TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We are on the road in Tokyo, Japan, for the first of three special broadcasts here. We’re here at a critical time for Japan and the region. Later in the show we’ll look at the crisis in Japan following the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant that occurred nearly three years ago. Our visit to Japan comes less than a month after thousands of people rallied on the Japanese island of Okinawa to protest plans to build a new U.S. Marine base. Meanwhile, protests continue here in Japan over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP would establish a free trade zone stretching from the United States to Chile to Japan, encompassing nearly 40 percent of the global economy.
We’ll look at Okinawa and the TPP later in the week, but we begin today’s show looking at the rightward shift in Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was re-elected just over a year ago. Abe heads the country’s Liberal Democratic Party, is known as a conservative hawk who has pushed nationalistic and pro-nuclear policies. In December, he visited the controversial Yasukuni war shrine, which honors Japanese soldiers who died in battle, including several war criminals who were tried by the International Military Tribunal after World War II. The visit sparked outrage from China and South Korea, who consider the shrine a symbol of Japanese militarism and its refusal to atone for atrocities committed in China and Korea in the first half of the 20th century.
For more, I’m joined in our Tokyo studio by Koichi Nakano, professor at Sophia University here in Tokyo and director of the Institute of Global Concern at the university.
We welcome you, Professor, to Democracy Now!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comments. In order to eliminate spam all comments are moderated. Comments will only be edited if they contain expletives or attacks on another person. All viewpoints are welcome.