TOKYO: Tens of
thousands of people rallied outside the Japanese prime minister's residence in
Tokyo Friday in one of the largest demonstrations held against the restart of
nuclear reactors.
The protesters, carrying placards which read "Rise
up against the restart" and "The nuclear era is over," lined the
streets around Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's residence in central Tokyo as
police watched on, according to an AFP photographer.
The main entrance to the residence was seen guarded by
armoured vehicles and barricades of uniformed police.
Organisers quoted in local media estimated turnout
exceeded 100,000 people, over double the turnout they estimated at a similar
protest last week. Lawmaker Yoshisu Arita, however, placed the figure at closer
to 20,000 on Twitter.
On June 16, Noda gave the green light to start work to
restart two reactors at the Oi plant in western Japan, despite public mistrust
in the technology following last year's meltdowns at Fukushima.
The demonstration had been called by liberal writers
Takashi Hirose and Satoshi Kamata in an online message which spread on Twitter
and Facebook in what was likened by a popular tabloid to the "Arab
Spring," a wave of protests that topped governments in the Arab world last
year.
"Down with the Noda government," read a sign
held by a protester.
A similar protest outside Noda's home last week saw a
turnout of 45,000, according to organisers, though the media issued a more
conservative figure of 20,000.
Smaller scale protests had been held every Friday outside
the premier's residence since late March, and have been led in part by Nobel
Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe, who started an anti-nuclear petition that
has so far gathered more than 7.5 million signatures.
Japan had been left without nuclear power since early May
when the last of its 50 working reactors was shut down. Authorities took the
decision to restart the two reactors as they seek to head off a summer power
crunch.
Radiation was spread over homes and farmland in a large
swathe of Japan's northeast when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami
in March last year crippled the cooling system of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
No one is officially recorded as having died as a direct
result of the meltdowns, but tens of thousands of people were evacuated and
many remain so, with warnings some areas will be uninhabitable for decades.
- AFP/cc
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