Appeal for financial solidarity with the victims and evacuees of the worst Northeastern-Japan earthquake/tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster

Japan Revolutionary Communist League (JRCL) 
National Council of Internationalist Workers (NCIW)

March 17, 2011

On March 11, at 2:30 PM (JST), the tremendously powerful earthquake of magnitude 9 hit the vast area of Eastern Japan, comprised of Northeast and Kanto regions. The earthquake gave rise to the formidable tsunami, and the latter devastated numerous cities and towns all along the Pacific coast from the northernmost prefecture of Aomori to the southern Chiba prefecture. At the time of March 17, the number of deaths and missing persons is already close to 20,000, and the number continues to increase.

At the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the symbol of Japan as a “major nuclear-power nation”, all six nuclear reactors from No.1 to No. 6 were damaged and impaired due to the earthquake and tsunami. All the reactors have gone out of control more or less, and dreadful extraordinary phenomena have developing such as gas explosions, fires of housing buildings, reactor-core meltdowns and radiation leaks and spills. The danger of Chernobyl-type nuclear disaster seems to be becoming more and more real. Within a 30-kilometer radius from the nuclear plant, residents have already been ordered to evacuate from the area.

There are now 500,000 evacuees who have lost their houses and/or their dearest family members. Those evacuees have lost their dwellings and foundations of livelihood, due to the threefold sufferings from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Fuel, food, clothing and medicine are terribly in short supply at evacuation sites that have assembled those people who lost their dwellings under the bitter cold.

In this rich and advanced capitalist country of Japan, there have been increase of unemployment and job insecurity, widening social disparity between rich and poor, disintegration of agrarian and fishery rural communities, and discarding of various social securities under the neoliberal policies of the capital. Those victimized social layers are the hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami.

The earthquake-tsunami damages and the nuclear disaster will widen the structural crisis of Japanese capitalism, and the ruling capitalist regime and its social forces will necessarily expand and strengthen their social, economic and political attacks against the suffered population and the whole working masses.

At the earthquake/tsunami-stricken areas of Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, our comrades and co-worker union-activists have already begun activities to support suffered people and to defend their lives and social rights. The pressing priority is to procure food, fuel and housing for the suffered and to secure employment for those who lost their workplaces. Our comrades and co-workers strive to develop and expand popular and autonomous initiatives among working masses and local residents all through their activities.

We call on our international comrades and friends to extend their financial solidarity to the activities of the Miyagi and Fukushima comrades and co-workers.

Furthermore, we call on the international comrades and friends.

The terrible disaster of Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has made it absolutely clear once again that the nuclear energy is to damage the environment irreparably, to ruin the agriculture and fishery and accelerate the food crisis accordingly, and to put the survival of human being on the earth into a fatal crisis. The capitalist propaganda about “nuclear power generation as efficient and clean resources of energy” has been definitely proved to be an outright lie. The Japanese government and the TEPCO are hiding the truth of the Fukushima disaster and worsening the nuclear crisis further.

Please intensify your global campaigns to oppose the nuclear energy and to abolish nuclear power plants. Advances of your anti-nuclear campaigns are surely to encourage the Japanese sufferers and evacuees and resisting workers and popular masses here.

With our thanks to your encouragements and solidarity to us.

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