Report on trip to Hawaii and Japan

26 November 2000

from: Bruce Gagnon

Friends:

I am just back from Japan and I think the trip was a great success.

I began with a stop in Honolulu and a talk at the University of Hawaii to local activists. Richard Salvador, a PhD student there from Palau, organized the event and helped to cover the cost of the Hawaii stop. Hawaii is the headquarters now for the Navy's part in TMD.

I had been invited to speak on a panel on NMD/TMD at the Nagasaki Global Citizens' Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Quite a number of Abolition 2000 leaders were also invited to speak on various panels and the attendance was well over 500 people, although our panel was not attended by that many people. The Nagasaki organizing committee reimbursed the Global Network for my full travel expenses.

I thought our panel went very well with excellent presentations also made by Alice Slater and Dave Knight (both of whom have asked to join our Advisory Board.)

I did a couple of newspaper interviews in Nagasaki, one for nearly two hours from a senior writer for the third largest Japanese paper who showed tremendous interest in the space issue.

Following Nagasaki I travelled to Hiroshima and spoke at the peace museum in an event organized by our friend and affiliate, Satomi Oba with Plutonium Action Hiroshima. She had just finished Japanese translation of Karl's last video "Nukes in Space II", and made 100 copies which she was distributing all over the country. Two newspaper reporters covered the Hiroshima event.

My next stop was to Kyoto and was hosted by our Advisory Board member Atsushi Fujioka. Atsushi teaches Economics and is now completing a book on the U.S.'s Echelon spy system. He organized a wonderful event for me at the Peace Museum in Kyoto which was well attended. He began the meeting by showing Karl's newly translated video. It was a great chance to get to know him better and Atsushi will be joining us in Leeds in May.

My last stop was in Tokyo where I met with a large group of mostly younger activists, many of whom participated in our October 7 demo in Tokyo. They were a very sharp group of people that belonged to several different organizations and were already making plans to follow up my talk with a showing of Karl's video.

I think that we will see quite a bit of organizing on the space issue in coming months in Japan. It is an important country to see more activity in as Japan is now a partner with the U.S. in R & D and funding of TMD.

I leave for my next trip to UK on Dec 1-16.

Here is the latest list of our Advisory Board members:

Our Advisory Board's job is to give us advice and support and to help promote the work of the GN in their area of influence.



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