�@On December 22, 1999, "The Year 2000 Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" was officially launched at a press conference in Tokyo. Preparations for this campaign were made by independent citizen groups in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo/Yokohama which had been organizing a series of counter-conferences to the Tokyo Forum, a government-led, expert conference for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, in 1998 and 1999. After the Tokyo Forum completed its final report, these groups felt compelled to revitalize nation-wide grassroots voices to ask for a Japanese initiative to abolish nuclear weapons and they thought the year 2000 would be a crucial year for that effort. They started drafting a unified set of demands of the people to be addressed to the Government of Japan, a set of demands which could be endorsed by a broad spectrum of people across various political lines and organizations.