Monday, August 31, 2015

Anti-war protest in Tokyo

This lady was at the anti-war protest in Tokyo this weekend. Police estimates are 30k people, organizer estimate were 120k people. I've no idea what the truth is but the pavement everywhere was jammed full of people with signs, chanting anti-war and anti-Abe slogans.

The protest is because the prime minister (Abe Shinzo) is trying to get a few bills through parliament that would allow Japan to participate in collective self-defense. In particular, this would mean that they could have a pact with the US. The US is currently at war with several abstract concepts and some entities that are not nation states, so what does collective self-defense mean in this case? It also seems to be contrary to article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Even if the bills pass, they will be quickly challenged in the Supreme court, where hopefully they'll be trashed. Of course Abe's party has a proposal to fix the constitution too.

For extra fun, she was being interviewed by CCTV, the Chinese state TV station.