Antinuclear group to hold 1st of annual meetings in Fukushima

A Japanese antinuclear group announced Wednesday it will convene the first of its annual meetings on nuclear weapons elimination this summer in Fukushima Prefecture, home to the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, on July 31.
At the meeting in Fukushima city, the Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs, or Gensuikin, will also call for early containment of the nuclear crisis and a halt to all nuclear plants in Japan.
The group has been calling for a nuclear-free world based on the country's experience of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
''Both the war that led to the atomic bombings and the nuclear energy policy, promoted to support rapid economic growth in Japan, are state policies, but who made the decisions?'' Yasunari Fujimoto, Gensuikin's secretary general, said at a press conference in Tokyo. ''We need to create a society that values each and every human life.''
The Fukushima meeting will be attended by Matashichi Oishi, a former crew member of the Japanese trawler Fukuryu Maru No. 5, which was exposed to radiation from an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1954, a survivor of the 1986 Chernobyl accident and an antinuclear journalist, Satoshi Kamata.
The Fukushima meeting will be followed by meetings on Aug. 4 to 6 in Hiroshima and Aug. 7 to 9 in Nagasaki. The group will wrap up its meetings in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, on Aug. 11, where the U.S. military presence is set to be discussed.