The Power of One

Let the cry of "Fukushima!" become for the world what "Three Mile Island!" was in the U.S.: a visceral, irrefutable protest that shut down industry expansion for 30 years.

Eric Ozawa at The Nation:

In that sense, the revival of protest has created an alternative public forum, quite unlike the fake public hearing in Saga. In an October NHK poll, nearly 70 percent of Japanese were in favor of reducing or eliminating the country’s nuclear plants. Organizers in Tokyo and Osaka have gathered the hundreds of thousands of signatures required for a local referendum in each city on whether to allow regional power companies to keep nuclear plants in operation. Nobel Prize–winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe, a longstanding critic of nuclear power, is leading a nationwide petition drive against it. The petition declares, “With the issues faced by the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still unresolved, we now have also become victims of nuclear energy. At the same time, we have become perpetrators of its damage.” By February the drive had gathered some 4.2 million signatures.

Sheer numbers are not everything. The most powerful protest in Japan might be that of a solitary man, Naoto Matsumura, the Fukushima farmer who is determined to remain at his home within the exclusion zone, a protest that has meant exposing himself to potentially lethal levels of radiation. He views himself as hibaku, a word that commonly refers to the victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Some might see in Matsumura’s self-sacrifice an echo of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire at a Saigon intersection in 1963 to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. “If I die here,” Matsumura said in an interview, “perhaps it will be a good reminder to people of the consequences of letting corporations and corrupt politicians get away with cover-ups, exploitation of the local people and criminal negligence.” Though aware of the risks, Matsumura doesn’t view himself as a martyr. The focus of his protest is not the spectacle of his own destruction but the ruination of what has been left behind in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. His photographs and videos show the carcasses of cows decaying in their stalls, dogs maimed by forgotten traps and the one person who has remained, tending to the abandoned animals. “I don’t think the people of this region are angry enough,” Matsumura says. “But they’re getting there.”