Youth join Climate Strike in Japan as government invests in fossil fuels · Global Voices
Thermal coal terminal at the Hokuriku Denryoku electric generation plant, Tsuruga, Fukui. Photo by <PERSON>, CC BY 3.0
<PERSON> noticed something odd when she went for a swim in the Setouchi Inland Sea with a cousin’s young son.
“Normally, if you stay even just a bit longer in that sea, you start turning blue (from cold). But this summer, the weather was so hot and humid, and the water was unusually warm,” the environmental activist and filmmaker recounted.
<PERSON> is an experienced field organizer in Japan for 350.org, an international organization working with student activists from Fridays for Future Tokyo (FFF) — a Japanese offshoot of Swedish teenager <PERSON>’s movement of the same name — to keep the global rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius.
<PERSON> and others have noticed Japan has had its share of the consequences of climate change for some time.
Not only has the ocean in places like the Inland Sea been gradually warming up, but unprecedented torrential rain and subsequent landslides during the typhoon season each August now regularly prompt local governments to ask for help from the Japanese Self-Defense Force, including assisting with evacuating 870,000 residents following heavy rains in southwest Japan in August 2019. Typhoon Hagibis, a powerful super typhoon, is poised to hit Japan on October 12.
Japanese people are starting to take action. On September 20, 2019, as nearly as 5 million activists in 115 countries around the world joined the Global Climate Strike, some 2,500 young Japanese protesters marched from the U.N. University in Tokyo’s trendy Omotesando avenue to the famous Shibuya crossing, shouting slogans amid hundreds of visibly surprised pedestrians standing by.
i-Dで取材してきました。800人近く参加してたらしい。学校帰りの高校生が結構いてたよ。 #FridaysForFuture #GlobalClimateStrikes #グローバル気候マーチ pic.twitter.com/Pglg9IF9zm
— 平岩壮悟 (@sogohiraiwa) September 20, 2019
I went to the march to report for i-D magazine. Close to 800 people showed up. 202
A lot were high schoolers on their way home from school. #FridaysForFuture #GlobalClimateStrikes
<PERSON>, 16, a senior at a public high school in Tokyo and a member of the Fridays For Future Tokyo creative team, explained hers and her classmates’ decision to start the Tokyo leg of the global march for climate at 5 p.m., at the end of the school day, even as students in other parts of the world organized school strikes: “I cannot betray the public who’s paying for my education,” <PERSON> said.
“We don’t even have a proper word in Japanese for ‘climate change’,” said <PERSON>, a college senior who co-organized the march. “Instead, the rather vague term ‘extraordinary weather events’ (異常気象) is used,” <PERSON> said.
As the host of the 1997 signing of Kyoto Protocol — the first global treaty setting internationally binding targets on carbon emission reductions — and of this year’s G20 — where it introduced a deal to reduce marine plastic waste — Japan was twice in a prime position to lead climate action.
However, despite evidence of climate change’s impact on Japan, the central government has been sluggish to respond to the climate emergency that <PERSON>, <PERSON>, and others are desperately trying to draw attention to.
Instead, Japan is promoting more GHG-producing coal- and gas-fired electric plants all over the world, exporting the technology to build them to countries such as Vietnam and India. In early October, only days after the climate strikes, Japanese plant engineering specialist JCG Holdings won a 3.73 billion USD contract to build a liquefied natural gas plant in Mozambique as part of a consortium of major oil and gas players that include Exxon Mobil.
In 2018, Japan rolled out a new energy plan that sets targets of generating 22-24 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This plan is an amendment of a 2002 strategy, whose goals, according to the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Environment, have only been partly accomplished. As a result, Japan wasn’t even invited to speak at the latest U.N. Global Climate Summit in New York on September 23, 2019. 202