Japan’s Friday Protest (27/7/2012)
The meeting against the restart of nuclear power plants in front of the PM’s Office in the evening has started to be scheduled with a one week cycle every friday by citizens. The promotors (Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes) who made the meeting happened as a routine occurrence were busy preparing the “Surround National Diet” on July 29 ; on July 27 it was organized by the other group (Opposed to restart of Nuclear Power Plant! Action all over Japan).The person in charge of the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes announced the meeting against the restart of nuclear power plants was going to be held on Sunday (July 29) via twitter and internet but shortly after 4pm people arrived in droves. People wanted to spew out the anger against the human resource management of Nuclear Power Regulatory Commission which was proposed to the National Diet by the Government.
Friday’s weekly protest outside of Noda’s office seemed to be diminishing in number, when compared to those reported on this site from previous weeks; however, this is simply because they are staging the bigger protest for the week on Sunday. At this time it is unclear to me why they are doing this, but after seeing 150,000+ on the street be either corralled or intimidated by the police, they must have realized that this could only be so effective.
I will try to gather as much information as possible on this, but major news media outlets are having a blackout and focusing only on the Osprey protests in Okinawa, which while important this is a a blatant selective bias to only exhibit a segment of the social-climate in Japan.
As an unnamed 50 year old housewife from Tochigi explains the situation:
If we appeal to Noda, nothing will happen, so [I] wanted to mount a protest against government bureaucrats.
It’s a good thing that it takes place in the evening every friday.I never participated to meetings neither demonstrations before. This is my first time. I participated because
[I] heard it’s not dangerous. I have been opposed to nuclear power for a long time. When there will be more and more people, it will become a true force”