Hydrangea Revolution Blooms, Will It Change Japan?
With the rallies, protests and actions growing every week in Japan what will be the tipping point for real change? What will it take to make the government change its ways? If Noda goes who is his replacement?
Protests Friday were met with metal barricade fences causing people to find inventive ways like by bike, taxi or car to go past the prime minister’s residence to express their anger. Protest crowds spilled all over the nearby district. Protests are growing elsewhere in Japan. Most cities of decent size have seen protests either in front of government buildings or in front of the power companies themselves. These protests are growing quickly also, with one in Osaka gathering a few hundred people the first week and having a few thousand this last week.
There has been growing frustration that the mainstream media in Japan has either downplayed or completely ignored the growing rallies and protests. Many relegate coverage to lesser slots and give very low estimates of turn out. The foreign media has been largely ignoring the protests in Japan. The huge rally in Yoyogi park in Tokyo Monday became too much for the media to ignore. The continued lack of coverage for what is going on in Japan hit a point that the mainstream media ignoring it would make them look incompetent and that they are not covering the news. NHK ran coverage on their evening news. Kyodo headlined citing the organizers attendance estimate of 170,000. Protests may have hit the point they can no longer be ignored.
Foreign media has picked up a bit more with a few major US outlets mentioning the Monday rally. German media gave it heavy coverage. This is a change over previous weeks. Will increasing foreign media coverage help push change in Japan? With such overwhelming public opposition in Japan to nuclear power, the government is torn between their allegiance to the nuclear mafia and the need to survive re-election as politicians.
These are just some of the foreign coverage of the rally in Japan, photo gallery follows:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/16/world/asia/japan-nuclear-protest/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/japan-nuclear-protest-tokyo_n_1675709.html
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