Subject: [cwj 116] Tokyo police brutalize peaceful protestors
From: Richard Wilcox <rwilcox@interlink.or.jp>
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 18:00:50 +0900
Seq: 116
*** 9/23/00 According to Hitomi Hikichi, Chairperson of the Tsuda College Student Committee, Tokyo police brutally attacked and beat three men who had taken part in protests on September 3rd, 2000 in Tokyo. People gathered at various locations throughout Tokyo to protest Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara's military training exercises which were carried out that day. After five protestors left the day's first protest in Nerima and then departed a subway at Nakano-sakaue station on the Ouedo subway line, ten police rushed the three men in the group. While some officers held them up, others beat them in the body and face, then threw them on the ground and continued to kick them. The three protestors, a Waseda University student and two labor union members, suffered lacerations and bleeding from the facial area. Some nearby passengers were said to have seen the occurence and made an effort to restrain the police from committing further violence. Video camera recordings which recorded the event were confiscated by police and not returned. The arrested were not charged for any crimes at the initial scene and only later charged with "invasion of a building" and "disrupting official business". The two women who were arrested are students of Tsuda women's college and were not physically beaten but were only recently released from police custody. Governor Ishihara's military training exercises were supposed to have been carried out to ready Japan in case of natural disaster. However, the very same day on the Tokyo island of Miyake, residents were forced to evacuate due to the extreme situation of volcanic eruption. According to the Asahi Shimbun and the Tokyo Shimbun (newspapers), Ishihara dismissed the real disaster on Miyake island because "it is only one part of Tokyo, but all of Japan rests on a volcanic mountain and is imminent danger. Therefore we need these training exercises..." Elsewhere, Ishihara is well known for his racist statements and denial of Japanese war crimes during World War II. His grand plan to turn Japan's legitimate day of preparation for natural disaster into a glorification of Japanese military might revolts many Japanese citizens who turned out on the day of the exercises to oppose his plans. A noisy assembly of 1,500 protestors began their march at Shiba park and wound up near Tokyo station. However, in the Koto ward of Tokyo, an anti-war group was denied its constitutional rights of assembly by the local government there which blocked their meeting in a local park. As a teacher of Tsuda College and a person who took part in the protest marches on September 3rd, I would personally like to urge people out there to contact the Tsuda College Student Committee (Tsuda College, 2-1-1 Tsuda, Kodaira city, Tokyo 187-8577, Japan, TEL/FAX 81-042-346-0359) and lend their support to the two students who were arrested. The police continued their harrassment of the students by visiting the campus in search of further details on the student's activities. -- Richard Wilcox, Tokyo, <rwilcox@interlink.or.jp> *** ______________________ The Corporate Watch in Japanese http://www.corpwatch.org/japan (CWJ) mailing list is a moderated email list in English designed to connect activists campaigning against Japanese corporations and investments around the world. * To unsubscribe from the CWJ mailing list, send an email to majordomo@jca.apc.org with text "unsubscribe cwj". To subscribe to the CWJ mailing list, send a message to majordomo@jca.apc.org with the text "subscribe cwj" * The CWJ mailing list is NOT intended for wide distribution. If you would like to post messages from this list somewhere else, we ask that you first contact us at cwj@corpwatch.org ______________________