Japanese taxpayers’ money to militarism, not to Fukushima survivors

This video says about itself:

14 January 2015

Japan’s Cabinet has approved the country’s largest ever defense budget, including plans to buy surveillance aircraft, drones and F-35 fighter jets.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

New budget gives ¥5trn to ‘defensive’ military

Wednesday 14th January 2015

THE cabinet approved Japan’s largest-ever defence budget today, spending nearly ¥5 trillion (£30 billion) on its military.

Shinzo Abe’s government plans to buy new F-35 fighters and surveillance planes from the United States and drones and amphibious vehicles for a new branch of the military mimicking the US Marines.

It also hopes to co-operate with Washington in developing an anti-missile system that could raise tensions in the east Asian region.

Mr Abe has increased military spending every year since he came to power in December 2012, following 11 straight years of defence budget cuts.

The right-wing PM has sought to amend Japan’s pacifist constitution and engaged in brinkmanship with China over islands claimed by both countries, forcing a government purchase of three disputed islands in 2012 that sparked massive protests in China.

But the Chinese response to the growing military budget was muted today, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei merely saying: “We hope Japan will reflect on its history and follow the path of peaceful development.”

See also here.

Obesity a growing problem among children in Fukushima — The Asahi Shimbun: here.

A worker at Japan’s destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant died on Tuesday, after the latest in a rising number of accidents at the plant. A second worker was crushed to death on the same day at the neighboring Fukushima Daini plant, also operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): here.

The β radioactivity of snow-pit samples collected in the spring of 2011 on four Tibetan Plateau glaciers demonstrate a remarkable peak in each snow pit profile, with peaks about ten to tens of times higher than background levels. The timing of these peaks suggests that the high radioactivity resulted from the Fukushima nuclear accident that occurred on March 11, 2011 in eastern Japan. Fallout monitoring studies demonstrate that this radioactive material was transported by the westerlies across the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. The depth of the peak β radioactivity in each snow pit compared with observational precipitation records, suggests that the radioactive fallout reached the Tibetan Plateau and was deposited on glacier surfaces in late March 2011, or approximately 20 days after the nuclear accident. The radioactive fallout existed in the atmosphere over the Tibetan Plateau for about one month: here.