women were simply 
 camp-following prostitutes out to make good money. In their view, Japan is 
 the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by South Korea to settle old 
 scores.\n\nFor scholars of the comfort women issue, the surprise was not 
 The Asahi’s conclusion that Mr. Yoshida had lied — the newspaper 
 acknowledged in 1997 that it could not verify his account — but that it 
 waited so long to issue a formal retraction. Employees at the newspaper 
 said it finally acted because members of the Abe government had been using 
 the articles to criticize The Asahi’s reporters, and it hoped to blunt 
 the attacks by setting the record straight.\n\nInstead, the move prompted a 
 storm of denunciations and gave the revisionists a new opening to promote 
 their version of history. They are also pressing a claim that has left 
 foreign experts scratching their heads in disbelief: that The Asahi alone 
 is to blame for persuading the world that the comfort women were victims of 
 coercion.\n\nThough dozens of women have come forward with testimony about 
 their ordeals, the Japanese right contends it was The Asahi’s reporting 
 that resulted in international condemnation of Japan, including a 2007 
 resolution by the United States House of Representatives calling on Japan 
 to make “a clear and unequivocal” apology for “one of the largest 
 cases of human trafficking in the 20th century.”\n\nFor Mr. Abe and his 
 allies, humbling The Asahi is also a way to advance their long-held agenda 
 of erasing portrayals of Imperial Japan they consider too negative and, 
 analysts say, eventually overturning the landmark 1993 apology to comfort 
 women. Many on the right have argued that Japan behaved no worse than other 
 World War II combatants, including the United States.\n\n“The Asahi’s 
 admission is a chance for the revisionist right to say, ‘See! We told you 
 so!’ ” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University 
 in Tokyo. “Abe sees this as his chance to go after a historical issue 
 that he believes has hurt Japan’s national honor.”\n\nContinue reading 
 the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main 
 story\nThe Asahi’s conservative competitor, The Yomiuri Shimbun, the 
 world’s highest-circulation newspaper, has capitalized on its rival’s 
 troubles by distributing leaflets that highlight The Asahi’s mistakes in 
 reporting on comfort women. Since August, The Asahi’s daily circulation 
 has dropped by 230,797 to about 7 million, according to the Japan Audit 
 Bureau of Circulations.\n\nRight-wing tabloids have gone further, singling 
 out Mr. Uemura as a “fabricator of the comfort women” even though his 
 article was not among those that The Asahi retracted.\n\nMr. Uemura said 
 few in the news media had taken his side. Even The Asahi, he said, has been 
 too fearful to defend him, or even itself. In September, the newspaper’s 
 top executives apologized on television and fired the chief 
 editor.\n\n“Abe is using The Asahi’s problems to intimidate other media 
 into self-censorship,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at 
 Hosei University in Tokyo who helped organize a petition to support Mr. 
 Uemura. “This is a new form of McCarthyism.”\n\nHokusei Gakuen 
 University, a small Christian college in northern Japan where Mr. Uemura 
 lectures on local culture and history, said it was reviewing his contract 
 because of bomb threats by ultranationalists. On a recent afternoon, some 
 of Mr. Uemura’s supporters gathered in a chapel on campus to hear a 
 sermon warning against repeating the mistakes of the dark years before the 
 war, when the nation trampled dissent in its march toward 
 militarism.\n\nMr. Uemura did not attend, explaining that he was now 
 reluctant to appear in public.\n\n“This is the right’s way of 
 threatening other journalists into silence,” he said. “They don’t 
 want to suffer the same fate that I have.”\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/12/02/18764974.php
SUMMARY:Berkeley Screening Of Australian Film "When The Dust Settles", Report On Japan & Video Of
LOCATION:Berkeley North Branch Library, Community Room\n1170 the Alameda (x Hopkins) 
 Berkeley, 94707
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/12/02/18764974.php
DTSTART:20141212T013000Z
DTEND:20141212T033000Z
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