Hundreds rally in Japan to demand end to atomic power

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hundreds of people rallied in a Tokyo park Saturday, March 9, demanding an end to atomic power, and vowing never to give up the fight, despite two years of little change after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, northeastern Japan, The Associated Press reported.

Gathering on a weekend ahead of the second anniversary of the March 11 quake and tsunami that sent Fukushima Dai-ichi plant into multiple meltdowns, demonstrators said they would never forget the world's worst nuclear catastrophe, and expressed alarm over the government's eagerness to restart reactors.

Only two of this nation's 50 working reactors are back online, partly because of continuous protests like Saturday's, the first time such demonstrations have popped up in this nation since the 1960s movement against the Vietnam War.

People have thronged Tokyo parks on national holidays, and outside the Parliament building every Friday evening, drawing people previously unseen at political rallies, such as commuter "salarymen" and housewives.

Two years later, 160,000 people have left their homes around the plant, entire sections of nearby communities are still ghost-towns, and fears grow about cancer and other sicknesses the spewing radiation might bring.

But the new Prime Minister elected late last year, Shinzo Abe, hailing from a conservative party that fostered the pro-nuclear policies of modernizing Japan, wants to restart the reactors, maybe even build new ones.

The protesters said they were shocked by how the government was ignoring them.