Humpback Whale Hunting to Resume in Japan

Chris Marker and Mario Ruspoli's THREE CHEERS FOR THE WHALE chronicled the history of mankind's relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposed their slaughter by the fishing industry in 1973, shortly after the moratorium was effected.

As reported on japanfocus.org, when Abe Shinzo was installed as prime minister of Japan in September 2006, there was some concern that he would push the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s proposal to revise Japan’s constitution and gut the no-war provisions of Article 9. But his "go slow approach" has reassured Japan’s neighbors, while masking a very ambitious agenda.

Japan’s Likely Next Premier in Hawkish Stand

As reported in the New York Times, Shinzo Abe, the nationalist politician who is expected to become Japan's next prime minister, said that Japan should revise the pacifist Constitution imposed on it by the United States. He made the statement as he formally declared his candidacy for the presidency of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, a post that would give him the prime ministership.

The acclaimed recent release JAPAN'S PEACE CONSTITUTION is a timely, hard-hitting documentary places the ongoing debate over the constitution in an international context: What will revision mean to Japan's neighbors, Korea and China? How has the US-Japan military alliance warped the constitution and Japan's role in the world? How is the unprecedented involvement of Japan's Self-Defense Force in the occupation of Iraq perceived in the Middle East?

As reported on CNN: 100,000 protestors chanted anti-U.S. slogans and burned American flags in New Delhi to protest President George W. Bush's first trip to the nation. "Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message, killer Bush go home," one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.

The Oxford Press reports that, in some strange irony, Bush will stop at Rajghat, the site of the cremation of Mahatma Gandhi, and during this same trip the two countries are working out under which India would buy nuclear fuel from the U. S. Our epic film WAR AND PEACE, the most recent film from Anand Patwardhan (India's leading documentarian), is framed by the 1948 murder of Gandhi. As a child, Patwardhan was immersed in the non-violent Gandhian movement, and because of this WAR AND PEACE examines India's militarism with sorrow, although along the way the film captures joyful stories of courage and resistance.

In today's Guardian, Booker Prize winning writer Arundhati Roy has a piece "Baby Bush Go Home" in which she addresses this visit. In DAM/AGE, our film about Roy's bold campaign against the Narmada dam project, she challenges the idea that only experts can speak out on such urgent matters as nuclear war, the privatization of India's power supply by Enron and issues like Narmada.