Dear friends, fighting all around the world!
Imperialism and its antagonistic prop, Stalinism, are violently shaken by Cobid-19, a product of their own crucial development. In the midst of intensifying US-China confrontation, they are seeking their way for survival by sacrificing the lives of working people.
In Japan, the Suga administration is depriving people of indispensable compensation for forced holidays because of pandemic, ordering the “stop and go” to the movement of people and throwing out a huge number of precarious workers, of which women workers are the majority, on the street.
At the same time, an attempt is on the way to set up Digital Agency in line with the enforcement of Social Security and Tax Number System with an aim of concentrating all personal information into the hand of the state power to eliminate labor movement.
And on April 13, the cabinet meeting has decided to dump 1,400,000 tons of contaminated water, product of Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, into the sea. The government decision is justified by groundless insistence: “There is no problem. The water is diluted. It is quite usual behavior.”
Moreover, the Olympic Games are going to be forcibly held without audience in the midst of lingering radio activity and Covid-19 pandemic.
Myanmar military has killed more than 700 workers and civilians including children and, amid global fury over its brutal massacre, is clinging to the power gained by the coup.
The Suga administration is desperately trying to maintain the ties with Myanmar military in order to secure the world’s largest ODA project to Myanmar and to keep the 440 Japanese companies that have rushed to “the sole business frontier in Asia”.
Also, the Suga administration is overtly rushing into the construction of huge military bases for war of aggression by building up an Osprey aircraft base of Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and US forces in Kisarazu, Chiba prefecture (near Tokyo), and a huge US military base at Henoko in Okinawa for which reclaiming work is now under way on sludge-like soft seabed at a depth of around 100 meters.
This is exactly the “War at home, War abroad”.
Japanese working people are also standing up with fierce anger.
Centering around Fukushima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anti-nuke struggle has been advanced with an effort to clarify incompatibility of nuke with and human beings. In line with this, struggle against military bases for aggressive war has been tenaciously carried out around the country.
Furthermore, the urgent task of Japanese working class, fundamental transformation of labor movement, has steadily been spreading in many workplaces, breaking down the fetter of system-friendly labor unions’ leadership at the moment of total bankruptcy of privatization and outsourcing enforced by neoliberalism.
On May Day 2021, we will carry through a rally and demonstration in the center of capital Tokyo.
Workers of the world fighting against all difficulties and obstacles!
Under the banner of working-class internationalism, let’s fight together to make “a society where every human being can live humanely”!
April 19, 2021
International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba
