I'm now passing Fukushima on a train, it is two years (almost to do the day) since the disaster. The train's next stop is Sendai, the nearest metropole. By strange irony I talked on a panel & deejayed at the anti-nuclear "Eco Active" protest here in Sendai in 2007 (see video). Yes, four years before the meltdown, we marched through the commercial center banging drums, earning glares from shoppers and shoves from police batons. As the only country to have directly experience with nuclear war, Japan has a long history of anti-nuke activism. But that day in Sendai I felt distinctly part of the fringe, a collection of alarmist hippies ignored by mainstream and media. I wish they'd been right, and we wrong, but history has proved otherwise. I'll close with a few quotes from a great essay by Sabu Kohso on the subject:

What has been revealed since 3/11 are not only the problems inherent in nuclear power (despite their immensity), but also those rooted in the amalgamation of the bureaucratic system, technology and civil society, constitutive of this apparatus called Japan, one of the zeniths that modern industrial civilization has reached.

and his words about a movement for the future:

The struggle will be unprecedented; the forms it takes are yet to be discovered. The only certain thing is that it will involve not only the negotiation process called politics, but also everything about our minds, society, and environment.